Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8X4E0PTSC4WGYF7776BZ98

The portal smelled of overripe figs. Rory noticed it before she noticed anything else — that thick, sweetly rotten smell rolling through the tear in the air like warm breath from an open oven, and she nearly pulled back from it on instinct. She didn't. She pressed her lips together, squared her shoulders, and stepped through. The ground on the other side was soft. Not wet, not muddy, but yielding in the way of very old soil that had been turned and fed for centuries, dark and loamy and somehow warm underfoot even through the soles of her trainers. She took one step and then another and then stopped breathing for a moment because the sky above her was amber. Not sunrise amber. Not the pale, apologetic gold of an English morning. This was deep and saturated, the colour of a tiger's eye gemstone held up to the light, and it stretched in every direction without a single cloud to interrupt it. No sun either — the light came from everywhere and nowhere at once, sourceless and honeyed, laying itself across the landscape like something poured. "Well," she said. It was not a useful thing to say. She said it anyway. Nyx stepped through behind her, their silhouette condensing from shadow into something approaching solidity as they cleared the rift. In this light, the violet glow of their eyes was muted, replaced by something warmer. They tilted their head upward and were still for a long moment, which from Nyx constituted a significant reaction. "Dymas," they said, in that whisper-from-nowhere voice. "I haven't been here since before the Restoration." "How long ago was that?" "Long enough." Isolde came last, stepping through the portal with the unhurried grace of someone crossing the threshold of a familiar room. Her silver hair caught the amber light and held it, and she left no impression at all in the dark soil as she moved forward to stand beside Rory. Pale lavender eyes swept the landscape without urgency. "The feast was set," she said, "before any of you thought to arrive." Rory had given up asking Isolde to speak plainly. She filed the comment somewhere in the back of her mind and turned to look at what was actually in front of them. The vineyards began perhaps fifty metres from where they stood and ran to the horizon without interruption, row after meticulous row of vines hung so heavy with fruit that the canes bowed under the weight. The grapes were not the purple-black of any cultivar Rory had ever delivered produce past — they ranged through colours she lacked proper names for, a deep bruised violet at one end, a luminous copper at the other, and between them something that looked almost arterial. She took a step toward the nearest row without meaning to and stopped herself. The air here was not quite right. It was too full — dense with fragrance the way air got during the brief ridiculous peak of summer, except there was no summer here, no season at all, just this relentless amber warmth pressing against her skin. She could smell yeast and honey and something beneath both that she recognised as the faint copper note of blood, barely there, a grace note under the sweetness. It made her stomach turn even as it made her mouth water, which disturbed her more than either reaction alone. She pressed her thumb against the crescent scar on her left wrist. Old habit. "Don't eat anything," Nyx said, without looking at her. "I wasn't going to." "You were thinking about it." She was. She put her hands in her pockets. They moved deeper along a broad dirt path that ran between the vineyard rows, and the vines closed in on either side with a slowness that felt deliberate, the way very old things moved — not menacing exactly, but aware. Rory kept her eyes moving. The Fae blade was at her hip, tucked under her jacket in a plain leather sheath Isolde had produced without comment. She could feel the cold of it through the fabric, constant and faintly reassuring. The Heartstone at her collarbone was doing something new. It had pulsed with warmth near the portal — she'd felt it before they even located the rift, a steady beat against her sternum like a second heart finding its rhythm. But now, deeper in, it had shifted to something she could only describe as eager. Not painful. Not alarming. Just insistent, a low thrumming warmth that moved when she moved, orienting toward something she hadn't found yet. She didn't mention it to the others. Not yet. What she did mention was the sound. "Do you hear that?" She stopped walking. Nyx stopped. Even Isolde paused, though her expression suggested she had been hearing it considerably longer. It was music, or something that functioned as music — a low, resonant hum that seemed to rise from the earth itself rather than from any instrument or throat. It had no melody in the conventional sense, just a series of tones that shifted against each other in complex, overlapping layers, and when Rory stood still and let herself actually hear it rather than strain after it, she realised it wasn't unpleasant. It was, in fact, the most beautiful thing she'd ever heard, and that was precisely what made her skin prickle. "The terroir," Nyx said. "The land here is old enough to have a voice. Don't let it lull you." "I wasn't—" "You were doing that too." She bit down on her reply and kept walking. The path widened as they crested a shallow rise, and beyond it lay the first of the structures. Rory had expected something medieval — hewn stone, rough timber, the functional architecture of ancient agriculture. What she found instead were open pavilions of pale material she couldn't identify, something between stone and bone, hung with garlands of fruit and draped with fabric in deepening shades of crimson and gold. Long tables ran beneath the pavilion roofs and the tables were set — plates and cups and serving vessels laid as if for an imminent feast — but there was no one anywhere that she could see. The food on the tables had not spoiled. That was the wrong detail. All of it gleamed under the sourceless amber light as if freshly plated, steam still rising from dishes at the far end, fruit still glistening, bread still pulling itself apart at the seams with interior warmth. The absence of any host or diner made it worse somehow, not better. It looked like a painting of anticipation. Rory's hand drifted toward the Heartstone. It was beating hard now, a staccato pulse, directing her attention toward the far end of the largest table where a single goblet sat apart from the rest, filled with something darker than wine. "Isolde," she said carefully. "The gift predates the giving," Isolde said, already looking at her with those pale eyes. "And the thief who does not take is still known for what they have touched." "That's—" Rory lowered her voice on instinct, though there was no one to overhear. "That's not actually helpful." "It is entirely helpful. You are choosing not to find it so." Nyx had drifted ahead, their form thinning at the edges the way it did when they were uneasy — not afraid, Rory didn't think Nyx did afraid precisely, but uncertain in a way that manifested as the slow erosion of their body's margins. The shadow-stuff of their hands bled into the air around them. "Something is watching," they said quietly. "Not at us. Watching the path ahead." Rory looked. The path continued beyond the pavilions, narrowing again between two hillsides thick with orchard trees, and the fruit hanging from those branches caught her attention before the shape beneath them did. Enormous fruit — swollen, almost grotesque in their excess, pressing against each other, splitting at the seams in one or two places and releasing something that rolled down the bark in slow dark rivulets. And there, between the trunks, a stillness that wasn't natural stillness. The kind of stillness that had stopped itself. She reached under her jacket and wrapped her fingers around the Fae blade's hilt. The cold bit into her palm instantly, sharp and clean, and she felt her thinking snap into focus the way it always did when cold water hit her face. Good. "All right," she said quietly, to both of them, to neither of them, to herself. "We go carefully." Nyx's violet eyes found hers in the amber dark. "We go carefully," they agreed. Isolde had already moved ahead of both of them. She left nothing behind her in the soil but the faint impression of bent grass, and even that was closing.