AI Rory disliked places that felt cleverer than she was.
The grove began feeling clever the moment she stepped between the ancient oak stones.
One breath she was in Richmond Park with damp winter grass under her boots, the broad dark backs of oaks hunched against a pewter sky, and the distant, ordinary sounds of London fraying at the edge of the afternoon. The next, the air tightened around her skin like cool silk . Sound folded in on itself. The city vanished so completely it felt stolen.
She stopped just inside the boundary.
Wildflowers spread through the clearing in a riot no sane season would allow. Foxgloves lifted their speckled throats beside crocuses. Roses climbed low thorny walls of briar in full red bloom while bluebells nodded beneath them. Frost silvered none of it. The flowers looked fed by some private light, each petal edged with a color too rich to belong to England. The scent was worse than perfume and better than it—honey, rain, crushed green stems, something sharp and moon-cold underneath.
Behind her, the standing stones looked older from this side, their bark-like surfaces ridged and split as if they had once been trees and had only reluctantly agreed to be stone.
“Still with us?” Nyx asked.
They had come through after her, gathering themselves out of the long shadow cast by one of the boundary oaks. In the park beyond, Nyx always looked like darkness behaving badly . Here they seemed almost native. Their tall shape sharpened at the edges, their violet eyes no brighter than the glow caught in the throats of the flowers.
Rory let out a breath she had not noticed she was holding . “Define ‘with.’”
Nyx’s whisper-thin voice brushed her ear from a pace away. “Heart beating. Mind mostly attached. That standard .”
“That’s a low standard .”
“It is often practical.”
She touched the pendant at her throat without thinking. The Heartstone sat warm against her sternum, the deep crimson gem pulsing faintly through her shirt like a live coal wrapped in cloth. It had been quiet on the walk through the park. Here, under the strange sweetness of the grove, it had woken. Not hot. Not yet. Just alert.
That bothered her more than the impossible flowers.
A pale shape moved between the trees ahead. Isolde Varga stepped into the clearing as if she had been coaxed out of the light itself.
She was smaller than the place made her seem. Silver hair poured over one shoulder to her waist. Her lavender eyes caught on Rory and held. A mortal woman crossing a field in winter ought to have bent stems, marked soft earth, left some ordinary proof of herself. Isolde left nothing. The moss beneath her bare feet did not even flatten.
“You came before the last bell,” Isolde said.
Rory glanced up automatically, though there was no bell tower, no church, nothing but branches arched high above them. “There are bells?”
“In places where hunger is dressed as celebration, there are always bells.” Isolde’s gaze dropped briefly to the pendant at Rory’s throat. “And some doors hear them better than others.”
Rory had learned that asking Isolde to speak plainly was like asking weather to sit still. “Good. We’re doing that again.”
A smile ghosted at the Seer’s mouth. “If you wanted simple roads, Aurora Carter, you should have stayed in law.”
Rory didn’t dignify that with an answer. She still hated when anything in this city knew too much about her.
Nyx drifted forward a fraction. “The tear is open?”
“Breathing,” Isolde said. “Not open. Not closed. The Veil is thin there tonight, and thinner for those who carry Hell close to the heart.”
Rory’s hand tightened around the pendant. The silver chain bit lightly into the back of her neck. “This thing’s been warming up since we crossed the stones.”
“Then it knows where it wants to go.” Isolde turned and began walking deeper into the grove. “Come, before wanting becomes invitation.”
Rory followed because standing still in a place like this felt more dangerous than moving.
The clearing narrowed into a path that could not have been there a second earlier. Trees leaned inward—yew, ash, oak, trunks twisted together like old fingers. Their bark held faint seams of silver that shone when she looked at them from the corner of her eye and dulled when she stared straight on. Thin streams ran across the path without making mud. Fish no longer than her little finger flickered through them, each bright as struck coins. Somewhere above, unseen birds called in notes so clear and glassy they barely sounded alive.
The deeper they went, the less human scale held. Ferns rose to her shoulder. Mushrooms the size of serving platters crowded the roots of a fallen tree, their caps painted in bruised blues and molten golds. A white moth fluttered past her face and left a wake of sparks that hung for a heartbeat before winking out.
Rory pulled her phone from her coat pocket on instinct. No signal. No surprise there. The lock screen clock flickered , skipped ahead three hours, then back twelve minutes, then went blank entirely.
“Useful,” she muttered, shoving it away .
Nyx’s low laugh was all wind and no warmth . “The grove does not admire clocks.”
Ahead, Isolde glided through the undergrowth without disturbing so much as a seedhead. Rory watched the ground more than once to be sure she wasn’t imagining it. Nothing. No footprints. No bent grass. It should have been eerie. It was eerie. But there was something worse in it too: the sense that the grove recognized Isolde as part of itself and was simply refusing to notice the rest of them.
She became aware, gradually and then all at once, that the light had changed. The sky overhead showed through in shards between branches, but it was no longer the grey she remembered from the park. It had taken on a diluted pearly sheen, bright without a visible sun. Her skin prickled. The hairs at the nape of her neck rose.
