AI “Don’t touch the vines.”
Aurora Carter said it like a warning and a dare, because the three-step gap between her and the stone doorway looked wider than it should have. The air inside tasted of iron and crushed berries. Nyx moved first, a smear of violet-edged shadow that clung to the threshold as if the world beyond were water.
Behind Rory, Isolde followed with the calm patience of a knife kept sheathed. No footprints marked her passage through the disturbed dust at the entrance. A crescent-shaped scar on Rory’s left wrist caught the faint crimson pulse of the Heartstone Pendant under her coat, warming against her skin.
The fourth member of their group, the driver of their borrowed courage, held the line like a man trying to keep his hands steady around a live wire. He wasn’t in the codex, not officially, but Rory had seen him twice in a week and already decided he belonged to the category of people who lied with their eyes and paid for it later.
“You said Hel portals weren’t like this,” he murmured.
Nyx’s whisper slid along the stones, carried by the movement of their shadow-form. “This is a mouth. Portals are throats.”
Isolde’s gaze lifted to the ceiling that didn’t look like a ceiling. The cavern overhead arched into a shimmering distortion, a faint distortion visible only to those with supernatural sight, the Veil’s presence pressed into the walls like the seam of a garment. A warm amber glow bled from somewhere that wasn’t a light source.
“A boundary, yes,” Isolde said, and her voice turned the word into a riddle. “But it doesn’t only separate. It invites.”
Rory tightened her grip on the Fae-Forged Blade at her hip. The moonsilver dagger rested cold against her palm through the fabric, luminescent at the edges only when she glanced at it. When she looked directly at it, the blade went almost blank, like moonlight hiding behind cloud.
They stepped in.
The sound changed instantly. Their footsteps stopped clacking on stone. Instead, each step landed with a soft, wet thump that felt like walking across the top layer of a lake bed. Rory kept her eyes on the ground and the ground kept moving, not visibly, but with a pressure behind the vision, as if the world rearranged itself to fit whatever they expected.
The doorway opened into a garden that refused to behave.
Vineyards rolled across slopes that should have been vertical. Orchards clustered in spirals, trees heavy with fruit that looked too freshly bruised to be real. Leaves shimmered with a sheen like oil on water. Above, the “sky” held a warm amber colour that never deepened into night. The air smelled of sweet rot and spice, like cinnamon burned on purpose.
Nyx drifted forward, their silhouette stretching longer as they inhaled the scent.
“Prince Belphegor,” Nyx whispered. “Dymas.”
Rory’s pendant pulsed , a steady throb that matched no heartbeat she knew. She felt the warmth spread up her arm, along the thin crescent scar, as if the pendant wanted to remind her it belonged to a larger system than fear.
Isolde walked in a straight line, serene and precise. “Gluttony’s gardens always grow better than they have the right to.”
The man behind them exhaled a shaky laugh. “We’re going to get rich, aren’t we?”
Rory turned her head enough to glare without fully facing him. “We’re going to get alive.”
His smile faltered, then returned, stubborn as a weed.
They moved deeper.
As they advanced, the garden began to reveal a logic of excess. The path widened into terraces lined with shallow pools. In each pool, something brewed. Not steam, not mist, but a slow swirl of scent . Rory could name ingredients only by taste memory that didn’t belong to her. Bitter greens. Smoked honey. A salt that stung the tongue in advance.
Somewhere ahead, a competition rumbled like distant drums. Rory didn’t see an audience, but she felt attention. The space had the weight of a crowded room, only there were no chairs, no walls, just endless growth and the suggestion that someone watched from behind the fruit.
A stone arch rose on their left, carved in a style that made Rory’s eyes hurt. Patterns coiled into themselves, loops forming letters that never resolved into anything human. The arch framed a table set on nothing. Plates sat stacked like dominos in mid-fall. Silver cutlery lay arranged as if a banquet had just ended, yet the food did not cool. It steamed faintly with amber vapour.
Nyx circled the table without touching it. Their shadow-form flickered at the edges, as if it had to negotiate each surface’s rules. “Contract offerings,” Nyx said. “Chefs. Courtiers. Sometimes, prisoners.”
Isolde’s attention tugged at Rory’s sleeve with her words. “Don’t eat.”
Rory hadn’t planned to. Still, the scent hit her like a fist. Her stomach tightened. She knew gluttony didn’t only mean hunger. It meant taking until the taking changed you.
The man stepped closer, drawn by the vapour. “Look at that. It smells like—”
“Like temptation,” Rory cut in. She stepped between him and the table. “You want to die tasting a memory that isn’t yours?”
He stared past her shoulder. His eyes reflected amber light. “We came for the Heartstone. We came for something that can get us through.”
Nyx’s voice slid low, intimate. “The Heartstone doesn’t open doors. It convinces doors to open themselves.”
