AI The standing stones had looked harmless from the path, old oak pillars half-swallowed by roots and wildflowers, the sort of secret the park kept for itself. Up close, they felt like a boundary that had learned to pretend it was only wood and age. Rory stopped just short of the ring and rubbed her thumb over the Heartstone pendant at her throat.
It pulsed once, warm as a held breath.
“Right,” she muttered. “That’s not ominous at all.”
Nyx tilted their head. In the dim undergrowth, their form held together like a shadow deciding on a shape. Violet light gathered faintly where eyes ought to be. “You say that as if you expected reassurance.”
Isolde stood at the center of the ring of stones, silver hair spilling down her back like moonlight caught in a river. She did not cast a proper shadow, and she did not seem to weigh the earth down at all. “A door that wants to be opened rarely welcomes the hand,” she said.
Rory looked at the place where Isolde pointed. Between two stones, the air shimmered . Not much. Just enough to make the branches beyond seem to swim, as though the world had developed a fever.
She had crossed strange thresholds before, if the London underground counted when Nyx had opened the wrong sort of darkness under the tracks. But this was different. The air itself had taken on a pressure that settled behind her eyes. The leaves overhead tasted faintly metallic. Somewhere beyond the veil, something rich and hot drifted through in a thin thread, so sudden and vivid she could almost mistake it for memory: roasted fruit, wine, smoke, spice.
Her pendant grew hotter.
“After you,” Nyx whispered.
“Helpful,” Rory said, but she stepped forward.
The shimmer swallowed the edge of her vision. For one terrible second, she felt as if she were walking into deep water dressed in all her street clothes, boots and all, every instinct insisting she should drown. Then the pressure snapped, and the world gave way.
Heat wrapped around her first.
Not London heat, damp and sour and full of exhaust. This was dry and golden, a warm weight laid over her skin like sunlight filtered through amber. Rory blinked hard. The standing stones behind them were gone . Or rather, they were still there, but they had become the back fence of another world: black stone inlaid with veins of copper, half-buried in climbing vines heavy with pale fruit. Behind her, the crossing had narrowed to a thin shimmer suspended in the air, like a soap bubble stretched to breaking.
Ahead lay a valley washed in gold.
The sky above Dymas burned a deep amber, as if the sun had been strained through honey. It was bright without being blinding, warm without seeming to come from a single source. Rory lifted a hand to shield her eyes and saw terraces rolling away below them in layered sweeps of green and silver and deep burgundy. Vineyards climbed the slopes in regimented rows, but the vines were stranger than any she had seen in catalogs or markets back home. Their leaves were narrow and glossy, almost metallic, and the grape clusters hanging beneath them were the size of plums, each one translucent enough to show a tiny star of pulp and seed inside.
Interspersed among the vines stood orchards, trees heavy with fruit that glowed softly in their own skins. Pears with skins like polished bone. Peaches the color of bruised sunsets. Pomegranates split open on the branches, spilling gems instead of seeds into woven baskets set below to catch them. The baskets were already full. No one seemed to mind.
The air smelled impossibly alive. Sweet smoke. Crushed basil. Wine spilling into stone channels. Butter browning on a pan. Warm bread torn open by hand. Beneath it all, something mineral and sharp, like the first bite of blood on the tongue.
Rory drew a slow breath and immediately wanted another.
“That’s unfair,” she said, mostly to herself .
Nyx had already drifted to the edge of the terrace, their shadow-thin body taking on depth as they entered the brighter air. They looked wrong here, but less wrong than Rory had expected—like a blot of night someone had forgotten to paint out of a gold leaf panel. “The place is hungry,” they murmured. “It likes to be noticed.”
From somewhere far off came a clang of metal against metal, then a burst of cheering. The sound rolled over the terraces in waves. Rory turned her head toward it. Beyond the nearest orchard, a line of white pavilions and arched colonnades rose from the slope, their roofs tiled in burnished bronze. Lanterns hung in their eaves though no darkness required them, each one glowing with a soft apricot light. Between the pavilions, figures moved briskly through the courtyards in long aprons the color of cream.
Chefs, she thought, and then wondered how she knew.
Not just chefs. Workers. Runners. People carrying trays the length of their bodies, balancing bowls of stewing herbs that steamed in the warm air, hauling copper cauldrons on narrow carts. Their clothes were tidy and practical, but their faces held the exhausted focus of people who had not rested in a very long time. Some wore bracelets that flashed when they moved, thin lines of light coiling around their wrists like decorative chains. Others had marks on the back of the hand, sigils that glimmered and faded with each step.
Helbound souls, a corner of her mind supplied, and the thought came with the flat certainty of a fact she had never learned.
Rory did not like that at all.
Isolde’s bare feet touched the stone path. She left no footprints. “Do not stare too long at the ones who work,” she said softly . “They do not care to be made of pity.”
“I wasn’t—” Rory began, then stopped because that was a lie. She had been staring.
Isolde’s lavender eyes slid toward her. “You were, and now you know it.”
Rory huffed a breath and adjusted the satchel slung across her body. The Fae-forged blade at her belt sat cold against her hip, a clean moon-cold line despite the heat around her. The contrast made her skin prickle. “You could have warned me before we stepped into a giant banquet fever dream.”
“This is only the outer hunger,” Isolde said. “You may yet survive the appetite.”
Nyx made a sound that might have been a laugh if laughter could be turned to smoke. “Comforting.”
They started down the path together, careful at first. The stone underfoot had been smoothed by centuries of passing feet and wheels. It gleamed faintly, veined with copper and something darker, as if wine had soaked into it and never dried. On either side, the vines leaned inward. Their tendrils brushed Rory’s sleeve as she passed, cool and damp despite the heat, and a few of the nearest grapes trembled on the stems like beads reacting to a faint current.
