Run: 2026-02-19-01KHT0WHTWHHSXRHVTRRB39HE9

Fog stung Aurora's lungs and tasted of iron. The standing stones loomed like old teeth around them, ringed in moss that hummed when she pressed her palm to cold oak. The pendant lay against her sternum, a tiny heart of crimson that pulsed in step with something deeper than her own pulse. Each beat sent a faint warmth along the silver chain and a tremor through the air, as if the world on the other side answered. Nyx shifted beside her, a silhouette that refused definition. The Shade's edges shimmered like oil on water. When they inhaled, the sound came from everywhere and nowhere, a hushed wind in the trees. "This is the fold you spoke of," Aurora said, fingers tightening around the dagger at her hip. The Fae-forged blade was chill through her coat, a coldness that steadied her bones. The moonsilver tasted of moonlight and regrets. Nyx's whisper braided with the wind. "The seam is thin. The taste is right. Step, and tastes change." Isolde stood with them, hair like harvest moonlight falling loose over shoulders that never seemed to catch dust. She rested her palm on a stone and left no mark. Her voice boiled like tea poured through glass—riddled and precise. "A boundary without a seam," she said. "You will find bellies and mouths at once. Count the grapes and you will miss the vine that eats you." Aurora met Isolde's pale-lavender eyes and tried to pin meaning to the words. She had no love for riddles, but she trusted the Seer the way she trusted her own pulse: because it rarely lied. The air between the stones thinned. Light bent and the trees folded; a pressure built behind Aurora's teeth until the world tilted, and the pendant snapped hotter against her chest. The warm thud in her palm became a drumbeat that matched an old rhythm—doors opening in the dark. They stepped. Dymas did not wait to be described. It announced itself with a sky the colour of the inside of a lantern, a suspended amber that breathed. Vines spun along invisible scaffolding and heavy fruit hung like promises. The scent hit first: honey, black pepper, stitched with something metallic that set Aurora's teeth on edge. Somewhere close, a kettle sang in a language of whistles and sighs. "Beautiful," Nyx breathed, voice sliding over her words so they felt like a touch. Shadows pooled and poured over their boots and then rose to trail along the roots. "Hungry beautiful." A path opened beneath their feet—soft soil threaded with crushed spice, tiny luminescent seeds that cracked like tiny bells when stepped on. The ground hummed with a softness that carried memory; Aurora almost felt the echo of hands that had picked these orchards long before she existed. They walked. The vineyards stretched on, but did not stretch like memory. Rows twisted in on themselves and reappeared in impossible angles; a trellis arched, broke, then looped into a ceiling like the ribs of some great sleeping beast. Light refracted from leaves that shimmered with oil-slick rainbows, showing them the reflection of faces that were not theirs—faces smiling while another part of them understood too late that the mouths did not belong to living things. "Feasts," Isolde said, and the single word came out like a bell toll. "Feasts feed more than hunger." A table lay across their path, impossibly long, strung with candelabras whose flames burned green. Platters rolled like tilted moons. Chefs moved around the table with surgical poise—hands that doubled as claws and as caresses, turning meat the size of a cartwheel, slicing fruit that bled a slow red juice into bowls. The sound of laughter threaded the air. The laughter did not reach the eyes. A woman at one of the stoves lifted a ladle and steam rose like a small cloud. Aurora caught the scent inside the steam and felt her memory tremble: her mother's bread, the hush of a kitchen at dawn, the sting of a memory she had tried to tuck away. The steam tasted of those things and then tasted of something else—of bargaining and a price. Aurora pressed the blade-idle against her palm until the metal bit cold into her skin. "Do not touch the food," she said, and the words came out flat, a command without melodrama. The pendant throbbed. Behind them, vines uncoiled, leaves scissoring the air. Somewhere laughter hummed and fell into the soil like rain. Nyx drifted forward, shadow sliding up one of the table legs as if testing the grain. A single grape on a plate rolled, split, and a tiny thing scuttled out from the centre—an insect the size of a fingernail, with eyes like pinpricks that reflected the lantern sky. It scuttled across Nyx's shadow and then melted into the darkness as if swallowed. Nyx extended a hand—no fingers, only suggestion—and plucked at the air. "You see how it eats itself," Nyx said. The voice wrapped around the scene, turning it a story. "Everything here tastes of last promises." Isolde knelt and let her palm hover over a bowl of fruits. The fruit gave no heat but hummed with a residual warmth, as if it had been held by a thousand palms. "Not all bargains are signed in ink," she murmured. "Some are sealed with salt and blood and the first bite." The chefs did not seem to notice them. The workers—thin, handsome people with collars of braided rope—moved with frantic tenderness. A man bashed a pestle into a mortar and the paste took the shape of a child's face for an instant before dissolving into glaze. The sight made Aurora's stomach flip. She found herself counting to three and then to three again, fingers digging into the hilt of the dagger until the pain built a ladder back to the present. They pressed on, past trees whose bark was veined with gold and eyes that blinked open when they passed. Shadows lengthened and shifted even without sun; they worried at corners and whispered names in a language that felt like a bruise. "Why would such a place exist?" Aurora asked, more to steady the sound of her own voice than to ask for an answer. She had read about older things, about bargains etched in margins of history. Seeing them was different. Seeing them made history smell like spice and rot. Isolde straightened and smiled, a tilt of lips that was both amused and terrible. "Because someone was always hungry," she said. "Hunger makes rooms where rooms are not needed. Hunger is a patient architect." A