AI Aurora drove the cold, leaf-shaped dagger into the seam between two oak standing stones, and the world answered with a sound like teeth grinding.
The moonsilver bit. Not rock, not soil, something thinner, like a skin stretched tight. Her left wrist stung where the chain of the Heartstone Pendant had yanked hard against her scar, the deep crimson gem pulsing as if it had found a heartbeat to mimic.
“Keep cutting,” Nyx murmured from the shadow at her shoulder. Their voice skimmed her ear like dust on a draught. “The Veil likes to pretend it cannot bleed.”
Isolde stood a few paces back in the wildflowers, silver hair falling straight as poured metal. She watched the stones with pale lavender eyes that never quite focused on the same point twice.
“A door that opens with theft,” Isolde said. “A blade that eats lies. A girl who swears she will not be hungry.”
Rory did not look away from the seam.
“Not a girl.”
The dagger slid again. The stone-face rippled, and the seam widened to a slit of darkness. Not ordinary darkness, not the kind a torch fixed. This darkness had depth. It had layers. It had the shape of a throat.
Warmth rolled out of it, rich and thick, carrying a scent that made her mouth water despite herself. Roasted fruit. Fat sizzling. Wine spilled on hot bread.
The pendant thumped against her collarbone, hot enough to make her hiss.
“Hel,” Rory said.
Nyx’s faint violet eyes glimmered in a place where no light should have been.
“Not all of it,” they said. “A place that leans towards it. A sin with a table set.”
Isolde stepped closer. Her feet left nothing behind, no crushed petals, no bent stems. The flowers should have betrayed her. They behaved as if she belonged to another rulebook.
“Dymas,” Isolde said, and the word tasted like honey turned sharp . “Gluttony’s orchard. Belphegor’s pantry.”
Rory tightened her grip on the dagger. The metal numbed her palm through the handle, cold spreading into her fingers.
“You said a grove,” Rory said.
“I said a path,” Isolde replied. “Mortals hear what makes them brave.”
The slit shuddered wider. The air tugged at Rory’s hair as if the opening had started to breathe in.
Nyx’s shadow-hand, more suggestion than flesh, brushed Rory’s elbow.
“Go,” they whispered. “Before it decides to shut.”
Rory went.
The Veil took her like a rip current. One step and the ground vanished. The standing stones, the year-round flowers, the faint London sounds beyond the boundary, all snapped away. Pressure squeezed her skull and then let go. Her stomach lurched . The pendant flared hot, then cooled to a steady, uneasy warmth .
She landed on something that felt like polished bone .
Not white bone. This surface shone dark as old ivory, etched with spirals that made her eyes itch when she stared too long. The spirals shifted, slow as a snail, rearranging themselves into patterns that nearly formed letters.
Nyx arrived without landing at all. They simply thickened out of a shadow that should not have existed in a place with no lamp and no sun. Isolde stepped through last, calm as a woman crossing a threshold into a neighbour’s kitchen.
The slit behind them narrowed to a vertical thread. It did not close. It watched.
A corridor stretched ahead, but “corridor” felt too polite. The space curved like the inside of a shell. The walls gleamed wet. Veins of pale light ran through them, pulsing in time with Rory’s pendant, as if the artefact and this place argued over which rhythm to follow.
The air tasted of sugar and iron.
Rory drew a breath and regretted it. The scent of food grew stronger, layered and wrong, like a feast prepared with a butcher’s care.
A faint sound drifted down the curving passage, not voices, not quite music . A chorus of forks scraping plates in unison. A satisfied sigh repeated, hundreds of throats, all exhaling at once.
Rory’s skin tightened across her shoulders.
“Tell me that’s not—”
“People?” Nyx finished. “Not here. Not yet.”
Isolde walked forward and did not glance back.
“The hungry sing,” she said. “They always do. Even when their mouths are full of ash.”
Rory followed, dagger in one hand, the other pressed briefly to the pendant as if she could quiet it. The gem glowed faintly beneath her fingers, deep crimson, alive in a way stone should never be.
They moved deeper. The shell-corridor widened into a chamber, and the first thing Rory noticed was the ceiling.
It did not exist.
Above them hung a canopy of floating objects, suspended as if caught in amber. Silver goblets. Gilded spoons. Platters the size of car tyres. A chandelier made of knives, each blade turned inward, points aimed at a central lump of darkness that swallowed light. The objects drifted slowly in circles, clinking now and then with a sound like polite laughter.
Along the chamber’s edge stood columns shaped like twisting vines, but the vines bore clusters of small, glassy eyes instead of grapes. The eyes blinked at Rory as she passed.
Her stomach tightened again, but not with fear alone. Some part of her, the part that had grown up on tight student budgets and late-night takeaway, reacted to the smell with a crude, immediate hunger.
