Run: 2026-02-18-01KHQ91BPXT05377W1TSDW6SEX

The pendant burned. Not painfully — more like pressing a palm to sun-warmed stone — but the heat had been building for the past ten minutes, and Aurora couldn't ignore it anymore. She reached up through the collar of her jacket and closed her fingers around the Heartstone. Even through her fist, the deep crimson light bled between her knuckles, pulsing in a slow, arterial rhythm. "It's faster now," she said. "Yes." Nyx drifted alongside her, their form half-dissolved at the edges where the amber light caught them, shadow bleeding into something almost translucent. "We are close." Close. Aurora turned the word over in her mind and found it offered no comfort. The rift had opened three days ago in an abandoned rail arch in Bermondsey — a shimmering seam in the air like a heat mirage that refused to move. Isolde had told them what it was, in her usual way, which was to say she'd told them almost nothing useful. The crack where hunger breathes, she'd said, silver hair pooling over her shoulder as she'd pressed the Fae blade into Aurora's hands. What is given freely may still be taken. What is taken freely may still be given. Aurora had stared at her. Isolde had smiled. And so here they were. The arch was behind them now, on the other side of a transition Aurora's mind was still refusing to fully process — a step forward into a shimmer, a moment of pressure like diving underwater, and then the world had simply become something else. The ground under her boots was dark and dense, like volcanic soil, and it gave faintly with each step, not quite soft enough to be unsettling but enough to make her conscious of every footfall. The sky above was amber. A deep, breathless amber, like the last light before a storm, unchanging and sourceless and vast. No sun. No horizon she could meaningfully identify. Just that warm, impossible colour pressing down on everything. "This is Dymas," Nyx said quietly. They weren't asking. "According to Isolde." Aurora's grip on the blade tightened. The moonsilver was cold even here, even under a sky that felt like a furnace waiting to exhale, and the contrast was grounding. Real. She focused on that chill. "Gluttony's realm. Wonderful." "You say wonderful as though you mean something else." "I usually do." Nyx made a sound that might, in a human throat, have been a soft laugh. They moved deeper. The terrain changed gradually — the dark soil giving way to something richer, almost black-red, and then the first plants appeared. Low sprawling things with leaves the colour of old wine, threaded with veins that caught the amber light and glowed faintly gold at the edges. Aurora crouched beside one without touching it. The leaves were fleshy and dense, almost succulent, and there was a smell rising from the ground that she couldn't immediately name — sweet, layered, something beneath the sweetness that was darker and more complex. She thought of overripe fruit. She thought of a kitchen where something had been cooking for too long. She stood up and kept moving. The vineyard came upon them slowly and then all at once. One moment she was walking through scattered growth, and then the vines were everywhere — great dark rows of them, wound around structures that had no obvious purpose, heavy with fruit that ranged in colour from near-black to a bruised purple-red. The clusters hung low, pendulous, almost grotesquely full. Some had split and were weeping a dark liquid onto the soil below, and small pale insects — if they were insects — circled the wet patches without landing. "Don't touch anything," Aurora said, though she suspected Nyx didn't need the reminder. "I rarely touch things," they replied. The air between the vine-rows was thicker. Warmer. The sweet-dark smell was stronger here and it was doing something Aurora didn't appreciate — making her mouth water. She hadn't eaten since the morning, and she recognised the manipulation for what it was even as her body responded to it. She pressed her lips together and breathed through her nose, which helped not at all. Something moved in the vines to her left. She stopped. Her hand came up — a reflex, an instruction to Nyx who was already still — and she stood listening. The sound had been liquid. The shift of something large enough to displace the heavy hanging clusters. Nyx's form darkened. She felt them change register beside her, felt the temperature drop a fraction as they pulled inward, becoming less and less visible. The violet glow of their eyes dimmed. A long, tense silence. Then the vines rustled again, and a figure emerged from between two rows, carrying an enormous ceramic vessel in both arms, their attention entirely occupied by not spilling whatever it contained. A soul-bound worker, Aurora realised — human in form, the face slack and preoccupied in the way she'd been warned about, wearing simple linen that had been stained repeatedly and dried stiff. The figure moved past them without looking up, following some invisible path, and disappeared into the amber haze further down the row. Aurora let out a breath. The Heartstone pulsed against her sternum. Faster. "Whatever we're looking for," she said quietly, "it's ahead." "The rift Isolde mentioned," Nyx agreed. Their form re-solidified gradually, edges firming back into something coherent. They were looking at the direction the worker had come from, their glowing eyes narrowed. "There is something else." "What?" "Can you not hear it?" She listened. Beyond the ambient warmth of the place, beyond the faint unconscious drip of the ruptured fruit, beyond the nothing-sound of that sourceless sky — yes. Something. A low, resonant hum, almost below the threshold of hearing, felt more in the chest than the ears. Like the note a struck bell makes long after the ringing has stopped. "What is that?" Nyx was quiet for a moment. "I am not certain. But it is old." A pause. "Older than me." That was not something Aurora had a useful response to. Nyx was older than London. Older than anyone she'd met, human or otherwise. The idea of something older still, humming beneath the surface of a place like this, making itself felt through bone and breath and the warm copper pulse of a stone she still didn't fully understand — she filed it under problems to worry about once they'd survived the current problem. She moved forward. The vines thinned again after another hundred yards, the ground rising in a gradual slope, and at the top of that slope the view opened up. Aurora stopped. Below them, spreading out across a shallow valley in the impossible amber afternoon, was a city. Or something that wore the shape of a city the way a dream wears the shape of a room — recognisable and wrong, simultaneously. Grand structures of dark stone, open-roofed, their walls carved with scenes she was too far away to read. Fountains that ran with something too dark to be water. Fires burning in enormous braziers along roads that curved and switched without apparent logic. And everywhere, the smell — intensified now to the point where it pressed against her like a physical thing, rich and sweet and wrong in its richness, a sensory excess that her mind kept trying to catalogue and giving up on. And in the centre of it all, visible even from this distance, something that wasn't architecture. A vertical seam in the amber air, maybe thirty feet tall, shimmering with a light that wasn't the warm amber of this place but something cooler, something that suggested the grey of a London sky and the familiar weight of the world she'd stepped out of. The rift. The Heartstone blazed. Aurora pressed her hand flat against her sternum, felt the heat of it through two layers of fabric, steady and urgent as a second heartbeat. "There," she said. Nyx stood beside her at the crest of the rise, their shadow falling behind them in the wrong direction, and said nothing. But the violet light of their eyes had shifted — not brighter, but deeper. She'd been around them long enough to recognise the look. Whatever the hum was, it was coming from down there. From somewhere close to that rift. Aurora pulled the Fae blade free and felt the cold of it run up her arm and settle in her shoulder like a reminder. "Right," she said. "Let's go."