Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8VPQ4KNJNMF8ET9GZ34HPP

The pendant burned against Rory's collarbone the moment she stepped through. Not a searing pain — more like pressing a mug of fresh tea to bare skin. She clutched it through her jacket and blinked against light that had no business existing underground. Or wherever they were. The Veil had parted like wet tissue paper, and the tunnel of cold displacement that followed had lasted three heartbeats, maybe four, before depositing them on a hillside that smelled of cinnamon and something deeper, something fungal and sweet and utterly wrong. "Breathe through your mouth." Nyx materialized beside her, their form flickering between solid shadow and a shape that was almost human. Almost. Violet eyes swept across the landscape with a recognition Rory didn't share. She breathed through her mouth. The air tasted like warm honey. "This is Dymas," Nyx said, and the name left them like a confession. Below, the land unrolled in a quilt of impossible color. Vineyards cascaded down terraced slopes, their leaves a bruised purple that shimmered copper at the edges. Between the rows, orchards sprawled — trees Rory couldn't name, heavy with fruit that glowed faintly from within, soft amber and rose-gold, as though each one held a trapped ember. The sky above was the color of whisky held to a candle flame, perpetually warm, perpetually bright, with no visible sun to account for it. Just light, sourceless and even, pouring from an amber vault that stretched to every horizon. "It's beautiful." The words left Rory before she could stop them. "That is rather the point." Isolde stood to her left, silver hair lifting in a breeze Rory couldn't feel. The Seer's bare feet had left no impression in the soft dark soil. Her lavender eyes were half-closed, reading something in the air itself. "Beauty here is architecture. They built it to make you forget." "Forget what?" Isolde's mouth curved. "That you would like to leave." Rory pulled the Fae blade from the sheath at her hip and held it loosely, reassured by its cold bite against her palm. The moonsilver caught no light here — stayed dull as tarnished pewter under Dymas's amber sky. She noted that. Filed it. They descended. The path was paved in flat stones the color of dark chocolate, worn smooth by millennia of traffic. Each footfall produced a faint musical note, a different pitch per stone, so their passage down the hillside created an accidental, wandering melody. Rory stopped. Stepped back. Stepped forward. The notes repeated — consistent, deliberate. Someone had tuned the road. "Don't linger on it." Nyx's whisper-voice carried an edge she hadn't heard before. Their shadow-form drifted ahead, not walking so much as flowing, a column of living dark that the amber light refused to touch. "The path wants your attention. Give it nothing." Rory kept moving. The vineyards rose on either side as they reached the valley floor. Up close, the vines were thick as her forearm and twisted into shapes that suggested intention — spirals, knots, what might have been letters in a language she didn't speak. The grapes hung in clusters the size of her fist, each berry a deep translucent red that revealed tiny threads of gold suspended inside, like veins, like circuitry. Isolde extended one pale finger toward a cluster, then stopped. Her hand trembled. "When was the last time something frightened you?" Rory kept her voice low. "1782. A cellist in Vienna." Isolde withdrew her hand. "These are memory-fruit. They are grown from the recollections of helbound souls. Each one contains a moment of someone's life — a taste, a sensation, a feeling." Her nostrils flared. "The vintners here press them into wine. They serve it at feasts. Demons drink the distilled experiences of humans and call it culture." Something cold settled behind Rory's ribs. She looked at the nearest cluster again. The golden threads inside pulsed — faintly, arrhythmically, like a heartbeat winding down. "Christ." "He has no jurisdiction here," Nyx said without humor. They pressed deeper. Past the vineyards, the orchards thickened into groves of such density that the amber light fractured into latticed patterns on the ground. The trees bore fruit Rory's brain refused to categorize — shapes that were almost pears but with skin like polished opal, things that resembled peaches but wept a slow golden sap from their stems, clusters of small round berries that chimed against each other when the unfelt breeze stirred them. And sounds. Everywhere, sounds. A low continuous hum rose from the earth itself, vibrating through the soles of Rory's boots, up through her ankles, into her shins. Beneath it, voices — or the ghosts of voices — murmured in overlapping waves, too distant to