AI The Veil shrieked as Nyx drove both shadow-thin hands into the shimmer between the ancient oak stones, and Aurora grabbed Isolde’s sleeve before the seer stepped through a gap no wider than a coffin lid.
“Hold it.”
“It will not hold long.” Nyx’s voice came thin and frayed, as if the words had blown through cracks in a door. Violet eyes burned inside their shifting face. “This wound bites back.”
The Heartstone pendant thudded against Aurora’s sternum. Warm at first. Then hot. The deep crimson gem pulsed under her jumper like a second, impatient heart. In her other hand, the slender moonsilver dagger felt cold enough to ache.
The grove pressed close around them. Wildflowers brushed her boots. The standing stones hummed in a note too low for ears and too sharp for bone. Isolde moved without sound over the moss, silver hair spilling down her back, pale lavender eyes fixed on the rip as if she watched an old enemy breathe.
“A door opened by hunger,” Isolde said. “Step clean, or it will taste you.”
“That’s comforting .”
“Comfort fattens the wrong beasts.”
The tear widened with a wet crack. Amber light spilled through, rich as old varnish. A smell followed it, sweet wine, hot spice, burnt sugar, blood, bread fresh from an oven, fruit so ripe it had tipped into rot. Aurora’s stomach clenched. She had eaten before leaving the flat. The scent made that meal feel like a lie.
Nyx hissed.
“Now.”
Aurora went first.
The rip licked across her shoulders like hot silk . Her ears popped. The ground vanished. For one sick beat she hung between two worlds, caught in a press of whispering mouths, then stone slammed under her boots and she stumbled forward into another sky.
She knew at once that this was no hidden corner of London.
Amber light washed everything, not from any sun she could see, but from the air itself . It glowed through ranks of vines that climbed broken colonnades and old white arches. Beyond them spread terraces heavy with grapes, figs, and strange, gold-skinned fruit the size of lanterns. Marble channels ran between the steps, carrying dark red liquid that moved with the thick patience of wine. Farther off, copper domes and pale towers rose from an expanse of gardens and orchards so vast they bent the eye. Bells rang somewhere in that distance. Not church bells. Dinner bells.
Isolde crossed after her. No footprint marked the dust.
Nyx flowed through last. The tear snapped shut behind them with a sound like teeth.
Aurora turned at once. Only stone now. Old, cracked, wrapped in black vine.
“No easy route back, then.”
“The return exists,” Isolde said. “Whether it welcomes us is another tale.”
Aurora looked out again. The place felt ancient in the way cathedrals did, if cathedrals had learned greed. Every arch and stair seemed built to praise appetite . Carved along the nearest column, human figures raised cups to their lips. As she watched, the stone wine inside the carved cup darkened and slid.
She stepped back.
“Did that move?”
“Yes,” Nyx said.
“That’s all I get?”
“It moved.”
A broad stair led down from the broken gate where they had arrived. Each tread bore a mosaic tile, bright despite the age, showing tables, knives, orchards, ovens, hands kneading dough, mouths opening, mouths full, mouths screaming. Gold tesserae flashed in the amber glow. Dark stains filled some of the cracks between them.
The pendant beat harder as Aurora descended. Heat spread across her skin in small, warning waves.
“This is Dymas.”
She had not meant to say it aloud. The name tasted rich and foul at once.
Isolde inclined her head.
“Gluttony wears many perfumes, but yes.”
They moved down the stair together. Sound carried oddly here. A breeze did not stir the leaves, yet whole avenues of vines rustled as if crowds brushed past them. From somewhere beyond the terraces came the steady chop of knives. Not one knife. Dozens. Rhythmic. Tireless. A kitchen at work on the other side of the world.
Aurora tightened her grip on the dagger.
The path brought them into a formal garden laid in concentric circles. Low hedges of purple herbs gave off scents that changed with every step, basil, anise, clove, smoke, warm fat. Stone bowls stood on plinths between the beds. Each held something different. Black salt in one. Pearls in another. Teeth in the third.
Aurora stopped by the teeth.
Human. Small. Milk teeth mixed with molars.
“Is this decoration or accounting?”
“In Dymas,” Isolde said, “the two often dine together.”
Nyx knelt beside a bowl filled with thick white cream. A face rose in it for the span of a blink, mouth open in a silent cry, then sank.
“Do not touch the offerings.”
“Wasn’t planning to.”
