AI “Don’t touch the stone.”
Aurora Carter didn’t slow. She just lowered her shoulder, like the warning had become another weight she had to carry. The group fanned around her as the air ahead shimmered , a faint distortion like heat you couldn’t feel. The entrance didn’t look like a doorway, it looked like an argument the world hadn’t finished.
Nyx slid forward first, their humanoid silhouette half-formed in the dark gap. Violet eyes flickered, then steadied on the boundary as if the boundary could hear them.
Isolde Varga walked in last, hands clasped behind her back. She left no footprints, only a quiet alteration in the dust where her feet passed. The standing oak boundary markers of her grove had not been visible from the path, but now Aurora saw them, impossibly close, as though they had always waited here.
And then, as if someone had drawn a curtain with invisible fingers, the air gave way.
Aurora stepped through and tasted copper and rain-salt on her tongue. Her stomach lurched, not like the start of a nightmare, but like the moment before a car crash when your body realises it can’t negotiate with physics. The space swallowed the sound of London behind them. Their footsteps landed with a softer impact, then stopped landing at all, as if the ground took the idea of weight rather than the weight itself.
A vineyard stretched out before her, not planted but grown in patterns that felt intentional. Vines arced like handwriting across black soil threaded with pale veins. Every leaf held a thin sheen, each one catching light no one produced. Orchards rose in terraces, fruit hanging in colours Aurora couldn’t name, some translucent, some deep as bruises. The sky above wasn’t a sky. It was warm amber, bright enough to make the world look steeped in lamp-oil.
Nyx breathed out, and the whisper rode it. “This place eats restraint.”
Isolde’s gaze, pale lavender and far too calm, swept the expanse. “Heed the kitchens, not the guests. Heed the bargains, not the bells.”
Aurora swallowed around the copper taste. Her bright blue eyes tracked every shift, every twitch of movement in the vines. “We’re here because there’s a Veil rift,” she said. “Because the Wardens have it marked. Because something is leaking.”
“It’s always leaking,” Nyx murmured. Their shadow gathered at their feet, then didn’t quite touch the ground . “Mortals build walls. Hel builds mouths.”
Behind Aurora, the boundary shimmered again, a faint, shimmering distortion clinging to where they’d entered. She didn’t look back for long. Looking back felt like admitting a door could be shut.
The ground under her boots pulsed once, warm and slow. It wasn’t a heartbeat. It was a reminder .
Prince Belphegor’s realm.
Dymas, Gluttony, stretched like a banquet that had never run out of hunger. Aurora had heard tales, had read the codices her new friends insisted were safer than prayers. Tales didn’t include the smell.
It hit next, thick and intoxicating. Roasted meats. Candied citrus. Herbs that felt illegal in the back of your throat. Something like spiced smoke. She forced herself not to inhale greedily.
“Don’t.” Nyx angled their head, their violet eyes catching her expression. “You’ve got that look .”
“What look ?”
“The look that says you want the smell to forgive you.”
Isolde stopped at the edge of an orchard terrace. A standing row of trees formed a corridor, trunks twisted as if they’d tried to climb out of the earth and failed. Fruit buds opened in fast, slow time. Aurora watched one apple bloom from green to gold, then split to reveal seeds like beads of light.
Isolde’s voice slid out in riddles, sweet as poison. “A heartstone answers to hunger, not to manners.”
Aurora felt the Heartstone Pendant under her shirt. The rough crimson gem warmed faintly against her skin, pulsing like it had woken up. She hadn’t asked how it worked. She had asked why it had been given to her at all, and no one had offered a straightforward answer.
The pendant pulsed again.
A distant sound answered it.
Not a bell. Not exactly. The noise came like a spoon striking crystal , repeated at intervals, drifting between terraces. The tone carried, then sank into the soil as if the earth drank music.
Nyx took a step and their silhouette sharpened, their edges more solid than before. “That sound doesn’t call servants. It calls openings.”
Aurora’s grip tightened around the small, cold hilt of the Fae-Forged Blade at her belt. The moonsilver dagger didn’t glow much, not here, not under this amber sky. Still, it felt like a promise against wards . Against demons. Against the sort of magic that treated flesh like seasoning.
Isolde didn’t reach for it. She didn’t need to. She walked on air and offered riddles like keys.
“The last time someone came asking for rift repairs,” Isolde said, “they brought a feast instead of a vow. The Veil fractured wider.”
Aurora’s jaw clicked. “We’re not here to snack. We’re here to find the leak.”
Isolde’s smile wasn’t kind or cruel, just precise. “Leaking is the language of weakness.”
They moved deeper into Dymas. The corridor of trees narrowed, branches intertwining above them like green fingers. Between the trunks, thin streams ran over black stone, not water but thick syrup that caught light and glimmered like molten amber. It smelled of vanilla and burnt sugar.
Aurora walked with her eyes open and her mouth shut. Her tongue ached where the copper taste lingered. The smell pressed against her senses like a hand against a locked door.
The orchard opened abruptly into a clearing. A table stood in the centre, massive enough for a giant, set without utensils, set without plates. Food sat in symmetrical arrangements across the wood, arranged as though someone had carved hunger into art.
