AI The standing oaks ringed the clearing like old judges. Bark furrowed into faces if you stared too long. Damp moss muffled Rory’s boots and the night smelled of crushed mint and wet stone. Her pendant warmed against her sternum. It throbbed with a heartbeat that wasn’t hers.
“You trust this spot?”
She thumbed the little crimson gem through her shirt and watched the air between the trees ripple, a faint three-dimensional tremor, like heat above a forge.
“Trust is a bird that eats from many hands,” Isolde drifted along the ring of roots, pale hair trailing the dew. “But the bird knows the worm.”
Nyx unspooled from the base of an oak. They grew from a rind of shadow to a man-shaped silhouette, violet eyes faint and steady. Their edges fluttered where leaves rustled. “Your stone purrs,” their voice rode the breeze . “The Veil thins until it coughs.”
Rory shifted the strap of her courier bag. The moonsilver dagger lay inside, leeching heat. “If it coughs, we run.”
“Run from a feast?” Isolde’s smile showed no warmth . She stepped and left no mark on the damp. “When the table swings low, even the fox looks up.”
“I’m not a fox.” Rory dug her hand into the bag and pressed her palm to the cold dagger hilt. It numbed the skin under her nails. “And I don’t eat what I don’t cook.”
“Keep that rhythm,” Nyx’s head tilted to the shimmer, the sound of thin glass being stroked by a wet finger. “Hel likes to swallow those who forget their mouths.”
The rippling in the air deepened. Threads of amber bled into the clear night. The tips of the oaks leaned, then straightened, the grove’s breath caught and released. The pendant burned. Rory hissed and fished it free. The little stone glowed with an inner ember. Tiny pulses clung to the chain and climbed her hand like ferrets.
“Hold to it,” Isolde touched her wrist, cool as river pebbles. “It knows home better than we do.”
“Home.”
“Every hunger calls somewhere.”
Rory didn’t bite that thought . The shimmer yawned, a vertical lid peeled open, revealing nothing and then too much: light the colour of old honey, scent of roasted fennel and caramel and something sickly under that, wet as overripe fruit. A breeze toyed with her hair and tasted faintly of lemon peel on her tongue.
Nyx leaned toward the wound in the world. Their fingers elongated, stretched thin as wire, met the ripple, sank, then reformed. “Soft as custard,” a breath of amusement. “Watch for tooth under it.”
“Your poetry makes me want toast,” Rory stepped forward. The grove muttered in its own green vocabulary. Shimmering shot through the standing stones like fish under ice. She pushed the pendant past the curtain.
It slipped out of her grip like a stone into gravy.
“Ah,” Isolde’s hand hovered inches from Rory’s shoulder, not touching. “Keep your feet. Taste with your eyes.”
They moved. The step down felt like walking off a kerb you didn’t know existed. For a heartbeat she fell and moved and didn’t. Every joint found a wrong angle and then slotted back. Rory clenched her teeth. The bone in her ear hummed. Cinnamon ghosted the roof of her mouth. The cold hilt in her bag steadied something that wanted to swing loose in her spine.
Their boots and not-boots found ground that wasn’t dirt. The air hugged close, warm and damp. The world settled.
Amber sky spread from horizon to horizon, stitched with slow-moving wisps like whorls in a glass of brandy. The light cast everything in gold except shadows, which clung deep and cool. Flanked by raised beds taller than cottages, the path wound into a textured landscape. Vines as thick as a child’s torso braided over archways. Fruit bowed the trellises—grapes with translucent skins and dark seeds that glittered like onyx; pears swollen into teardrops big as a head; figs that oozed when breeze brushed them, syrup beads like tears.
Rory touched the ground with her toe. It sprang. A sponge of rich black earth mixed with something elastic. Her boot left a print that was gone the moment she lifted her foot.
Nyx inhaled without lungs. “Heh. This soil remembers mouths.”
A sound from deeper in, a quick staccato: chop, chop, chop in precise rhythm. Pans kissed flame with sharp tongues. A bell chimed, metallic but dampened, as if it woke under cloth.
Rory drew the pendant on its chain. It pulsed slow and content in her palm. Warmth climbed into her wrist. “This is Dymas.”
Isolde glanced at a vine that had threaded into a shape like a chaise and then melted back into leaf. “Call a wolf a name and it becomes a dog for a blink.”
“Fine. Vineyard from someone’s fever dream.” Rory’s stomach clenched, not from hunger, but from the smell . Herbs, sugar, fat. A memory rolled across the path and hit her shin: jam tarts cooling on a windowsill, her mother’s laugh when the pastry crumbled, the scold when little fingers stole before dinner. She stepped sideways.
“We are seen.” Nyx’s eyes swiveled. Not fear. An awareness, like a cat adjusting to the new hum under the fridge.
Shapes worked in the distance, far down the terraces: hunched figures with white caps welded to skulls, arms moving in clockwork arcs. A chef sliced at a speed that made his hands a blur of pale fish. The sound of his knife wasn’t one blade, but a chorus.