Rory swallowed. The pendant warmed further, as if pleased by the reminder .
They continued, choosing the path between vineyards and orchard spirals. The plants leaned inward, leaves bowing as though listening . Rory felt tiny shifts in the air, like the garden breathed in short cycles.
Then the first sound of voices arrived.
It didn’t come from human mouths.
It rose from the trees and terraces and pooled vapour. A murmuring chant, layered, shifting pitch with the rhythm of their steps. Rory caught phrases in English and fragments in something older, consonants that sounded like grinding sugar .
“Portions,” Nyx said. “Judging.”
Isolde lifted one pale hand. Her fingers trembled, not with fear, with emphasis. “Careful. In Dymas, praise tastes like permission.”
Rory drew the Fae-Forged Blade. The moonsilver dagger’s outline sharpened as the amber light hit it. Cold spread up her arm, anchoring her. She held it low, not ready to strike, but ready to cut through whatever magical ward tried to decide she didn’t belong.
The garden opened into a clearing where a grand feast sat suspended beneath an enormous canopy of intertwined vines. Instead of leaves, the canopy held rings of fruit, each one glowing faintly from within. The rings rotated slowly , driven by unseen currents.
In the centre stood a dais built from stacked stone that looked half-grown, half-carved. Above it hung something like a chandelier made of bones polished to honey-colour. Each bone held a drip of amber fluid that moved upward instead of falling, climbing back toward the hollow marrow.
Rory stopped so hard her boots dug into soft, rich soil.
On the dais, chefs moved.
They weren’t demons. Not exactly. They wore aprons stitched from dark fabric that swallowed the light. Their hands moved with impossible speed, folding dough that steamed with bright crimson. They sang while they worked, and their songs aligned with the chant the garden had carried.
Rory watched them stir sauces with ladles whose handles braided into cords. The cord ends vanished into the air, as if reaching into another layer of reality to fetch ingredients .
A helbound soul contracted from Earth, Rory thought, not as an exposition but as a recognition her stomach offered . Helbound didn’t always look like fire and horns. Sometimes it looked like labour with a smile.
Nyx approached the dais without stepping onto it. Their shadow stretched long, reaching toward the hanging bone-chandelier. Violet light pooled around their fingertips.
A chef turned its head.
Rory expected a face. It gave her something worse. Where a face should have been, there was a blank oval of dough, still warm and rising, as if the chef wore its hunger like a mask.
The dough-oval stretched wider.
The voice that came from it sounded like someone chewing glass . “Visitors.”
The man behind Rory let out a breathy, eager sound. “We’re not here to—”
“Silence,” Rory snapped, and the word came out sharper than she intended . The amber vapour thickened around the chefs, as if the garden itself listened and decided she deserved the authority.
Isolde leaned closer to Rory. Her eyes shone pale lavender, reflections of a future that refused to make itself clear. “You spoke like a judge.”
“I’m good at judging,” Rory replied.
Isolde’s expression didn’t change, but the air around them did. The chant tightened, the notes aligning into something like a chord that made Rory’s teeth ache. The pendant pulsed hard enough to sting.
The blank dough-mask chef gestured toward the suspended feast.
The plates shivered. Food rose from them in ribbons, curling into shapes that hovered near the ceiling. Rory saw glistening ham gliding like fish. Sweet pastries spun like small planets. A bowl of broth lifted on invisible hands, turning slowly so the surface faced them.
Every ribbon of food pointed at Rory’s chest.
Nyx hissed a whisper . “They want the heart of the door.”
Rory’s mouth went dry. “They don’t get it.”
The pendant warmed into a boil. The crimson gem flared, and for a heartbeat the Veil shimmered stronger around the dais, the boundary distortion visible in a way Rory could suddenly see. It didn’t look like a line. It looked like a web of threads that stuck to their thoughts.
The man behind her reached into his coat. Rory saw the outline of something metallic.
A blade? A charm ?
“Don’t,” Rory said, too late.
His hand pulled out a small mirror frame, dark and tarnished. The mirror’s surface didn’t reflect him. It reflected a place Rory hadn’t been in, a narrow corridor full of eyes carved into the stone. The eyes moved when he tilted the mirror.
Isolde’s voice cut clean. “A Warden’s toy.”
Rory whirled. “What is that?”
He swallowed. “A way to look through. My contact said—”
Nyx stepped between them and the dais, their form thinning into shadow so fine it looked like ink spilled on light . “Contacts die. Mirrors lie.”
The chef with the dough-face clapped once.
The sound echoed like a bell struck underwater. The amber vapour surged toward them, ribbons of food whipping through the air with sudden, hungry intent. Rory thrust the Fae-Forged Blade forward.
The moonsilver dagger met a ribbon of pastry that had formed into a serpent. The serpent hissed, its sweetness turning rancid. Where the blade cut, the serpent’s magic snapped like sugar glass.
