Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8V29FY4FHXDH36T17RSK83

The pendant burned against Rory's sternum the instant they stepped through. Not the gentle pulse she'd grown accustomed to — the faint metronome tick of warmth whenever they passed a rift point in London. This was a flare, sudden and insistent, as though the crimson gemstone had swallowed a coal. She pressed her palm flat against it through her jacket and felt it throbbing beneath the fabric, alive with a heat that bordered on pain before settling into something almost pleasant. Almost like a heartbeat that wasn't hers. The light hit her next. She'd braced for darkness — for fire and brimstone, for the stench of sulfur, for screaming. Every story she'd ever been told about Hel had prepared her for horror. What she got instead was an amber glow so rich and warm it felt like stepping into the last hour of a summer afternoon, the kind that turned the Severn estuary to hammered gold when she was a girl. "Breathe," Nyx whispered beside her. Rory realized she'd stopped. She pulled air into her lungs and tasted something on it — ripe fruit and woodsmoke and something sweeter underneath, like honey left too long in the sun. The breath she exhaled came out shaking. They stood on the crest of a low hill, and the world of Dymas unfolded beneath them like a painting someone had poured too much color into. Vineyards stretched in every direction, row after row of heavy vines sagging under the weight of fruit she didn't recognize. The grapes — if they were grapes — were the deep purple-black of bruises, each one the size of a plum, their skins so taut they looked ready to split. Between the vineyards, orchards rose in terraced groves, their branches laden with things that caught the amber light and threw it back in facets. Pomegranates, maybe, or something that wanted to be mistaken for pomegranates. "It's beautiful," Rory said, and hated how true it was. "Beauty is a door left open," Isolde murmured from her other side. The seer's silver hair moved in a wind Rory couldn't feel, drifting around her shoulders like something underwater. Her pale lavender eyes swept the landscape with an expression Rory couldn't read — not quite fear, not quite recognition. Something older than both. "And every door leads somewhere." "That's not actually helpful," Rory said. "It was not meant to be helpful. It was meant to be heard." Nyx's form rippled at the edge of Rory's vision. In the mortal world, the Shade could pass for a trick of the light — a shadow that lingered a beat too long, a dark smudge in the corner of a room. Here, under Dymas's amber sky, they were something else entirely. Their silhouette had sharpened, the edges of their form crisp and defined, and for the first time Rory could see fine details in the living shadow — the suggestion of cheekbones, the hollow where eyes should be, lit from within by that faint violet glow. They looked more solid here. More real. "You look different," she said quietly. Nyx turned their head toward her. The violet points of light regarded her with something that might have been amusement. "We are closer to the spaces between here. The air is thinner between planes." Their voice carried the same quality it always did — a whisper on wind that shouldn't exist — but it came clearer now, without the effort she sometimes sensed behind it in London. "I feel more. This is not entirely welcome." They started down the hill together. Rory kept her hand inside her jacket, fingers gripping the Fae-forged blade sheathed against her ribs. The moonsilver hilt bit cold against her palm — always cold, winter-stream cold, regardless of the ambient warmth pressing against her skin. The contrast grounded her. Amber heat and Fae cold. She held onto both. The path, if it was a path, wound between the first rows of vines. Close up, the plants were wrong in ways the distance had concealed. The vines didn't grow from the soil so much as emerge from it, thick as Rory's forearm, their bark a glistening red-brown that reminded her of wet muscle. They twisted around trellises made of a pale bone-colored wood that was too smooth, too uniform. Not wood at all, she realized, and stopped looking at it. The fruit, though. The fruit was extraordinary. Each swollen grape radiated warmth she could feel on her face when she leaned close, and inside the taut skin she could see something shifting — a faint luminescence, like a candle flame glimpsed through dark glass. "Don't touch them," Nyx said. "I wasn't going to." "You were leaning." "Leaning isn't touching." "In Dymas, the distinction may be academic." Isolde had drifted ahead, moving between the rows with her peculiar silent grace. She left no footprints in the dark soil — she never did — but the vines seemed to notice her passage. They swayed gently toward her as she passed, the heavy fruit pendulumming on their stems, and Rory could have sworn she heard the plants exhale. A soft, sighing sound, like the contented noise someone makes settling into a warm bath. They walked for what might have been ten minutes or might have been an hour. Time felt soft here, malleable, slipping through her fingers when she tried to measure it. The vineyards gave way to one of the orchards she'd seen from the hill, and the trees that grew here stopped her in her tracks. They were enormous — each trunk as wide as a London taxi, the bark a deep burgundy that spiraled upward in grooves she could have fit her fist into. The branches spread wide and interlocking overhead, creating a canopy that filtered the amber sky into something more intimate, dappled and warm. And