“Helbound,” Isolde watched without blinking. “They traded their last bite and now cook meals they cannot taste.”
Rory swallowed down the iron flare in her mouth. “You always know how to make an appetite.”
They slid along the path. Grapevines leaned as though they wanted to listen. Each grape hissed something as Rory passed. She strained her ear. Not words. Names. She picked out Ellis. Her mother’s maiden name pinged off her bones. She tightened her grip on the pendant until the little edges bit her palm.
A row of hedges clipped into waves funneled them into a courtyard. In the centre rose a fountain, but water didn’t leap from it. A warm, glossy stream of chocolate arced and caught the light. Strawberries grew on the fountain itself, lacquered and obscene. It gurgled like a satisfied throat.
“Touch it and it touches back,” Nyx’s fingers combed the spray’s shadow. Droplets clung to them like beetles.
“I’m good,” Rory steered clear. A dragonfly lit on the rim. Its wings were almond slivers dipped in sugar; it snagged a bubble and dragged it like a pearl.
Beyond the fountain a wall of stacked cheeses towered, rinds inscribed with little capital letters that crawled and rearranged. A nibble at the base showed bites the size of fists. Teeth-marks not round, but layered with serrations . A wet smack echoed from between two wheels. Rory didn’t look. She moved faster.
They found a canal cut through caramel-coloured dirt. A slow stew drifted past, surface broken by star anise and cinnamon bark. Barges floated along it, charred oak trays carrying fat jars that leaked steam. Little paddlewheels spun, driven by kitchen flames trapped in cages. A demon with a cork body and a tap for a nose guided one barge with a spitted fork. Its eyes were olives skewered on picks.
“This place makes you laugh and then cycles the joke back through your throat,” Nyx’s voice wrapped the word throat like cloth.
“Stop talking like a menu warning,” Rory watched the demon until it dipped under a rosemary arch and out of sight. “We need a direction.”
“We have one.” Isolde pointed where the path dove under a pergola woven of bones that had gone pearlescent. At the end hung a bauble of glass lit from within. The pendant in Rory’s hand warmed in response, a dog pricking to a whistle.
“You knew it would guide us,” Rory’s eyes cut to the Seer.
“I knew a stone from a kitchen would know the way to fire.”
They walked under the pergola. Bone ribs curved overhead, carved with images of fish turning into birds, loaves sprouting wings, knives blossoming flowers. Shadows dappled their faces. The pendant’s heat worked up her forearm. She flexed her fingers to keep blood in them.
A swarm buzzed at the far end. Bees the size of plums, bodies like spun sugar, eyes embedded raisins. Each beat of their wings shook glitter from the air. They clustered over a heap of something. As the group approached, the bees rose in a gust, sugar dust fogging their ankles.
“Hold,” Nyx’s palm spread toward the swarm. Their shadow lengthened, climbed the air, and overlaid the cloud with a cool night. The bees, deprived of light, calmed. They settled on the heap again, which revealed itself: a man’s jaw carved of gingerbread, iced with a white moustache. It chewed nothing. The peg teeth clicked hollowly. The bees crawled in and out of the mouth as if working a hive .
Rory’s skin crawled. “This place is disgusting.”
“It’s a body built of what they thought they wanted,” Isolde crouched, hair slipping like silver rain around her shoulder . “Taste your life long enough, or it tastes you.”
She pushed through a curtain of falling thyme. Beyond lay a stepped amphitheatre, sunk into the earth. Stone seats, each facing a central pit lined with blackened rock. Hooks hung overhead, empty, swaying as if someone had just brushed past. The floor glittered where sugar had melted and set again. The sound of knives had faded. Here, silence gathered like bread dough and rose.
Rory stepped onto the sugar-lit floor. It cracked under her heel, dimpled, then smoothed. An oven door in the pit’s rim yawned, steel with a patina of a thousand heatings. A breath came from inside it, not wind, but the exhale of an immense sleeping mouth .
Her pendant went hot enough to press-cooked steak into her palm. She hissed and looped the chain around her wrist. “We’re close.”
Nyx edged along the wall, testing with their hand. Their fingers met a place and skittered back. “Ward. Sticky as toffee. It clings to thought.”
Rory drew the dagger out. The blade shed the grotto’s heat. Cold peeled off it like winter from stone. She pressed the tip to the air where Nyx’s fingers had twitched. The resistance felt like pushing through overbeaten meringue. The metal sipped and the ward shuddered. Frost spidered where the blade kissed nothing. A quiet, petulant hiss bled from the edges. It smelled faintly of scorched sugar and bile.
“Cut with care,” Isolde rose without a rustle. “Things stitched hold other things in place.”
“Other things can wait,” Rory worked the dagger. It made clean fluting cuts through the invisible. The gap didn’t open; it unseamed. A membrane sagged inward. Beyond, dark.
She finished the last inch and stepped back. The ward’s sag shifted to a doorway, rimmed in fine hoarfrost that steamed and then dripped clear. Nyx reached an arm through. Their silhouette’s edge fuzzed, then sharpened.
