AI Aurora Carter tore the silver chain off her throat with one hand and jammed the Heartstone Pendant into the seam of shadow, where the stairwell’s dimness failed to behave like dimness.
The pendant pulsed, deep crimson swelling like a bruise coming to life. Violet light crawled up Aurora’s wrist, painting her crescent scar an alarming shade of omen.
Nyx’s silhouette filled the gap behind her, a long-bodied smear of darkness that didn’t so much stand as gather itself in place. The air tasted wrong, like someone had spilled honey over cold iron.
“Belphegor keeps his bargains clean,” Nyx whispered, voice sliding through the crack between realities. “Clean enough to cut you.”
“Then stop talking and help me hold it open.”
The shadow seam widened with a sound like parchment tearing. Not loud, not sudden, but inevitable, as though it had been waiting for Aurora’s decision. The step under her foot didn’t feel like a step. It felt like the edge of a knife.
Aurora stepped forward anyway.
Cold velvet swallowed her knees. Heat followed, thick and sweet, and the world snapped sideways with the kind of pressure that made her teeth ache. Her delivery coat flapped once, then dissolved into something else in the new air, cloth turning to the wrong kind of fabric without permission.
She found herself on ground that looked like packed earth, but it held her shoes the way living things held warmth . Vines stretched in every direction, heavy-laden and unfamiliar, fruit the size of fists hanging like lanterns. Leaves glittered with moisture that smelled of wine and scorched sugar.
A low roar rolled through the distance, not thunder, but conversation layered over music . Laughter, too, the kind that came out too quickly , like a crowd trained to cheer on command.
Nyx landed beside her with a soft collapse, incorporeal for half a second before solidifying into a tall outline. Their faintly glowing violet eyes fixed on the horizon.
The amber sky above them shimmered as if lit from within.
Aurora swallowed and forced her pulse back into her bones. “Dymas.”
Nyx’s mouth did not move the way human mouths did, yet the whisper found her ear all the same. “Gluttony wears a crown of taste.”
A figure approached along a path of pale stones veined with crimson. The stones looked like they’d been carved from sugar glass and polished with patience. The figure carried a cart stacked with knives that had been sharpened to a theatrical edge.
The chef was helbound, that much Aurora could tell from the way his smile never reached his eyes. Dark skin, too-smooth, too uniformly perfect , as if the realm had scrubbed him clean of any trace that he’d ever belonged to Earth. His uniform sat on his body like it had been tailored from hunger itself.
He bowed, deep and slow, and when he rose his hands were stained red at the fingertips.
“Welcome, honoured taster,” he said, accent sliding between places Aurora couldn’t name. “Belphegor invites you into his gardens.”
Aurora kept her grip firm on the pendant chain. The Heartstone warmed until it felt almost feverish. She didn’t glance down at her scar again. She’d seen enough warnings in it already.
“I’m not here to taste,” she said. “I’m here to find a way back.”
The chef’s smile widened without change in the rest of his face. “Back?” His eyes flicked to Nyx, then to the pendant, then to Aurora’s hand, as if reading an ingredient list . “There is no back in Gluttony. Only more.”
Nyx moved a fraction closer, the air around them thinning. Their silhouette swallowed light as though it disliked the idea of being seen .
“Oracle-given blade,” Nyx murmured. “Gifted to cut wards.”
Aurora’s fingers brushed the pocket at her hip. Moonsilver. Cold as regret. Her knuckles tingled where the Fae-forged Blade rested.
She drew it halfway. The slender, leaf-shaped dagger flashed with faint luminescence, pale as moonlight that refused to warm. The chef flinched, just once.
Good. Fear worked better than bravado.
Aurora didn’t give him time to recover. “Where’s the rift point?”
The chef’s cart wheels creaked as if they’d learned to complain. “Rifts are for those who cannot chew their way through consequences.” His gaze hardened, settling on the Heartstone pendant. “That little warmth belongs to Prince Belphegor.”
Aurora tightened her grip. “Then he can claim it himself.”
“No,” the chef said. “He sends others when he wants a lesson delivered without mess.”
He lifted a hand. The knives on the cart began to vibrate, a barely audible purr. Around the cart, the air grew thicker, clinging to Aurora’s tongue. She tasted cloves and blood-orange peel. Something in her stomach lurched as if it recognised an invitation.
Nyx’s violet eyes flashed brighter. “This is a contract taste,” they whispered. “Swallow the wrong thing and you agree.”
Aurora pulled back her own breath. “Show me the portal, or I cut through your wards.”
The chef bowed again, slower this time, as though humbling himself cost him nothing . “If you insist on teeth, then come. Belphegor hosts a culinary contest for new mouthpieces.”
