AI The stone swallowed Rory’s scream whole.
One moment her fingers had been splayed against the cold granite of the standing stone in Isolde’s grove, the next the world had inverted. Pressure crushed her lungs. Her stomach lurched sideways. A kaleidoscope of impossible colors spun behind her eyelids—not light, but something else, something that tasted of burnt sugar and ozone and absence.
Then gravity remembered her.
She hit the ground hard, rolling through what felt like a soft, spongy moss . The air that rushed into her lungs was thick, humid, and heady with the perfume of overripe fruit. She gasped, pushing herself up onto her elbows.
Beside her, Nyx flowed to their feet like spilled ink, their shadowy form solidifying into a humanoid shape. Their faintly glowing violet eyes scanned the surroundings. “Glamorous entry,” they whispered, the sound like dry leaves skittering across stone.
Rory glared at them, brushing the strange moss from her jeans. It left a faintly sparkling powder on her fingers. “You said the portal was stable.”
“I said it was *formed *. The Fae have a different relationship with physics.”
The third member of their small, ill-advised expedition was already up, her silver hair catching an odd, directionless light. Isolde stood statue-still, her pale lavender eyes wide. Not with fear, Rory noted, but with something closer to grief . The Half-Fae seer hadn’t wanted to come, but Nyx had been insistent. They needed a guide. The Heartstone pendant, now a warm, insistent weight against Rory’s sternum, had pulsed with a feverish heat until Isolde had reluctantly placed her palm on the stone. The grove had shimmered, the air tasting of lightning, and then… here.
Wherever ‘here’ was.
Rory took her first proper look. They stood in a clearing, but the trees were wrong. Grotesquely, beautifully wrong.
Huge, fleshy trunks the color of bruised plums rose towards a warm amber sky, their surfaces glistening with a viscous, clear sap. Instead of leaves, vast, translucent cap-like growths unfurled from the tops, glowing with a soft internal bioluminescence. The forest floor was a carpet of the same springy, phosphorescent moss Rory had landed in, dotted with bulbous fungal growths that pulsed slowly with a gentle purple light.
The air hummed. Not with insects, but with a low, resonant frequency that vibrated in Rory’s back teeth. The scent of sugar and decay was overwhelming.
“The Glutton’s Garden,” Isolde breathed. Her voice, usually layered with riddles, was flat with dread.
“Dymas,” Nyx confirmed, their whisper tinged with a strange satisfaction.
Rory’s left hand went automatically to the slim, cold sheath at her hip. The Fae-forged blade Isolde had given her felt like a sliver of winter ice against her thigh. Comforting.
“Right,” Rory said, her own voice sounding too sharp in the alien quiet . “We’re here for the Veil-Eye. We find it, we get out. No sampling the local cuisine.”
“The cuisine samples you,” Isolde murmured, still staring at a nearby mushroom. It trembled as she watched, releasing a cloud of shimmering, silver spores.
“Charming.” Rory started moving, picking a direction away from the towering fungal trees. Survival first. Assess the threat. *Think, Rory.*
“Stay close to me,” Nyx said, gliding past her. “The shadows here are… active.”
Rory looked. They were right. Where the canopy of glowing caps filtered the amber light, the patches of darkness on the mossy floor didn't just lie still. They shifted subtly, like oil on water, contracting and expanding with a slow, rhythmic pulse . One slid over her boot. A cold, numbing sensation seeped through the leather. She jerked her foot back.
“Point taken.”
They walked. The soft moss muffled their footsteps , creating an eerie silence broken only by the low hum and the occasional pop or squelch from the surrounding flora. They passed a cluster of upright stems topped with what looked like crystalline fruit . Rory reached out instinctively.
“Don’t.” Isolde’s hand closed around her wrist. The seer’s touch was startlingly cold. “Echo-pods. They don’t feed on soil. They feed on memory.”
As if on cue, the nearest pod shimmered . A faint, ghostly sound leaked from it—a child’s laughter, distant and distorted. Then a sob. The pod pulsed , the crystalline surface flushing a brief, pained crimson, before it faded back to clear.
Rory pulled her hand back slowly . “Okay.”
They found the river ten minutes later. Or what passed for a river. It flowed thick and slow, the color of dark honey, between banks of glistening black clay. The surface bubbled lazily , releasing sweet, alcoholic fumes that made Rory’s head swim. Shapes moved beneath the surface—long, sinuous things with too many fronds.
Nyx knelt at the bank, a tendril of their shadow extending to touch the viscous liquid. It recoiled instantly. “Not water. Distilled essence. Fermented… something.”
A sound echoed from downriver. Not a natural sound. Clattering. Metal on ceramic. And voices.
Rory dropped into a crouch, pulling Isolde down with her behind a thick, pulsing fungus. Nyx simply dissolved, becoming one with the shifting dark at the tree’s base. Through the fleshy stems, Rory saw the source of the noise.
A path of smooth, polished bone-white stones had been laid along the riverbank. Walking along it were three figures. They were humanoid, but elongated, their movements graceful and eerily fluid. Their skin had the waxy, variegated sheen of expensive cheese, mottled with blue and gold veins. They wore elaborate, draping garments that seemed woven from cobwebs and dried flower petals .
