Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8V0ZYF8XQ67MJDX3RK6FE5

The Heartstone Pendant burned against Aurora's chest the moment they stepped through. Not a searing burn — more like pressing a mug of tea to bare skin. She gripped the silver chain through her jacket and felt the crimson gem throb in a slow, steady cadence. A heartbeat that wasn't hers. The light hit her first. Everything bathed in warm amber, as if someone had poured honey over the sun and let it drip across the entire sky. No clouds. No visible source. Just that omnipresent golden warmth pressing down from above, thick enough that Aurora could almost taste it on the back of her tongue — sweet, faintly cloying, like overripe fruit left too long in the bowl. "Breathe through your mouth for the first minute." Isolde stepped past her, silver hair catching the amber light and turning the color of old coins. "The air here metabolizes differently. Your lungs need time to adjust." Aurora sucked in a breath. The air sat heavy. Dense. Like breathing through warm velvet. She coughed once and blinked hard, her eyes watering as they strained to make sense of what sprawled before her. Vineyards. Endless vineyards rolling down a hillside that shouldn't have existed behind the tear they'd just walked through. The vines were wrong, though — their leaves too dark, nearly black at the edges, and the grapes hanging in fat clusters gave off a faint phosphorescence, each one glowing a different shade. Violet. Amber. Deep arterial red. They pulsed gently, like the pendant against her sternum, and Aurora had the unsettling thought that the entire landscape was breathing. "Don't touch anything you haven't been told to touch." Isolde's bare feet left no impression in the rust-colored soil beneath them. She moved without sound, which Aurora had grown accustomed to in the Grove but which felt more pronounced here, more deliberate — as if the ground itself refused to acknowledge the half-Fae's presence. A ripple of darkness pooled at Aurora's left, and Nyx materialized beside her. Their form solidified slowly, shadow gathering into the shape of a tall figure, violet eyes blinking open like twin flames in a draft. "The Veil is thin here. Paper-thin." Their voice wound around Aurora's ear — that familiar whisper-on-wind quality stretched taut with something she'd never heard from them before. Caution, maybe. Or recognition. "I can feel every realm pressing against this one. Like walls in a house that's too small." "You've been here before." Nyx didn't answer. Their silhouette flickered at the edges, shadow tendrils curling and uncurling like fingers testing the air. Aurora took that as a yes. They descended the hill along a path of packed earth the color of cinnamon. The soil crunched beneath Aurora's boots with a sound like grinding sugar. On either side, the vineyard rows stretched away in perfect geometric lines that converged at some impossible vanishing point — too far, too precise, as if drawn by a mathematician who'd never seen a real field. Between the rows, wildflowers Aurora couldn't name pushed up through the dirt: blooms with petals like spun glass, stems that twisted in corkscrews, pistils that wept a slow golden nectar onto the ground. She caught herself reaching for one and yanked her hand back. "Smart girl." Isolde hadn't turned around. "What would've happened?" "The flowers remember the shape of whatever touches them. They would have grown to look like your hand. And then they would have wanted more of you." Aurora shoved both hands in her jacket pockets. The path curved and the vineyards gave way to an orchard. If it could be called that. Trees rose in knotted spirals, their bark a deep burgundy, their canopies spread wide with branches that didn't bear leaves so much as membranes — translucent sheets stretched between twigs, catching the amber light and splitting it into prismatic patterns on the ground below. Fruit hung everywhere. Shapes Aurora recognized — apples, pears, something like a fig — alongside others she had no name for. Bulbous things with skin that shifted color when she looked at them from different angles. Elongated pods trailing filaments that swayed without wind. A cluster of small spheres, perfectly white, that chimed softly against each other with a sound like distant bells. The chiming filled the silence between their footsteps and Aurora realized she hadn't heard a single bird. No insects. No rustling of creatures through underbrush. Just that gentle, crystalline ringing from the white fruit, and beneath it, something lower — a vibration more felt than heard, a bass note humming up through the soles of her boots. "What is that sound? The low one." Nyx's form drifted closer to one of the trees without touching it. "The realm digesting." "Digesting what?" "Everything. Dymas consumes. That's its nature. The soil, the air, the light — all of it breaks down whatever enters and makes it part of itself." The violet glow of their eyes swept toward her. "Including visitors, given enough time." A chill ran the length of Aurora's spine despite the pressing warmth. "How much time?" "More than we need," Isolde said. "The danger is not the realm's hunger. It is the desire it cultivates. Dymas does not take. It convinces you to give." They walked deeper. The orchard thinned and the path widened into a broad avenue paved with stones that were warm to the touch — Aurora could feel the heat even through her boots. She knelt and pressed her palm flat