AI The roots of the oaks rose like ribs around the clearing, their boles shot through with pale lichen that caught the dusk and held it. Wind moved through the wildflowers without sound. The standing stones ringed them, grey and old and pitted, and the air around them held the faintest sheen, like heat above a road.
Rory slid a finger under the Heartstone’s chain where it pressed against her collarbone. Warmth pulsed against the pad of her finger. Once. Twice. Thrice. The beat felt out of step with her own.
“It hungers where it thins.” Isolde tipped her silver head, hair slipping like water over her shoulder. Her bare feet rested on moss. No prints marked the place she had stood even a breath before. Pale lavender eyes studied the shimmer between the stones. “Offer passage, take passage. The old bargains never broke.”
Nyx bled up from the shadow thrown by an oak root and stood beside Rory, violet eyes faint in the near-dark. Smoke without smoke curled at the edges of their shape. “Doors always ask. You brought the coin?”
Rory touched the pendant again. Heat swelled, then settled. “If this counts as currency.”
“In this place, all hunger counts.” Isolde’s voice wound through the leaves like a hidden brook. “A clean blade meets a greedy knot.”
Rory slid the Fae-forged dagger from its sheath. Cold leached into her palm and up her wrist, an ache that made the old crescent scar on her left wrist prickle. The blade held no light here under the trees, but it felt like moon on skin . She stepped forward until the shimmer wrinkled at the tip of the knife.
Nyx’s whisper brushed her ear. “Push like you mean it.”
She pushed. The air gave like old sugar and the dagger’s edge bit. A thin line opened, dark and deep, and the scent of caramelised stone and crushed grapes spilled through, sweet enough to tilt her stomach . The Heartstone flared against her chest.
Isolde’s eyes narrowed . “A mouth in a mouth. Step before it tastes you.”
Nyx slipped through with the grace of something poured. Rory took a breath that stuck halfway, then followed. The world flipped. Her ears popped. The taste of copper hit her tongue and then she stood on spongy ground under an amber sky that felt like late afternoon caught forever .
Heat pressed but carried no sting. The vineyard rose in terraces on either side of a path the colour of toasted bread. Vines clung to trellises grown from bone-white stone, their leaves thick as a palate, the veining almost like fingerprints. Clusters of grapes swelled, beads of black and deep purple and a strange pale jade that held tiny fish-shaped shadows darting within. Wind moved across them in a swell and the leaves rubbed together with a whisper not unlike breath between teeth.
Rory rubbed her wrist and glanced up. The sky hung warm and glossy, a dome brushed with smoke at the edges. Bees drifted past, oval bodies of obsidian shot through with thin seams of gold, and the hum they carried settled in her ribs rather than her ears. In the distance, a hillside broke open with rows of ovens, mouths dark as caves. Copper pans the size of cartwheels caught the light and threw it back as a dulled glow.
“Welcome to a belly carved into land.” Nyx’s head tilted, their eye-flare catching on a ribbon of light where a river curved. The river gleamed deep garnet, surface tremoring as if something beneath breathed. “He gave this place his name because he believed it belonged to him.”
“Princes write their names everywhere.” Isolde lifted her hand, palm cupped to catch a drifting piece of white down. It landed, then wriggled. A seed. It uncurled into a tiny spoon, then turned and dove for the ground like a fish returning to water. “But the ink always runs.”
Rory didn’t ask which prince. She could taste the answer on the air anyway, along with spice and smoke and a note that tugged at the back of her throat: fried bread from a childhood fete, her mother’s leftover stew reheated late and eaten over the sink. It hit, sharp and sure, the way aching hits a bruise, and for a heartbeat she wanted to sit on the toasted path and scoop up handfuls of dirt and see if it melted like sugar on her tongue.
Nyx’s shadows tightened around their frame. “Keep your mouth shut unless you mean to give it something.”
“I caught the hint.” Rory braced the dagger against her thigh and set off along the path. The bread-crumb firmness compressed under her boots, then sprang back. Her prints remained, then slowly puffed away until the path looked untouched. Isolde walked to her left. No prints marked her passage.
A figure moved along the second terrace, half-hidden by leaves. Rory slowed. A man in a white apron came to the edge of the trellis and turned a face stained with wine. Eyes blank, hands moving without pause, he pinched off a grape that leaked smoke instead of juice and set it in a wide basket with a practiced flick. The hum of the bees deepened around him. He didn’t look at them. He breathed in rhythm with the field.
“Helbound?” Rory kept her voice under the bees’ hum.
“Recipe caught in a loop.” Isolde’s mouth crooked, not smile, not frown. “He stirs until the stirring stops him.”
Nyx watched the man’s hands, then the smoke curling from the broken grape. “He feeds it stories so it lets him keep his hands.”
Rory shifted her grip on the blade. “Good for him.”
They wove deeper between trellises. The grapes changed as they walked. First language curled inside the skins, words in a script she didn’t know that broke and reformed when she blinked. Then eyes stared out, fish-bright and vacant. Then the clusters bulged and subsided in slow waves like sleeping animals. The hum of bees became a low drone that made the tiny hairs along her arms lift. Every scent that rose felt targeted and kindling: chipped ice and lemonade from summer fields, curry steamed out of foil after a late shift, the first coffee of a morning when she had been sure she couldn’t get up.
