Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8VYCVHPTGAJEQEBF6NSKP9

The Heartstone went warm the moment Aurora ducked through the rift. Not warm the way a stone left in sunlight was warm, passive and borrowed — this was alive, a pulse against her sternum like a second heartbeat. She pressed her fingers to it through her jacket, more out of instinct than comfort, and stepped forward into whatever waited on the other side. The air hit her first. It was thick, syrupy almost, carrying the smell of overripe plums and wood smoke and something sweeter underneath, like honey left in a hot jar. She pulled a breath through her nose and immediately felt it sit heavy in her chest, more substance than air. Behind her, she heard Nyx slip through the rift with that near-silent displacement they always made — less a footstep and more the suggestion of one — and then the rift sealed itself with a sound like the snap of a green branch. There was no going back. Not quickly, anyway. "Well," Aurora said, because she needed to hear her own voice in it. Dymas opened before her. The sky was the first shock. She had expected darkness — Hel in her imagination had always been a word for absence, for cold and shadow and the closing of things. Instead, the sky above her burned amber, a deep and saturated gold that had nothing to do with any sun she could identify, no single source casting it, just the entire canopy of atmosphere lit from within like a stained-glass window. Beneath it, the land rolled outward in extravagant abundance: vineyards, row upon row of them, the vines heavy with clusters so dark they were nearly black, some burst and weeping their juice down the wooden stakes that could barely support them. Between the rows, fig trees grew unpruned and enormous, their broad leaves furred with an amber light that pooled in the creases. An orchard curved away to the left, the branches bent almost to breaking. Everything here was in the condition just before rot. That was the word that settled into her mind before she could find a better one. Not decayed — not yet — but tipping forward into it, gorgeous in the way a bruise was occasionally gorgeous, too much of everything. Nyx moved alongside her, and she watched them from the corner of her eye. Their form had compressed slightly, the shadow-edges of them drawing inward, and she realised it was the light — that amber saturation had nowhere to pool, no proper shadows in which they could spread. They looked denser here, more defined, more contained, and there was something in the set of what passed for their shoulders that she'd learned to read as discomfort. "You alright?" she asked quietly. "Narrow." Their voice came out softer than usual, that windborne whisper flattened by the heavy air. "The shadows here do not move as they should. They are fed but not free." She filed that away and turned to look for Isolde. The Seer stood three paces behind them, exactly where she'd been when they stepped through, except that she'd stopped. She was looking at the vineyards with an expression that on anyone else might have been called distaste, her silver hair lifting slightly in a breeze that Aurora couldn't feel. "You recognise it," Aurora said. Isolde turned those pale lavender eyes toward her, and there was something in them that was old in a way Aurora still hadn't quite grown accustomed to, not old in the sense of a face that had weathered time, but old in the sense of a depth she could not see the bottom of. "A gift extended is a hand that does not release," Isolde said. "What is given here was given long before the giving." "That's very helpful, thank you." Isolde's mouth curved. It was not quite a smile. She left no footprints as she walked to meet them, the long grass between the vines bending around her feet rather than beneath them. They moved deeper into it. The path, such as it was, descended between the vine rows, and with the descent came sound — a low and constant swell of noise Aurora had taken for wind at first but wasn't. Music, she thought, except that wasn't precisely right either. It was many things layered: cutlery against ceramic, voices talking across each other in a dozen registers, something rhythmic and percussive she couldn't place, and occasionally, rising above it all, what might have been laughter except it lasted too long. She couldn't see the source. The path curved and the vineyards thickened, and the amber light through the canopy gave everything a quality of unreality, like a room lit entirely by candlelight. She noticed the workers when they were close enough that she should have seen them earlier. They were stationed between the rows — a dozen of them in her immediate sightline, more beyond — bent to the work of harvest, cutting and sorting and carrying the heavy clusters in wooden crates. They moved with a mechanical efficiency that would have looked normal at a distance. Up close, it looked like exhaustion that had passed through the other side of itself and come out as something compulsive. A woman not far off was cutting grapes with her hands moving in the same rhythm so precisely repeated that Aurora found herself watching the pattern of it, grip and cut and drop, grip and cut and drop, and realised the woman's eyes were open but fixed on nothing. The crescent scar on Aurora's left wrist prickled. She looked away. "Don't stare," Nyx said beside her, barely audible, the words less spoken than inhaled in reverse. "Are they—" "Contracted," Isolde said from behind. She offered it simply, with none of her usual curvature. "The ones who bargained. The ones who chose abundance and found that abundance chose them back." The pendant pulsed again, harder, and Aurora covered it with her palm without thinking. They came through the last row of vines and the source of the noise revealed itself. The feasting ground spread across a bowl in the terrain, vast and terraced, tables upon tables loaded with food in quantities that defied any purpose beyond spectacle. Towers of glazed meat, bowls of fruit piled high enough that the ones on the bottom had already split under the pressure, bread in shapes that had nothing to do with bread's usual function, decorative and elaborate and stacked among flowers that Aurora was fairly sure were real but couldn't verify because the flowers here were the same colour as everything else, amber-saturated, almost too vivid. Figures moved between the tables, eating and being served and eating again, and the music she'd heard — she found its source now, a cluster of musicians on a raised platform at the far end whose instruments were unlike anything she recognised, strung with what might have been gut or might have been something she preferred not to consider. Above it all, on a dais higher than the rest, something watched. She couldn't see it clearly from this distance. Only the impression of it: enormous, settled into its throne with the particular stillness of something that had not needed to move in a very long time. Two lights that might have been eyes, warmer than the ambient amber, tracking across its domain with the unhurried attention of complete ownership. Belphegor's court. Aurora kept her breathing even and her hands loose at her sides. Beside her, she heard Nyx exhale — a long, controlled sound — and felt them shift marginally closer, close enough that the edge of their shadow fell across her arm. Isolde, behind them both, made no sound at all. "The blade," Nyx said. Aurora's hand had already moved to the hilt of the Fae-forged dagger, cold even through her jacket, that particular cold that went past temperature into something she thought of as intent. She hadn't reached for it consciously. She let her fingers rest against it without drawing, and the cold ran up into her palm like water finding its level. "We're not here to fight," she said quietly. "No," Nyx agreed. "But they'll want to know if you know that." Somewhere in the feast below, something that had been laughing stopped. In the sudden gap of sound, Aurora heard, very clearly, the pendant pulse once — twice — against her chest like a question. She straightened, lifted her chin, and considered her next step with the particular cool deliberateness that had carried her through worse than this. The amber light poured down over everything without warmth, and the court of Gluttony stretched before them, enormous and patient and already watching, and there was nothing to do but walk into it. She walked.