AI
The Heartstone pendant burned against Rory's collarbone the moment she stepped through.
Not the gentle warmth she'd grown accustomed to, the soft pulse that quickened near rift points and thinning spots in the Veil. This was a brand. A searing declaration that she'd crossed something that shouldn't be crossed, and her body, her mortal body with its ordinary bones and unremarkable blood, had no business being on this side of it.
She bit down hard enough to taste copper and kept walking.
The ground beneath her trainers wasn't soil. It looked like soil, dark and rich and loamy, but it gave under her weight with a fleshy resistance, like stepping on the skin of overripe fruit. Each footfall left a shallow impression that filled with amber liquid, pooling in her wake.
"Don't drink it."
Nyx materialised beside her, their shadow-form flickering at the edges like a flame caught in a draft. In this place, they looked more solid than Rory had ever seen them. More defined. The violet glow of their eyes had deepened to something closer to bruise-purple.
"Wasn't planning on it."
"Everyone plans. No one intends."
Behind them, Isolde moved without sound, her bare feet somehow failing to indent the ground at all. Her silver hair caught the light of a sky that had no sun, no clouds, no familiar reference point. Just warmth . A vast amber wash overhead, the colour of honey held up to candlelight, stretching from horizon to horizon without source or shadow. It made everything beneath it look gilded. Beautiful. Wrong.
"The Seer seems comfortable ," Nyx observed.
"A bird does not struggle in the wind." Isolde's pale lavender eyes tracked something in the middle distance. "It is the fish that panics in open air."
"Cheers for that," Rory muttered. Fish. She was the fish in this metaphor. Noted.
They'd emerged on a hillside, and the slope carried them down into a valley that unfolded beneath like someone peeling back the rind of something magnificent and rotten. Vineyards stretched in precise geometric rows, vines thick as Rory's forearm supporting clusters of fruit she couldn't name. Some resembled grapes, if grapes grew the size of plums and pulsed with internal light, deep reds and golds flickering beneath translucent skin. Others looked like nothing she'd seen before, elongated teardrop shapes that wept a sticky resin onto leaves already blackened by the excess.
The smell hit next. Rich, cloying sweetness undercut by something savoury and deep, like someone had poured a full English breakfast into a vat of mulled wine and set it to simmer for a century. Rory's stomach clenched, not from revulsion. From hunger. A sudden, clawing hunger that had nothing to do with her last meal and everything to do with the air itself, thick with flavour, thick with want.
"Dymas feeds before you eat." Nyx's whisper -voice carried a thread of warning. "The air is appetite. Breathe shallow."
Rory adjusted, pulling breaths through her teeth. The hunger dulled from a roar to a murmur. Manageable.
They passed between two vine rows and the path widened into a cobbled road, the stones a mottled burgundy like aged meat. Along its edges, low walls of stacked fruit crates bordered orchards so abundant that branches bowed to the ground under the weight of their impossible harvest. She spotted what looked like pomegranates split open on the branch, seeds catching the amber light like rubies. Beside them, something like a pear the colour of midnight , its surface so dark it seemed to swallow photons.
A sound drifted up from deeper in the valley. Not music, not speech. A rhythmic clattering, metallic and purposeful, underscored by a low collective hum.
"Kitchens," Isolde said. The single word sat flat, unadorned. No riddle this time.
As they descended, the orchards gave way to structures. The architecture defied Rory's sense of scale, buildings that seemed to shift depending on the angle, facades of dark polished stone veined with gold that pulsed faintly, like the whole valley had a circulatory system . Arched doorways gaped wide enough to admit three abreast, their lintels carved with figures she didn't want to examine too closely. She caught glimpses. Mouths. Open mouths everywhere in the stonework, frozen mid-bite, mid-scream, mid-laugh.
Through one archway, she spotted a courtyard containing a long stone table set for dozens. Crystal decanters caught the amber light and threw fractured rainbows across white linen. Every plate bore food, steam still rising, but no diners sat in the high-backed chairs. Place settings for ghosts.
"Helbound souls," Nyx said, reading her gaze. "The contracted. They cook, they serve, they prepare. The feasts are endless. The guests are... selective."
"And the cooks?"
"They taste nothing." A pause. "That is the arrangement."
The clattering grew louder as they rounded a curve in the road. A vast open-air kitchen sprawled before them, all copper and fire and motion. Dozens of figures worked at stations carved from a single slab of obsidian, chopping, stirring, plating with mechanical precision. Their movements held the eerie synchronisation of a murmuration. Starlings made of sinew and regret. Some wore chef's whites stained with colours Rory couldn't reconcile: blues, greens, a vivid purple that seemed to move independently of the fabric. Others worked bare-armed, skin marked with symbols that shifted when she tried to focus on them.
None looked up. None acknowledged the three strangers watching from the road's edge.
Rory's hand drifted to the Fae blade at her hip. The moonsilver dagger radiated cold through the leather sheath, a steady chill that grounded her against the valley's seductive warmth . Isolde had given it to her three days ago, which might have been three weeks ago, time being the slippery thing it was anywhere the Fae touched. The blade felt like an anchor to something real, something outside this amber-soaked fever dream.
"We're looking for a name," she said, keeping her voice low. "Not a tour."
"Names have weight in Hel." Nyx's form rippled, shadow-stuff contracting. "Speak one carelessly and it becomes an invitation."
"Then how do we find, " she stopped herself . Right. She'd written the name on her forearm in biro before they'd crossed, because Nyx had warned her about exactly this. She pushed up her jacket sleeve and showed them the letters. Nyx's violet eyes tracked the ink.
"The south quarter. Past the gardens."
