Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8V1EJ21D611BCFR5VP72DY

The pendant burned. Not painfully — not yet — but with a persistent, insistent heat that pressed through the fabric of Rory's jacket and into her sternum, like someone had pressed a warm coin against her skin and held it there. She pulled the chain out from under her collar and the crimson stone sat against her palm, pulsing with that faint inner light, slow and rhythmic as a second heartbeat. "It hasn't stopped since we came through," she said. Nyx drifted to her left, their silhouette shifting against a light source that didn't behave like light ought to. The sky above Dymas wasn't black or blue or any colour that belonged to a sky — it was amber, thick and saturated as the inside of a lantern, casting everything below it in shades of honey and gold. No sun hung in it. No clouds. Just that unbroken, glowing warmth pressing down from horizon to horizon. "It recognises home," Nyx said. Their voice came as it always did, a whisper finding purchase in the air rather than originating from any single point. "The stone was made here. It knows." Isolde stood several paces ahead of them, silver hair catching the amber light until it looked almost copper. She had passed through the rift first and had not moved since, her pale lavender eyes scanning the landscape with an expression caught between reverence and wariness. "The Seer's been through worse than this," Rory muttered, tucking the pendant back under her collar. Isolde turned her head. "What the eye reads as beauty, the blood reads as danger. They are not mutually exclusive." Rory didn't argue. She looked. The landscape unfolded before them in waves. Vineyards stretched impossibly far to the east, their vines heavy with fruit too large and too dark to be ordinary grapes — each cluster the size of a fist, nearly black, trembling under their own weight. Between the rows of vines moved shapes that were almost human, bent low, filling baskets that never seemed to reach capacity. No one looked up. To the west, orchards. Trees with bark the colour of dark rum and canopies so dense the amber light barely reached their roots. From somewhere inside them drifted something sweet and rotting, not unpleasant, but excessive — the smell of fermentation, of abundance left to turn. The ground underfoot was soft. Not mud. Something that gave slightly beneath each step, like grass grown over a mattress, springy and yielding. It was uniformly green and immaculate. No weeds. No bare patches. The kind of perfection that suggested maintenance by something that didn't sleep. "Keep moving," Nyx said. They had extended one arm to their full height, the shadow-substance of their form thinning slightly at the edges, as though they were testing the air like a fingertip testing water temperature. "We are not invisible here. Being stationary is worse than being seen." Rory fell into step. "Worse how?" "Things that feed on stillness know this place well." She chose not to ask what things. They moved along a path that appeared between the orchards and the vineyards, wide enough for a cart, paved with flat stones the colour of old bone. On either side, the sounds began to build. At first she'd assumed Dymas was quiet — the hush of it had struck her the moment they'd come through the rift, that sudden absence of city noise, of traffic, of the low mechanical drone London never fully surrendered. But it wasn't quiet. It was layered. Sounds she hadn't been able to separate at first were clarifying as her ears adjusted. Music. Somewhere ahead, string music, slow and elaborate, the kind played at a dinner where no one was in any hurry to leave. Laughter. Rich and continuous, ebbing and swelling, never fully subsiding. And eating. The sound of it, amplified and everywhere, knives and plates and chewing and swallowing — not grotesque in isolation, but in aggregate, in constant unbroken drone, deeply wrong. "Grand feasts," Isolde said, more to herself than to them. She hadn't broken stride. "He sets his table every hour of every day. The guests are never the same but the table is never cleared." Rory looked at a fork in the path where a figure sat on a low stone wall, cross-legged, wearing what had probably been fine clothing a long time ago. The figure held something in both hands — a piece of fruit from one of the nearby trees, overripe, its juice running down their wrists. They weren't eating it. They were simply holding it, staring at it, their expression beyond hunger and beyond satisfaction, lodged in something that had no name she recognised. She looked away. The path curved and the orchards thinned and the first building appeared. Rory stopped walking. It was enormous — not the enormity of a skyscraper or a stadium, which existed in scales her mind had already catalogued and filed away. This was enormous in a way that felt architectural in nature, as though the building understood its own size and used it deliberately. Columns of dark stone. Arched windows three storeys tall, lit from within. Banners hanging from those arches in deep burgundy and gold, embroidered with a crest she didn't recognise — a crowned figure seated at a table, mouth open. From inside: the music, louder now. The laughter, louder. Heat bloomed outward from the open doors in waves, carrying with it the assault of a hundred dishes cooked simultaneously, not unpleasant individually but overlapping into something overwhelming. The pendant pulsed hard against her chest. Once. Twice. "That's the hall," Nyx said. "I know it's the hall." Rory stared up at the banners. "We're not going in through the front." Isolde had already turned, moving along the building's exterior wall without being asked, fingers trailing the stone but not quite touching it, an inch of air between her skin and the surface. She paused at the corner. "What passes for shadow here does not behave as shadow does elsewhere." She glanced back at Nyx. "You will feel it." Nyx tilted their head. Their violet eyes, faint as embers, moved across the building's facade. "I already do." Rory pressed her back against the stone beside Isolde and peered around the corner. A narrower path ran along the building's side — service access, loading, whatever the equivalent was in a realm built on excess. Figures moved there too, carrying crates, hauling things covered in cloth, none of them looking at each other, all of them moving with the focused, joyless efficiency of people who had stopped asking questions about where they were and why. Her stomach tightened. "Those people," she said, low. "Are they—" "Contracted," Isolde said. "Bound by choice or by trick. The difference matters to them. It does not matter to Dymas." Rory looked at the crescent scar on her left wrist, a reflex she'd never broken. She pulled her sleeve down. "Then we don't touch anything, we don't eat anything, and we don't agree to anything."