Music swelled somewhere ahead. Not instruments she could identify, but layered harmonies of singing voices and sizzling grates. The sound carried a promise that everything would be served.
Aurora felt her resolve sharpen. “Let’s go.”
Nyx drifted forward, shadow pooling at their feet. “You move first,” Nyx said. “Shade must see the shape of the trap before it locks.”
They followed the path. Vines arched overhead like ribs, their fruits pulsing with faint inner glow. The fruit’s light reflected on the pale stones, turning every step into a brief painting of crimson.
As they walked deeper, the world became too clean. No dirt. No rot. Even the compost smell of something organic had been replaced with an expensive imitation of decay.
Aurora noticed other visitors, too, helbound souls in chef whites and street-clothes. Some walked with purpose. Others swayed as if the taste in the air had unspooled them. A few wore the dulled expression of those who’d already accepted a bargain, eyes fixed on imaginary plates.
One woman sat on the edge of a fountain shaped like a bowl of overflowing cream. She stared into it with hollow devotion, lips parted.
Aurora stepped closer before Nyx could warn her.
The woman’s eyes snapped to Aurora, pupils too wide. “They’re marinating the sky,” she said, voice thin as pastry paper. “They’re marinating it and I can smell myself becoming appetiser.”
Aurora backed away. “Not marinating anything,” she said, keeping her voice steady. “Help me find the rift.”
The woman blinked slowly . Her gaze slid past Aurora, past Nyx, and landed on the Heartstone pendant like a tongue tasting heat. “Warm stone. Warm promise. The prince wants your warmth .”
Aurora’s breath caught. “Your warmth ?”
The woman smiled, and Aurora realised the smile hadn’t changed since she’d first spoken. “You’re invited,” she said. “Chew until you agree.”
Nyx let out a whisper of frustration that sounded like a snapped thread . “Lures. Gluttony breeds agreement out of hunger.”
They moved on.
The path opened into a terrace overlooking an arena carved into the land. Rows of stone seats descended around a central platform where iron grates glowed orange beneath trays of ingredients. Above, lanterns hung from vine-strands, glass bulbs filled with liquids of shifting colour.
People packed the seats. Some wore crowns of fruit leaves. Some wore nothing at all but still looked dressed, as though the realm had decided what counted as attire. They leaned forward in unison when Aurora stepped into view, the collective motion unsettling as a school of fish.
A banner unfurled across the arena’s far edge, letters written in thick syrup:
WELCOME, MOUTHPLEDGES.
Aurora’s skin crawled at the wrongness of that language, words shaped like commands. She didn’t read it with her eyes. She read it with her nerves.
Nyx leaned close enough that Aurora felt the faint chill of living shadow. “This place hears you,” Nyx said. “Gluttony enjoys feedback.”
Aurora kept the dagger visible. The moonsilver blade felt steadier in her hand now that eyes were on her.
A demon emerged from a doorway of stacked bread. It looked like a man sculpted out of crumbs and plated in glossy fat. Its head turned too smoothly on its neck.
“New mouthpiece!” it boomed, voice reverberating through the iron grates . The sound made Aurora’s molars ache. “Bring the warmth . Bring the cut.”
The chef from before moved ahead of Aurora, eager now, as if the realm itself had pushed him into a role. “Prince Belphegor’s request,” he announced. “A Heartstone carrier. Fresh. Willing. Ready to taste.”
Aurora didn’t believe in willing in this place. Willing tasted like a trap with a sweet wrapper .
“I came for a rift,” Aurora said over the crowd’s rising cheer. “Where is it?”
The demon’s smile stretched too far. Its teeth shone like polished bones. “Rifts are dull. Rifts don’t feed. We feed. We fold hunger into law.”
Nyx’s glow sharpened. “Aurora.”
Aurora lifted the pendant, then turned it so the crimson stone faced the arena’s central platform. The Heartstone pulsed hard enough to hurt. Heat licked up her arm, and for a blink she saw distortion in the air, faint shimmering like the Veil had been skinned thin.
The Veil. Between Earth and Hel, between boundaries. A monitored weakness.
The rift point wasn’t a door. It was a reaction.
A Hel portal, hidden in plain taste.
The crowd quieted, senses narrowing on the same pulse Aurora felt in her bones. The demon’s eyes narrowed too, hunger focusing into purpose.
Then the rift shimmered .
Aurora grabbed for the blade with her free hand. Moonsilver cold steadied her grip. She knew cuts. She knew wards. Isolde’s gift had always promised that she could slice through what didn’t want to be sliced.
But as the rift widened, the arena’s air thickened, not just sweet but pressurised, like syrup poured over a wound . Aurora’s tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth. She fought it by biting down hard enough to hurt.