They skirted the open-air kitchen and descended further. The road narrowed between buildings that leaned together overhead, their upper storeys nearly touching, and the amber light filtered through the gap in a thin bright seam like a surgical incision. Down here, the cloying sweetness gave way to earthier notes. Fermentation. The heady punch of alcohol so potent it stung her sinuses. Cellars, she guessed, or breweries. The walls sweated condensation that beaded and ran in rivulets the colour of dark ale.
Isolde's hand closed on Rory's shoulder. The Seer's grip held surprising strength for someone who looked like she might dissolve in a stiff breeze.
"Three steps ahead. Stop."
Rory stopped. Looked down. The cobblestones ended. Not gradually, not with a kerb or a ledge. They simply ceased, and beyond them stretched a drop into darkness, a gap in the road like a missing tooth. No bottom visible. No far side. Just a wound in the architecture of Dymas, exhaling cold air that smelled of nothing at all, which in a place saturated with scent felt like deafness, like blindness, like a hole punched through sensation itself.
"What is that?"
"A debt unpaid." Isolde withdrew her hand. "The realm consumes what it is owed. When a soul breaks contract, Dymas takes its portion. This is where it takes it from."
The gap stretched perhaps three metres across. On the far side, the cobbles resumed as though nothing had happened. Warm light, sweating walls, the distant clatter of kitchens.
"Can we go around?"
Nyx flickered , and for a moment their form stretched thin, a dark thread bridging the gap. They snapped back.
"Warded. On both sides. Nothing passes by shadow."
"The blade," Isolde said. Not a question.
Rory drew the Fae dagger. Its pale luminescence intensified, moonsilver catching light that shouldn't exist in this sunless place. The cold bit into her palm. She extended it over the gap, and the darkness recoiled. Not much. An inch, two inches, the void contracting from the blade's edge like flesh flinching from a hot iron.
"It fears the Fae," Nyx said. Something in their whisper -voice sounded close to admiration. "Old treaties. Older grudges."
"Will it hold?"
"One way forward. One way to learn."
Rory set her jaw. She placed a foot on the edge of the last cobblestone, extended the blade, and stepped into the gap.
Cold hit her like a wall of water. The nothing-smell became a nothing-everything, a roar of absence that tried to fill itself with her. Her breath, her warmth , the beat of her stubborn mortal heart. The Heartstone pendant screamed against her chest, a white-hot point of defiance, and the Fae blade sang a single clear note that cut through the void like a bell through fog.
Two steps. Three. Her foot found stone on the far side. She hauled herself forward and the warmth of Dymas crashed back over her, amber light and fermentation and the distant hum of industry. Behind her, Nyx flowed across the space the blade had carved, and Isolde followed, still leaving no footprints, even on the far side where the cobbles bore a thin film of condensation.
Rory realised she was shaking . Not from the cold. From the hunger. The crossing had amplified it tenfold, a hollowness in her gut that felt like it could swallow her from the inside. She breathed through her teeth. Counted to four. The edge softened.
"The gardens," Nyx said, and their shadow-hand pointed down the alley where the sweating walls opened onto something green and sprawling.
They emerged into a space that stopped Rory's breath for reasons that had nothing to do with hunger or dread. It was massive. An amphitheatre of growing things, terraced gardens climbing up the inner walls of a natural bowl in the valley, each level bursting with plant life so vivid it bordered on violent. Flowers with petals like wet silk . Herbs that released clouds of pollen when the air shifted, each cloud a different colour, gold, vermillion, a blue so deep it looked like a wound in the spectrum .
At the centre of the lowest terrace, a figure knelt among rows of something that resembled basil, if basil grew waist-high and hummed.
"That's not the name on your arm," Nyx observed.
"No." Rory studied the figure. Broad-shouldered, dressed in chef's whites that had seen better decades, hands deep in the singing soil of Dymas. Human, or human-shaped. One of the helbound, contracted from Earth to serve in the kitchens of excess for however long their soul had bartered for.
The figure looked up. Eyes the colour of cooked caramel found hers across the garden, and a smile spread across a face that was too young for the weariness it carried.
"English?"
"Welsh, actually."
"Close enough." The figure stood, brushing amber soil from scarred knees. "You're breathing through your teeth. Smart. Most newcomers pass out before they reach the second vineyard." A glance at Nyx, then Isolde. Recognition flickered , then something colder. "You brought a Shade and a half-blood Fae into Belphegor's pantry."
"Sounds worse when you say it like that."
"It sounds exactly as bad as it is." The figure pulled a sprig from the nearest plant and offered it. "Chew this. Kills the appetite. Tastes like burning tyres but your stomach will forgive you."
Rory took it. Bit down. Her eyes watered. Burning tyres was generous. But the hollow hunger in her gut retreated like a tide pulling back from shore.
"I need to find someone," she said, once she could speak again.
"Everyone here needs to find someone. That's sort of the point." The figure's gaze dropped to her forearm, to the biro letters bleeding slightly in the humidity. The caramel eyes widened . "Oh. Oh, you're looking for her."
"You know her?"
"She runs the south quarter competition kitchen. Has for thirty years, our time." A pause heavy with implication . "Nobody looks for her. People run from her."
Nyx's shadow-form contracted, drawing tight around their humanoid outline, a reflex Rory had learned to read as alert. Isolde tipped her head, silver hair sliding over one shoulder, and smiled the particular smile that meant she'd already seen how this ended.
From somewhere deeper in the gardens, a bell rang. Low, resonant, shaking pollen from the flowers in cascading clouds of colour. The figure in chef's whites went pale beneath the amber light.
"That's the dinner bell." Their voice dropped. "She knows you're here."