Candied figs floated above bowls of darkness. Loaves of bread rose like lungs, steaming with nothing. A roasted bird lay lacquered in spice, its feathers shimmering as if they wanted to crawl away.
The amber sky above pulsed . Once. Twice.
Aurora realised the food wasn’t waiting for them.
It was waiting for their attention.
Nyx stopped at the clearing’s edge, their violet eyes widening. “The smell… it’s not for eating.”
“It’s bait,” Aurora said, voice low .
Isolde’s bare hands moved through the air, as if measuring invisible threads . “Not only bait. Permission.”
The Heartstone pendant pulsed so hard Aurora thought it might burn. Warmth spread up her throat, then down her sternum, as if something inside her acknowledged the invitation. She tightened the chain against her skin with her fist.
“I don’t consent to anything I don’t understand,” she said.
Nyx gave a sound that might have been amusement if humour lived in shadows. “Good. Consent burns brighter than hunger.”
Then the table spoke.
Not with words. With sound, a thin crack as if ice had formed on water. A ripple went through the air above the food. The clearing’s light bent, the amber warping into a tunnel shape, a corridor leading deeper into the realm.
Aurora smelled smoke now, sharp and charred.
A shadow detached from under the table. It rose on uneven legs that looked too long, too jointed. Its body didn’t have a face, only an absence where a face should be, and it moved like something learning to mimic life.
Nyx hissed through their teeth. “A Helbound scout.”
The thing’s movement stopped, then it tilted its head toward Aurora’s pendant. The Heartstone responded, pulsing brighter, its crimson glow seeping faintly through her shirt. The Helbound scout lifted a limb, thin as a butcher’s hook.
Aurora drew her blade.
The moonsilver dagger came up cold and clean, the leaf-shaped metal catching a sliver of amber light. When it cleared the darkness around her belt, it glimmered, not with glamour, with threat. It cut the air with a quiet, surgical pressure.
The scout lunged.
Aurora didn’t hesitate. She stepped aside, blade angled down and forward. The Helbound creature hit the edge of the dagger’s arc and made a sound like a sigh forced into glass. The metal slid through an invisible ward layer in the creature’s form, and the scout’s limb separated without blood, only black ash spiralling upward.
The clearing convulsed.
The food arrangements trembled . Steam rose from bread that had never been bread. The amber sky above them flashed, and Aurora felt the Veil’s geometry twist. Not the Veil itself, not exactly. Something shaped by it, something that had learned its outline.
Nyx moved fast, too fast for the eye to track properly. Their shadow stretched across the ground and wrapped around another unseen point. When Aurora looked, the scout’s remaining body wasn’t there. It had slipped into the spaces between shadows, leaving only ash and a faint violet smear on the air.
Isolde stepped closer to the table, calm as if she were visiting a friend. She leaned in slightly , as though listening to cutlery .
“It’s not only a scout,” Isolde said. “It’s a key.”
Aurora’s pendant pulsed again, and this time the warmth hurt, like it wanted to climb out of her skin. Her scar on her left wrist itched in sympathy, the crescent remembering an older accident and refusing to let her ignore pain.
“Where’s the rift?” Aurora asked.
Isolde didn’t answer with direction. She answered with consequence. “Rifts open where hunger bargains with the boundary. That means it opens where someone offered more than they could swallow.”
The amber light dimmed by degrees. The corridor-tunnel above the table widened, stretching thin and stretched, and Aurora heard that spoon -crystal sound again, closer now, faster.
Something else stirred in the food.
A movement in the figs. A twitch under the lacquered bird. A shift inside the bowls of darkness. Aurora didn’t look long enough for her mind to make sense of it. Her stomach clenched, not from hunger but from disgust . The realm wanted her appetite, and it didn’t care what fed it, only that it fed.
Nyx circled behind her, whisper -voice low. “They’re trying to entice a breach.”
“They can’t just—” Aurora started.
“They can.” Nyx’s silhouette sharpened. “They can, because the Veil is only a promise. Hel offers a better contract.”
Isolde knelt beside the table.
Aurora jerked toward her. “Don’t touch it.”
Isolde’s fingers hovered a hair above the wood. “I don’t touch what I can already read. Watch.”
The wood under Isolde’s hands shimmered . Not with light, but with faint glyphs appearing in the grain, words written in the language of appetite. Aurora couldn’t read them, but she felt the meaning settle into her bones.
The heartstone pendant pulsed in an answering rhythm, like it had been tuned to this specific hunger-script.
Isolde lifted her gaze. Her pale lavender eyes met Aurora’s.
“The benefactor who gave you this did not do charity,” Isolde said. “They negotiated.”
Aurora’s throat tightened. “With who?”
Isolde smiled at her, and the smile offered no comfort. “With the open mouth.”
The corridor above the table ruptured with a sudden snap. Amber air tore, and a line of distortion appeared, a jagged shimmering seam where the realm’s boundary met something else. Aurora’s eyes latched onto it, compelled by how familiar it looked from the Wardens’ notes, how the Veil’s faint shimmer played tricks on perception.
