Run: 2026-02-19-01KHTX48X68E6ME1ZFQ7BBV3PY

The arch waited where the trees broke. Ancient oaks leaned away from it as if they’d grown tired of brushing its stones. Lichen crawled over the curve of the lintel in pale veins, yet the rock beneath it held a sharpness that time on Earth never left alone. Air shimmered inside the gap like heat above tarmac, though the evening in the grove hung cold and damp. Aurora’s Heartstone warmed against her skin. She lifted the pendant from under her jumper. The gem glowed with a deep, smouldering light, like coals banked under ash. Each thud in her chest answered with a faint pulse of heat against her palm. Nyx’s shadow stretched across the grass and up the arch. Their outline sharpened as they drew closer, the edges of their form stealing definition from the twilight. Violet eyes burned within that darkness, faint as foxfire in a hedge. “This wasn’t here last time,” Rory murmured. She stepped nearer. The pendant grew hotter, not enough to burn, but enough to remind her of Dymas’ kitchen fires and the reek of caramelised sugar and char. Isolde watched from the edge of the clearing, silver hair unruffled by the wind that swayed the bracken around her. No footprints marked the damp soil at her bare feet. “Doorways are stories,” she answered, fingers tracing idle patterns in the air. “They come when told, and when forgotten, they sleep.” Nyx tilted their head toward the arch. “Who forgot this one?” “The ones who built it,” Isolde’s gaze slid along the curve of stone. “And the ones who feared it. And the ones who fed it.” “Fed it what?” Rory adjusted the Fae-forged blade at her belt. The dagger lay against her hip like a shard of winter, cold through denim. Isolde’s eyes grew distant, pale lavender gone thin as smoke. “Gluttons with crowns. Wardens with tired hands. Children with wishes.” Rory snorted. “So, everyone.” Her laugh came out rough around the edges. The grove’s birds had gone silent. No pigeons clattered, no deer rustled through undergrowth. The quiet pressed in. Nyx stepped into the arch’s shadow. Their form fuzzed at the edges, then pulled tight again. “The Veil’s thin here,” they murmured. “Feels…chewed.” Rory eyed the Heartstone. The warmth had shifted to a steady thrum. Not alarming. Not gentle either. “You’re sure about this?” She glanced at Isolde. “The path remembers you,” Isolde replied. “You carry its key.” Her eyes flicked to the pendant. “And its debt.” Rory’s throat dried. “Yeah, that’s comforting.” Isolde’s mouth curved. “Comfort is for those who stay home.” Nyx’s laugh rustled like paper. “Come on, Carter. You’ve already annoyed one Prince of Hel. Might as well see what the plumbing between realms looks like.” Rory breathed out through her nose, rolled her shoulders once. The arch yawned before her, edges wavering. She stepped through. Cold bit every inch of exposed skin. Not wind. Not rain. A clean, cutting cold that sliced heat from her in strips. The world stretched, not outward but sideways, as if someone pulled reality like toffee. Her ears popped. The grove snapped out of existence. Rory staggered as ground rose under her boots. Nyx flowed through behind, then solidified with a grunt. Isolde drifted through like a thought, hair trailing behind in a slow, silver banner. The sky broke first. It hung far overhead, a vast dome of amber glass veined with moving shadows. Light seeped through in syrupy layers, too thick, too rich, casting the world in shades of bronze and rust. Patches of darkness marbled the dome, pulsing like clouds caught under ice. Rory stared up, lips parted. “Not London, then.” Nyx’s eyes glowed brighter in the dim. “Not Hel either. Not yet.” Under their feet lay no soil. No cobble. The ground formed from interlocking plates of something that looked like stone and bone had decided to share a body. Pale ridges curled along each plate, etched with spirals and symbols that shifted as Rory watched. She blinked hard. The marks froze, then slid again in the corner of her vision. Isolde moved ahead. Her bare feet left no trace on the plates. “This place sat between bites.” Her voice carried, clear but soft, swallowed fast by the space. “Built when the world still fancied new flavours.” Rory crouched and brushed fingertips over the nearest plate. The ridges rose smooth under her touch, too smooth, no grit, no dust. Temperature felt wrong. Not cold, not warm. The absence of either. The Heartstone’s heat concentrated in a line down her sternum, facing forward. “Feels like a waiting room,” she muttered, straightening. “For what?” Nyx peered over the edge of the path. Rory joined them. The plates ended in a clean drop. No cliff. No slope. Just an abrupt edge where ground stopped and everything else fell away. Below gaped