Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8WAZ83WH8QDWZ8557H9GAJ

The portal closed behind them with a sound like tearing silk, and then there was nothing but the amber. Rory pressed her hand flat against her sternum, where the Heartstone pendant lay beneath her jacket. It had been pulsing for the last ten minutes — a slow, rhythmic warmth like something alive and breathing — but now it went perfectly still, as though it had gotten what it wanted. She wasn't sure which unsettled her more. "Well," she said. Nyx said nothing. They rarely did when words weren't necessary, and what stretched before them required no narration. The sky above Dymas was the color of cooling embers, a deep amber that ran to orange at the horizon and bruised to something darker overhead, not quite night and not quite dusk but some third thing that existed only here. There were no clouds, or nothing that Rory could identify as clouds — only slow drifts of golden haze that moved against whatever passed for wind in this place. The light it produced was warm and directionless, falling without shadow, turning everything it touched the color of old honey. She had expected heat. The realm of Hel, she'd assumed, would be heat. Instead the air was thick and almost fragrant, heavy with something she couldn't name at first — sweetness, yes, but layered, complex, the way a market smelled when every stall was open at once. Stone fruit and something floral. Fermenting grapes. The ghost of woodsmoke threaded underneath it all. Before them, the land rolled in low and generous hills, and every inch of it was cultivated. Vineyards stretched away to the left in precise dark rows, the vines heavy with fat clusters of deep purple — no, red — no, they seemed to shift, the colour changing as the amber light moved across them. To the right, an orchard climbed a gentle slope, and even from here Rory could see the trees were wrong in a way she couldn't immediately articulate. Too symmetrical. Too laden. Every branch bowed with fruit, none of it fallen, none of it rotting, as though the trees existed in a permanent state of perfect harvest. "The fruit does not decay," Isolde said, beside her. Her voice was always exactly level, like water finding its surface. "Nothing rots here. It only accumulates." Rory looked at her. The half-Fae's silver hair caught the amber light and held it, and her pale lavender eyes moved slowly over the landscape with something that wasn't quite recognition and wasn't quite peace. Isolde left no footprints in the soft reddish earth. Rory's boots sank half an inch. "Is that supposed to be comforting?" Rory asked. "It is supposed to be accurate." Isolde moved forward without seeming to initiate the movement, more like the ground receded beneath her. "Walk close." Nyx drifted at the edge of Rory's peripheral vision, their form loosening slightly at the edges — the shadow that composed them bleeding out a little into the ambient light, tasting the air. Even in the strange warmth of the amber sky they remained dark, a silhouette that absorbed rather than reflected, their faintly violet eyes reading the landscape with an attention that rarely blinked. "There are souls here," they said softly. The sound arrived at Rory's ear like something carried on a draft. "Many. Though I cannot yet see them." Rory reached into her jacket and kept her hand near the hilt of the Fae-forged blade at her hip. The moonsilver dagger was cold as ever against her palm, indifferent to the warmth surrounding it, and she found the temperature grounding. Real. She focused on it. They followed a path that wasn't quite a path — a seam in the land where the reddish earth was packed and pale, worn by passage. It wound between the vineyard rows and Rory found herself looking sideways at the vines as they passed. Up close, the grapes were enormous, each cluster the size of a fist, and the skins had an iridescent quality, shifting between deep burgundy and something almost black under her gaze. She had the strange impulse to reach out and take one. She didn't. The path curved, crested a low rise, and opened onto a valley and Rory stopped walking. Below them, built into a natural hollow in the land, was a city — or something like a city. The structures were low and sprawling, built from a warm pale stone that glowed faintly in the amber light, arched and open-sided in a way that did not look like architecture designed for shelter but for display. Wide terraces descended the valley's sides in tiers, and on each terrace there were tables. Long tables covered in white cloth, loaded with food, set for dozens. And at them, figures were seated, or moving, or circling. They were too far away to make out clearly, but something in their movement was off — too slow in places, too frenetic in others, like a crowd playing at dinner in a dream. "The feasts," Isolde said simply. "They run without interruption. The chefs work in shifts of decades. The diners—" She paused in the way that she did when she was selecting which true thing to say. "The diners have forgotten what hunger feels like, and so they have no mechanism for stopping." "Those are people," Rory said. "Some of them." She watched the distant figures for a moment. A faint sound reached them on the amber-thick air — not music exactly, but something rhythmic, drums perhaps, or the beat of many forks against many plates, or both. "We're not here to intervene," Nyx said, not unkindly. Their gaze had moved from the city to the near edge of the valley, where a series of low stone archways were half-buried in the hillside, dark against the pale rock. "We need the vault, not the feast hall." "I know," Rory said. She pulled her hand away from the blade and flexed her fingers. The crescent scar on her left wrist caught the amber light, pale against pale skin. Isolde had already begun descending the far side of the rise, not toward the city but veering along the valley's rim, stepping through the tall grass that grew there — gold-tipped grass that bent in her direction as she passed without touching her. She moved as though she already knew the route, which she very possibly did. Rory followed, because following was what you did when the alternative was standing on a hillside in Hel staring at a cursed feast. The grass was strange. It didn't whisper when she moved through it; it sighed — an exhale, almost contented, from the land itself. It pressed lightly against her jeans like something curious, and she told herself it was wind and moved faster. Nyx flowed beside her, keeping close, and she was grateful for it, for the way their presence occupied the air at her left shoulder, steady and familiar in a place where nothing else was. The archways were older than the city by some order of magnitude that felt impossible to estimate. The stone was not the same pale rock as the buildings below; it was something darker, almost black at the core, threaded through with veins of deep red that pulsed — faintly, slowly, like the Heartstone had before the portal closed. Rory noticed that without deciding to and stopped herself from saying anything about it. Isolde passed beneath the first arch and paused on the other side, turning back. "The way becomes narrow," she said. "The walls will press. They are learning what you are." "Reassuring," Rory said. The word came out dryer than she felt. She stepped under the arch. The temperature shifted immediately, dropping to something closer to cold, and the amber light thinned behind her as though the archway reflected it away. The space beyond was a passage — low-ceilinged, stone-walled, lit by those same red veins that traced patterns through the rock she could almost resolve into something ordered. Symbols, maybe. Script. The kind of thing that meant something once and might still. The walls were, as Isolde had said, close. Rory's shoulders came near to grazing both sides at once, and the stone radiated a faint warmth that contradicted the cool air — the warmth of something containing something else, sealed away and patient. Nyx compressed inward, their silhouette pulling tighter, edges sharpening. Without the ambient space to diffuse into, they looked almost solid, more human than Rory had seen them. Their violet eyes glowed a little brighter from the contained dark. "The veins in the stone," Nyx said quietly, as they moved deeper. "They've been mapped." "What do you mean?" Rory glanced at the walls as she walked. Now that her eyes were adjusting, she could see it — the pulsing channels of red didn't run at random. They joined. Branched. Connected at nodes and split again and rejoined in configurations that had a logic to them even if she didn't have the grammar to read it. "A diagram," Nyx said. "Of what the realm holds. Or held." "Or what it hungers for," Isolde said, ahead of them, and then said nothing further. Rory pressed her hand to the cold hilt of the Fae blade again. The passage turned and the red light grew fractionally brighter and somewhere deep below — or perhaps far ahead, distance was hard to trust here — something that might have been music and might have been the sound of eating echoed up through the stone. They walked deeper.