Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8X05GZBHV1HBVF4TAPSN90

The pendant burned against Rory's sternum like a coal pressed to skin, and then the world folded. There was no doorway, no arch of light, no dramatic threshold. One moment she stood in the damp grass of Richmond Park with Nyx's shadow-hand gripping her elbow and Isolde's cool fingers laced through hers, and the next the ground buckled beneath her feet and she was falling—not downward but sideways, through something that felt like bathwater and tasted like static on the back of her tongue. The Veil parted around them with a sound like tearing silk, and then it was done. Rory's knees hit soil. Warm soil. She pressed her palms flat and felt heat radiating up through rich, dark earth that smelled of turned compost and something sweeter underneath—overripe fruit, maybe, or honey left too long in the sun. She blinked, and the world assembled itself around her in pieces. The sky came first. Not a sky, really—a ceiling of light, amber and molten, as though the entire atmosphere had been steeped in whiskey. No sun that she could see, no clouds, just that vast warm glow stretching from horizon to horizon, casting everything beneath it in shades of gold and umber. It made her skin look honeyed. It made her shadow stretch long and soft behind her. "Breathe," came Nyx's voice, close to her ear—that strange whisper-on-wind quality that she'd slowly learned to parse from actual wind. "You need to breathe, Aurora." She sucked in air. It was thick. Not humid exactly, but dense with scent—layers upon layers of it. Roasting meat. Caramelized sugar. The bright green bite of fresh herbs. Something yeasty and warm, like bread just pulled from an oven. Her stomach clenched with sudden, violent hunger, and she pressed the back of her hand to her mouth until it passed. "Don't," Isolde said, already standing, already composed, her silver hair catching that amber light until it looked like spun copper. "The appetite is the first trap. A seed planted in the belly that grows if you feed it." "Brilliant. Love that for us." Rory pushed herself to her feet and brushed the dark soil from her jeans. The Heartstone pendant had quieted against her chest, its frantic pulse settling into a slow, steady throb—the rhythm of a sleeping heart. She cupped it through her shirt and felt the warmth of it, no longer painful but insistent, as if it recognized this place the way a compass recognizes north. They stood at the edge of a vineyard. It sprawled before them in rolling, impossible abundance—row after row of thick, gnarled vines heavy with fruit she didn't recognize. The grapes, if they were grapes, hung in clusters the size of her fist, their skins so dark they looked almost black, with a faint violet blush where the amber light caught them. Between the rows, the soil was dark and meticulously tended, and small channels of liquid ran in carved grooves at the base of each row. Rory crouched to look. The liquid was the color of claret, and it moved with a sluggish, almost syrupy quality. "Is that wine?" she asked. "It was, once," Nyx said. Their form had solidified in this place more than Rory had ever seen on Earth—edges sharper, the darkness of their body deeper, that faint violet glow in their eyes burning brighter against the golden air. They looked almost human here, and that unsettled her more than the alien sky. "Dymas irrigates with the thing it worships." Isolde moved ahead of them without waiting, her bare feet pressing into the soil without leaving a single mark. She paused at the nearest vine and tilted her head, lavender eyes narrowing as though listening to something in the wood. "The roots go deeper than they should," she murmured. "Down through the realm's floor and into something older." She withdrew her hand before touching the vine, fingers curling back to her palm. "We should not linger among growing things here. They are hungrier than they appear." Rory nodded and unshouldered her bag, checking by touch that the Fae blade was still secured in its leather wrap along the side pocket. The moonsilver was cold even through the leather—a biting, persistent chill that grounded her against the cloying warmth of the air. Isolde had pressed the dagger into her hands three days ago in the Grove, and Rory had nearly dropped it from the shock of its temperature alone. Now she found its coldness reassuring. A sliver of another world strapped to her hip, proof that not everything here played by Dymas's rules. They followed a path between the vineyard rows, moving deeper into the landscape. The vines grew taller as they walked—first waist-high, then shoulder-high, then arching overhead to form a canopy that filtered the amber light into dappled, shifting patterns on the ground. The fruit grew larger too, and stranger. Some clusters had split open, revealing flesh that was luminous and wet, veined with threads of gold. The smell intensified until it was almost a physical pressure against her sinuses—sweet and ripe and cloying, with a faint undercurrent of decay beneath it all, like fruit left too long on the branch. Something moved in the vines to their left. Rory stopped. Nyx stopped. Between them, a shape uncoiled from the dense foliage—not an animal, not a person, but something in between. It had the rough suggestion of a torso and limbs, but its body was a