distance. At first, she thought she saw mist. Then her eyes focused. The space beneath the ledge churned with tangled bands of colour, twisting and braiding. Streaks of violet, green, gold, and something that hurt to look at looped endlessly. Sounds rose from the depths, too faint and layered to parse: snatches of laughter, the shatter of glass, a child’s wail, the grind of gears, waves against rock, a crowd chanting in a language her ears refused. The sight tugged at her stomach. “Okay,” Rory stepped back. “Not falling off there.” Nyx’s shadow stretched downward, yet cut off halfway, like someone erased part of it. “I can’t reach those,” they rasped. “Whatever’s below, it doesn’t have room for me.” “Then we stay up here.” Rory wiped her palms on her cargo trousers. A path wound away from the arch. The plates arranged themselves in a twisting ribbon, hovering above the swirling gulf. No rail, no wall. Here and there, stone teeth rose from the edges, smooth as river rock, carved with the same shifting scripts. Isolde already walked along it. Rory jogged to catch up. “Any chance this place comes with a map?” “The path maps itself.” Isolde’s gaze never dropped to her feet. “It remembers its own hunger.” “That’s not…never mind.” Rory set her boots with care, resisting the urge to stare at the drop. “What is this? A corridor? A…service tunnel?” Isolde’s smile came thin. “Between a question and an answer lives a room where no one dusts.” Nyx’s shadow brushed Rory’s shoulder. “She means yes.” They moved on. The air tasted rich. Each breath carried hints of other places, as if someone had brewed a tea from stolen atmospheres. Dymas’ spiced smoke clung under the sweetness of apple orchards, cut through by brine and petrol and wild garlic from the park. Scents shifted step by step, too fast for comfort. Rory’s head swam. “We’re walking through…memories?” “Through debts,” Isolde replied. “Doors always cost.” “Who pays?” Rory’s hand drifted unconsciously to the knife at her belt. “Those who cross. Those who build. Those who forget they did either.” They rounded a bend. The path widened without warning. Plates flared outward in a circle, forming a platform. At its centre rose a pillar of translucent material, clear as glass, shot through with veins of dark red that pulsed in time with the stone under their feet. Images flickered inside the pillar. A street in Cardiff under rain. A kitchen in Dymas lit with amber fire. The Fae Grove at dawn, dew on spiderwebs. Faces Rory knew and ones she did not. Each scene bled into the next and looped back. Sound seeped through like water from a cracking pipe. Nyx circled the pillar, eyes narrowed. “Someone used this. Often.” Rory drew near. The Heartstone burned against her collarbone now, the warmth almost painful. The pillar’s light shifted. Scenes skipped, blurred, then snapped into focus on one image. Her. She watched herself crossing a pub’s back alley, takeaway bag under one arm, rain soaking her hoodie. She looked up, startled, hand flying to her throat. Rory swallowed. “Is this spying on me?” The version in the pillar paused and turned as if sensing her gaze. For a heartbeat, their eyes met across time and glass. Then the image broke apart, shards of light spinning, reforming into another scene. A boy on a bike. A woman in hospital scrubs. A goat-headed demon tasting wine. Isolde rested fingers on the pillar. The veins of red brightened under her touch. “Not spying. Remembering. It holds what passed through. Light, scent, promise, breath. Your echoes linger.” “Echoes.” Rory rubbed the scar on her wrist with her thumb. The old crescent of raised skin tingled. “From when I first crossed the Veil?” “From every time you slipped close to it,” Isolde replied. “Every almost and nearly.” Rory winced. “I hate that.” Nyx’s grin flashed. “Artists call it inspiration. Wardens call it surveillance. Demons call it leverage.” Rory turned away from the pillar. “Let’s keep moving before it starts playing my worst choices.” “You’d be here all night,” Nyx murmured. She elbowed them in the side. Their form rippled around the contact. Beyond the platform, the path split. To the left, the plates narrowed, yet glistened, slick with a faint sheen like oil on water. Light pooled thicker that way, warmer, almost golden. Thick scents drifted from it—roast meat, baked bread, sugared fruits, wine—rich and cloying. To the right, the plates grew pale. Frost laced the ridges. Air thinned, sharp as a clean blade. The scents dropped away, replaced by a metallic tang that coated Rory’s tongue. The Heartstone pulled left. The Fae blade at her hip chilled further, an extra layer of winter biting into her skin. Rory shifted her weight. “Hel, Fae?” Nyx sniffed the air. “Dymas smells like the left. That