AI The air tasted of overripe peaches and rot.
Rory’s boots squelched on what she’d first mistaken for moss, but the texture shifted and pulsed underfoot. Not moss. Something alive. She yanked her foot up, fighting a gag as a thin stream of amber liquid oozed from the wound in the fleshy ground.
"Stick to the stones," Nyx’s voice came, a dry rustle of leaves from just ahead. The Shade was a deeper patch of twilight between two massive, grinning pumpkins the size of caravans. Their skins shimmered with an oily, iridescent sheen. "The ground here remembers hunger."
Isolde drifted past them both, her silver hair stirring in a wind Rory couldn’t feel. The Half-Fae’s feet left no prints on the crushed sugar-stone path. She reached a hand towards a vine snaking from the pumpkins, its flowers like porcelain cups filled with dark, syrupy wine.
"A vintage of despair, I think," Isolde murmured, not touching it . "Very popular in the court of Belphegor. It numbs the longing for a world you can no longer taste."
Rory wiped her boot on a clean patch of stone, the scar on her wrist tingling. "Can we focus on the not-dying part?"
They’d fallen through the tear in the Veil not an hour ago. One moment, Richmond Park and its familiar damp chill . The next, this. A world painted in shades of honey, amber, and decay, under a sky the colour of baked clay. The Heartstone pendant, nestled against her sternum, pulsed with a steady, insistent warmth .
They moved along the winding path, leaving the pumpkin grove behind. The landscape shifted into sprawling orchards, but the fruit hung heavy and strange. Pears with skin like spun sugar, glowing faintly from within. Apples so black they seemed to swallow the amber light. The air was thick, cloying, a physical weight on the tongue.
"Isolde, any idea where we’re headed?" Rory asked, her voice sounding small in the vast, quiet expanse . There were no birds, no insects. Just the occasional wet, tearing sound from the undergrowth.
"The heart of the garden," the seer said, her lavender eyes distant. "Where the oldest hunger is buried. Your stone will lead you."
*My stone.* Rory’s fingers brushed the pendant through her shirt. The unknown benefactor who’d left it for her in a battered envelope hadn’t left instructions. Just the warm crimson gem and a note that read: *For when the gilded cage becomes a grave .*
Nyx solidified beside her, a seven-foot silhouette of woven night. "This place is a larder. We’re the next course." Their whisper-voice was grim . "Be mindful of what you admire. Everything here wants to be consumed, or to consume."
As if on cue, a cluster of berries on a nearby bush turned in unison. They weren’t berries. They were tiny, lidless eyes, a dozen shades of violet and gold, blinking in slow, syrupy unison. Rory recoiled.
"Don’t stare," Nyx advised. "They feed on attention as much as light."
They pressed on, passing a pond where liquid gold bubbled thickly, releasing heady fumes that made Rory’s head swim. Isolde paused, pointing a slender finger at a copse of trees. Their bark was cinnamon-red, peeling to reveal what looked like soft, pink flesh underneath . Growing from the branches were not leaves, but delicate, crystallised feathers.
"Fallen seraph plumes," Isolde whispered, awe softening her cryptic tone . "Preserved in sweet resin. A rare delicacy. The Prince serves them at his coronation feasts, they say."
Rory watched a single, glittering feather detach and float down, landing on the path. It chimed like a distant bell. The wonder of it, the sheer impossible beauty, warred with the deep, primal wrongness that coiled in her gut.
"We’re not here for souvenirs," Rory said, her voice firmer than she felt . "We need to find a way out."
The path began to slope downwards, leading them into a valley. The air grew warmer, the scent of rot intensifying, now undercut with a sweet, baking smell like caramelised meat. The vegetation grew denser, stranger. Flowers with petals of thin, shaved ham. Grass that looked like spun gold thread . A low, rhythmic thumping began to vibrate up through the soles of their feet.
"Drums?" Rory asked.
Nyx’s form flickered . "A heartbeat. This valley is alive. Literally."
They rounded a bend and stopped. Before them lay a vast, shallow basin. In its centre stood a structure that defied logic: a colossal, ancient oak tree, its trunk and branches made not of wood, but of polished, dark chocolate . Its leaves were thin, green candies, rustling with a sound like tinkling glass. Weaving through its roots and hanging from its boughs were veins of glowing, molten caramel, pulsing in time with the deep, subterranean heartbeat.
And suspended from its branches, like grotesque fruit, were cocoons. Dozens of them. They were translucent, formed from a hardened, amber syrup. Inside each, a shadowy, humanoid form floated, eyes closed, mouths open in silent, eternal screams.
Rory’s stomach turned. "What is this?"
