Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8TP3SCEJM1R5S86CNB2NBF

The pendant burned against Rory's sternum before they even stepped through. She'd expected the crossing to feel like something — a threshold, a door, a ripping sensation as the Veil parted around them. Instead, it was quiet. One moment they stood in the rain-slicked alley behind a Bermondsey warehouse, and the next the ground shifted beneath her boots and the air changed in her lungs, thicker and sweeter, like breathing through warm honey. She stumbled. Her hand shot out and caught nothing but empty space where the brick wall had been. "Steady." Nyx's voice came from everywhere and nowhere, a whisper threaded through air that suddenly smelled of cinnamon and overripe stone fruit. Their form had solidified for the crossing — six feet and change of humanoid shadow, dense enough to have edges — but now they rippled at the margins, violet eyes bright with something that might have been recognition. "Don't move until your eyes adjust." Rory blinked hard. The light was wrong. Not the grey drizzle of London in November but a warm, saturated amber, as though someone had dipped the entire sky in honey and held it up to a flame. There was no visible sun, no clouds — just that impossible golden glow pressing down from above, turning everything it touched the color of late afternoon in a place that had never known morning. "Oh," she said quietly. They stood on a ridge of dark soil overlooking a valley that stretched farther than it had any right to. Vineyards cascaded down terraced hillsides in perfect geometric rows, their leaves a green so vivid it looked painted, heavy with clusters of fruit she couldn't name — not grapes exactly, but something rounder, darker, with skins that caught the amber light and refracted it in bruised purples and deep golds. Between the vineyards, orchards spread in dense copses, their branches sagging under the weight of things that glistened like wet jewels. She saw crimson spheres the size of her fist, pale yellow crescents dripping clear sap, and — impossibly — what looked like pomegranates split open on the branch, seeds glittering like garnets. The smell hit her next. Layer upon layer — fresh bread, caramelized sugar, roasted meat, something floral she couldn't place, and underneath all of it, a cloying sweetness that sat at the back of her throat and wouldn't leave. Isolde moved past her without a sound. The Half-Fae's bare feet touched the dark soil and left no impression, as though the ground refused to acknowledge her weight. Her silver hair caught the amber light and threw it back in pale fire. She stood very still at the edge of the ridge, her lavender eyes distant and unblinking, reading something in the landscape that Rory couldn't see. "The roots drink deep here," Isolde said. "And what is drunk must first be given." "Meaning what?" Rory asked. Isolde tilted her head. A faint smile, the kind that promised nothing. "Meaning the fruit remembers who it was." A chill walked the length of Rory's spine despite the warmth. She pressed her hand flat against the pendant through her jacket. The crimson stone throbbed in a slow, steady rhythm against her palm, a second heartbeat, stronger now than it had ever been on the other side. In London, it had pulsed faintly near the rift points the Wardens monitored — a gentle nudge, easily ignored. Here, it felt almost alive, radiating a heat that seeped through the silver chain and into her skin. "The pendant's reacting," she said. Nyx's shadow-form drifted closer. They had no face, not truly, but the suggestion of features gathered in the darkness where a face should be — the angle of cheekbones, the faint impression of a mouth. Their violet eyes studied the pendant's glow through her jacket. "It was forged here. Dymas. It knows it's home." "You could have mentioned that before we jumped through." "Would it have changed your decision?" Rory didn't answer, because it wouldn't have, and they both knew it. They descended the ridge single file, Isolde leading with the unerring confidence of someone who could see five minutes into the future — or five centuries, depending on her mood. Rory followed, one hand resting on the Fae blade sheathed at her hip. The moonsilver dagger was cold even through the leather wrap, a sliver of winter pressed against her thigh, and she found the sensation grounding. The warmth of Dymas wanted to lull her. Everything about this place wanted to lull her. The golden light, the fragrant air, the soft soil yielding gently beneath each step — it felt designed, calibrated to soothe. And anything designed to soothe her in a realm of Hel was something she refused to trust. The vineyard closed around them as they reached the valley floor. The rows were wider than they'd appeared from above — broad enough for three people to walk abreast, the trellised vines arching overhead to form a canopy that dappled the amber light into shifting patterns on the ground. The fruit hung at eye level, and this close Rory could hear something she hadn't expected. Humming. Low and resonant, barely audible, thrumming from the vines themselves. Not music exactly — more like the memory of music, a melody that lived just below the threshold of recognition. She found herself leaning toward it before she caught herself and pulled back sharply. "Don't