Run: 2026-02-19-01KHTYRHAZD27J0J6YHKDNPRC8

The abandoned platform breathed damp. Water dripped from the curved brick ceiling, each drop a hollow tap in the empty Underground station. Old posters peeled in ragged curls from the walls. A rusted sign still clung to a beam, letters half eaten by mould: HOL…BOR…N. Rory shifted the strap of her messenger bag higher on her shoulder. “The Wardens ever come down here?” Her whisper bounced off the tiles and crept back at her. A strand of Nyx’s shadow peeled from the gloom and stretched, thickening into their familiar shape beside the dead tracks. The violet glow of their eyes washed faint over the grime. “If they did, we would not be here.” “That’s a yes, then.” “Once.” Nyx glanced toward the far end of the platform. “They sealed three rifts in this line. Left that one.” Rory followed their gaze. At the far wall, behind a forest of sprayed tags and faded murals, something thinned the air. The brick wavered. Not a trick of light. A patch the size of a door shimmered, as if heat rose off invisible tarmac. The Heartstone against her chest grew warm. It beat once, a slow ember-pulse through her shirt. “Feels like standing next to an oven.” Her fingers closed around the pendant. The tiny crimson gem gave off a steady heat, not painful, just insistent. Nyx drifted closer to the wall. Their form stretched upward, taller, shoulders tapering to smoke near the ceiling. The graffiti’s colours bled in the ripple of the Veil, lines of fluorescent pink and black sliding through them. “Dymas lies behind this one.” Rory stepped up beside them, boots crunching old glass. “The gluttony place.” “Prince Belphegor’s demesne.” “So a demon prince runs a massive restaurant. Figures.” She flicked her gaze over the empty platform. “You sure your friend’s in there?” Nyx’s eyes dimmed for a heartbeat. “‘Friend’ is generous. He owes me. He works Belphegor’s kitchens. He will know who sent the pendant.” Rory tugged the Heartstone free of her shirt and held it up. The gem’s inner glow matched the shimmer in the wall. Heat rolled off it in slow waves. “How do we… open it?” “You already are.” The shimmer thickened around the pendant. The wall’s bricks bent away from the centre, not moving yet not fixed, as if something inside pushed to escape. Mortar lines swam. Rory drew the Fae-forged blade from the sheath at the small of her back. Moonlight clung to the slender leaf-shaped dagger even in the stale gloom. Cold soaked into her palm from the hilt, a fierce, clean bite that fought the Heartstone’s heat. “You sure a Hel prince won’t mind visitors with anti-demon cutlery?” Nyx watched the knife’s glow reflect in the worst of the graffiti. “Everything in Dymas cuts. Some things only cut your tongue. Some cut your name. That blade will not stand out.” “Comforting.” She lifted the dagger and touched its tip to the shimmer. The Veil gave with the soft resistance of thick skin. A pale ripple ran outward from the point of contact. The entire patch of air shuddered, then split. Sound crashed through first. Not a roar. A swell. Clatter of plates and iron on stone. A low, constant murmur of hundreds of voices overlapping, thick as surf. Above it, the sharp crackle of something frying and the wet tear of meat pulled from bone. Scent followed, thick enough to taste. Fat and sugar and wine and fruit. Smoke that held cinnamon and char. Underneath, buried like mould under icing, the sour tang of overripe grapes and old blood. The split in the air widened into an arch of hazy amber light. Beyond it, no bricks. No tunnel. Rory swallowed against the flood of scent. “Right. Well.” She slid the Fae blade back into its sheath but left her hand near. “After you.” Nyx didn’t walk. They leaned into the tear and flowed through, their edges smearing into the amber haze, then snapped back into shape on the other side. The warmth from the arch hit Rory’s face. Damp chill from the Underground faded under a sunless heat that smelled of baking bread. She stepped. The world on the other side grabbed her by the lungs. The sky hung low and wide, a constant warm amber like late afternoon trapped forever. No sun, only a diffuse glow that seeped from the air. The light gilded