Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8WTXEE691215QDGHH2XTB2

The pendant burned against Rory's sternum like a second heartbeat. She'd felt it quicken a half-mile back, when the three of them had crossed into Richmond Park under a sky bruised purple with early dusk. By the time they passed Isolde's standing oaks — those impossible sentinels whose bark had fused into something more like stone than wood — the crimson gem was pulsing so fiercely she could see its glow through her jacket, a hot coal nestled against her chest. Now it throbbed in time with a sound she couldn't quite hear, a resonance below the threshold of her ears, more pressure than noise. The air ahead of them shivered. Not wind. Not heat distortion. Something deeper, as though reality itself had taken a breath and forgotten to exhale. "That's it," Rory said, though no one had asked. She could see the rift. A vertical crease in the twilight, barely three feet wide, running from the grass to a height just above Nyx's incorporeal head. Through it, colors bled that had no business existing in a London park — amber and gold and something warmer still, a hue she had no name for. Isolde stopped walking. She left no mark in the soft earth where she'd stood, and the wildflowers — crocuses, impossibly, in this season — swayed back upright as though she weighed nothing at all. Her pale lavender eyes fixed on the rift with an expression Rory couldn't read. Fondness, maybe. Or grief. "A door remembers every foot that crosses it," the Seer said. Her silver hair lifted in a breeze that touched nothing else. "And every foot remembers the door." "Meaning what, exactly?" Rory kept her voice level. Three months of cryptic pronouncements from the half-Fae woman had taught her that demanding clarity only earned longer riddles. Isolde tilted her head, ageless and infuriating. "Meaning you will not come back the same." Nyx drifted forward. In the fading light of the park, they were barely visible — a tall humanoid absence, a place where shadow pooled and thickened into something with intent. Their violet eyes floated like foxfire in a silhouette that the rift's amber glow couldn't quite penetrate. When they spoke, the words arrived as though carried from a great distance, a whisper threaded through wind. "The Veil is thin here. Thinner than it should be this far from solstice." A pause. The shadow-form rippled. "Something on the other side has been pulling." Rory's hand found the Fae blade at her hip. The leaf-shaped dagger was cold as always, moonsilver biting through the leather sheath into her palm. She drew a slow breath. The pendant pulsed. The rift shimmered. She stepped through. The world turned inside out. There was no transition — no tunnel, no corridor of light, no gradual dissolve from one place to another. One moment her boot pressed damp English grass, and the next it sank into soil so dark and rich it looked like coffee grounds, and the sky above her was the color of warm amber, and the air smelled like nothing she had ever encountered in twenty-five years of living. Rory gasped. Not from fear. From the sheer sensory weight of it. The smell hit first and hardest — roasting stone fruit, caramelized sugar, woodsmoke, and beneath it all something vegetal and alive, the concentrated essence of a thousand growing things exhaling at once. Her mouth watered before her brain could catch up. Her stomach clenched with a sudden, ferocious hunger that had nothing to do with having skipped lunch. Then her eyes adjusted, and she forgot about hunger entirely. They stood at the crest of a low hill, and below them Dymas unfolded like something dreamed by a painter who'd gone mad in the most beautiful way possible. Vineyards cascaded down terraced slopes in rows so precise they looked etched, their leaves a deep viridian that seemed to pulse with internal light. Between the vine rows, fruit hung in clusters she couldn't identify — too large for grapes, too luminous, their skins shifting color as she watched, cycling from plum-dark to a blushing gold. Beyond the vineyards, orchards spread in concentric rings around structures that might have been kitchens or temples or both. Smoke rose from chimneys shaped like open mouths. Rory could hear, faintly, the rhythmic percussion of knives on cutting boards — dozens of them, maybe hundreds, a polyrhythmic chopping that rose and fell like rain on a tin roof. And beneath that, music. Something stringed and low, keening in a minor key. "God," she breathed. "Not quite," Nyx whispered from behind her. The Shade had come through the rift in a pour of darkness, reconstituting beside her like ink finding its shape in water. Their violet eyes swept the landscape, and Rory caught something in that faintly glowing gaze she hadn't seen before. Recognition. "I've read about this place. Aldric — I — read about it. Centuries ago." It was the first time Nyx had used that name voluntarily. Rory filed it away and said nothing. Isolde arrived last. She stepped through the rift the way she did everything — silently, with an economy of motion that made the extraordinary look habitual. The amber sky painted her silver hair in shades of honeyed bronze. She closed her eyes and inhaled, and for one unguarded