rot-sweet thing.” They wrinkled their nose, or the shadow suggestion of one. “But not fully.” Isolde’s eyes half-lidded. “You stand at a fork of appetite and abstinence. Feast and fast. Indulgence and edge.” Her gaze landed on Rory. “One path remembers your debt. One does not.” Rory’s jaw worked. She stared left. Warmth lapped at her skin, coaxing and heavy. The Heartstone thrummed against her chest, eager, like a dog pressing against the door. She looked right. The Fae blade grew so cold it burned. “Which is safer?” she asked. Isolde’s lashes flicked up. “You brought a knife and a key. Not a cushion.” Nyx chuckled. “She means neither.” “Of course she means neither.” Rory dragged a hand down her face. Her fingers shook. Not from fear, she told herself. From the strain of the place pressing at her edges, trying to parse what she was, what she owed. Nyx watched her. “We don’t have to pick forever. We just see how far we get.” Rory studied the left-hand path. The plates there bulged, faintly rounded, as if something underneath swelled against them. Faint shapes moved under the surface—hands reaching up, curling, withdrawing. Her throat tightened. She turned right. “The last Prince of Hel I met wanted to eat London. I’m not walking straight into his pantry. We go cold.” Nyx’s eyes glinted. “Knew you weren’t the gluttonous type.” “You haven’t seen me with chips.” She stepped onto the pale plates. Frost cracked under her boots but left no footprint. The cold rose through the soles, up her calves, into her bones. Breath steamed from her lips. The scents of feast faded to nothing. Sound shifted too. The air picked up a thin, singing hum. High and low notes threaded together, not music, not quite, more like the noise a blade made when drawn from a sheath. The path ahead curved, vanishing behind a jag of stone. As they walked, the sky overhead thinned. Amber light leeched into a paler hue, something closer to London’s dawn reflected on a dirty river. The veins in the glass dome pulsated slower. Shapes appeared along the edges of the path. Figures, half-carved from the plates themselves, halfway out, frozen mid-stride. Some looked human. Some did not. A woman with curls of stone hair, one arm extended, fingers reaching for something that never arrived. A stag-headed man with antlers that dissolved into tangled symbols. A child clinging to a wooden toy that merged with the path under her bare feet. Rory stopped beside the nearest. Their eyes held no pupils, only smooth stone, yet grief poured off them. Not in tears. In the angle of shoulders. In the twist of mouths. Nyx’s voice dropped, rougher. “They tried to step off at the wrong angle.” Rory’s stomach lurched. “They died?” “Not here.” Nyx leaned closer to the statues, searching. “This place doesn’t do ‘here’ the way you think. Their bodies went somewhere. Parts stayed.” Rory reached toward the stone child, then froze an inch from the cool surface. The Fae blade at her hip hummed, an almost inaudible vibration, eager for resistance to slice. Isolde’s hand landed on her wrist. Weightless yet firm. “Do not touch.” Rory met her gaze. “Why?” Isolde’s expression shuttered, the open strangeness gone, replaced by that distant look she wore when something tugged on her Fae blood. “Because you are not finished,” she replied. “They are. Fingers blur lines.” Rory drew back. They continued. The path tightened, pulling closer to the glass dome above. Here, at this height, Rory could see faint figures moving behind the amber. Shadows of cities, forests, vast halls, flickering like fish in murky water swimming just beyond reach. Her Heartstone’s heat calmed, no longer insistent, more like coals banked for a later fire. The blade settled against her hip, a steady, frozen weight. Nyx touched the dome with their hand. Their dark fingers sank in a hair’s breadth, then met resistance. “Can’t slip through,” they muttered. “This skin’s thick.” “Good,” Rory answered. “Let it stay that way.” The hum in the air swelled. The curve of the path opened at last into another chamber, this one narrower than the first platform but taller, ceiling pressed low with jagged shards of the glass sky. Amber light fractured around them in broken beams. In the middle of the chamber stood a door. Not an arch. Not a swirling rift. A door. Tall enough to swallow a double-decker bus, forged from bands of metal and bone woven into a single surface. Symbols crawled across it, glimmering, shifting through alphabets Rory only half-recognised and ones she knew did not belong on Earth. Handles jutted out from the centre. Several, placed at different heights, shapes, and sizes. Some fit human hands. Some fit claws, hooves, tendrils. Rory stared. “So this is it,” she breathed. “This is where it actually starts.”