Nyx noticed. Of course they did.
“The realm presses,” they said. “It offers, then it asks. Do not answer.”
Rory kept her jaw set.
“What does it ask for?”
Nyx’s head tilted. Their silhouette rippled, edges softening.
“Everything,” they said. “But it starts with something small. A lick of sweetness. A second helping. A bargain signed in gravy.”
Isolde stopped at the centre of the chamber, where the floor spirals tightened into a knot. She crouched, placed two fingers on the pattern, and smiled as if greeting an old friend .
“Here,” she said. “A hinge.”
Rory came up beside her. The spirals under Isolde’s fingers rearranged faster, forming a ring. The ring deepened, becoming a shallow bowl. In its centre, a bead of dark liquid gathered, thick as wine and black as ink.
It trembled . Then it rose, stretching into a thin thread that pointed down another passage beyond the chamber, as if the architecture itself offered directions.
“A guide,” Rory said.
Isolde lifted her fingers, and the black thread snapped back into the bowl with a wet sound.
“A leash,” Isolde corrected. “Hold the blade, Carter. The door likes to close behind what it eats.”
Rory’s grip tightened again. Cold crept further into her hand, but it steadied her, sharpened her focus.
They left the chamber and entered a passage that sloped downward. The walls here changed. The wet gleam faded. In its place, carved reliefs marched along both sides, scenes worked in shallow lines.
A table piled high with fruit. Mouths open wider than skulls should allow. Hands reaching, reaching, reaching. A figure with a crown that looked like a stack of dinner plates sat at the head of the carving-table, watching with a serene smile.
Belphegor, Rory guessed, though she had never seen the Prince of Gluttony and did not want to.
The passage opened again, and Rory’s breath caught for a different reason.
They stepped out onto a terrace overlooking a valley that should not have fitted inside any corridor. Vines spread in neat rows down rolling hills, heavy with grapes that glowed faintly from within, amber and red, like lanterns trapped inside fruit. Orchards dotted the slopes, trees bent under the weight of unfamiliar produce: pear-shaped things covered in fine hair, clusters of pale berries that dripped slow, syrupy tears into the soil.
Farther off, grand structures rose, half palace, half market. Domes tiled in colours too rich for human eyes. Arches carved with feasting scenes so detailed Rory could almost hear the crunch of bone. Roads wound between them, crowded with figures that moved like ants, carrying baskets, hauling barrels, pushing carts stacked with bread taller than a man.
Above it all stretched a sky the colour of warm amber, not a sunlit sky, more like stained glass held close to a flame. Light filled everything without casting honest shadows.
Rory stood still and forced her feet to move again.
“This is Dymas,” she said, the words coming out flat as if that could make it less real.
Nyx stepped to the terrace edge and stared down at the valley. For a moment, their silhouette sharpened, and Rory almost saw a human outline under the shadow, like a memory caught in soot.
“Gluttony loves order,” Nyx said. “Rows. Lists. Courses. It counts what it consumes.”
Isolde did not look at the valley. She looked at Rory.
“Do you feel it?” she asked.
Rory swallowed. Her mouth watered again, and the taste of phantom sugar coated her tongue.
“I feel hungry.”
Isolde’s smile turned sad.
“Hunger is not the danger,” she said. “Hunger can be sated. Appetite cannot.”
A path led from the terrace down between the vines. The soil looked dark and rich. Rory stepped onto it and felt the ground yield under her boot like fresh-baked cake. It sprang back slowly , leaving no print, as if the land refused to record her presence.
They walked between vine rows. The air grew thicker. It carried warmth and fermentation, fruit and sweat, spice and smoke.
Rory reached out before she could stop herself, brushing her fingers against a grape the size of a plum. Its skin felt taut, warm as a living cheek. It pulsed once under her touch.
Nyx’s whisper snapped close.
“Do not eat.”
Rory jerked her hand back as if burned.
“I wasn’t going to.”
Nyx’s violet eyes fixed on her. There was no judgement in their face, only a warning that felt old.
“Your body will lie,” they said. “It will tell you it wants. It will tell you it needs. Dymas listens to those words more than you do.”
They continued, and the first people they saw up close did not look like demons.
They looked like tired chefs.
Men and women in stained aprons moved through the vineyard rows with knives and baskets, harvesting glowing grapes with quick, practised hands. Their faces held that particular dullness Rory recognised from late shifts and low pay, the exhaustion that did not ever quite leave the eyes.
One man looked up as they passed. His gaze snagged on Rory’s dagger, then slid to the pendant at her throat. His pupils widened.
He dipped his head, not quite a bow, not quite submission .
“Don’t,” he mouthed without sound, then returned to his cutting as if his life depended on looking busy.
Rory’s pulse jumped.
“You saw that,” she said.