She moved on, yet her eyes kept snagging on details. Fruit trees trained into perfect arches. Bronze cages hanging from branches, each cage empty but lined with silk napkins. A fountain carved as a cluster of open hands, pouring not water but golden syrup into a basin where pale moths drowned and did not sink. The air clung to her. It felt edible.
At the centre of the garden stood a table of green-veined stone, long enough for thirty guests. No chairs. On the table lay a feast, untouched and steaming.
Roast birds glazed in lacquer-dark skin. Split figs shining with syrup. White cheese dusted with blue mould like powdered velvet . Loaves braided with herbs. A silver tureen that breathed out the smell of onion and marrow. Goblets stood full beside every plate. No one served. No one sat. The food shone with impossible freshness, as if invisible hands had plated it seconds ago.
Aurora’s stomach knotted again, harder this time. Hunger came down on her with sudden force. Not a polite ache. A drag from inside her ribs. Her gaze fixed on a small plum near the edge of the table, its skin so dark it drank the light.
“Rory.”
Nyx’s whisper struck her like cold water.
Aurora looked down. She had already reached out. Her fingers hovered inches from the fruit.
She snatched her hand back.
“Right. Good catch.”
The plum split on its own. Inside, instead of flesh, a neat row of tiny white teeth clicked shut.
Aurora swore.
Isolde smiled without humour.
“A host loves eager guests.”
“That thing was about half a second from taking my thumb.”
“Half a second is a banquet here.”
They circled the table rather than pass too close. On the far side, Aurora found writing carved into the stone edge. Names. Hundreds. Some in Latin. Some in French. Some in Arabic. Some in scripts she did not know. A few in English. She traced none of them, but one snagged her eye.
E. Price, Bristol.
Below it, another.
Tom Evans , Cardiff.
Her skin prickled.
“People from Earth.”
“Many.” Isolde ran her fingers through the air above the names and touched nothing. “Skilled hands travel well when debt opens the road.”
The chopping in the distance stopped.
Silence fell so fast it felt dropped.
Nyx lifted their head.
“We have been scented.”
“By what?”
“Kitchen things.”
Aurora eyed the empty place settings.
“That narrows it down beautifully.”
A narrow arcade opened beyond the garden, half-hidden behind curtains of vine. The pendant swung towards it. Once. Then again, like a compass finding north. Aurora felt the pull in the chain.
“This way.”
She did not wait for agreement. The path had found her as much as she had found it. She pushed through the curtain and entered a long corridor lined with ancient ovens, each large enough to crawl inside. Their brass mouths stood open. Warm orange embers glowed in their depths . The walls between them held faded frescoes of feasts so lavish they became grotesque, fish piled upon swans, towers of pastry, whole stags glazed and crowned with flowers, children offering platters to faceless lords whose mouths took up half their heads.
The heat thickened. Flour dust floated in the air like pale ash.
Under it all lay another smell, iron and old skin.
Aurora slowed near the third oven. Scratched into the soot-black stone beside it were marks, countless short lines grouped in fives, cut with something sharp and desperate.
“Someone counted days.”
“Or meals,” Isolde said.
Nyx touched the marks with a shadowed fingertip.
“No. Escapes.”
A sound came from the next chamber. Soft. Wet. Kneading.
They passed under a low arch and entered a bakery the size of a chapel.
Long stone benches ran the length of the room. On them sat bowls, sacks, trays, knives, and loaves in every stage of making. Pale dough rose in copper tubs large enough to drown in. At the far end, a woman worked at a central slab. Her back bent under a plain grey dress. Both wrists wore dark iron bands sunk into the flesh so deep the skin had scarred around them. Her hands moved with harsh speed, folding and striking dough that shone pink under the flour.
She did not look up.
“Service has not been called,” she said. Her accent snagged on something northern, then flattened into nothing at all. “If you’ve come to beg, stand in line. If you’ve come to steal, use the left door. The beasts nest in the right.”
Aurora stepped closer. The woman’s hair had gone white at the roots and stayed yellow at the ends. Flour coated her lashes. The dough beneath her fists bled a thin red seam each time she slammed it down.
“We’re not here for your bread.”
The woman laughed once.
“Then you’re fools.”
“Can you tell us where this passage leads?”
“It leads onward. All passages here do.” She folded the dough again. “That’s the trick.”
Isolde tilted her head.
“Who owns the iron on your wrists?”
The woman’s hands stopped. For the first time she looked up.