everything in soft gold, yet shadows clung dense and violet at the roots of things. They stood on a ridge. Below them, a valley unfurled in terraced steps. Vineyards in long tangled rows stretched out, leaves a glossy green shot through with streaks of red. Grapes swelled heavy from the vines, each one the size of her fist, skins so thin she saw seeds pulse faintly inside. Some bunches dripped juice before anyone touched them, clear streams that stained the soil rust. Rory’s boots sank into ground that felt less like dirt and more like packed sponge cake. Each step left a perfect footprint that drew in dark moisture before puffing back up. “Hel of harvest festival.” Her voice came out rough. “Dymas feeds Belphegor’s legions.” Nyx turned their face to the wind that rolled up from the valley. “And every hunger that crawled in with a human soul.” Closer now, she heard it. Not just voices. Chewing. Slurping. The quiet grind of teeth on bone. Laughter streaked through it, bright and raw. A flock of something like birds drifted above the vineyards. Not birds. Pies. Dozens of crusted circles, steam leaking from torn vents in their tops, floated on unseen currents. They trailed strips of torn parchment that fluttered behind them like tails. One pie dipped close to the ridge, its crust sagging as if it looked at them. Sugared fruit glistened in the gap. Nyx lifted a hand, fingers ghosting near it. “Do not touch the food,” Rory muttered. The pie bobbed once, disappointed, and drifted away. They started down the path carved into the ridge, a narrow track of hard white stone that gleamed as if glazed. Her toe kicked the edge. Not stone. Sugar. A shard chipped off and spun away, catching the light with a clear crystal shine before it tumbled into the vines. A hand in the vines reached for it. The hand grew from no arm. Fingers sprouted straight from a thick knot of roots, skin bark-brown and sticky with sap. It plucked up the sugar shard and shoved it into a mouth that split the vine’s bark where a trunk twisted. Teeth pushed out between leaves and chewed. Rory halted mid-step. Nyx didn’t. “The plants eat the path?” “The path eats the plants, when Belphegor walks.” Nyx’s shadow slipped longer across the sugar, licking at the edges. “Then it grows back.” “Recycling. Green credentials. Nice.” They moved on. The heat rose off the vineyards in waves that carried scent with them. Roast lamb. Poached pears in wine. Something fried in batter that crunched in her teeth without touching her tongue. Her stomach clenched. She had eaten half a cold takeaway bao in Silas’s stairwell hours ago, but this place pressed greed straight into blood. Her pendant burned against her skin. The Heartstone’s beat matched something under their feet, a deep slow thud like a distant drum. “Feel that?” Nyx tilted their head. “Dymas’s heart. Pipes. Ovens. Something always cooks.” She glanced sideways at them. “You ever… eat here?” “I do not own a mouth.” “Minor detail.” They walked along a terrace that hugged the slope. Vines lined one side, heavy and dripping. On the other, a drop of twenty feet fell to another level carpeted not with plants but with tables. Hundreds of tables stretched in ranks across the lower terrace, each set with heaped plates and bowls. Flesh in every shade from pink to indigo. Fruits with glistening skins, some furred like peaches, others slick like tongues. Breads scored with symbols that shifted if she looked too long, crusts cracking to reveal steaming insides that smiled. Most tables held diners. Some looked human. Their clothes spanned centuries. A man in a Victorian frock coat tore into a spiced haunch with perfect etiquette, knife and fork never clinking. A woman in a sequined dress from the seventies leaned over a bowl of something purple and soupy, hair stuck to her cheeks with sweat. A teenager in a hoodie sucked marrow from a twisted bone, eyes hollow and fixed on nothing. Between them slithered and trotted creatures that were not human. A cook with four arms and a pig’s bristled head refilled goblets from a cask that sweated golden drops. A tall creature with the long neck of a heron and a torso like a kitchen range slid plates onto the tables from the open