AI The silver blade cut through the air, leaving a trail of moonlight that shouldn't exist underground. Aurora watched the faint luminescence fade as she lowered the Fae-forged dagger, its cold metal burning against her palm like frozen fire.
"Fascinating." Nyx's whisper came from three directions at once. "The blade remembers starlight."
"Less poetry, more caution." Aurora tucked the weapon back into her belt. The tunnel stretched ahead, carved from stone that looked too smooth, too deliberate to be natural. "This place feels wrong."
"Wrong is relative." The shadow being coalesced beside her, their violet eyes the only solid point in the writhing darkness. "We stand between what is and what shouldn't be. Of course it feels wrong."
Aurora touched the Heartstone pendant at her throat. The crimson gem pulsed with warmth , steady as a second heartbeat. They'd followed its pull for three hours through Richmond Park, past the standing stones of Isolde's grove, down into tunnels that no map would ever show.
"The Seer's directions were clear enough." She stepped forward, boots scraping against stone that sang faintly under pressure. "Find the Threshold. Cross at moonrise. Follow the Heartstone's pull."
"Clear as her riddles ever are."
The tunnel opened into a cavern that defied geometry. Aurora's breath caught. The ceiling arced impossibly high, disappearing into darkness that moved like liquid. Pillars of twisted crystal sprouted from floor and ceiling, meeting in the middle to form hourglasses of frozen time. Inside each one, fragments of light danced, casting shadows that moved independently of their sources.
"Dymas." Nyx's form rippled with something that might have been excitement. "A pocket of it, at least. Pulled through during a rift event."
Aurora approached the nearest pillar. Inside the crystal , she could see her reflection multiplied and refracted, each version slightly different. In one, her hair was white as bone. In another, her eyes burned amber instead of blue. A third showed her with wings of smoke and starlight.
"Don't stare too long." Nyx pulled her back . "The crystals show possibility, not truth. They'll trap you in what-ifs if you let them."
The Heartstone's warmth intensified, pulling her deeper into the cavern. The air tasted of honey and copper, thick enough to chew. Somewhere in the distance, she could hear music, discordant notes that made her teeth ache.
They passed between the crystal pillars, careful not to brush against their surfaces. The floor beneath their feet shifted from stone to something that looked like compressed twilight, purple-black and shot through with veins of gold. Aurora's reflection in its surface showed her walking upside down, matching her movements perfectly .
"There." Nyx gestured with what might have been an arm. "The feast hall."
The cavern opened into a vast chamber that shouldn't fit inside any earthly hill. Tables of polished obsidian stretched in impossible directions, some vertical, others twisted into spirals that hurt to follow. Platters of food covered every surface, dishes that steamed and sparkled and moved of their own accord.
Aurora's stomach clenched with sudden, violent hunger. The scent hit her like a physical force, every meal she'd ever loved condensed into a single overwhelming moment. Fresh bread from her mother's kitchen. Her father's Sunday roast. The lamb tagine from that Moroccan place Eva loved.
"Don't." Nyx's voice cut through the haze. "Dymas feeds on hunger, makes it art. One bite and you'll never stop eating."
"I know." But her feet moved forward anyway, drawn by a platter of perfect strawberries that gleamed like rubies. "I'm not hungry. I know I'm not hungry."
"Your body knows. Your soul might disagree."
Aurora bit down on her tongue, using pain to clear her head. The copper taste of her own blood broke the spell, replacing false hunger with genuine nausea. She turned away from the tables, focusing on the Heartstone's pull.
"This way."
They skirted the edge of the feast hall, past chairs carved from single blocks of amber with figures trapped inside. The trapped forms moved occasionally, reaching for food they'd never touch. Aurora didn't look too closely.
The music grew louder as they walked. Not quite singing, not quite instruments, but something between the two that made her bones resonate . She could feel it in her chest, trying to sync with her heartbeat.
"Cover your ears."
"What?"
"Now!"
Aurora slapped her palms over her ears just as the music crescendoed. Even muffled, she felt it trying to rewrite her, to turn her rhythm into its own. Beside her, Nyx's form scattered and reformed, fighting to maintain cohesion.
The assault ended as suddenly as it began. Aurora lowered her hands, ears ringing.
"Dinner music." Nyx sounded shaken, or as shaken as a whisper could sound. "Belphegor's little joke. Makes the feast more appealing when your soul harmonizes with appetite."
"Charming."
They pressed on, leaving the feast hall through an archway of braided bone. The passage beyond flickered between states, sometimes narrow, sometimes vast, occasionally not there at all. Aurora had to close her eyes and trust the Heartstone's warmth to guide her through the spaces that didn't exist.