"A larder of a different sort," Nyx said, their voice devoid of its usual dry wit . "The Prince’s stock. Souls contracted for their talent. Chefs, sommeliers, epicures. He preserves them at the peak of their flavour."
Isolde’s expression was unreadable , but her hands were clenched at her sides. "They dream of banquets. Endless, perfect feasts they can never partake of. It is the cruelest seasoning."
One of the cocoons near the edge of the tree’s canopy pulsed . The syrupy shell cracked. Not with the violence of an emergence, but with the slow, weary resignation of a final breath . The form inside dissolved into golden light, which flowed down the branch and into the trunk. The heartbeat in the ground grew stronger for a moment, then settled.
Rory’s hand went to her hilt, the Fae-Forged Blade a cold promise against her palm. "We have to do something."
"We are three," Isolde said, her voice a silken warning . "This is a fortress of the Seventh Circle. To strike here is to invite a prince’s gaze."
The Heartstone pendant flared with a sudden, sharp heat against Rory’s chest. Not a pulse . A blaze. She gasped, pressing a hand to it. The crimson gem was glowing through her shirt, casting a bloody light on the candy-floss grass.
"It’s reacting to something," she gritted out .
Nyx turned their featureless head towards the far side of the basin. "There. A rift. Small. Stable. It’s not a portal to Earth."
"How do you know?" Rory asked, the pain in her chest receding to a dull, insistent throb .
"Because it smells of nothing. No rot, no sugar, no spice. Just… absence." The Shade took a step towards it. "It leads deeper. Down. To the root of the sin. That is what your stone seeks."
The choice hung in the syrupy air. Back towards a known, if terrible, danger. Or forward, into the unknown heart of Gluttony itself.
Isolde studied the glowing pendant, then Rory’s determined face. "The stone chooses for you, it seems. A path written in heat and blood."
"Great," Rory muttered, checking the draw on her blade. "My favourite kind."
They left the nightmare orchard behind, skirting the basin’s edge. The heartbeat grew louder, more complex . It was no longer a single, deep pulse . Rory could hear layers now—a rapid, skittering beat beneath a slow, grinding one, all overlaid with a high, whining thrum that set her teeth on edge.
The ground changed again. The sweet grasses gave way to a crust of what looked like brûléed sugar, shattered and sharp. It crunched under their feet with a sound like breaking glass. The air grew hotter, dry, carrying a new scent: iron. And something else. Fermented. Ancient wine left to sour for centuries.
Ahead, the landscape dropped away into a chasm. Not a natural canyon, but a wound in the world, its edges jagged and dark. From its depths rose a column of shimmering, distorted air, like heat haze over a summer road. The rift.
As they approached its edge, the nature of the chasm became clear. Its walls were layered, strata of geological time made manifest. The top layer was the caramelised earth they stood on. Below that, a thick, dark band of what might have been preserved spice cake. Then a vein of pure, white sugar crystal , miles thick. Deeper still, layers of petrified bread, dark as pumpernickel, and below that, something that glowed with a dull, red light.
And the sound. It wasn’t a heartbeat anymore. It was a constant, grinding, chewing sound, as if a world-sized mouth worked ceaselessly at the bottom of the pit.
Nyx peered over the edge. "The maw . The literal, metaphorical, and actual stomach of Dymas. Everything consumed here, every feast, every gorged soul, eventually feeds this."
Rory’s gaze followed the winding, treacherous path that switchbacked down the chasm wall. It led directly to the shimmering rift, which hovered a few hundred feet down, its edges kissing the petrified-bread layer.
The Heartstone’s glow intensified, pointing down like a divining rod. The heat was painful now, searing .
"That’s where we need to go," Rory said, a statement, not a question.
Isolde looked at the path, then at the grinding darkness below. "A direct route into the gullet. Poetic."
"Got a better idea?" Rory shot back.
"Ideas are not the issue. Will is." The Half-Fae’s pale eyes met Rory’s. "What you seek at the root of this place… it will not be a door. It will be a test. And the price of passing may be more than you are willing to pay."
Before Rory could answer, a new sound cut through the grinding. A wet, slapping noise from behind them. They spun. From the candy-tree grove, a tide was pouring onto the sugar-crust plain. Not of water, but of thick, translucent syrup, moving with a purposeful, flowing intelligence. Within its amber mass, half-dissolved shapes floated—furniture, crockery, the vague outlines of small animals. It moved fast, spreading to cut off their retreat.
And rising from its leading edge, forming and re-forming, were figures. Humanoid shapes made entirely of the flowing, golden syrup, their faces smooth and featureless except for wide, hungry mouths.
The syrup-beings gurgled, a sound like a drain clearing, and surged forward.