Run: 2026-02-19-01KHT0ZN5Z3AR06XQJDMF3P8YW

The amber sky stretched above them like a bruise made of honey and firelight. Rory stopped at the edge of the slope, boots sinking into soil that was too dark, too rich, too warm beneath her feet. The air tasted of overripe plums and something underneath — something mineral and sharp, the way pennies taste when you put them on your tongue as a kid. She breathed through her mouth and felt her lungs resist, as if the atmosphere here was thicker, denser, designed for different bodies. "Don't just stand there gawping." Nyx's voice slid past her ear, less than a whisper. They flickered at the periphery of her vision, their shadow-form rippling against a sky that had no sun to cast shadows from. "We're exposed." She moved. The hill descended into a valley so lush it looked staged — vineyards in impossible purples and blacks cascading down terraced slopes, orchards with trees whose branches bent under the weight of fruit she couldn't name. Some of it pulsed, faintly, the way the Heartstone pulsed against her collarbone. She pressed her hand flat over the pendant through her jacket. Warm. Almost hot now. "The pendant knows where it was born." Isolde walked beside her without walking, exactly — her feet skimmed the dark earth without pressing into it, without leaving marks. Her silver hair caught the amber light and threw it back copper. "As a river remembers the mountain." "Can you just once tell me something in plain English?" Isolde's lavender eyes fixed on her. A smile that was not quite a smile. "The pendant came from this realm. It resonates. That is plain enough, I think." Fair point. Rory didn't press it. She was too busy trying to catalogue everything her eyes were feeding her, her brain two steps behind her senses. The vineyards up close were stranger than they'd appeared from the ridge — the vines twisted around trellises made of something that looked like bone but had the sheen of ceramic, and the grapes, if they were grapes, were each the size of a child's fist. Translucent skins revealed interiors that shifted color: garnet to amber to a deep, swallowing black. She reached for one. "Don't." Nyx materialized at her wrist, their fingers — if fingers was the right word — cold and feather-light against her skin. Against the crescent scar. She pulled back. "Nothing here is free. Everything feeds, everything takes. Touch nothing you aren't prepared to pay for." "What's the price?" "Depends on what's being sold." They dissolved back into the space between her shadow and the vine's shadow, stitching themselves into the dark geometry of the world. "That's the game in Dymas." They descended further. A path materialized, or perhaps it had always been there and she'd only just recognized it — flagstones of black slate fitted together without mortar, each one carved with sigils that had been worn soft by centuries of feet. The path wound through the orchards, and the trees here bore fruit she almost recognized. Pears, maybe, but the skin was iridescent. Figs that wept a golden sap from their stems. Something that looked like a pomegranate split open on the ground, its seeds glittering like actual rubies, and the smell that rose from it made her stomach clench with a hunger so sudden and violent it frightened her. She walked faster. "Others have come this way." Isolde knelt — or rather, lowered herself to a hovering crouch — near a patch of disturbed earth beside the path. Boot prints. Human boot prints, unremarkable except for their presence in a realm that was definitively not Earth. "Mortal feet. Recent." "The contracted chefs," Rory said. She remembered the briefing, such as it was — Nyx's clipped explanations offered in Isolde's grove while the oak stones hummed around them. Helbound souls. Humans who'd signed contracts with Belphegor's agents, traded years or skills or memories for something they wanted badly enough to barter with a Prince of Hel. They cooked here now. Served here. Created dishes for beings that experienced flavor as something closer to ecstasy. "Not just chefs." Nyx's voice came from everywhere and nowhere, the wind's own secret. "Farmers. Sommeliers. Butchers. Belphegor collects talent the way your kind collects stamps. Obsessively and with dubious purpose." The path opened into a clearing, and Rory stopped again. A structure rose before them — part greenhouse, part cathedral. Walls of smoky glass held in a framework of the same bone-ceramic material as the trellises, soaring upward to a vaulted peak that had to be sixty feet high. Through the glass she could see movement: shapes tending rows of plants, steam rising from something in the center, the warm amber light of Dymas filtering through the panes and scattering into fractured gold across the flagstones at her feet. "A kitchen," she said, and the word felt absurd. Inadequate. Like calling the ocean a puddle. "A temple." Isolde's head tilted, birdlike. "In Dymas, the distinction is irrelevant." Rory circled the building's exterior. The glass was warm to the proximity of her hand — she didn't touch