Isolde laid two fingers against Rory’s forearm. Cold slid into her heat. “Not food. Tools.”
“Tools for what?”
“Building.” Isolde’s gaze climbed a slope where the terraces broke and rose into a mound. The mound swelled and sank on a steady breath. Pitted bronze doors sat half-buried in its side, a few feet ajar. Sticky amber had run from the crack, cooled, and set in ripples like frozen honey.
Nyx drifted ahead. “It isn’t asleep because it dreams. It sleeps because that is how it hunts.”
Rory felt the Heartstone kick once against her sternum, sharp enough to pull a gasp. The amber around the doors gleamed. A faint warmth rode the air from the crack, and something metallic undercut the sugar.
“Wards.” She tasted the word and knew it. The cold of the Fae blade pushed up into her bones as if anticipating the cut .
Isolde’s voice lowered. “Teeth for those who bite slow. Your knife knows fast work.”
Rory stepped to the seam and slid the blade’s tip into the gummy sugar. It resisted, then parted with a sound like silk pulled from damp. Heat steamed her face. She worked along the crack, arms steady, shoulders engaged. The amber flaked in curls that hit the ground and scurried away on tiny limbs. Nyx’s shadow flicked , pinned one, let it wriggle until it settled into stillness.
“Charming.” Rory pushed. The doors shifted with a groan that pushed air past her like a sigh from a buried thing. The sound rolled over the vineyard. Bees lifted, paused, then settled as one.
Inside lay a hall long enough that the far end softened into haze. The ceiling arched high, ribbed with beams crusted in salt. Chains hung from them, hooks notched and clean, as if waiting . Worktables ran in rows, surface pitted, scored, stained in old patterns. Copper pots sat fat-bellied and red-brown, each one fixed over a mouth in the floor that glowed low. Smoke rose from some of those mouths in thread-thin lines, spices riding them: clove, cinnamon, something darker that sang under her teeth and made her think of marrow.
Rory picked up a ladle from the nearest hook. It weighed too much for its size and held a dimple exactly the size of her palm, as if the metal had remembered being held and accommodated. She set it down. The motion sent a ripple through the line of tools as if they shared a spine.
“Look.” Nyx’s arm pointed, their voice only barely voice at all . On the far wall, a mosaic of tiles wove across stone, colours deep and wet-looking. The tiles resolved into a river snaking through a field. But the river moved, ever so slightly , and the field grew and pruned itself. Tiny figures the size of her thumbnail carried baskets from vine to vat. In the lower corner, a hand larger than any figure reached in from an edge that had to be the frame of the world and plucked one worker up like a grape, then set it back down inside a copper pan.
Isolde’s eyes tracked the hand. “A lesson. Eat or be eaten. Skin, seed, pulp. The order doesn’t matter much if the mouth is big enough.”
“Who learns from that?” Rory’s knuckles whitened on the blade.
“The mouth. Always the mouth.”
Something scratched under the nearest table. Rory crouched. A pile of grains—barley, rice, things long and short and round—shifted. Two beads of onyx clicked as eyes and a thin seam opened where a mouth might be. The pile trembled and reshaped itself into a small man no higher than her knee, his body made of grain held together by nothing she could see. He peered up at her, blank, then scattered as if sneezed apart by a wind that didn’t exist. The grains rolled, pooled, grew still.
Nyx ran shadow-fingers across one of the chains. “Hungry work leaves echoes .”
Rory straightened. The Heartstone warmed again, a tingling pulse that lined up with a faint tremor in the floor. She pressed the pendant through her shirt and the tremor sharpened like a tap against glass. The heat drew her toward a door at the back of the hall where the salt-ribbing tightened into a throat of white stone. A sign hung above it, hammered iron in a language she didn’t know, but the shape of the letters tasted like burnt sugar when she looked too long.
Isolde drifted toward it. “The deep pantry.” Her gaze slipped over the iron. “Open only when empty, close only when full.”
“Helpful.”
“Hungry doors speak plain.” Her fingers hovered a hair over the metal. “Tell it what you bring and it lets you live.”
“I brought a stomach and poor ideas.” Rory rolled her shoulders and moved closer. The chill of the blade pushed against the soft heat of the pendant like two magnets arguing. Sweat prickled under her hairline. She swallowed and it carried the copper and salt and sugar up and back down.
Nyx pressed two fingertips to the door. Their shape thinned, then thickened. “It recognises the stone you wear.” They didn’t look at her. “It recognises everything the person who gave it to you wanted it to recognise.”
Rory stared at the door until the edges of her vision glittered. “You keep giving me confidence.”
“I gave you fact.”
Isolde’s eyes softened in that way that never quite became kindness. “A gift left on a table always has a name written under it. You didn’t look yet.”
“Because I was busy not getting eaten.” Rory drew in a breath and let it out slow. She lifted the blade and set the flat to the iron. Frost smoke curled from where metal kissed metal. The iron hissed and the sign drew back like a creature that had learned the sting of a hand.
