Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8VTDJ2EFT2J6A387TSZ7VT

The pendant burned against Rory's sternum before they even stepped through. Not the pleasant warmth she'd grown accustomed to — this was urgent, a coal pressed to skin through the thin cotton of her shirt. She pulled the silver chain free and the Heartstone swung loose, its crimson facets throwing light that had no source. It pulsed. Once. Twice. A heartbeat that wasn't hers. "That's our invitation." Nyx's voice drifted from somewhere to her left, though their body had already thinned to a ribbon of dark against the shimmering tear in the air. The rift point hung between two bollards on the Southbank like a heat mirage, bending the grey London skyline behind it into something liquid. Isolde stood at the edge, silver hair lifting in a breeze that blew from nowhere on this side. Her bare feet made no impression on the pavement. She tilted her head, lavender eyes fixed on the distortion the way a bird watches a cat. "What waits on the other side of a door depends on how you open it." "That's not helpful." Rory closed her fist around the pendant. The heat spread through her fingers, up her wrist, past the crescent scar. "Is it safe to walk through?" "Safe is a word with very short legs." Nyx rippled back into solidity, their violet gaze the only feature in the dark silhouette of their face. "She means no. But that's why we brought the blade." Rory touched the Fae dagger at her hip. Cold as always, even through the leather wrapping she'd wound around the grip. Moonsilver. She still half-expected to wake up back in her flat above Silas' bar and find the whole thing had been a fever dream brought on by bad takeaway. "Together, then," she said, and stepped forward. The rift swallowed her like water. No — not water. Water was cold, indifferent. This was warm and it *noticed* her. The membrane of the Veil clung to her skin and peeled away with a sound like tearing silk, and the light changed, and the ground changed, and the air changed, and London vanished as though it had never existed at all. Amber sky. That was the first thing. A sky the color of dark honey stretching from horizon to horizon without a single cloud, without a sun, the light diffused and sourceless and warm on the back of her neck. Rory looked up and kept looking. No stars. No moon. Just that deep, golden glow pressing down from everywhere at once. "Breathe." Nyx materialized beside her, their shadow-body denser here, more defined. As though this place gave them more substance, not less. "The first breath is always the hardest." She hadn't realized she'd been holding it. Rory inhaled. Flavor. That was the only word for it. The air tasted of ripe stone fruit and woodsmoke and something underneath, something darker and sweeter that coated the roof of her mouth like honey left too long in the jar. Her lungs expanded with it and a flush crept across her cheeks — the involuntary, physical pleasure of a first bite of something extraordinary. "Christ." She pressed the back of her hand to her lips. "Is the air always—" "Yes." Nyx's whisper carried an edge. "Don't trust it." Isolde arrived without sound. One moment the space beside Rory was empty; the next, the Seer stood there, wildflowers sprouting from the cracks in the reddish earth around her feet. They bloomed and died in the space of a breath. Isolde didn't seem to notice. "Oh," the Seer said, and for the first time since Rory had known her, Isolde's voice held no riddle. Just a single syllable, soft and wounded. "I remember this." Before them, the landscape of Dymas unrolled. Vineyards first. Row after impossible row cascading down hillsides that shouldn't have existed in any geometry Rory understood — slopes that curved upward at the edges, folding back toward themselves like the inner surface of a bowl. The vines were thick as a person's arm, gnarled and black-barked, heavy with fruit that ranged from deep purple to a luminous, fleshy gold. The grapes — if that's what they were — hung in clusters the size of her head, and they moved. A slow, rhythmic swell. Breathing. Beyond the vineyards, orchards. Trees with white bark and leaves that shifted color as Rory watched, cycling through green to copper to a deep arterial red before starting again. Their branches drooped under the weight of fruit she didn't recognize — oblong things with skin like burnished metal, round globes that wept clear juice from their stems, small clustered berries that gave off a faint chiming sound when the sourceless wind stirred them. And beyond the orchards, far in the amber distance, structures. Towers built from something that caught the honeyed light and threw it back in fractured beams. A city, or something that served as one, sprawling across a valley floor that shimmered with heat. "Don't stare at the horizon too long." Nyx moved ahead, their form sliding across the reddish soil. "Distance lies here. What looks far might be close. What looks close —" "Might be unreachable. Yeah, I'm getting the picture." They started down a path between the nearest vineyard rows. The soil was the color of rust and soft under Rory's boots, yielding slightly with each step as though it was packed organic matter rather than mineral. Which, she realized with a chill that cut through the warmth of the air, it might well be. She