moment her expression cracked open into something raw and wondering. "The soil remembers seeds that were never planted," she murmured. Then her composure returned, smooth as a door clicking shut. "We should move. Time here is — uneven." They descended the hill single file, Rory in front, the pendant leading her like a dowsing rod. Its pulse had steadied since they'd crossed over, settling into a deep, patient rhythm that she felt in her molars. The Fae blade stayed cold at her hip, a reassuring chill against the pervasive warmth of the air. Everything here was warm. The ground radiated heat through the soles of her boots. The light had no visible source — no sun, no moon, just that depthless amber glow suffusing the sky like stained glass backlit by fire. The vineyard swallowed them. Up close, the fruit was even stranger. Each cluster grew on stems as thick as Rory's wrist, and the individual fruits were the size of plums, their skins translucent enough that she could see seeds inside — tiny dark shapes suspended in glowing pulp. The scent this close was devastating. Her body wanted desperately to reach out, to pluck, to taste. She curled her fingers into fists. "Don't touch," she said over her shoulder, more reminder to herself than warning. "The fruit does not poison," Isolde said from the rear, which sounded like permission until she added, "but debts incurred by appetite are paid in other currencies." Nyx moved between the vine rows like a rumor, their shadow-form flickering as they passed from one patch of amber light to the next. Rory noticed they were more solid here than she'd ever seen them in London — more defined, the edges of their silhouette sharper, as though Dymas was a place where even shadows had more substance. Nyx seemed to notice it too. They kept flexing their hands, opening and closing fingers that actually looked like fingers for once, instead of vague dark appendages. "I can feel it," Nyx said, and there was something fragile in that wind-carried whisper. "Weight. I haven't felt weight in — " They stopped. The violet eyes dimmed briefly. "This realm wants to make things real." "Real and indebted," Isolde replied. They came out of the vineyards into a clearing, and Rory stopped so abruptly that Nyx drifted through her before pulling back with a murmured apology. The cold of their passage lanced through her ribs, but she barely noticed. She was too busy staring. A banquet table stretched across the clearing. It was carved from a single piece of dark wood — or grown from it, the legs still rooted in the earth, branches curling up from the table's edges to form candelabras that held flames without wicks or wax. The table was set for dozens, perhaps a hundred, with plates of hammered copper and goblets that looked grown from crystal. Food covered every inch of available surface. Roasted birds with skin like lacquered mahogany. Towers of bread that steamed as though just pulled from the oven. Fruits split open to reveal interiors of shocking jewel-toned color — ruby, sapphire, emerald. Sauces in boats shaped like open hands. Cheeses veined with something that glowed faintly gold. No one sat at the table. No one served. The food simply was, perfect and waiting, and the smell of it nearly drove Rory to her knees. "Who is this for?" she managed. Isolde was quiet for a long time. When Rory glanced back, the Seer's lavender eyes were glazed with that distant look that meant a vision was pressing at the edges of her sight. Her lips moved soundlessly. Then she blinked and focused, and her voice came out steady but thin. "For the ones who couldn't stop eating," she said carefully, each word chosen as though she were stepping across stones in a river. "And for the ones who haven't started yet." Somewhere deeper in Dymas, a bell rang — low, sonorous, the kind of sound you felt in your chest cavity. The pendant flared hot enough that Rory hissed and pulled it away from her skin by the chain. The crimson gem blazed, its inner glow no longer faint but fierce, throwing red light across her fingers. It was pointing. Not metaphorically — the stone had angled on its chain, straining toward the source of the bell like a compass needle finding true north. "Belphegor's kitchens," Nyx said. The name fell from them like a stone into deep water. "The bell calls the chefs. The helbound ones. Souls under contract." Rory looked at the table, at the impossible feast that no one had come to claim. She looked at the vineyards behind them, the orchards with their keening music, the amber sky that held no sun. She thought of Yu-Fei's kitchen back in London — the cramped galley behind the Golden Empress, the clatter of woks, the honest human sweat of a dinner rush. This was something else entirely. This was hunger made into architecture, appetite elevated to religion. The crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist itched. It always did when her body was telling her something her mind hadn't caught up with yet. "We keep moving," she said, and wrapped her hand around the pendant to keep its light contained. Its warmth seeped into her palm, insistent and strange, pulling them deeper into a realm that wanted very badly to be generous. That, Rory thought, was exactly what frightened her.