AI The pendant flared against my throat, a tiny hot fist, and the world hiccupped.
Stone became soft. Air bent around the standing stones as if someone had unbuttoned reality and left it to sag. I felt the silver chain bite my skin, then slacken. The amber light that took my breath away smelled of overripe fruit and old coins. Behind me, Eva swore and caught her foot on a root that had not been there when we stepped in.
"Hold on," I said.
"Why's your necklace thrumming like a dead heart?" Eva asked.
"Because it is the only useful thing hanging from my neck tonight," Nyx whispered, their voice a silk thread in my ear. They moved like ink poured into a cup, a silhouette of shadow with shoulders and a tilt of head, violet eyes gleaming like faint stars. "It remembers its soil."
We were not supposed to be here. The Fae Grove called to a handful of people, or so Isolde had told me with her hands folded like closed petals. She had warned about time moving strange. She had not warned about the sky tasting like amber. She had given me the blade and the advice that always came wrapped in a riddle. Not the warning that the pendant would remember its origin.
The trees stood like polite dancers around the clearing, giants in silver bark whose leaves shivered without wind. Vines braided themselves into archways. Grapes the size of a small apple dangled like polished beads. When I reached out, one breathed and shuddered, a soft, wet sound like a throat clearing.
"Uncanny," Eva breathed. She had an easy grin that cracked whenever things got too strange, a human reaction to split the pressure. "Like Camden market after midnight if Camden sold immortality."
"Tamper with it and you will need new teeth," Nyx said.
The ground no longer accepted prints. Moss closed like a slow mouth beneath our feet and left no trace of the three of us. The standing stones at the grove's rim gleamed faintly, carved with knots that did not belong to any alphabet I recognised. They marked the boundary, and as we crossed them the air tightened. The pendant warmed further, a steady pulse that echoed in my jaw.
A sound floated through the grove, a multi-threaded chorus of clinking porcelain , distant laughter, and something like knives sharpening against bone. The sound did not belong to any single source. It belonged to celebration and to hunger all at once.
"Feast," Nyx said, tasting the syllable.
We moved toward the sound. The path narrowed to a corridor of fruit trees, their branches heavy with glistening things. Light pooled at our feet, not from above but from within the foliage . Petals unfolded to reveal small candles that burned with an inner light, their flames a greenish blue, and when moths touched them the moths did not burn. They folded into vapour and climbed the trunks like living smoke.
Eva stopped and picked up a fallen fruit, a small pear in patterned bronze skin. The pear hummed faintly. When she cupped her hands around it the hum became a murmur of names, of faces, of kitchen tiles and the hiss of oil. I heard, for a second, a voice that was not a voice, an inventory recited, all the ways the fruit could be eaten.
"Do not taste that," Nyx said.
"Isn't that the point of coming to somewhere called Gluttony?" Eva asked, grinning.
"Points to gluttony come with agendas," Nyx replied. Their shadow leaned forward and pooled around the pear. "This garden deals in debts."
A fountain opened up ahead, porcelain bright and impossibly white. Instead of water it flowed with wine that caught the amber light and held it like a thought. The wine's surface shimmered and rearranged into reflections that were not our faces. I looked down and saw a woman with a child's laugh trapped beneath the film. Her lips moved without sound. She did not notice me. She reached for the glass rim and could not reach.
The pendant burned.
The thought of Dymas did not need my mind to conjure it. Prince Belphegor's domain tasted of sweet things and promises. It looked like a banquet and it waited like a trap. The Heartstone had come from there, its deep crimson a memory of opulence and hunger. It pulsed in tune with the fountain, a barbaric little drum.
"Isolde said the Fae do not lie," Eva said quietly.
"They mislead," Nyx corrected, their hand trailing through the shadow at the fountain's edge and not making a single ripple. "Isolde told you true, however. The bartering here wears its bargains as medals."
"Do we have anything she would value?" Eva asked.
"Curiosity?" I suggested.
Nyx smiled, the movement a ripple across darkness. "Curiosity pays in small, pleasant ways. But you carry debt already, Aurora Carter."
I felt the blade at my hip, cold against my thigh. Isolde had pressed it into my hand when she thought I looked ready, the moonsilver singing under her fingers. It was slender and patient, leaf-shaped and deadly without being showy. I had practised sliding it out until the motion was muscle memory. The world here smelled of cooked bread and old regrets; the blade smelled of moon and the clean after sleep. It did not belong to me; it belonged to the Fae courts and to Isolde's generosity, wrapped in a chastising smile.
"We look," I said.
We had three rules for dealing with otherworldly pockets: do not touch the centrepiece, do not accept food unless offered by the host, and never, never linger where time did not agree with your watches. The pendant had no regard for our rules. It pulsed and hummed, a mosquito in the ear, and somewhere a pitcher lifted itself from a table and tilted as if in memory of being poured .
Tables stretched into the clearing like ribs. Chairs were carved from bone-limestone so pale they hurt to look at. Platters heaved with meats that stewed in their own memories, crusts that breathed steam into the air like fog. Servers moved between guests, hands gloved in petals, faces hidden beneath veils of braided ivy. The people swallowing their fill were beautiful and wrong, their eyes occasionally flickering to black at the pupils, their laughter cutting like silver knives.
"Trying to look like splendour," Nyx murmured, and their whisper threaded through the guests. A man at the head of a long table turned his head, his smile too wide.
"Welcome," he said to no one, as if welcoming the whole grove . "Hungry ones are the best company."