Isolde’s voice came soft.
“I see most things,” she said. “But I do not always see what they mean.”
Nyx’s shadow stretched towards the man, then withdrew.
“Helbound,” Nyx said. “Contracted souls. Working off promises they never read.”
Rory kept walking, but her stomach twisted into something that was no longer hunger. The relief carvings had not shown this part. The realm did not boast of its labour.
As they neared the market-palace structures, the sound grew louder. Not forks now. Voices. Laughter. The slap of dough against wood. The hiss of fat hitting fire. A bell rang in repeating patterns, as if announcing courses .
They passed under an archway carved with grapes and teeth. Beyond it sprawled a covered market that felt more like a cathedral than commerce. Stalls lined the wide aisles, each piled with food too perfect to be safe. Loaves with crusts that shone like lacquer. Cheeses veined with gold. Cuts of meat displayed like jewels. Huge pots simmered over blue flames, steam rising in scented coils that made Rory’s head swim.
Figures moved among the stalls. Some looked human. Some did not bother. A creature with a long neck and a mouth full of fine needle teeth sampled sauce from a spoon and moaned as if in prayer. A woman in a gown made of stitched napkins held a dripping roast in her bare hands and tore into it, chewing with eyes closed.
Rory forced herself to breathe through her nose, but every inhale tasted like temptation .
A vendor leaned out from behind a stall stacked with candied fruit skewers. His smile showed too many teeth.
“First time in Dymas?” His voice carried the patter of a market trader, cheerful, sharp. “You look parched. Complimentary taste, love. House tradition.”
Rory held up her dagger, point angled down, not a threat, a statement.
“We’re not here to eat.”
The vendor’s eyes flicked to the blade, then to Isolde’s hair, then to Nyx, and his grin tightened.
“Oh.” His tone shifted, polite but cold . “Court metal. Grove-scent. And a Shadow. You’re lost.”
Isolde leaned forward, her expression pleasant.
“We are exactly where we are,” she said. “Tell me who watches the pantry doors.”
The vendor chuckled, and the sound scraped.
“The pantry doors watch themselves,” he said. “But the Wardens watch the tears. They hate a spill.”
Rory’s pendant pulsed harder, as if offended by the word.
Nyx drifted closer to the stall, their presence dimming the blue flames in the vendor’s pot.
“We came through a hinge,” Nyx said. “We will leave the same way.”
The vendor’s smile returned, wider, hungrier.
“Course you will,” he said. “After you pay.”
Rory stepped forward, cold blade catching the strange amber light.
“We don’t have coin.”
The vendor’s gaze fixed on the pendant, and something like reverence flashed across his face, then greed swallowed it.
“You have,” he said. “It beats against your throat.”
Isolde’s hand lifted, palm open, a calming gesture that did not calm Rory at all.
“Some hungers cannot be fed,” Isolde said. “Some prices cannot be named.”
The vendor’s grin twitched. He leaned back, and Rory saw the chain around his neck, threaded through with charms, tiny bones polished smooth, each carved with a spiral like the corridor floor.
He tapped one charm with a fingernail.
A bell rang from somewhere deeper in the market, a harsher, more urgent tone. Conversations faltered. Laughter thinned. Figures turned their heads in unison, like a flock reacting to a gunshot.
The vendor’s eyes gleamed.
“You heard that?” he said. “That’s not dinner. That’s a hunt.”
Nyx’s shadow thickened, spilling across the stall like ink.
“Who hunts?” Nyx asked.
The vendor did not answer. He lifted his hand and pointed past Rory’s shoulder.
Rory turned.
Between two stalls, something tall pushed through the crowd, and the market parted for it. It wore an apron of cracked leather, stained dark. A chef’s hat sat on its head, absurd and ceremonial, but the face beneath it had no human shape. Skin stretched too tight over bone. Eyes like hot coals sunk deep. A mouth that opened sideways, lined with flat grinding teeth.
It carried a cleaver as long as Rory’s arm. The blade dripped a thick, glossy sauce that steamed where it hit the floor.
Behind it marched three more, smaller, quicker, each holding hooks instead of knives. Their nostrils flared as they tasted the air.
The first creature lifted its cleaver and pointed it straight at Rory’s pendant.
Its voice rolled out, loud enough to shake spoons on nearby stalls.
“UNREGISTERED INGREDIENT.”
Rory’s hand snapped up, yanking the Heartstone Pendant under her shirt, but the gem’s warmth burned through fabric like an ember.
Isolde’s silver hair stirred as if something unseen tugged it.
“The kitchen found you,” she said.
Nyx slid in front of Rory, shadow body widening, edges sharpening into something like a shield .
“Run,” they whispered.
The chef-demon roared, and the three hook-bearers surged forward, hooks raised high, aiming for Rory’s throat.