One grape burst softly under its own weight . Not juice. Honey-thick wine, dark as rubies, dripped onto the soil below and vanished with a hiss.
Rory stopped. “Did that just—”
“Want for nothing?” Isolde said. “No. It just wanted.”
“That is absolutely worse.”
A breeze stirred across the terraces. Rory expected it to be warm, but it carried a surprising tang of herbs and citrus. The orchard trees rustled, and from somewhere within them came a sound like a thousand small bells made of glass striking one another. She glanced toward the trees and saw, for half a heartbeat, small winged shapes flashing between the branches—birds, perhaps, though their bodies looked too narrow and bright, their tails too long. They fed on fruit no larger than walnuts and flew in perfect spirals above the boughs, calling in notes that sounded almost like someone humming through a mouthful of laughter.
The path widened as they descended, opening onto a terrace that overlooked a lower basin. Rory slowed again.
It was a kitchen garden on the scale of a cathedral.
Beds of herbs laid out in geometric patterns glowed with a green so intense it looked lit from beneath. Purple cabbages sat like open umbrellas in rows. Mushrooms the size of dinner plates grew in clusters under trellises draped with flowering vines. Stone basins held water so clear she could see silver fish beneath the surface, each one nudging floating leaves into spirals. At the center of the garden, a fountain spilled not water but a pale broth into a channel of carved marble , steam rising from it in fragrant ribbons.
“Why would anyone need that much food?” Rory asked before she could stop herself.
Nyx’s voice came soft as ash. “Because wanting is a religion here.”
That answer should have been ridiculous. Instead it landed somewhere inside her with an unpleasant little click.
Beyond the garden, an open hall stretched beneath a roof of arched beams and hanging brass pans. Rory could see the movement of knives flashing in the light, the quick blur of hands chopping, stirring, plating. A crowd had gathered along the far side of the hall, their silhouettes leaning forward as if to witness something vital. Every now and then the air rang with applause or a delighted shout. The cheers sounded half-mad with pleasure.
The pendant at Rory’s throat warmed again, stronger this time, a heartbeat against her skin.
She frowned and touched it through her shirt. The Heartstone throbbed with a faint inner glow, deep crimson even in the amber light. It pointed, subtly but insistently, toward the far end of the garden, where an old archway stood half-swallowed in ivy.
“Do you feel that?” she asked.
Isolde’s gaze had already shifted to the archway. “Yes.”
Nyx turned too, the edges of their body thinning. “There.”
The arch was older than the polished stone around it. It had been built from blackened blocks engraved with curling symbols now softened by age. Vines crept over its sides and into the carved grooves, but they did not conceal the shape of the thing beneath. Rory could see the faint distortion in the air inside the arch, a wavering like heat over pavement. It was the same kind of wrongness she had seen at the standing stones, only thinner here, narrower, as if something had been forced to stay shut and had grown tired of pretending.
As she watched, one of the workers in the garden came close to the archway carrying a tray piled with pears split open and filled with cream-colored custard. He paused at the threshold without looking up, set the tray on a stone table, and turned away with the stiff precision of someone following instructions written long ago.
His sleeve had ridden up.
A thin silver line ran around his wrist like a bracelet. It wasn’t jewelry. Rory saw the way it glowed once, faint and cold, and then recognized it for what it was: a mark that did not want him to leave.
Her stomach twisted.
He caught her staring and looked up. For one stark moment their eyes met across the length of the terrace. He was younger than she’d expected, no older than her, maybe younger, with tired brown eyes and a face too carefully blank. Something in his expression flickered —not hope, not exactly, but the barest edge of recognition, as if he had seen a stranger before and had no right to speak to them. Then a woman in a saffron apron called his name from the hall, and he moved on at once, as though pulled by a string.
Rory had the absurd urge to go after him. To ask how long he had been here. To ask whether he remembered bread made in ordinary ovens and tea in chipped mugs and rain on pavements. To ask whether he had once believed he would go home.
“Don’t,” Isolde said quietly, and Rory realized she had taken a step forward without noticing.
“Why not?”
“Because this place feeds on what it is offered,” Isolde replied. “And pity is a generous meal.”
Rory swallowed hard, angry at herself for feeling so easily read. She looked away from the worker and back at the archway. The distortion within it deepened, a shimmer with teeth. The pendant burned hotter against her chest.
“What’s through there?” she asked.
Isolde’s expression did not change, but her voice went softer. “A door that has forgotten which side of itself is the gate.”
“That sounds like the sort of answer people say when they don’t want to panic me.”
“It should not panic you to learn the truth.”
Nyx moved closer to the archway and stopped just short of it. Their form dimmed at the edges, shadow drawn toward shadow. “Something waits beyond.”
Rory could hear it now, faint and low beneath the music and clatter from the hall: a hum like a giant bowl being stroked with a wet finger. Not a voice. Not quite. More like the sensation of a throat clearing on the other side of a wall.
She flexed her left hand, and the small crescent scar on her wrist pulled tight across the skin. The old familiar ache steadied her, simple and human and impossible to fit into this place. She took a breath that tasted of rosemary and fire and looked once more at the arch, at the vine-choked stone, at the worker’s retreating back, at the golden terraces rolling away under a sky that seemed to have been poured from ancient honey .
It was beautiful.
That was the worst part.
“Right,” she said, because if she kept silent she might start thinking too hard about all the ways this could go wrong. She reached back and checked the blade at her belt, the moonsilver still cold against her palm. “Let’s find out what the door forgot.”
Behind her, somewhere in the great pavilion, the crowd erupted into another round of applause. The sound echoed over the gardens like thunder made by happy people. Ahead, the archway answered with a faint, hungry pulse , and Rory stepped toward it with the uneasy sense that the world had just shown her its open mouth.