The door eased, heavy and sure. Air moved out, cool and wet, and with it came a sound like a sigh through a hundred throats. Shelves lined the narrow passage beyond, grown from the rock itself, every surface beaded with what at first looked like dew . She reached out with her free hand and touched a bead. It rolled away and fell, not water but a pearl of fat that landed on her boot and then melted, soaked, and disappeared.
“Brilliant.” Rory rubbed a palm against her thigh.
They walked into the deep pantry single file, Nyx skimming the right-hand wall, Isolde floating forward without leaving the dust disturbed, Rory between, shoulders set. The shelves held jars of blown sugar sealed with poured wax, their contents moving behind the glass. She watched a swirl of smoke inside one shape into a bird, then into a block of letters she could not make sense of , then into a tongue that licked the inside of its prison before collapsing back to curl.
A narrow ladder leaned against a beam. The beam pulsed like a throat. Rory looked up. Hooks crowded above them, holding cuts of meat that didn’t hang so much as grow, spreading slow, edges knitting to the air and then parting again. She pushed her gaze down, jaw tight.
Nyx paused at a set of shallow bowls mounted along the floor. Each bowl held a liquid of a different shade: pale cream, deep red, a green so dark it read as black. Heat folded over the bowls like invisible hands. Nyx dipped a finger into the green. Pulled back empty. Their voice cooled. “Not for consuming. For marking.”
Rory’s attention snagged on a slab of stone at the pantry’s end. It rose waist-high and smooth, no tool-marks, just veins of something like mica running through granite . The pendant burned against her skin. She stepped to it and laid her palm flat. The stone thrummed. Deep. Once. Twice. It pushed back into her, just enough to make the nerves in her fingers light.
Isolde moved up beside her, silver hair shaking with the faintest movement of breath. “Stone remembers the hand that cut it. Your heartstone remembers the hand that cut it too.”
“You can say who?” Rory didn’t look away from the vein that had begun to pulse under her palm, not in time with her or the pendant, something older, slower.
“I can say why. Why is always easier. Names slip. Intent sticks.” Isolde’s tone tasted like a smile without warmth . “It wanted you to find kitchens that never close.”
Nyx’s shadow stretched, touched Rory’s boots, withdrew. “And this wall wants payment in return for the map it hides.”
Rory blinked. Lines rose on the stone where her skin met it, pale to start, then darkening into a web that made sense only if she softened her focus, like reading a reflection. She let her eyes unfocus, let the hum of the bees far behind thread the roar of her own blood, let the scents level out until they were one thing rather than a thousand.
The web became rows and stairs and caverns and lifts. Arrows that weren’t arrows pointed downward and sideways at once. Circles pulsed where the veins ran thicker. The nearest circle pulsed hardest when she looked at it. The pendant burned, then cooled to a steady glow.
“South and under,” she breathed. “And again under.”
Nyx leaned in, their voice a draught from an open window in winter. “You feel it as hunger. That is how this place speaks.” A pause, almost fond. “You learn fast.”
“I’d like to live long, thanks.” Rory took her hand from the stone. Her palm had reddened where the big vein had pushed.
The pantry breathed around them. Not loud. Not soft. A fact like weather. Isolde tilted her head, listening, then moved away toward a narrow slit in the far wall where moisture collected and ran in thin threads. Wildflowers grew out of that slit, tiny and stubborn, petals bright as fresh paint against white stone. Their scent cut through the sugar for a heartbeat—green and rain and the park in spring when foxes left wet pawprints on the paths.
“An edge of elsewhere.” Isolde brushed one flower with her knuckle and it cupped itself around her skin. “A place folded inside a place. You brought your own door and your own knife. The meal can come later.”
“Let’s skip the meal.” Rory turned from the flowers, back to the web on the stone. The circles pulsed . The furthest ones flickered like distant lighthouses through fog. “We go now. Before this wants more from us.”
Nyx slipped between her and the shelves, a smear of dark that kept the jars from touching her. “It already wants more.” Their mouth barely shaped the word. “We teach it what it can have.”
Rory checked the blade, slid it home, then took it back out with a grunt. Better in her hand than at her side. The chill steadied her. The glow of the pendant steadied her too. She glanced once at the moving mosaic way behind them, then faced the narrow stairs that turned out of the deep pantry and into white-limned dark. The hum rose through the stone and pressed her soles.
“Right.” Her voice curled and flattened, found a rhythm that matched the hum. “South and under.” She put her boot on the first step and it dipped and pushed back like a muscle. She set her weight and it held.
Nyx’s whisper drifted. “Down we eat our names until only hunger answers.”
“I’m not on the menu.” Rory didn’t look back.
Isolde’s riddle picked up behind her, a weave rather than a block. “Bring your blade. Bring your stone. Bring your empty hands. Leave the rest on the table for the mouths that live in walls.”
They moved, one after the other, into the stair’s curve where the light bent like dough being worked , and the air cooled from amber to something salt and spare, and the smell of spice slipped and made way for iron and the clean bite of ground just turned.