His voice landed on me like a coin. It bore the varnish of something old and practiced. I saw him now, at the far end of the table, ornate and fat as a crowned loaf, a wreath of fruit around his head. He looked up and the pendant flared so strongly that the heat licked into my teeth.
"He sees you," Nyx said.
The man rose and moved toward us with the slow grace of someone used to being served . He did not walk; he flowed. With each step the vines tightened as if to applaud. The servants parted like curtains. One of them, a woman with a mouth that smelled of sugar, held out a plate piled with small pastries, each one glinting with a sheen that looked like human skin beneath glaze .
"Do not take anything," I said.
Eva put a hand on my arm. "We are underdressed," she joked, because you make jokes when you are nervous, and the words were thin. Her eyes were bright. She was trying to measure danger like you measure stairs in the dark.
The man stopped close enough that I could see the tiny insects crawling beneath his skin, like little silver stitches. He breathed in a way that suggested a throat that belonged to someone who had swallowed a bell.
"Guests," he said, and his breath fogged the taste of the air. "Where do you hail from? Earth does not send so small a party without story."
Nyx laughed, and the sound did not leave their mouth so much as spill from the space beside them. "From a place where kitchens close at ten," they said. "And where debts are ledgered in song."
"A ledger," the man repeated, tasting the word. "Ledger is delicious."
I slid my hand to the blade at my hip. The moonsilver thrummed like a caged thing. I had not unsheathed it since Isolde's grove, and even the motion made Eva's fingers twitch. Nyx made no motion to help; their shadow merely pooled and thickened, a well beneath the man's feet.
"You should not have come," Nyx said softly . "But you came wanting."
"We came to look," I said. My voice felt wrong in my chest. People in ballrooms spoke with velvet . I had my voice to rely on, cool and useful. "We will not eat."
"Look only, yes," the man agreed. He tilted his head. "Look with longing. Longing is a spice I favour. Stay and I will show you a dish that remembers why you are lonely."
Nyx's eyes narrowed . "We will not barter ourselves for novelty."
The man smiled until his cheeks cracked. "Ah, but you already walk wearing a contract," he said, and he reached for the pendant.
Heat detonated against my collarbone. The strap of the Heartstone gave, the chain straining, and for a hateful second the stone pulsed so hard it sang. I felt memory spill into me, not mine but the thing's memory: a market in a city I did not know, the clink of coins, a hand offering a small red gem across a table slick with oil. A man's laugh. Fire. A bell.
"Do not touch it," I warned.
The man's fingers brushed the pendant. The world split its first seam.
It began as a ripple, a shallow one at the fountain's rim, and in seconds it became a tear. The amber sky folded like fabric and a throat of darkness opened above the table. The guests' laughter snapped into silence as if someone had cut the line that threaded them to their songs.
Something moved inside that darkness. Not a face yet, not a form that your mind could pin down, but a pressure like the hush before a beast exhales . The servants dropped their trays; pastries rolled and burst into soft cries like infants. The vines twisted toward the rift as if they wanted to pluck the thing out and set it on the nearest plate.
Nyx stepped forward, shadows crawling like a cloak. "That's a rift," they said. "An open mouth. Hel loves a mouth."
The man with the fruit wreath let out a sound that might have been a laugh or might have been the tearing of cloth. He stumbled backward, the wreath falling away and revealing skin that glistened with honey.
"You brought the stone," he said in a voice that tasted of old sugar. "You brought my appetite."
The pendant burned, then in the same breath the blade at my hip snapped free under my hand. Moonsilver met aerial cold and I felt a hush like a held breath. I did not think. My body moved in rules it had learnt in smaller battles—draw the blade, point the edge at the thing, cut the shadow where it joined light.
"Hold it," I ordered.
Eva backed up, her heels finding a gap in the bone chairs. "Aurora, what are you doing?"
"Not breaking any bargains," I said. "Cutting a seam."
Nyx stepped of their own accord, and their shadow braided with the blade's edge like a ribbon around a knife. "Cut the memory tether," they whispered. "Cut what makes it hunger."
The blade slid through the air and met a thin filament, something like a silver thread that stretched from the rift to the pendant. Sparks of flavour—wine and roast meat and a child's laugh—flew like moths from it, and the rift answered with a low keening, the sound of a great thing lamenting.
Hands like roots burst from the table and gripped the edge. A shape unfolded from the dark, oil-slick and beautiful, with too many mouths tucked along its torso like bad jewellery. The guests screamed, a high, fragile sound that shattered into a dozen small pieces of grief.
"Now!" Nyx breathed.
I sank the blade deeper. It was cold enough to bite, but it cut, and where it passed the thread unspooled into smoke that smelled like kitchens long abandoned . The man with the wreath clawed at the air as if to stop the unravelling. He screamed the name of a dish and something in him died.
The pendant went silent for an instant, then screamed so loud the sound struck my molars. The creature from the rift drew itself forward, tasting, and a great maw opened in its chest that wanted and wanted.
Eva grabbed my arm. "Aurora, pull!"
I could not pull. The world had contracted to sharpen into teeth and edge and the pendant's light. Nyx's shadow flared, and for a breath I saw Aldric's face in it—old in a way that tasted of centuries—before the Shade folded itself back into incomprehensible night.
The creature lunged.
We did not leave invitations on someone's table. We had not come here to fight. We had come to look. The blade sang in my hand, the Heartstone hanged like a pulsar at my throat, and behind us the bones of the grove groaned as if waking from a long, unpleasant nap .
The first hand found the blade. The first mouth found Eva's shoulder. The rift widened like the opening of a great, indulgent eye.