Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8WVN6NKDAJETWWT4EGBA4Y

The pendant burned against Rory's sternum the moment the air changed. Not a gradual shift — one step she breathed London's damp November chill, and the next her lungs filled with something thick and sweet, like inhaling warm honey. The shimmer she'd walked through dissolved behind them with a sound like tearing silk, and the grey of Richmond Park vanished as though it had never existed. "Oh," she said. Just that. Because what stretched before her stole every other word she might have summoned. The sky was amber. Not sunset amber, not the muddy orange of city light pollution bouncing off clouds. This was a deep, saturated gold, the color of aged whiskey held up to a candle, and it stretched from horizon to horizon without a single cloud to break it. The light it cast had weight — Rory could feel it pressing against her skin like bathwater. Nyx solidified at her left shoulder, their form pulling tight and dense, the violet glow of their eyes narrowing to pinpricks. "This is wrong." Their whisper-voice carried an edge she hadn't heard before. Not fear, exactly. Recognition. "This is Hel." "The second circle." Isolde moved past them both, her bare feet making no impression on the dark, loamy earth. Her silver hair caught the amber light and turned to molten copper. "Dymas. The glutton's garden." Rory pressed her palm flat against the Heartstone where it lay beneath her jacket. The pulse that had been a gentle nudge for weeks now throbbed with the steady rhythm of a second heartbeat, warm enough to sting. "You could have mentioned it was a door to bloody Hel before we walked through it." Isolde's lavender eyes slid sideways. "A door is only a door. What matters is what you carry through it." "That's not an answer." "It is the answer you were given." Rory bit down on the inside of her cheek and turned her attention forward. Arguing with Isolde was like arm-wrestling smoke — you exhausted yourself while the smoke just drifted. They stood at the edge of a vineyard that rolled down a gentle slope and kept going. The vines were nothing like any grape she'd ever seen. They twisted around trellises of bone-white wood, and their leaves shimmered between deep purple and black depending on how the amber light caught them. The fruit that hung in heavy clusters was translucent, each grape the size of a marble, and inside Rory could see something moving — tiny currents, lazy spirals of luminescence, as though each one contained its own small weather system. The vineyard stretched for what might have been miles. Beyond it, the landscape erupted into terraced orchards, the trees unlike anything terrestrial — some bearing fruit that glowed faintly blue, others dripping with what looked like crystallized sap. And beyond the orchards, rising from a valley basin, she could make out structures. Towers. Domes. Smoke rising from a hundred chimneys, carrying with it the ghost of spices she couldn't name. "Don't touch the fruit." Nyx drifted forward, their shadow-form rippling. Here, in this amber world, they seemed more defined than they ever had on Earth — the edges of their silhouette sharper, the darkness of their body deeper by contrast against the golden light. "You've been here before," Rory said. "No." They paused at the edge of the nearest row of vines. "But I have been close. The spaces between realms border every realm. I have... heard Dymas. Smelled it. Felt it pulling." Their violet eyes dimmed. "It is designed to pull." A breeze rolled up the slope and Rory's stomach clenched. Not with nausea. With hunger. A sudden, visceral, hollow ache that hadn't been there thirty seconds ago. The breeze carried roasting meat and caramelized sugar and something underneath those — something dark and earthy and ancient, like the smell of a forest floor after rain but richer, deeper. Her mouth flooded with saliva. She swallowed hard. "I feel it." "Gluttony is not merely food." Isolde knelt beside one of the vines and studied its trunk without touching it. Up close, Rory could see the bark was etched with fine lines — patterns that might have been natural grain or might have been script. "Gluttony is the want that grows faster than the having. The appetite that sharpens with each bite." "So the whole place is, what, a trap?" "A garden does not trap the deer. The deer walks in because the garden is beautiful." Rory crouched beside her. The Fae-forged blade sat against her hip in the makeshift sheath Nyx had fashioned from a belt, and even through the leather she could feel its perpetual cold — a counterpoint to the pendant's heat. The dagger's moonsilver hadn't reacted to the crossing, hadn't glowed or warmed. It just sat there, patient and chill, like a surgical instrument waiting for the operation to begin. "These markings." She pointed at the vine's trunk. "Language?" "Recipes." Isolde's mouth curled at one corner. "Instructions for preparing the fruit. Written in Dymasian script. This is a cultivated place — every vine, every orchard, planted with intent." "Recipes for who?" "Whom." "Isolde." The half-Fae straightened. "Souls come here, Aurora. Not all damned — some