parse into words but close enough to feel. Laughter. Arguments. The rising pitch of someone telling a story. All of it layered and folded into the ambient noise of the place like seasoning into a broth. "Souls?" Rory asked. "Kitchens." Nyx solidified enough to point. Between the trunks, light spilled from low structures built into the hillside — stone and iron buildings with wide chimney stacks that emitted plumes of fragrant smoke. Each plume was a different color: saffron yellow, blood red, a green so vivid it left afterimages. "The contracted chefs work here. Preparing for the feasts." "Contracted chefs. You mean people." "I mean people who made deals they didn't understand." Nyx's form rippled, a distortion that Rory had learned to read as discomfort. "The kitchens run constantly. Prince Belphegor's appetite is not a metaphor." They skirted the kitchen structures, keeping to the tree line. Through a gap in the foliage, Rory caught a glimpse of the interior of the nearest one — a cavernous space lit by hanging braziers, long iron counters, and figures in stained aprons moving with mechanical precision. Their hands worked cleavers and whisks and implements Rory couldn't name against ingredients that shifted color on the cutting board. One chef — a woman with cropped hair and hollow eyes — looked up. Her gaze passed through the gap, through the leaves, and found Rory's face. Held it. Her mouth opened. Nyx pulled Rory sideways into shadow. Cold. A moment of absolute black. Then light again, amber and warm, and they stood fifty yards further along the path, the kitchen behind them. "Don't meet their eyes." Nyx's form was distorted, stretched thin from the effort of shadow-stepping with a passenger. "They'll ask you to take a message. And if you hear the message, you're bound to deliver it, and delivery requires a name, and a name here—" "Is currency. I remember." Rory's heart hammered against the pendant. The crimson gemstone pulsed hot — hotter than before, a rhythm that matched her pulse. Isolde caught up without apparent hurry, moving through the grove like water around stones. She stopped and tilted her head. "We're being watched." "Since we arrived," Nyx confirmed. "No. Since now. Something specific." Isolde knelt and pressed her palm flat to the dark soil. When she lifted it, her skin was stained with a residue that sparkled like crushed garnet. "The earth here has a memory too. We left a signature when we crossed. They know a Fae-touched and a Shade and—" She looked at Rory with something that lived in the neighborhood of pity. "And someone carrying a Heartstone." The pendant throbbed. "How long before someone comes?" "The question that matters is who." Isolde straightened and wiped her hand on her dress, leaving a streak of dark glitter across the white fabric. "This is a realm of appetites. We are, at present, the most interesting new dish." Rory tightened her grip on the Fae blade. Its cold radiated up her wrist, past the crescent scar, into her forearm. She scanned the groves ahead — more fruit-laden trees, more winding paths of musical stone, and in the far distance, something that broke the skyline. A structure. Massive. Pillared in dark stone with banners the color of raw meat hanging from its parapets. Smoke and music poured from its open gates in equal measure. "Is that where we're headed?" "The Grand Table. Belphegor's palace." Nyx drew themselves taller, shadow coalescing into something sharper, more defined. "If the answers exist in Dymas, they're in there." "Lovely." "You wanted to find who sent the pendant." "I wanted a lot of things. Didn't expect most of them to involve walking into a demon prince's dining room." Rory exhaled through her teeth. The warm air filled her lungs with cinnamon and char and the ghost of something that reminded her, painfully, of her mother's Christmas pudding. She shut that down. Memory was currency here. Nostalgia was a trap. She could almost feel the soil beneath her feet reaching for her recollections, hungry, patient, extracting what it could from the pressure of her weight. She lifted her foot. A faint golden residue clung to the sole of her boot. "Walk lighter," Isolde murmured. "Walk faster," Nyx corrected. They moved toward the palace. Above them, the amber sky darkened by a single shade — the only indication of time passing in a place that seemed designed to make time irrelevant. The musical stones sang beneath their feet, and the melody they created, by pure accident, sounded like a lullaby Rory hadn't heard since she was four years old. She didn't stop walking. She set her jaw, pressed the cold blade against the hot pendant, and let the dissonance between Fae-forged steel and Hel-born stone anchor her to the only thing that mattered. Forward. Answers. Out.