listen," Nyx whispered. Their form had thinned at the edges, tendrils of shadow curling outward like smoke. They were uncomfortable here, Rory realized. A being of darkness in a realm drenched in warm light. "The vineyards sing to the hungry. If you listen long enough, you'll forget you ever wanted anything else." Rory clenched her jaw and focused on the crunch of her boots against the soil, the cold bite of the blade at her hip. Concrete things. Real things. She counted her steps — twelve, thirteen, fourteen — and the humming faded to a dull background noise, still present but no longer pulling. They walked deeper. The vineyards gave way to an orchard of trees she had no name for — massive, gnarled things with bark the color of dark chocolate and leaves that chimed softly when the breeze caught them. Each tree was heavy with a different fruit, and no two trees bore the same kind. Some she almost recognized — apples, but with skins that swirled with iridescent color; pears, but translucent, their seeds visible through the flesh like dark stars in pale sky. Others were entirely alien: spiraling cones of layered flesh that peeled open like flowers, fat pods that oozed a golden syrup from their seams, clusters of tiny spheres that pulsed with a faint bioluminescence. The ground beneath the trees was littered with windfalls, and where the fallen fruit had split, the juice had stained the soil in vivid streaks of red and purple and gold. The stains formed patterns — or Rory's brain insisted on seeing patterns, spirals within spirals, like the growth rings of a tree drawn by a fevered hand. "Someone tends these." She stopped and pointed to a branch above them. Clean cuts. Pruning marks. Fresh ones. "Many someones," Isolde said. She reached up and touched a leaf with one finger. Frost crept from the point of contact, spreading across the leaf's surface in delicate crystals before melting away. Fae magic reacting to Hel-touched soil. "This is a garden, not a wilderness. Gardens require gardeners." "Helbound souls," Nyx said flatly. "Contracted from Earth. Chefs, farmers, vintners — gluttons in life, servants of the feast in death. Prince Belphegor collects them." Rory thought of the old stories her mother used to tell, the Welsh ones, about the dangers of eating fairy food. She suspected the principle held here too, amplified and inverted. In the Fae realms, eating bound you to the place. In Hel, she imagined, eating bound you to something worse. "Nobody eats anything," she said. "Not a bite. Not a sip. Not even if it smells like your mum's Sunday roast." Nyx's approximation of a mouth twitched. "I don't eat." "Then you're ahead of the rest of us." They pressed on. The orchard thinned, and through the gaps between trees Rory caught her first glimpse of what lay beyond: buildings. Not the jagged, sulfurous architecture she'd half-expected from a realm of Hel, but something altogether more unsettling in its beauty. Low-slung structures of pale stone and dark wood, strung with lanterns that burned with the same amber glow as the sky. Open-air kitchens with great clay ovens billowing fragrant smoke. Long tables set with platters of food so elaborate they looked sculpted — towers of glazed pastry, spirals of carved meat, arrangements of fruit and flower and spun sugar that defied gravity and good sense. She could hear voices now, laughter and conversation, the clink of crystal, the sizzle of something hitting a hot pan. A grand feast, laid out as if for visiting royalty, in the middle of a demon prince's domain. Rory's fingers found the crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist and pressed hard. The old habit centered her, a small bright pain to cut through the fog of wonder. Because it was wonderful — that was the trap. Dymas didn't threaten. It invited. It seduced. It offered you everything you'd ever craved and asked only that you sit down and partake. "How far to the archive?" she asked, keeping her voice low. Nyx condensed, their form pulling tight and dense as they studied the settlement ahead. "Beyond the feast halls. On the far side of the valley, where Belphegor keeps his collections. Books, artifacts, contracts. Everything he hoards." "Through the middle of it, then." "Unless you'd prefer a three-day trek through the outer vineyards." Rory exhaled slowly. Through her jacket, the Heartstone Pendant pulsed its steady, insistent rhythm, faster now, urging her forward. Toward the feast. Toward the heart of Dymas. Toward whatever it was that had been calling her since the day an unknown benefactor slipped a crimson stone on a silver chain into her delivery bag at the Golden Empress. She drew the Fae blade from its sheath. Moonsilver caught the amber light and threw it back blue-white, a cold sharp defiance in this warm indulgent place. The steel hummed — not the vine's seductive melody but something cleaner, colder, a note that said not here, not yours, not yet. "Stay close," she told them both. "And nobody sits down at that table." Isolde smiled her half-smile, the one that could mean anything. "Three roads to a feast," she murmured, "and only the hungry walk home." "That's not reassuring." "It was not meant to be." Rory stepped out of the orchard and into the amber light, the blade cold in her hand, the pendant hot against her heart, and walked toward the sound of laughter.