"Stop."
She froze, eyes snapping open. They stood at the edge of a chasm that definitely hadn't been there a second ago. The drop yawned infinite, or perhaps just convinced the eye it was. Far below, or maybe above, lights moved in patterns that suggested city streets or constellation maps or the neural firing of some vast brain.
"The Between." Nyx moved to the edge, form bleeding into the void. "Every realm touches it, but none claim it. We're close to something important."
"How do we cross?"
"We don't. We go around."
But the Heartstone pulsed urgently now, its warmth becoming heat. Aurora pulled it out, watching the crimson gem flare with inner light. It pulled not forward but down, toward the chasm's depths .
"It wants us to jump."
"Then it's developed a death wish."
"No." Aurora studied the void, noting how the lights below moved in response to the Heartstone's glow. "Look. They're matching the pulse ."
The lights swirled upward, forming a spiral staircase of crystallized starlight. Each step materialized just before they'd need it, dissolving the moment they passed. Aurora took the first step, half-expecting to plummet.
Solid. Cold as winter night, but solid.
"This is unwise." But Nyx followed, their shadow-form flowing down the steps like spilled ink .
The descent lasted years or minutes, time meaning nothing in the Between. Aurora's legs burned with exhaustion that vanished between one step and the next. The chasm walls showed glimpses of other realms, windows into places that shouldn't exist side by side. A library where books wrote themselves. A garden of glass flowers that bled color into the air. A throne room where the shadows cast people instead of the reverse.
"Don't look." Nyx's warning came too late.
In one window, Aurora saw herself. Not a distortion or possibility, but herself as she was now, descending these same stairs . But in the reflection, something followed her. A figure wrapped in light that hurt to perceive, reaching out with too many hands.
She spun, looking up the staircase. Nothing.
"The Between shows truth alongside lies." Nyx continued descending. "Best not to guess which is which."
The stairs ended at a platform of black glass. A door stood in its center, carved from what looked like compressed night . No walls, no frame, just a door standing alone in the void. The Heartstone burned against Aurora's chest, its pulse synchronizing with the rhythm of her blood.
"This is what we came for?"
"Apparently." Nyx circled the door, form rippling with unease. "I can't see through it. That shouldn't be possible."
Aurora approached slowly . The door's surface showed no reflection, absorbed light without giving anything back. The handle was silver, shaped like a crescent moon with too many curves.
"Together?"
"If we must."
Aurora grasped the handle. Cold shot up her arm, a freezing burn that made her muscles spasm. But she held on, turned, and pulled.
The door opened onto nothing.
Not darkness. Not void. Simply nothing, an absence so complete it made her eyes water trying to process it. The Heartstone flared, casting crimson light that the nothing swallowed without trace.
"I can't enter that." Nyx's whisper held something like fear . "It would unmake me."
"Then wait here."
"Aurora-"
But she stepped through before doubt could take root. The nothing embraced her, erased her, reformed her between one heartbeat and the next.
She stood in a garden.
Not the glass garden glimpsed through the chasm walls, but something older, wilder . Trees with bark of silver grew in spirals, their leaves shifting through every color of autumn with each breath of wind. The grass beneath her feet was soft as silk , each blade a slightly different shade of deep purple. Flowers bloomed and withered and bloomed again in accelerated cycles, their petals falling upward to join clouds that looked like spun sugar .
The Heartstone had gone cold.
"Welcome." The voice came from everywhere and nowhere, young and ancient, kind and terrible. "I've been waiting for you to find the door."
Aurora's hand went to her blade, but her fingers found only empty air. The Fae weapon was gone , along with everything else she'd carried except the Heartstone.
"Who are you?"
Laughter like broken bells. "The better question, dear one, is who are you? But we'll come to that. First, shall we discuss why your friend the Seer sent you to me?"
"Isolde didn't mention you."
"Didn't she? 'Follow the stone to where hunger meets dream.' I am the dream that hunger builds, the feast that never fills, the want that creates itself. I am why Dymas exists."
A figure stepped from behind a silver tree. Aurora's breath caught. It looked like her, exactly like her, down to the small scar on her left wrist. But this version's eyes held depths that had swallowed stars.
"I am you, of course. The you that said yes instead of no. The you that stayed instead of fled. The you that opened the door three years ago, when the Heartstone first called."
"That's impossible."