it, heeding Nyx's warning — and up close she could see that it wasn't glass at all. It moved. Slowly, imperceptibly, the way glaciers move, the surface rippling with internal currents of color. Amber, crimson, gold. Alive, or close enough to alive that the difference didn't matter. Around the back of the structure, a garden spilled outward in raised beds that formed concentric circles. Herbs she recognized — rosemary, thyme, something that might have been basil — grew alongside plants she'd never seen. A bush with silver leaves that chimed when the nonexistent breeze touched them. A low ground cover with flowers that opened and closed rhythmically, breathing. Vines that climbed invisible supports, hanging heavy with pods that crackled faintly, as though the seeds inside were arguing. The hunger hit again. Deeper this time. Not in her stomach but behind her ribs, in the hollow place beneath her heart. A craving that had nothing to do with food and everything to do with this place — a longing to sit down at one of the long stone tables she could see through the glass walls, to eat whatever was being prepared inside, to let the warmth of Dymas soak into her bones and never leave. "Rory." Isolde's voice, sharp for once. No riddles. Rory blinked. She was standing at the entrance to the structure, her hand on the door — a slab of dark wood carved with scenes of feasting so detailed she could see individual teeth in the revelers' mouths. She didn't remember walking here. "It pulls," she said, and her voice came out rough. "It is designed to pull." Isolde stood behind her, and for the first time Rory noticed something in those pale eyes that might have been fear. "The whole realm is an appetite. You are standing in the belly of a hunger older than my grandmother's grandmother." Nyx coalesced beside the door, tall and dark and sharp against the amber-gold of everything else. A wound in the warmth. Their violet eyes — the only color they possessed — burned cold. "Three rules if we go inside." Their voice was quiet. Deadly serious. "We eat nothing. We accept nothing. We compliment nothing. Flattery in Dymas is currency, and currency creates debt." "You forgot one." Isolde lifted her chin toward the carved door. "Do not let them learn your name." Rory thought of her flat above Silas's bar. Thought of the Golden Empress and Yu-Fei's voice barking orders from the kitchen. Thought of Cardiff and her mother's face. All of it felt impossibly distant, separated by something far more vast than the Veil. She wrapped her fingers around the Fae blade at her hip. The moonsilver hilt bit cold through her glove, a sharp antidote to the warmth that was trying to lull her into softness. "Then let's get this over with." She pushed the door open. The smell that poured out was transcendent — roasting meat and caramelized sugar and something floral and green and alive — and underneath it all, the faintest trace of smoke. Not wood smoke. Not coal. The acrid, chemical tang of something that had burned and kept burning, endlessly, feeding a fire that never went out. The interior unfolded before them in layers. The first was sensory: heat and fragrance and the sound of chopping, sizzling, the rhythmic thud of dough against stone. The second was visual: a vast open space filled with workstations, each one occupied by a figure in stained whites. Some human, clearly — their postures held that particular exhaustion that Rory recognized from watching Yu-Fei's cooks at the end of a dinner rush. Others were not human at all. A creature with too many arms julienned vegetables with mechanical precision, four blades moving simultaneously. Something amphibian and glistening stirred a pot large enough to bathe in, its wide mouth open in what could have been concentration or agony. The third layer was the one that made Rory's skin prickle. Eyes. Every pair in the cathedral-kitchen found them within seconds of the door opening. The humans looked up with expressions that cycled through surprise, recognition, and something terrible — hope, maybe, or its ghost. The non-human workers stared with harder, flatter gazes. Assessment. The way a butcher eyes a cut of meat, measuring its potential. Nobody stopped working. "Fresh," said a voice from somewhere above them. Deep. Resonant. Amused. Rory looked up and saw a mezzanine level she hadn't noticed, a balcony of dark wood overlooking the floor. A figure leaned against the railing, too far away and too high up to see clearly, but their silhouette was broad and unhurried. "Fresh ingredients," the voice continued, and laughter rippled through the kitchen like grease popping in a hot pan. "How delightful." The Heartstone pendant flared against Rory's chest, so hot it nearly seared her skin. She pressed her palm against it and felt the pulse quicken — a heartbeat that wasn't hers, drumming in the deep crimson of the gem, answering some call she couldn't hear. Nyx shifted closer, their shadow overlapping hers. Cold poured off them, welcome and grounding. "Steady," they breathed. "We're in the mouth now. Don't let it swallow."