lattice of woven vine and root, and its face was a split fruit, pale flesh glistening, two dark seeds set where eyes should be. It regarded them with no expression, because it had no face capable of one, and then it sank back into the foliage with a wet rustle and was gone. "Keeper of the vine," Nyx said, in answer to the question Rory hadn't asked. "They tend the orchards and the fields. Helbound souls who traded form for purpose." "They chose that?" "Choice is a complicated word in Hel." Rory stared at the place where the thing had vanished. A single fruit hung where its head had been, already swelling with new growth, its skin flushed and taut. She turned away and kept walking. The vineyard ended at a ridge, and beyond it the world opened into a valley so vast and so dense with color that Rory's eyes struggled to take it all in. She stood at the edge and let it wash over her. Orchards filled the valley floor in geometric spirals, each ring a different species of tree—some bearing fruit like lanterns, glowing softly from within; others drooping under the weight of produce she had no name for, bulbous and ridged and furred and translucent. Between the orchards, gardens blazed with vegetation in shades she'd never seen in nature—deep arterial reds, incandescent yellows, blues so vivid they looked painted. Pathways of pale stone wound between them, and along those pathways figures moved: distant shapes carrying baskets, pushing carts, bending to harvest. At the center of the valley, rising from the convergence of all those spiraling rows, stood a structure. It was enormous—a palace or a hall, built from what appeared to be living wood and dark stone, its walls curved and organic, its roof a lattice of interwoven branches bearing a canopy of broad leaves the color of burnished bronze. Smoke rose from dozens of chimneys along its spine, and even at this distance Rory caught fragments of sound drifting up from it: the clatter of metal on metal, the roar of open flame, voices calling out in a language she almost recognized but couldn't quite place. "The Grand Kitchens," Isolde said. She stood beside Rory at the ridge's edge, her expression unreadable. "Where the feasts of Dymas are prepared. Every dish a work of art. Every ingredient grown from soil fed on hunger itself." She paused. "The food is extraordinary. That is the danger. One taste and the body remembers, and it will ache for that taste until the mind breaks trying to forget." "You've been here before," Rory said. It wasn't a question. Isolde's lavender eyes flickered. "A different path brought me here, in a different age. What I saw then still grows in the garden of my memory, and it blooms when I do not wish it to." She turned those pale eyes to Rory. "The answer you seek is in that hall. But the price of entry is always the same in Dymas—you must bring something to the table." "We didn't bring anything." "You brought yourself," Nyx said. They had drifted to the edge of the ridge, their incorporeal lower half trailing into mist where it met the warm updraft from the valley. They looked vast here, their shadow spreading wider than it should, drinking in the amber light. "In Dymas, a mortal body is a delicacy. Not to consume—to employ. Human senses, human creativity, human hunger. The master chefs of the Grand Kitchens were all mortal once. Prince Belphegor collects them the way your world collects fine art." Rory's hand drifted to the pendant. It pulsed once, warm and steady, as though affirming something she hadn't yet said aloud. "So I walk in there and, what, offer to cook?" "You walk in there," Isolde said, "and offer to taste. In Dymas, the truest currency is an honest palate. The chefs have been here so long they have forgotten what food means to the living. A mortal tongue that can still discern pleasure from compulsion—" She let the silence carry the rest. Rory looked down at the valley. At the spiraling orchards and the blazing gardens and the enormous hall with its bronze canopy and its smoking chimneys. She thought about the vine-keeper with its seed eyes and its borrowed body, and she thought about the wine running in channels through the soil, and she thought about the smell—God, the smell, working its way into her hindbrain, lighting up parts of her nervous system she hadn't known existed. She thought about Evan, and the way hunger could wear a person's name. She thought about the flat above Silas's bar, and Yu-Fei's kitchen, and the way a bowl of congee on a bad morning could feel like an anchor to something real. She understood hunger. She understood what it meant to want something so badly your ribs ached with it, and she understood what it meant to walk away from the table anyway. "Right," she said. She pulled the pendant out from beneath her shirt and let it rest against her collarbone, its crimson light pulsing in time with her heartbeat. She shifted the strap of her bag so the cold press of the Fae blade sat firm against her hip. "Then let's go be delicious." Nyx made a sound that might have been a laugh—a whisper of wind folding over itself. Isolde said nothing, but one corner of her mouth lifted, barely, before she began her descent into the valley, her bare feet finding purchase on stone and soil and leaving no trace of their passage. Rory followed her down into the amber dark, the warmth rising to meet her like an open mouth.