Nyx surged forward, reaching for the seam in the air with shadow-arms that didn’t exist in solid form. Their fingertips touched the distortion and the world flinched.
The rift tugged at them, too.
“You slipped into the space between realms,” Nyx hissed, voice harsher now . “You brought us an open wound.”
“I brought a way back,” Aurora snapped, and thrust the Fae blade toward the shimmering line.
The moonsilver blade cut the air.
For one heartbeat, everything looked wrong in the best possible way. The distortion split like fabric, lines of shimmering light peeling away. Beneath it, Aurora glimpsed not Hel’s amber sky, but something colder, darker, Earth-adjacent and wrong. The scent hit her next, sharp and metallic, like rain on stone, except she didn’t dare think about rain.
The crowd erupted, not cheering now but roaring .
The demon shrieked, fat limbs twitching. “Stop the mouth from swallowing!” it yelled. “Seal it! Seal it!”
Hel-bound hands surged from the sidelines, carrying trays and bowls tipped with liquid that swirled like living sauce. It wasn’t cooking . It was offering . They moved with practiced desperation, as if everyone in this arena had been trained to keep a rift from opening by force of appetite.
Aurora shoved the cut wider, blade scraping along the seam. The moonsilver sang quietly, a sound like glass remembering how to shatter.
Nyx grappled the distortion on the other side, shadow fingers clawing at the boundary. Their glow flickered .
“Belphegor’s Warden watches,” Nyx whispered. “Not with eyes. With hunger.”
Aurora tasted the shift instantly. Her stomach clenched, craving spiking as if someone had poured a potion into her bloodstream. She smelled spice and sweet yeast. Her own breath started to smell like food.
The Heartstone pendant burned hotter. Its crimson glow brightened until it reflected in every knife edge in the chef’s cart.
Aurora heard Isolde before she saw her. A voice threaded through the arena’s noise like a blade through silk , riddled and precise.
“Three steps, no footprints. One vow, no lies. A blade that bites, a stone that warms, a shadow that cannot be owned.”
Aurora spun, and there, on the terrace’s edge where no one else stood, Isolde Varga appeared as if she’d always been there. Silver hair flowed without wind. She stepped forward without leaving footprints, the stones accepting her presence like they recognised an old debt.
Aurora couldn’t breathe around the sudden terror of being seen by an Oracle.
Isolde’s lavender eyes fixed on Aurora’s pendant. “You opened a hungry gate,” she said, and her riddle came with a smile that never quite touched her mouth. “And hunger has manners only until it learns your name.”
The demon lunged toward Aurora, tray in both hands. The liquid inside the tray shimmered with tiny moving eyes, or Aurora’s mind insisted they were eyes, begging her to understand them.
Nyx flung shadow across the demon’s path, blocking with a sudden solid body that forced the air to remember its shape. The demon slammed into the shadow, and for a second it looked like the liquid in the tray boiled backwards into the demon’s belly.
It screamed, furious and delighted.
“Prince Belphegor wants the Heartstone carrier!” it bellowed. “Bring her to the feast, and we’ll chew the gate shut!”
The first helbound runners closed in on Aurora from either side, hands outstretched, fingers sticky with syrup-scented magic.
Aurora held her blade steady and drove it into the seam one more time.
The rift widened like a mouth pulled open by teeth.
Light erupted, not bright, but sharp, slicing through the crowd’s syrupy air . The taste of Gluttony screamed against itself. The Heartstone pendant pulsed , almost in rhythm with her heartbeat.
Then something struck Aurora’s shoulder from behind, hard enough to jolt her stance sideways.
A Wardens’ seal.
Cold metal pressed through her coat fabric and into her skin, a band of iron sensation that crawled up her arm, trying to anchor her inside the gate instead of letting her step through it.
Nyx turned their head sharply . “They marked you,” Nyx said. “Earth’s guardians will not let you leave unclaimed.”
Aurora wrenched her shoulder, fighting the seal’s grip. The rift tugged at her like a hook in flesh.
Isolde stepped closer, her expression unreadable . “You sought a way back,” she said, voice quiet enough to cut through the roar . “Now you carry a door that belongs to two princes.”
Aurora’s blade trembled as the helbound runners grabbed her wrists. The pendant burned like a coal in her palm.
The rift snapped wider again, and the arena tilted.
For an instant, she saw two worlds collide in the seam, saw her own stairwell in London superimposed over Dymas’ vineyards, both trying to decide which one got to be real.
Aurora’s feet slid on the stone.
The crowd surged forward like a tide, hands reaching, mouths opening, all hunger and teeth.
And right as Aurora tried to wrench free, the Heartstone’s glow flared white-crimson, the Veil’s distortion collapsing inward around her like a clasp tightening.