Her eyes were clouded like old glass. Still, they sharpened on Isolde at once, then on Nyx, then on the pendant at Aurora’s throat. Something ugly and hungry moved through her face.
“You should cover that stone.”
Aurora’s hand went to the Heartstone.
“Why?”
“Because the house knows its china.”
Nyx moved between them in a ripple of black.
“Who are you bound to?”
The woman’s mouth twitched.
“Who isn’t?”
Before Aurora could press further, a bell rang overhead. The woman flinched so hard she nearly drove both hands through the dough.
“Service,” she whispered.
The dough swelled. Not with yeast. With breath. A child’s face pushed up beneath the skin, then another, then a third. Small mouths opened and gasped.
Aurora recoiled.
The woman snatched a long blade from the bench and hacked the dough into pieces with brutal, practised strokes.
“Go,” she said. “If the first course sees you, the last course wears you.”
She jerked her chin towards a side arch veiled with bead strings made from seeds, teeth, and tiny silver spoons. Aurora did not need more urging. She ducked through first, Nyx gliding after her, Isolde last, her silver hair brushing the beads with no sound at all.
The next corridor sloped down.
The walls changed from oven brick to ancient white stone shot through with red veins. The floor gleamed, polished by ages of traffic. Niches held statues of cooks, servants, cupbearers, each carved life-size and each missing the tongue. Some had bowls carved into their stomachs. Others had open palms hollowed deep enough to cradle fruit.
As they descended, the pendant grew hotter. Aurora tucked it out from under her jumper and watched the deep crimson gem pulse with inner light. The chain burned against her fingers.
“It’s leading somewhere.”
“Or calling somewhere,” Nyx said.
“Helpful distinction.”
They reached a bronze door set with a round panel of dark crystal . The Heartstone flashed in answer. A low note sang through the passage, so deep the statues seemed to hum with it. Aurora stepped closer. In the crystal she saw not her reflection but a banquet hall, crowded and bright, a vision trapped in glass. Figures turned. Their faces blurred like grease in water.
Isolde’s lavender eyes narrowed .
“This threshold remembers.”
“Can it open?”
“It can,” Nyx said. “It has smelled us for some time.”
Aurora took the pendant in her fist and held it towards the dark crystal . The gem blazed. Heat bit into her palm. Inside the door, bolts the size of cart axles slid back with a series of ponderous clunks. The bronze leaves parted inward.
Scent struck first.
Roasted meat. Honey. Citrus. Char. Wine. Flowers opening over grave soil.
Then light, amber and gold and deep red, spilling across a hall so vast it could have swallowed a palace whole.
Aurora stepped over the threshold and forgot, for one clean second, to breathe.
The chamber stretched ahead in terraces, descending towards a circular dais at its far end. Hundreds of tables curved around that centre like rings in a tree. Silver candelabra rose like winter branches from the cloth. Crystal bowls overflowed with pomegranates split to their seeds, black grapes, sugar flowers, and things she could not name. Above, the ceiling arched high and impossible, painted with feasts that moved when she blinked, clouds of spice drifting between the figures as if the frescoes cooked themselves. Vines dropped from the rafters, thick as hawsers, each heavy with glassy fruit that glowed from within. Marble channels cut through the floor, carrying dark red wine in glittering streams.
No diners sat at the tables.
No servants moved between them.
Yet every plate steamed. Every goblet stood full. Every knife and spoon gleamed as if a hand had polished them moments before.
At the centre dais rose a throne carved from pale bone and green stone, broad as an altar. Before it stood a single silver dome, enormous, covering a platter the width of a carriage wheel.
Aurora walked three steps in before she noticed the sound.
Breathing.
All around them. Low. Wet. Patient.
She stopped.
“Do you hear that?”
“Yes,” Nyx said.
Isolde did not answer. She had gone still as carved glass.
Aurora looked at the nearest chair.
The cushion slowly sank, as if an invisible body had just sat down.
Then the next chair sank.
Then the next.
All across the vast hall, seats depressed one by one, ring after ring, a silent audience taking its places.
Goblets lifted from the table edges. Not far, only an inch. Enough.
The giant silver dome at the centre trembled .
A fork skittered across a plate somewhere to the left.
Then every carved face in the frescoed ceiling turned downward in unison, and a voice rolled through the hall from nowhere and everywhere at once, rich as velvet laid over a grave .
“Unexpected guests,” it said. “Serve them warm.”
The silver dome began to rise from within.