“Do you feel that?” she asked.
Nyx tilted their head. “The pressure?”
“Like walking downhill and not moving.”
Isolde answered without turning. “You are near a seam.”
That was all she said, because of course it was.
The path opened abruptly onto a circular hollow ringed with standing yews. Their roots knotted above the earth, weaving a raised edge around a pool no larger than a dining table. The water was black and perfectly still. It reflected not the branches overhead but an amber sky.
Rory stopped at the sight of it. The Heartstone gave a sudden, hard throb against her chest.
There. At last. Something she could trust more than beauty.
The air above the pool shimmered . At first it looked like heat haze . Then it thickened, a wavering distortion like oil spread thin over glass. The Veil. Even without whatever supernatural talent was meant to be required for it, she could see the boundary straining. It made her eyes ache. If she looked too long, she had the queasy sense of depth opening where there should have been none.
On the far side of the shimmer, shapes moved: a slope terraced with vines, leaves gleaming darkly under an amber light; a marble balustrade; the suggestion of white pavilions in the distance. And over all of it, a scent hit her with such force it almost staggered her.
Roasted meat. Wine. burnt sugar. Citrus split under a knife. Yeast. Smoke. Spice. A hundred rich things layered until appetite ceased to be a bodily fact and became an atmosphere.
Rory swallowed. “That’s Dymas.”
“The lip of it,” Isolde said. “A garden at the edge of Gluttony. Not the throne. Not the kitchens. Not yet.”
Not yet. Comforting.
Nyx drifted closer to the pool, their edges fraying in the trembling light. “It widens.”
The shimmer had begun to pull apart along a line no thicker than a thread. Rory felt the Heartstone heat in answer, a pulse synced to the tear’s slow opening. The pendant seemed to tug, ever so slightly , toward the rift.
“What do I do?” she asked.
Isolde looked at the dagger at Rory’s hip.
The Fae-forged blade sat under her coat, sheathed flat against her side. Rory drew it. Moonsilver caught the warped light and answered with a faint, clean glow. The dagger was always cold. Tonight it felt cold enough to hurt.
“Cut what should not be tangled,” Isolde said.
“That’s nearly comprehensible.”
“I am in a generous mood.”
Rory stepped to the edge of the pool. The Veil hummed against her teeth. She could not see anything like rope or thorn or seam, only that shimmering distortion and the amber world breathing beyond it. She trusted the blade more than her own sight. Lifting it, she pressed the leaf-shaped point into the thinnest place in the air.
Resistance met her—soft, then suddenly taut, like pushing into stretched hide. Then the moonsilver bit.
The Veil split without sound.
Amber light poured through the cut. Heat hit her face. The scent of Dymas deepened until her empty stomach tightened painfully around itself. The opening widened into a doorway tall enough for a person, its edges wrinkling like torn silk in water.
Beyond it, the other realm waited.
Rory looked once at Nyx. Their violet eyes fixed on the gap, unreadable . She looked at Isolde, who stood serene and impossible in her trackless clearing. No one said don’t go. No one needed to. She had been walking toward this since the pendant first came into her life.
“All right,” Rory said, though it came out rougher than she meant. “Let’s see what Hell grows.”
She stepped through.
Heat wrapped around her like a living thing.
Not furnace heat. Not the dry blast of a kitchen oven door opening. This was soft and lush and intimate, heavy with moisture and sweetness. It slid under her coat, settled in the hollow of her throat, pressed fruit and smoke and fermentation into every breath.
The ground beneath her boots was dark red stone veined with gold, warm through the soles. Ahead, terraces unrolled in slow sweeping curves down a valley so fertile it looked obscene. Vineyards stitched the slopes in precise ranks, grapes hanging in great translucent clusters—green like sea-glass, purple so dark they were almost black, ruby red and faintly luminous from within. Beyond them spread orchards with trees bowed under impossible fruit: pears with skins like polished bronze, figs the size of fists, pomegranates split wide enough to show jewels of wet garnet flesh. Irrigation channels carried not clear water but liquid with the color of pale wine . It ran over stone and gave off a faint, yeasty perfume.
Above everything hung the sky: a vast warm amber, neither day nor sunset, lit from somewhere beyond sight. No sun. No clouds. Just that rich burnished glow, as if the whole realm had been lacquered in honey.
For a moment Rory could only stand there and look.
The place was beautiful in the way a trap is beautiful when it has been built by someone patient.
White pavilions rose in the middle distance, their canopies bellied by a wind she could not feel. Further off stood towers and broad-columned halls in cream stone, draped with trailing vines and banners the color of old wine. From that direction came music—strings, drums, a bright peal of laughter—and beneath it the fainter metal rhythm of kitchens at work: knives on boards, lids clattering, the hollow ring of ladles against deep pots.
Nyx came through behind her, then Isolde. The rift drew itself smaller at their backs but did not close.