But the chef wasn’t finished.
The bone-chandelier began to drip upward faster, each amber droplet pulling itself like a living bead. The beads floated toward Nyx, drawn to the shadow like iron filings to a magnet.
Nyx recoiled a fraction, violet eyes bright. “Belphegor’s chefs can contract hunger. They can bind it to—”
“To what?” Rory demanded, stepping in close enough to feel the heat from the dishes.
Nyx’s whisper threaded the panic. “To the shape of you.”
The man with the mirror staggered backward. The mirror’s surface flickered , showing Rory again, but wrong, wearing an apron and smiling with teeth that weren’t hers. He dropped the mirror with a clatter.
The moment it hit the soil, the mirror shattered into shards that drank the amber light. A thin line of blackness opened on the ground, like a crack in reality made by something hungry to escape.
The crack widened.
Through it, Rory saw another corridor, the same corridor as the mirror had shown, but the eyes carved into stone blinked in unison. The sound that came from it wasn’t a voice, it was a throat clearing somewhere far too close.
Isolde’s eyes widened a fraction, the first clear sign of alarm. “You’ve opened a rift.”
Rory yanked the man by his sleeve, hauling him away from the crack. “Close it.”
He fumbled at his coat. “I can’t. It’s—”
“It’s answering hunger,” Nyx said. Their shadow thickened, becoming solid enough to stand firmly . A violet seam ran along their chest like a scar. “It wants the invitation you never meant to give.”
Rory raised her pendant. The Heartstone’s warmth surged, and the gem’s crimson pulse synced with the crack. The Veil shimmer above the dais trembled , as if the boundary had begun to recognise the pendant as a key.
Then the crack spoke.
Not in words. In taste.
Rory tasted smoke and salt and something like childhood fear, the kind that lived under doors you didn’t open. Her scar on the left wrist burned. She clenched her hand around it until pain steadied her.
“Don’t let it take your shape,” Nyx rasped.
Isolde’s riddle came sharp as a snapped thread. “Heart shows door. Door shows court. Court shows debt.”
The chef with the dough-face leaned forward. Its blank oval flexed, revealing a seam where a mouth should be. “Give.”
The word carried weight . It fell on Rory’s shoulders, heavy and familiar , like an old contract being read aloud.
Rory couldn’t afford to comply. She couldn’t afford to refuse. The garden felt too eager, too delighted by the dilemma. Dymas didn’t attack quickly . Dymas made you choose what to surrender.
She drove the Fae-Forged Blade into the soil near the crack, using the cold moonsilver as an anchor. The dagger bit into the ground as if the ground were warded cloth. The crack shuddered.
The amber vapour snapped toward the blade, trying to feed it, to sweeten it into acceptance.
Rory shoved the pendant against the gap, holding the Heartstone so its crimson glow spilled directly into the crack. The warmth became heat. The gem’s inner glow brightened until it painted her fingers in crimson.
For one breath, the crack narrowed.
Nyx lunged, their shadow reaching into the narrowing slit. Their hand vanished into darkness, and violet light flared from within like a lantern being shoved into a throat. The floor around the crack scorched with absence.
The man screamed, not at the crack, but at Nyx . “Stop them! You’re tearing—”
Rory didn’t look back. She gripped her blade harder, forcing the moonsilver through the soil until it stopped meeting resistance and began meeting something else. A ward. A boundary thread.
She cut it.
The world flinched.
The Veil shimmered violently overhead, visible now as a distortion that rippled like stretched glass. Amber light shattered into fragments, each fragment clinging to different angles of reality. The garden’s chant warped into a scream. Fruit rings above them spun faster, glowing brighter as if the entire clearing had become a mouth trying to swallow its own tongue.
Isolde grabbed Rory’s wrist, gentle as a promise and cold as winter steel. No compulsion, no coercion, just urgency. “Now!”
Rory wrenched the dagger free, and the soil around the crack boiled away into ash that didn’t fall. It lifted, hanging in the air like glitter made from burnt contracts.
Nyx yanked their shadow-hand back. Something dark clung to their fingers, not blood, not slime, but a strip of hunger bound to the shape of a doorway . Violet light wrapped it, trying to cauterise the bond.
The chef with the dough-face slammed both hands down on the dais.
The suspended feast collapsed in on itself, plates and food dropping not toward the floor but toward the crack as if gravity had chosen one direction only . A final wave of amber vapour surged forward, reaching for Rory, for Nyx, for Isolde, for the man with the shattered mirror.
Rory ran.
She ran without waiting for the crack to finish closing, because Dymas didn’t reward delay. Behind her, the garden’s excess churned , and the last sound she heard before the vines swallowed the path was the dough-mask chef’s hungry command, stretched thin by panic:
“Come back.”