chose not to look too closely. The vines closed overhead as they moved deeper, forming a tunnel of twisted wood and swollen fruit. Light filtered through the leaves in dappled amber pools. Somewhere ahead, Rory heard music — not instruments exactly, but a rhythmic clanging and hissing punctuated by voices raised in what might have been song or might have been argument. The sounds carried strangely, bouncing between the vine rows, seeming to come from all directions. "Kitchens," Nyx said. "They never stop." A grape dropped from a vine above and split open on the path an inch from Rory's boot. The juice was dark, almost black, and it steamed where it hit the soil. The smell that rose from it made her mouth flood with saliva — roasted meat and caramel and the sharp bite of alcohol all at once. Her stomach clenched with a hunger so sudden and violent it doubled her over. Isolde's hand closed on her elbow. The Seer's grip was surprisingly strong, her skin fever-cool. "Don't eat. Don't drink. The fruit here fills the belly but empties everything else." Rory straightened, wiping her mouth. The hunger faded as quickly as it had come, leaving behind a hollow ache and a thin thread of fear. She'd *wanted* it. Not in an idle way. In the way a drowning person wanted air. "How do people live here?" "They don't live." Nyx paused at a break in the vines where the path forked. Left descended toward the chiming orchards. Right climbed toward a ridge where stone structures crouched — low, heavy buildings with smoke curling from square chimneys. "They're consumed. Dymas feeds them and feeds on them in the same motion." The right path, then. The smoke from the chimneys carried scents Rory couldn't separate — dozens of them layered together in a complex, shifting architecture of aroma. Saffron and char. Butter and blood. Something floral and delicate weaving through something animal and deep. Her body responded before her mind could intervene: skin flushing, pupils dilating, a tightness in her chest that had nothing to do with fear and everything to do with want. She gripped the Fae blade's handle. The cold of the moonsilver cut through the warmth like a slap. Her head cleared. "Useful, that." Nyx watched her, violet eyes unreadable. "Keep holding it." The stone buildings grew larger as they climbed. What Rory had taken for crude huts resolved into something far more elaborate — a compound of interconnected kitchens, each one open on at least one side, each one blazing with fire and motion. Through the nearest opening she saw a figure hunched over a cutting block the size of a dining table, working a cleaver through something that wept purple. The figure was human, or had been. A man, heavy-set, with forearms roped in old burn scars and eyes that held the glazed, ecstatic focus of someone in the grip of a drug. He didn't look up. Other figures moved between the kitchens. Some human. Some decidedly not — taller, with too many joints in their fingers, skin that shifted between colors like the orchard leaves. They carried platters piled with things Rory couldn't identify and didn't want to. The platters steamed. The air shimmered above them. "Helbound souls," Isolde murmured, watching the scarred man. Her expression had gone distant, the way it did when visions pressed behind her eyes. "Contracted from Earth. They cook and they eat and they cook again. The cycle has no end they can see." "Can they see us?" "They see nothing but the next dish." Rory watched the man bring the cleaver down. His technique was flawless — precise, economical, the motion of someone who had performed it ten thousand times. His lips moved as he worked, mouthing words or a recipe or a prayer. A smaller figure scurried past him carrying a bowl of something that writhed, and the man's hand shot out and snatched a piece of it without breaking his rhythm, popping it into his mouth. His eyes rolled back. A tremor ran through his body. The cleaver came down again. "We need to move." Rory pulled her gaze away. The pendant pulsed against her chest — faster now, insistent. "Which way to the lower gates?" Nyx pointed past the kitchen compound, toward the city in the valley. In the amber light, the towers looked less like buildings and more like bones. Tall, curved, tapering to points. "Through the markets. Past the Feast Halls. Down." "Down always means worse in these places, doesn't it." "In Dymas, down means hungrier." Nyx's shadow-form rippled at the edges, a tell Rory had learned to read as discomfort. "The deeper you go, the less the food satisfies. At the bottom, there's a hunger that nothing in any realm can fill." Isolde crouched beside the path and touched one of the wildflowers that had sprung up in her wake. It was already withering, its petals curling inward, the color bleeding out of it into the rust-red soil. She watched it die with an expression Rory couldn't read. "The city has a name it does not speak. The gates swing both directions. What you carry will light the way, and what you hold will cut it open." The Seer looked up, lavender eyes sharp. "But a key that opens a lock becomes the lock's possession. Remember that." Rory looked down at the pendant in one hand, the blade at her hip under the other. Light the way. Cut it open. "Right." She started walking toward the bone-white towers. "Let's go find out what's hungry."