against one. Smooth. Almost soft, like the stone had a layer of give to it, like touching skin stretched over a drum. "Rory." She stood quickly, wiping her hand on her jeans. The avenue led to a structure. Not a building — not exactly. It rose from the landscape as if the earth had exhaled it: a sprawling complex of terraces and open pavilions, all constructed from the same burgundy wood as the orchard trees, reinforced with a dark metal that gleamed like wet obsidian. Massive archways framed entrances tall enough for three people stacked head to toe. Braziers lined the approach, each one burning with a different colored flame — cerulean, emerald, a deep saffron that threw dancing shapes across the carved walls. And the smells hit her. Aurora's knees almost buckled. Roasting meat, rich and caramelized. Bread fresh from an oven, the crust cracking. Something sweet — chocolate, maybe, or burnt caramel — winding through a savory undercurrent of herbs she could identify and dozens she couldn't. Her mouth flooded. Her stomach clenched with a hunger so sudden and fierce that she pressed her fist against her abdomen. "The feasting halls." Isolde stopped walking. Her pale lavender eyes had gone flat, unreadable. "Prince Belphegor's pride." "That smell — " "Is not for you." The half-Fae's voice carried an edge Aurora had only heard once before, in the Grove, when a fox had wandered too close to the standing stones. "Tell yourself that until you believe it. The smell is not for you." Aurora swallowed against the saliva pooling under her tongue and repeated the words in her head like a mantra. The pendant pulsed harder, the warmth climbing from her chest up the sides of her neck. She pressed it flat with her palm and felt the crimson gem vibrate against her skin. Nyx had gone still. Their shadow-form stood rigid, edges sharp and defined in a way that meant they were concentrating, drawing themselves together. A tendril of darkness extended from their shoulder, reaching toward the nearest archway, and then snapped back. "Wardings. Old ones. Layered." Their whisper had thinned to almost nothing. "Not meant to keep us out. Meant to keep something in." "The souls," Aurora said. Nyx inclined their head. Through the nearest arch, Aurora could see movement. Figures — dozens of them — moving between long tables laden with food that gleamed and steamed under the amber light. They wore aprons, carried platters, bent over fires. Some of them looked up as the three of them approached, and Aurora caught their faces in the flickering glow. Human faces. Drawn. Hollowed at the cheeks. Eyes that burned with a fevered intensity she recognized from late nights in the restaurant kitchen when Yu-Fei pushed herself past exhaustion into something mechanical, something that didn't stop because stopping meant thinking. One of them — a woman with dark skin and cropped hair — paused mid-stride, a copper pot balanced on her forearm. She stared at Aurora through the archway. Her lips moved, forming a single word that Aurora couldn't hear through the warding. Then someone behind the woman barked an order and she turned away, her shoulders hunching, her feet carrying her back toward a bank of flames that burned too blue to be natural. Aurora's hand dropped to her hip, where the Fae-forged blade sat sheathed against her belt. The moonsilver was ice-cold through the leather. It always ran cold, but here, in this realm of oppressive warmth and golden light, the chill felt deliberate — a declaration of opposition, the blade rejecting every molecule of the air around it. "How many of them are there?" "In this hall? Perhaps sixty." Isolde's gaze moved across the archway with a precision that suggested she was counting something beyond the visible. "In Dymas entire? Thousands. Tens of thousands. Every master chef, every vintner, every confectioner who ever signed away what they shouldn't have, they end up here. Cooking feasts they're never permitted to eat." The amber sky pulsed once — a slow, deep throb like a massive eye blinking — and the ground hummed its low, hungry note, and Aurora stood at the threshold of Prince Belphegor's domain with the Heartstone burning at her chest and the Fae blade freezing at her hip and the distant sound of white fruit chiming behind her like bells tolling for something already lost. "We keep moving," she said. Isolde studied her with that ageless, unreadable expression. "The path forward winds through the hall. Not around it." A pause. "You will be offered something. You must refuse." "What if I can't?" "Then the realm keeps you. And I will not be able to retrieve what it takes." Aurora pulled the Heartstone Pendant free of her jacket. The crimson gem sat in her palm, thumbnail-sized, pulsing with that stolen heartbeat rhythm. Its inner glow had intensified since crossing the Veil — deeper now, the red of wine held up to candlelight. She closed her fist around it and felt the warmth spread through her fingers, up her wrist, past the small crescent-shaped scar that had been part of her skin for as long as she could remember. "Then I won't eat." She walked through the archway. The smells crashed over her like a wave. The wardings parted around the blade at her hip with a sound like tearing silk, and the helbound souls in the feasting hall turned their hollow, burning eyes toward her, and the amber light of Dymas pressed down on her shoulders with the full weight of a realm that had been waiting — patiently, hungrily — for exactly this.