Nyx’s form thinned at the edges in the relentless amber light. “Too little shadow,” they murmured, displeased.
“There’s shadow enough where fruit ripens,” Isolde said.
Rory barely heard them. Movement among the terraces had caught her eye.
People worked the vines below. At least they looked like people from this distance—men and women in aprons and rolled sleeves, moving in careful practiced lines with baskets over their arms. Some wore chef’s whites stained at the cuffs with juice or soot. Some carried knives curved like moons. Their motions were efficient , almost graceful. Not one of them spoke.
One man straightened at the end of a row and turned his face up toward the terrace where Rory stood. Even from here she saw the hollowness in him. Not thinness. Something worse. A look as if appetite had eaten everything behind his eyes and left the body to keep working.
He looked away at once and bent back to the grapes.
Rory felt a small hard knot tighten low in her stomach . “Those are the contracted souls.”
Isolde’s expression did not change. “Some signed willingly. Some were hungry in the wrong company.”
That smell again—bread crust, roasting fat, sugared peel—rolled over the terrace, and Rory’s mouth flooded with saliva so sharply it angered her. She had eaten before coming here. She knew she had. It made no difference. Dymas leaned on hunger like a hand on a bruise.
“Do not taste anything unless you mean to be remembered,” Isolde said quietly.
Rory looked at her. “That sounds like advice someone should give before the portal.”
“I have given it now.”
“Again,” Nyx whispered, “practical standards are low.”
They started down the terrace.
The path wound between low walls of pale stone, every surface carved. At first Rory thought the designs were vines and leaves. Then she saw plates, cups, knives, hands lifting goblets, mouths open in song or laughter or greed. The carvings were old enough for their edges to have softened, but not so old the message had gone. Feast, they said. Feast until your wanting becomes the only thing left with your name on it.
At one bend they passed a tree trained flat against a trellis. Its fruit resembled peaches until she got close enough to see the skins shimmer with faint opalescent scales. One split open of its own weight . Thick silver-gold nectar ran down the bark, releasing a fragrance so rich she had to lock her jaw to stop herself from licking it from her knuckle when a stray drop landed there.
The Fae blade at her side stayed cold as river ice. The Heartstone grew steadily hotter.
Below, the sounds of the realm resolved into layers. Bees droned in the lavender hedges lining the path, though these bees were the size of plums and shone with metallic green bodies. Somewhere hidden, water chuckled over stone. Further off came the calls of unseen birds, low and fluting. Over it all rolled the hum of a place devoted to making desire respectable: ovens breathing, crowd-noise swelling and falling, the occasional distant cheer.
They rounded another bend and the valley opened wider.
Rory stopped dead.
Built into the slope below was an amphitheater the size of a stadium, its descending tiers lined not with seats but with long banquet tables dressed in white cloth . Candles already burned in ranks though no evening approached. At the center, where a stage might have stood, sprawled a kitchen vast enough to serve armies—hearths blazing blue and gold, hanging copper pans, marble blocks for butchery, racks of herbs drying in the warm air. Figures in white moved through it with the brisk, terrible focus of surgeons. Above them, suspended from iron chains, enormous glass globes held simmering amber liquid that caught the realm’s light and turned it to fire.
The smell coming from that place hit like a blow.
Rory had never understood how scent alone could feel indecent. Now she did.
“Oh,” she said softly .
Wonder made the word too small. So did unease.
On the far wall of the amphitheater loomed a carved face larger than a house: heavy-lidded eyes, a serene mouth, the suggestion of indulgent amusement in every line of it. Vines draped the brow. Fruit garlands hung from the stone cheeks. The whole thing watched the kitchens below with the calm possessiveness of a god inspecting a table laid in his honor.
“Belphegor,” Isolde said, following her gaze.
Rory had not asked, but the answer had been obvious. “Subtle.”
“Princes of Hell rarely are.”
A bell sounded.
The note was deep enough to tremble in Rory’s ribs. It rolled out across the terraces, and everywhere the realm answered. Workers in the vineyards straightened as one. The metallic bees lifted from the lavender. Leaves shivered. Even the channels of pale wine seemed to quicken.
From the kitchen floor of the amphitheater rose a cheer that carried no joy at all.
Rory’s hand went to the hilt of the moonsilver dagger. The small crescent scar on her left wrist pulled white against the grip. Her pendant beat hot against her chest, almost painful now, as if something in Dymas had felt her arrive and was delighted by it.
Nyx moved a half-step closer, their shadowed shoulder nearly brushing hers. “We are noticed.”
Rory stared down at the feast-hall valley under its amber sky, at the white-clothed tables waiting like teeth, at the workers turning their faces toward the bell, at the colossal stone prince smiling over all of it.
A place of excess, she thought. A place of indulgence.
Standing there, breathing it, she understood the lie tucked inside those pretty words. Dymas did not merely offer appetite room to stretch. It cultivated hunger the way a vintner cultivated grapes—carefully , expertly, until it became the realm’s finest crop.
And they had just walked into the vineyard.