from those branches hung fruit unlike anything she'd ever encountered. Some glowed with their own soft light — pale gold, rose pink, a deep arterial red. Others were dark and quiet, absorbing light rather than reflecting it, their surfaces so matte they looked like holes in the air. The smell was overwhelming. Ripe mango and vanilla and caramelized sugar and underneath it all, turning slowly like an undercurrent, something savory and rich — roasted meat, maybe, or the smell of a kitchen after someone has spent all day cooking a feast. Her stomach cramped. Not from nausea. From hunger. A sudden, savage hunger that drove saliva into her mouth and tightened her jaw. She hadn't been hungry a moment ago. She was certain of that. "You feel it," Nyx said. Not a question. "The hunger." Rory swallowed hard. "It came out of nowhere." "It came out of everywhere. This is Dymas. Gluttony is not just permitted here — it is the architecture. The air itself is designed to make you want." She looked at Isolde. The seer had paused beneath one of the vast trees, her head tilted back, her eyes half-closed. A single wildflower had bloomed in the dark soil at her feet — small and white and entirely out of place. "Isolde. Are you all right?" "I am listening." "To what?" "To the trees. They are old." Her eyes opened fully, and for a moment the lavender irises seemed to darken, like clouds moving behind glass. "Not as old as the oaks in my grove, but old. They remember the hands that planted them." "Whose hands?" Isolde turned to face her. "That question has teeth, Aurora Carter. Be certain you wish to be bitten before you ask it again." A sound reached them from deeper in the orchard. Low and rhythmic — the clatter of metal on stone, the hiss of something hitting a hot surface. Voices, too, distant but unmistakable, calling out in a language Rory didn't recognize. Then laughter, sudden and sharp, cut short by the crash of what sounded like breaking crockery. "Someone's cooking," Rory said. "Many someones," Nyx corrected. The Shade had gone still, their edges fraying slightly, shadow tendrils reaching outward like antennae testing the air. "I count at least twenty voices. More beyond. There is a structure ahead — large, open-sided. A kitchen or a hall." "The feasting grounds," Isolde said softly. "Where the helbound prepare their offerings to Prince Belphegor." The name landed heavy. Rory felt the pendant flare again, a sharp kick of warmth against her breastbone, and she closed her hand tighter around the Fae blade's hilt. The cold of the moonsilver raced up her arm and met the heat of the Heartstone somewhere in her chest, two opposing forces balanced on a knife's edge. She breathed through it. "Helbound souls," she said. "Those are people. Contracted from Earth." "They were people," Nyx said carefully. "What they are now depends on the terms of their contracts." "They are still something," Isolde said, and it was the simplest, most direct thing Rory had ever heard her say. They moved deeper into the orchard. The trees grew closer together, their branches weaving a tighter canopy, and the light dimmed from amber to a deep honeyed bronze. Under her boots, the soil softened to something loamy and warm — and it was warm, she realized, as though the ground itself was heated from below. She could feel it through her soles. The air grew thicker, more fragrant, and the hunger prowled through her belly like a living thing. She set her jaw against it and kept walking. A fruit fell from a branch above her and landed with a soft, wet sound at her feet. It was the size of a peach, its skin a deep translucent gold, and through it she could see the flesh within — honeycombed and glistening, pulsing with that faint internal light. It smelled like every perfect thing she'd ever eaten distilled into a single breath. Her grandmother's bara brith. The chips from the shop on Cowbridge Road, drowned in vinegar. The first coffee of the morning, black and bitter and necessary. She wanted it so badly her hands shook. "Walk past it," Nyx said, close now, their shadow falling across the fruit and dimming its light to something bearable. "Do not touch. Do not taste. One bite and Dymas has a claim on you." Rory stepped over the fruit. It took more effort than she would ever admit to anyone. Past the last row of trees, the orchard opened onto a clearing, and she saw it — the feasting grounds of Dymas, spread out before her in a spectacle of controlled chaos. Massive stone kitchens stood open to the amber air, fire pits blazing, great iron spits turning slowly over beds of coals that burned in colors she'd never seen — deep blue, vivid green, a pure and sourceless white. Figures moved between the stations, dozens of them, shapes both human and decidedly not, chopping and stirring and plating and shouting to one another across the fragrant haze. And in the center, a table that seemed to go on forever. A banquet without beginning or end, loaded with dishes that steamed and glistened and shifted color as the firelight played across them. No one sat at it. It was a display, an offering, a monument to appetite itself. Rory stared at it and felt the hunger rise until it pressed against the inside of her skull. "The Veil is thin here," Isolde said, standing at her shoulder. "Thin enough to tear. Do you feel it?" Rory felt the pendant throbbing. She felt the blade's cold singing up her arm. She felt the hunger and the heat and the terrible, seductive beauty of a place built entirely around want. "Yeah," she said. "I feel it." She took one more breath of that dangerous, perfumed air, and stepped forward into Dymas.