A rift point.
Not in the distance.
Here.
It opened like a wound refusing to heal.
The Helbound scout’s ash swirled back into the seam, pulled toward it as if the tear needed seasoning. The food arrangements shuddered harder now, and the smell spiked, sweet and rotten in quick succession.
Aurora took a step back. She couldn’t stop herself. The air around the rift tugged at her skin, trying to pull her scent, her heat, her presence apart from her body.
Nyx threw themselves in front of Aurora, solid form tightening like a coat around a hook. “Don’t lean in,” they whispered. “That’s how it eats your name.”
Isolde rose. She moved with no footprints, yet the air adjusted to accommodate her. “The blade will cut the wards,” she said, voice sharp enough to cut through riddle-softness . “But hunger has a counter-blade.”
Aurora’s grip tightened on the moonsilver dagger. “So we stop it.”
Isolde looked past Aurora, toward the rift as though watching someone arrive late to a party . “Not stop. Interrupt. You can’t close a mouth chewing on a contract. You break the contract first.”
A new sound rose from inside the rift.
Voices. Too many voices layered like a choir built out of murmurs. They didn’t form words, not yet. They formed a rhythm. A plea. A demand. The cadence of indulgence turned into instruction.
Aurora felt her pendant pull, the chain tightening as if it wanted to leap free and throw itself into the tear. Her skin burned along the crimson glow’s warmth .
She yanked the pendant outward, baring the Heartstone pendant so the gem faced the rift.
The gemstone pulsed so hard the amber light dimmed around it, like the gem drank the realm’s glow to feed itself. For an instant, Aurora saw something in the pulsing crimson, not a picture, but a pathway . A helbound route that traced the rift seam, then climbed along invisible lines toward somewhere beyond Dymas.
A bargain route.
Nyx’s whisper sharpened into alarm. “That pendant links you to whatever opened this.”
Aurora’s breath came fast. She forced it slower. “Then I’ll cut the link.”
She moved before anyone could argue.
Blade in her right hand, Heartstone in her left, Aurora stepped toward the rift. The seam rippled at her approach, resisting like skin resisting a needle. The air smelled of sugar and bile. Her eyes watered.
Nyx grabbed her wrist. Their touch carried chill , a wind-chill that didn’t belong to the realm. “If you cut the wrong thread, you become part of the table.”
Aurora met their glowing violet eyes. “I’m already on the table.”
The rift’s voices surged, the rhythm turning to pressure. Aurora’s bones felt it. Her ribs wanted to expand around someone else’s hunger. Her jaw clenched , crescent scar on her wrist aching as if warning her of older injuries and the way pain remembered .
Isolde spoke from behind her, riddles snapping into urgency. “Now. While the heartstone seeks its bargain, while the seam listens.”
Aurora thrust the Fae-Forged Blade toward the rift seam.
Moonsilver hit shimmering distortion and did not bounce. It slid into the boundary like a needle into fabric. The ward layer resisted, then gave in a clean, tearing sound.
The seam split wider.
And from inside, something reached out.
Not a hand. Not a creature’s limb. A shape of wanting, a silhouette made of appetite with edges sharpened into intention. It poured itself toward the Heartstone pendant as if the gem were the only plate that could satisfy it.
Nyx lunged, shadow stretching toward Aurora’s pendant, trying to snatch it away from the hunger-shape.
Isolde thrust her palm forward, and frost-white light flickered briefly across her skin, though she didn’t reach far enough to touch anything. She misled the realm with a half-truth.
“Not hers,” Isolde whispered in riddles, and her voice wrapped around the hunger.
For a heartbeat, the appetite-shape hesitated.
Then the Heartstone pendant flared crimson.
Aurora felt the pendant tug in both directions at once, like it had been hooked to two opposite pullies. Her shoulder jerked. Her feet skidded on wrong-sense ground that didn’t care about friction.
The rift yawned.
The hunger-shape pulled, hard, and Aurora’s arm twisted toward the seam against her will. The moonsilver blade slipped slightly , and the ward-cut she’d made started to heal around the mistake.
Nyx’s shadow snapped out, grabbing at Aurora’s other wrist, violet eyes blazing. “Aurora!”
Aurora didn’t have time to answer. The seam widened enough that she felt cold from Hel without leaving Dymas. The smell of excess roared into something colder, like iron on the tongue. The voices inside the rift became clearer, not intelligible, but insistent, as if a contract was reading itself aloud .
The hunger-shape pressed into the heartstone.
Aurora’s pendant tore against the chain.
Crimson light shot outward like blood in reversed gravity, and the chain snapped clean through Aurora’s fingers, leaving the gem exposed, floating, pulled between her and the open mouth.
Isolde’s eyes widened for the first time.
Nyx screamed without sound, their whisper turning into a wind that couldn’t carry breath.
Aurora raised her empty hand just as the Heartstone plunged toward the rift seam, vanishing into the amber tear like a swallowed coin.
The seam didn’t close.
It fed.
The last thing Aurora saw before the light swallowed her was the table’s food rearranging itself into a circle, then a mouth.