Run: 2026-02-19-01KHSSW0E7VVA8TSFATTZN0G9D

The portal had tasted like copper and cold fire, and now Rory stood on the other side of it with her boots sinking slightly into earth that was too soft, too warm, too alive beneath her feet. Dymas. She didn't say it aloud. None of them did. The word felt presumptuous against a place like this. The sky above her was the colour of a bruised peach, amber deepening at the horizon into something almost molten, though there was no visible sun to account for it. The light simply existed, sourceless and thick, pressing against her skin like standing too close to an open oven. She lifted her hand and watched the light pool strangely across her knuckles, casting shadows in the wrong directions. "We're moving." Nyx didn't step through the portal so much as peel away from the shadow it left behind, their silhouette assembling itself at the edge of Rory's peripheral vision. Their violet eyes swept the landscape with an expression that was hard to read on a face made of darkness. "Standing at the threshold makes us visible." "Visible to what?" Rory asked. "Everything." She moved. The ground rose gently ahead of them, terraced in wide shallow steps like a hillside carved by a patient and obsessive hand. Vines covered every level. They climbed iron trellises shaped into forms that, if she looked at them directly, resembled reaching hands — fingers spread wide, knuckles bent. She looked away from them. The grapes that hung from the vines were extraordinary things, swollen far beyond any natural proportion, clusters of them drooping nearly to the earth, their skins stretched translucent and luminous. Deep purple, deep black, deep red. Some she couldn't name a colour for at all. Isolde moved at her left side, silver hair catching the amber light, and left no footprints in the soft earth behind her. Rory had stopped finding that unsettling three weeks ago. Mostly. "The air is wrong," Isolde said. She tilted her head up, pale lavender eyes half-closed. "It carries too much. Sweetness upon sweetness until the sweetness becomes a kind of pressure." She was right. The air tasted of fermenting fruit and something underneath that — something headier and less definable, like the memory of a meal eaten somewhere long ago. It sat at the back of Rory's throat and refused to clear. "Don't eat anything," Rory said, mostly to herself. "A redundant instruction for those of us without appetite," Nyx replied. "I was talking to myself." They crested the first terrace and stopped. Below them, the vineyard opened into a valley so wide and so dense with life that for a moment Rory couldn't organise what she was seeing into separate components. Orchards ran in long geometric rows, trees laden past reason with fruit in impossible colours — gold rinds, silver skins, flesh that glowed faintly from within as though lit by something small and warm buried at each core. Between the orchards, market paths wound through stalls and open-air kitchens, each one attended by figures bent over clay pots or long stone tables. Smoke rose from a dozen fires in thin, sweetly scented columns. Somewhere beneath all of it, a sound like a vast and distant crowd — not chaotic, but rhythmic, almost ceremonial. "A competition," Isolde said. "They are mid-feast." "Good." Rory pressed her fingers briefly against the outside of her jacket, felt the faint warmth of the Heartstone through the fabric. It pulsed — slow, steady, almost like a second heartbeat slotting alongside her own. "That means they're distracted." Nyx shifted beside her, their edges softening. In daylight — or whatever passed for daylight here — it was harder for them to fully dissolve, but their silhouette blurred and stretched, bleeding shadow across the path ahead like ink dropped into water. "The soul we're looking for is in the lower kitchens," they said. "Near the third orchard. I can feel the binding from here." "How?" "Bound souls have a particular silence to them." A pause. "Everything around them vibrates. They do not." They descended. The path between the terraces was narrow and paved with flat stones that had been laid without mortar and had since grown apart, pale yellow moss filling the gaps between them. The moss was warm underfoot, almost uncomfortably so, and Rory found herself taking slightly longer strides than necessary to keep contact with it brief. Above her, the iron trellises continued their reaching. She kept her eyes forward. At the base of the second terrace, they passed a fountain. It was the first thing she'd seen in Dymas that was clearly decorative rather than functional, and it arrested her for a moment in spite of herself. The basin was white stone, carved in relief with figures frozen in the act of reaching toward its centre, where water flowed upward in a single column before spreading in a wide curtain back down into the basin. Not a trick of pressure or pipe. The water simply rose. It caught the amber light and fractured it into dozens of small burning points, scattering across the path. Rory reached out and let a single drop land on the back of her hand. It was warm. It smelled of overripe plum and something older beneath it, something she had no name for — the smell of deep earth and great age and things fermenting in darkness over very long spans of time. She wiped her hand on her jacket and moved on. Isolde had paused a few steps ahead, her posture very still, her face turned toward the nearest orchard. One of the trees had a fruit she couldn't identify — roughly pear-shaped, but black, perfectly black, with a surface that reflected no light at all. A small absence in the shape of a fruit. "What is it?" Rory asked quietly. "An answer I was not yet asked a question for." Isolde turned away from the tree. "Continue." They reached the lower path. Around them the noise of the feast grew, the rhythmic sound resolving itself into something closer to music — low and repetitive, punctuated by sounds that might have been approval or might have been something else entirely. And then Rory felt it. Amid all the warmth and sweetness and living pressure of this place, something ahead was cold. Not cold the way the Fae blade was cold, not the cool of shadow or stone. Cold the way absence was cold. The space where something should have been vibrating and wasn't. Nyx was already looking at her. "The third orchard," she said.