ovens in its chest. No one looked up at Rory and Nyx. “They never stop?” Her voice tasted of smoke and sugar. “They asked for more.” Nyx stepped over a stray grape that crawled toward their foot like a beetle. “They received it.” Her fingers brushed the hilt at her back. Across the terrace, beyond the ocean of tables, a building rose from the vineyard floor. It didn’t climb. It oozed upward, a low sprawl of fused stone and bone that had grown into towers of stacked platters and fallen soufflés petrified mid-collapse. Windows gaped like carved bread holes. Steam poured from vents shaped like yawning mouths. “The kitchens.” Nyx’s gaze fixed on the largest vent, where a plume of scented steam climbed in a twisting pillar. “He will be there.” Rory watched a demon the size of a mastiff drag a wheeled trolley from a side door of the building, loaded with hanging carcasses. The carcasses whispered to one another as they swung, voices dry as paper. Her shoulders tightened. “How do we get down without becoming snack of the day?” Nyx’s shadow lengthened over the edge of the terrace and pooled down the wall, a dark tongue that lapped at the bottom floor. “We walk.” Rory stared. “That thirty-foot drop?” “My form links shadows. Step on mine.” “Next time, lead with that.” She moved closer to the ridge. Nyx’s shadow boiled richer, a sump of night on the sugar path. It spilled over like ink and painted a solid ramp down the wall. The already-thick light around them dimmed at the edges, as if the realm itself held its breath. Rory set her boot on the shadow. It held. Cold shot up into her calf, clean as winter on Penarth Pier. The sugar-rock beside her leg hissed, its edge frosting where the shadow brushed it. Nyx slipped down beside her, their shape stretching and compressing with the fall. Together, they descended to the lower terrace. Sound hit harder there. The wet noise of eating pressed at her ears. Cutlery. Burps. Little groans. Laughter that held no humour, only relief and panic and need. A man at the nearest table glanced up as she stepped off Nyx’s shadow and onto the spongy floor. Grease slicked his chin. His eyes darted to the Heartstone at her throat, then to Nyx, then past them as if someone called from behind. His fork kept moving. “See that?” Rory kept her voice low. “They are chained,” Nyx murmured. She looked for shackles. None. Only the chairs. Each chair’s back sprouted two small hooks that curved into the diner’s shoulders, just enough to pierce fabric and skin. Thin silver chains ran from the hooks down the legs of the chairs and vanished into the floor. Rory’s stomach lurched. “They could stand if they wanted.” “They wanted to sit. Once.” She swallowed and stepped around a discarded plate that crawled away from her boot on insect legs made of cutlery. A smear of sauce on its surface puffed like a lung. As they neared the kitchen building, smells crowded tighter. Hot sugar. Acidic wine. The sharp iron reek of blood. The stink of burned fat that clung to her nostrils. A small demon child, all eyes and teeth with a body like a satchel, lugged a sack near a side entrance. The sack whimpered as it bounced. The demon paused when Rory passed, nostrils flaring. “Fresh.” Its voice rasped, not quite words, more like the scrape of knives in a drawer. Rory kept walking. They reached the main entrance. No door, just a curtain of steam. Thick, white, and heavy as cloth, it poured from an archway carved in the shape of an open ribcage. Bones of some colossal beast framed the portal, polished to a pale gloss. Tongs, hooks, and ladles hung from the ribs like wind chimes that chimed not with sound, but with shivers that ran along her skin. Nyx paused before the arch. “The pendant will glow brighter inside.” Their eyes shone faint against the steam. “Stay near me. Do not taste anything offered unless we discuss the price first.” “You think I’ll grab the first demon canapé I see?” “In Dymas, hunger wears many mouths.” Her hand closed around the Fae blade’s hilt. Cold steadied her. The Heartstone pulsed hot under her collarbone, an eager beat that pressed toward the steam. Rory drew one breath of air that did not smell of meat. Then she stepped through the curtain.