"In most places, yes." Her doppelganger smiled, and the expression was wrong, too wide, too knowing. "But this is Dymas, where hunger writes reality. I hungered to exist, and so I do. Just as you hunger for answers, and so here they are."
The other Aurora gestured to the garden. Where trees had stood, mirrors now grew, each one showing a different scene. Aurora saw herself in London, delivering takeaway. Saw herself in Cardiff, still with Evan, bruises hidden beneath foundation. Saw herself somewhere else entirely, wearing a crown of black thorns and commanding shadows like Nyx.
"Every choice creates hunger for the paths not taken." Her double moved between the mirrors, trailing fingers across their surfaces. "Dymas collects those hungers, feeds on them, grows fat with possibility. And sometimes, when the hunger is sharp enough, it creates."
"You're not real."
"Real enough to know what you're really looking for. Why you've come so far on the word of a Fae who speaks in riddles." The other Aurora pulled out an identical Heartstone pendant. "You want to know why you have this. Why it chose you. Why doors keep opening that you can't help but walk through."
Aurora's hand closed around her own pendant. "Tell me."
"I could. But would you believe words from your own mouth? Or would you rather see?"
The mirrors shifted, their surfaces rippling like water. In their depths , Aurora saw a night three years past. Herself, younger, standing at a crossroads in Cardiff. Evan's flat to the left. The train station to the right. And straight ahead, barely visible in the lamplight, a door that shouldn't exist.
"You almost opened it then." Her doppelganger's voice held something like pity. "But fear won. You chose the train, chose London, chose the safe path. And the door closed. But doors like that don't forget. They wait. They send gifts."
The mirror showed a flash of crimson, a stone falling from nowhere to land at her feet weeks later.
"The Heartstone found you because you'd already found the door. It's a key, yes, but also a chain. Binding you to the choice you didn't make, the hunger you created by walking away."
"I don't understand."
"Then let me show you another truth."
The mirrors shattered , reforming into a single vast surface. In it, Aurora saw the feast hall they'd passed through, but filled now with diners. Hundreds of them, all eating with mechanical precision, their faces blank with bliss. At the head table sat a figure that hurt to perceive directly, all appetite and absence.
"Belphegor." Her double's voice dropped to a whisper . "Prince of Hunger, Lord of the Feast Eternal. He Who Consumes. And he knows you're here."
The figure in the mirror turned, and Aurora felt its attention like acid on her skin. Eyes that were not eyes fixed on her through the glass, and she understood with terrible clarity that the mirror was not showing a reflection but a window.
"Run," her doppelganger said, but the voice was changing, becoming deeper, older, wrong. "Run, little morsel. Make the chase interesting."
Aurora turned to flee, but the garden was gone . She stood again in the feast hall, but now it was full, the tables groaning under weight of impossible delicacies. The diners turned to look at her with synchronized precision, their mouths still chewing, always chewing.
At the head table, Belphegor smiled with too many teeth.
"Welcome to my realm proper. I do so hope you're hungry."
The Heartstone erupted with heat, searing through her shirt. Aurora gasped, stumbling backward, and found herself falling through shadow. Nyx had somehow reached through the nothing, pulled her back, but the shade's form was tattered , edges bleeding smoke.
"Run," Nyx wheezed, and they ran, up stairs that crumbled beneath their feet, past windows showing their deaths in a hundred different ways, through passages that tried to loop back to the feast.
Behind them, laughter rolled like thunder, and Aurora knew with cold certainty that they'd woken something that should have stayed sleeping. The Heartstone pulled them forward, no longer a guide but a desperate beacon , and she wondered if Isolde had known, if this had always been the plan.
They burst from the tunnels into Richmond Park just as the sun rose, collapsing onto frost-covered grass. The entrance sealed behind them, leaving only smooth earth and the echo of distant hunger.
"That," Nyx gasped, form slowly stabilizing, "was not a pocket of Dymas."
"No." Aurora clutched the Heartstone, feeling it pulse in time with her racing heart. "That was a trap."
And somewhere in the spaces between heartbeats, she could still hear Belphegor laughing, could still feel the weight of his attention. The Heartstone had led them true, but to what end?
In the distance, church bells rang six times, and Aurora realized they'd been gone for hours that felt like minutes, or perhaps minutes that felt like hours . Time, like everything else, meant nothing in the presence of hunger.
She stood on shaking legs, helping Nyx solidify enough to move. They needed to find Isolde, needed answers that wouldn't come wrapped in riddles. But as they walked toward the grove, Aurora caught her reflection in a puddle and froze.
For just a moment, her eyes had burned amber instead of blue.