“Empty,” the word felt like a thought . “Nothing moves unless you count breath in jars.”
They slipped inside. Rory followed. The air changed. It went cooler by a few degrees and held a metallic tang like wet pennies sucked between teeth. Shelves rose to the cave ceiling, crammed with glass containers. Hearts that were not hearts pumped in syrup. Plum pits suspended in jelly ticked against their jars in tiny clacks, like beetle feet. A jar of cream had a swirl frozen inside that never slowed. On a slab sat a pie made from something that once had eyes and now watched through lattices.
Rory hugged her elbows. The cold from the blade and the heat from the pendant pulled at each other across her skin. “What is this place?”
“A pantry for wants,” Isolde’s fingers hovered over a row of tongues arranged by size. They lay like sleeping slugs, pink and polite. “A museum of mouthpieces.”
“Charming.” Rory lifted the pendant. It dragged her arm toward the back wall. The heat seemed to thrill at one corner of the room.
Nyx drifted that way , their outline deforming against shelves. The corner held a copper door set into stone. It had no handle. Around it, the wall wore a white bloom like mould, delicate and lacy as spun sugar frost. A sigil above the door wasn’t etched but grown, a cluster of tiny mushrooms in the shape of a circle with a bite missing.
“Portal,” Rory breathed. The pendant almost burned. She could feel its heartbeat in the bones of her hand now. “It wants to go through.”
“Want drags you until your ankles bleed.” Isolde’s voice softened as it could. “Do not make the door larger than your mouth.”
Rory knelt. The copper threw back her face tinted orange, eyes large under the amber light. The pendant’s red lay in the reflection like a wound. She pressed the gem to the door. It thrummed in harmony with something beyond. Something answered under her palm, too regular to be a drum, too warm to be a bell.
Nyx’s eyes glowed a fraction brighter. “We are not alone on the other side.” Their shadow pricked like a thousand bristles, every hair sensing.
A slow scrape in the room pulled Rory’s glance. On the slab, the pie twitched. The lattice lifted and fell. Inside, the filling arranged itself, trying to mimick an organ it had never known. The smell of nutmeg turned the stomach . She stood fast.
“Keep your throat,” she muttered to herself. “Breathe.”
On a lower shelf, a jar fizzed. Bubbles rose through red liquor, popping soundlessly under the wax seal. Tiny shapes floated in the liquid—hearts, but not animal; the hearts of fruits, cores and seeds held together by surface tension . They pulsed in rough sync with the pendant. Her own heart threw in sympathies before she reined it back.
Isolde moved along the stone with her fingers barely grazing the air as if stroking invisible fur . “This one marks who opens and who eats,” she murmured, more to the wall than them. “It collects lost recipes. It feeds failure back to fire.”
“Can you open it?” Rory kept the dagger in her left hand, the pendant in her right.
“I can cut,” Isolde’s mouth tilted. “But this door likes keys that bleed.”
Nyx flowed forward. “Her stone bleeds proper.”
Rory met the door with the gem point and held her breath against the heat. The copper flexed under the touch, not like metal, but like a ribcage . The sigil of mushrooms brightened, exuding a smell like damp cellars and clean cloth. Something clicked on the other side, an orderly, final sound.
The copper rolled back an inch. A seam widened, just enough to let a shadow across it.
Nyx leaned. The line of their body drew taut. “There is a kitchen,” the whisper threaded into her ear. “A deep one. Knives hung like stars. Fire that does not eat, only remembers. And a man with no mouth who still hums.”
Rory shot a look at Isolde. The Seer’s eyes reflected the amber not as colour but as weight . Her expression didn’t tighten. It never did.
“Every court sets a chorus.” Isolde’s hand hovered over the gap, then drew away. “Belphegor keeps his time.”
Rory could have thrown up a wall of bravado. She didn’t. She breathed. The pendant cooled a heartbeat, then heated. The blade in her left hand cut a thin line in the air as if hungry to meet its match.
“We go until the stone stops pulling,” she said, voice level. “We leave our tongues on our leashes.”
Nyx’s chuckle lifted dust motes like gnats. “Your metaphors sharpen.”
“Yours make me want out.”
They pushed the copper a handspan more. The sugar frost around the door sloughed down in soft sheets and melted away on the stone. The sound in the other room swelled, not louder, but nearer: the kind of silence that gathered under high ceilings and crept into ears like steam.
Rory stepped up to the threshold. The air beyond wrapped her skin greasy-slick, then clean, then nothing, as if someone had wiped her with a cloth. Her pendant beat fast. The blade ached with cold.
She took one more breath of the pantry. The jars ticked. The tongues were still. The pie stilled its shiver as if embarrassed at being caught . Dust smelled of flour and ash.
“Feet,” Isolde murmured behind her. “One before the other. Do not let the path walk you.”
Rory set her boot into the crack of beyond. It took her weight and held it. Nyx slipped past as smoke. Isolde came last and left no print on the sugar frost melting under their ankles.