breeze carried the clink of glass. They reached a courtyard where fountains did not pour water but a syrup so thick it held coins and the glint of teeth. People gathered around the fountains and cupped the syrup in their hands like water, tasting, and when they swallowed, their faces would wet with something else—tears or sweat or joy, Aurora could not tell. One man laughed until his shoulders jumped and then he placed his palm over a small wound at his throat and cradled a memory there like a bird. "These souls look human," Nyx said. "They were. Not now." "No," Isolde said. She looked into the fountain and saw, for a heartbeat, a reflection of someone she had known, then someone else—faces braided into a single mirror. "Traded themselves into a recipe. Contracts can be clever." Something moved beneath their boots. Roots, shaped like fingers, tangled and then uncoiled. One of them brushed Aurora's ankle. It left behind a sheen that tasted of cinnamon and iron. The pendant burned; the Heartstone's pulse quickened until Aurora could feel it against her tongue. She unclasped the chain and let the pendant dangle over the syrup in the fountain. The metal warmed, and the gem's inner light flared a little brighter. The syrup's surface tightened and trembled as if listening. From within the sticky pool a voice rose, not loud but intimate, like someone whispering through the silk of a curtain. "Who dips the red into gold?" it said, and the syllables combed the air. Isolde's smile thinned, and her palm lifted without touching the pendant. "It will speak to what it knows," she said. "Answers are never free. They want your hands." Aurora recoiled so fast a vine snapped. The pendant pulsed and sank back into warmth in her palm, as if deciding the safer course was her skin. "We asked for directions," she said. "Not company." A figure detached itself from the far end of the courtyard. Not one of the cooks. Not exactly a cook at all. It wore a coat stitched from plates and silverware, each clinking with an argument of its own. The figure rested one gloved hand on the hilt of a knife enormous enough to split a tree and smiled in a way that made ribbons of light curl out from under its teeth. Nyx's shadow leaned into the figure like a seeker leaning into the dark. "Host," they breathed. "Or host's echo." The figure inclined its head with exaggerated politeness. "Guests should be welcomed properly," it announced, and the voice bled into the room like wine. "We have chairs. We have a plate. Come, taste our welcome." Isolde's laugh came then—little and brittle. "Welcomes are the first mouth," she said. "Ever so courteous." Aurora remembered the blade in her hand. She felt its cold resolve and the way it bit when she thought of using it, the way it had sliced through the last ward that tried to keep her from what she wanted. The Fae-forged metal hummed with a subtle knowledge, as if it remembered the feel of faerie court airs and silvered songs. She slid the dagger free so its blade caught the green candlelight. "How do we leave when we've had the first bite?" she asked, voice dry, an attempt to hold the balance. Isolde's lavender eyes shifted. "You will remember the way you came," she said. "But remember comes with stains." The host of the courtyard spread its hands like a conductor. Around the table, plates turned and showed them scenes—cities swallowed by vines, children trading their lullabies for glossy fruit, lovers bartering promises for a last taste. The plates turned toward Aurora and held a mirror of her own life: the break in her wrist where the crescent scar lay; Eva's laugh echoing from kitchen tiles in a Cardiff flat. The plates whispered. The whispers sidled close to memory and tried to burrow. Nyx moved without formality, shadow uncoiling to slip a tendril between two plates. The tendril touched the ceramic and retracted loaded with a sliver of sound—a lullaby that had once soothed a tiny child in a room with lavender curtains. Nyx fed that sound back into the air like bread crumbs and the courtyard chewed and then swallowed. "Not everything here swallows meat," Nyx murmured. "Sometimes it eats what you remember you want." A chair scraped. The host gestured gracefully, so all their fingers flashed like knives. "Sit. Witness the festival. Take. Give. There are courses for every craving." Aurora felt a calculus in her bones, a ledger flipping pages she could not stop seeing. The pendant pulsed against her palm, urgent and small. She had come here because the Heartstone had tugged at something she could not refuse. She had come because Isolde had pronounced a riddle and because Nyx's presence made edges softer. Now the ledger opened in full. She took a breath and the air inside her became something heavy and sweet. Her mouth flooded with salt. "No," she said, because words could still be weapons. She lifted her chin. The dagger gleamed. "We are looking. Not supping." The host's smile sharpened. Around them, someone laughed—soft and delighted—and the servants with their rope collars looked up, their expressions split between servile and feral. One of them stepped forward, holding a tray. On it lay a single thing: a small tart, its crust perfect, its filling bubbling with an opalescent glow. Isolde tilted her head and let a leaf fall from her hair. "Even a single tart can be a treaty," she said. "You understand the terms when the sugar sticks to your teeth." Aurora's fingers twitched near the dagger. The pendant's light hummed through the chain. Nyx's shadow poured itself into the space between them like a shield and then like a hand, waiting. At the edge of the courtyard a door opened, and cool air breathed out, carrying a sound like pages being turned. From that doorway something came toward them—boots on cobblestones, steady, not the chirp of a host. Footsteps that did not belong to servers, nor to cooks, nor to the bound. The host gestured as if presenting a new course. "Ah," it said. "Now the real company arrives." Aurora did not have to be told. She tightened the grip on the dagger. The Fae blade hummed against expectation. The pendant pressed hot to her chest and pulsed like a second heart. They had crossed for the first time. They had not yet decided what to hand over. And someone else had arrived who might decide for them.