contracted. Chefs, vintners, bakers. Mortals who traded a span of earthly years for the chance to work with ingredients that do not exist on the human plane." She gestured at the glowing fruit, the impossible orchards, the spice-laden air. "Belphegor collects them. Prizes them. This realm is his larder and his stage." The name landed like a stone in still water. Rory filed it for later. They moved down through the vineyard in single file — Nyx leading, their incorporeal edges brushing the vine leaves aside without disturbing them, Rory in the middle, Isolde trailing with her silent, footprintless steps. The deeper they went, the more the air changed. Layers of scent accumulated like geological strata — fruit and fermentation at the surface, then roasted grain, then butter and saffron and black cardamom, then deeper still something almost mineral, almost metallic, that Rory associated with blood. The hunger sharpened. She caught herself staring at a cluster of the translucent grapes and leaning toward it, her hand halfway extended, before she snapped her arm back and shoved her fist into her jacket pocket. "It's getting worse." "It will." Nyx didn't turn around. "Focus on something that repulses you. Counterweight." She thought about Evan's smile. The charming one. The one that preceded the worst nights. The hunger dimmed like someone had turned down a dial. They cleared the vineyard and stepped onto a path of packed earth that wound between two orchards. The trees here were massive — trunks wider than cars, bark the color of dried blood, branches heavy with fruit she had no frame of reference for. Some of the fruit pulsed. Some hummed at a frequency she felt in her molars rather than heard. One tree bore what looked like peaches made of glass, and inside each one she could see a tiny, perfect scene playing out — a dinner table, a feast, figures eating and laughing in endless loop. "Memory fruit." Isolde plucked a leaf from the tree — just a leaf — and held it up. It was warm green shot through with veins of gold. "Each one contains a mortal's memory of their greatest meal. The taste recreates the experience perfectly. Belphegor trades in them. Collectors' items among the demonic aristocracy." "That's..." Rory watched the tiny figures inside the nearest peach. A family, she realized. A woman serving something from a steaming pot while children grabbed at bread rolls. Sunday dinner. Someone's perfect Sunday dinner, bottled and hung from a tree in Hel. "That's obscene." "Desire always is, when viewed from outside." Nyx had stopped ahead of them. Their form had gone rigid — fully solid, which Rory had learned meant they were alarmed. The violet of their eyes blazed bright enough to cast faint purple light on the path. "Someone is coming." Rory heard it a second later. Footsteps. Not cautious ones — confident, measured, accompanied by the clink of metal on metal. She drew the Fae blade and the cold of it flooded up her arm and across her shoulders like jumping into a winter sea. In the amber light, the moonsilver didn't glow as it did under Earth's moon, but it caught the gold and threw it back sharper, whiter, a defiant sliver of something that did not belong here. Three figures emerged around a bend in the path. The first was tall and broad-shouldered, dressed in a long apron stained with things that might have been sauces or might have been worse, a heavy cleaver hanging from a chain at his hip. His skin had a faintly reddish tint, and his eyes — when they locked onto the group — were solid black from corner to corner. Behind him walked two others in similar garb, one carrying a basket overflowing with the luminous blue fruit from the orchards, the other holding a long hooked pole used for reaching high branches. They stopped. The lead figure's black eyes moved from Nyx to Rory to Isolde and lingered there. His nostrils flared. "Fae blood," he said. His voice was deep and smooth, the voice of someone accustomed to calling out orders over the roar of open flame. "Half, by the dilution. And a Shade." His gaze shifted to Rory and his head tilted. "And something else. Something with a heartbeat." The pendant pulsed hot against her chest, and the demon's black eyes dropped to the spot where it lay hidden beneath her jacket. His expression didn't change — he had the still, appraising look of a butcher evaluating a cut of meat — but something in his posture shifted. A new attentiveness. A sharpening. "You carry a Heartstone." Not a question. "Into Dymas." His lips parted, showing teeth that were just slightly too numerous for his mouth. "Prince Belphegor will want to know about this." Rory adjusted her grip on the Fae blade. The cold had spread through her whole body now, pushing back both the ambient heat and the ravenous hunger, leaving her thoughts clear and sharp. "Take us to him, then." Nyx's head snapped toward her. Isolde, behind her, made a sound that might have been a laugh or might have been a sigh. The demon studied her for a long moment. Then he smiled — wide, too wide, the excess teeth catching the amber light. "Follow me," he said, and turned down the path toward the smoking towers in the valley below.