Each carried an ornate, impossibly delicate glass amphora. They dipped these vessels into the honeyed river, filling them, then stoppered them with carved corks.
One of them spoke, its voice a melodious gurgle. “The Master requests the ’89 vintage. The one that whispers of mortal despair.”
“The London batch?” another gurgled. “A fine choice. Notes of smog and quiet desperation.”
They laughed, a sound like champagne bubbles rising. Then they turned and walked back the way they came, following the bone path deeper into the glowing forest.
Rory waited until their bizarre forms had vanished from sight before she stood. “Servants?”
“Helbound,” Nyx whispered, reforming beside her. “Souls contracted from your world. Chefs, vintners, gourmands. Their punishment is to create perfection they can never truly taste again. Only serve.”
Isolde was staring after them, her expression unreadable . “They follow the path. Paths here lead to places. Or to people.”
It was as good a direction as any. They left the river, skirting the edge of the bone-white path, keeping to the deeper gloom between the giant trees. The forest grew denser, the caps above glowing brighter, casting everything in a dreamlike, amber-tinged twilight. They passed cages hanging from sinewy vines, intricate and gilded. Inside one, a small, furry creature with too many eyes wept golden tears into a tiny crystal chalice. The tears sizzled as they hit the crystal , filling the cage with a fragrant steam. Rory looked away.
The unease was a physical thing now, coiling in her gut alongside the nausea from the airborne fermentation. This wasn’t a place. It was a digestive system. A beautiful, horrifying digestive system for a realm that consumed experiences, memories, sensations.
The path began to slope upwards, the moss giving way to steps carved from a single, massive dark red crystal . They climbed. The hum deepened. The air grew warmer, sweeter.
At the top of the crystal steps, the forest opened.
They stood at the edge of a vast, natural amphitheater. The ground dropped away in terraced rings, each one a different garden. One tier spilled over with jewel-toned vegetables shaped like internal organs. Another held trees from which hung what looked like cured meats, glistening with fat. In the center, where the amber light of the false sky was brightest, stood a structure .
It wasn’t a building. It was a *cake *.
Towers of spongy looking stone rose, frosted with something that sparkled like powdered sugar. Windows of hardened caramel looked out over the gardens. Gargoyles shaped like laughing chefs and weeping diners adorned the parapets. From its many chimneys, not smoke, but ribbons of fragrant steam drifted —the smell of baking bread, roasting meat, caramelizing sugar.
The Bone Palace. Prince Belphegor’s demesne.
And crawling all over it, tending the gardens, carrying platters larger than they were, were hundreds of the helbound. A city of damned chefs, eternally preparing a feast for a prince of Gluttony.
Rory felt the Heartstone pendant burn against her skin. Not a warning. A confirmation.
“The Veil-Eye will be in there,” Nyx murmured. “The seat of his power. Where the veil between realms is thinnest.”
“We can’t just walk in the front door,” Rory said, her mind racing . *Delivery person. Think like a delivery person.* The Golden Empress’s orders came in, she packed them, she navigated London’s chaos to drop them off. This was just logistics. Alien, hellish logistics.
Her eyes tracked a group of helbound leaving the palace grounds, pushing a cart laden with empty, ornate casks towards the river of honey. They took a smaller, less ornate path that wound around the base of the cake -palace, disappearing behind a stand of shivering, fruit-laden trees.
A service entrance.
“We follow the supply line,” she said, nodding towards the cart. “In with the empties, out with the full.”
Isolde finally looked at her, a flicker of something like respect in those lavender eyes. “The mouse in the pantry.”
“Better than the fly in the soup.”
Nyx’s form shimmered in what might have been amusement. “I’ll scout ahead. Shadows are plentiful here.” They dissolved into a dark streak that slid across the glowing moss, silent and swift, disappearing into the deeper gloom near the service path.
Rory turned to Isolde. The seer looked pale, her ageless features drawn. The alien pollen of Dymas clung to her silver hair like tinsel. “You alright?”
“This place… it feeds on want,” Isolde said softly . “It finds the hollow places and pours sweetness into them until they burst.” She touched her own chest, just over her heart. “Be careful what you hunger for here, Aurora Carter.”
Before Rory could ask what she meant, Nyx’s whisper echoed directly in her ear, though they were nowhere to be seen. “Path is clear. Two sentries. Distracted by a… leaking cask. We have a window.”
Rory’s fingers found the cool hilt of the Fae-forged blade. It felt real in a world of confectionery nightmares. “Let’s move.”
They flitted from the cover of one pulsing, alien tree to the next, closing the distance to the service path. The air grew thicker, the cloying smells of baking and brewing intensifying until they coated the back of Rory’s throat.
As they reached the shadow of the first towering cake -spire, the world of Dymas seemed to lean in, its amber gaze heavy, its sweet breath warm on their necks. The Bone Palace loomed above them, a monument to endless, hungry consumption.
And the Heartstone pendant between Rory’s collarbones gave one last, fierce pulse , as if biting down .
*Showtime.*