AI The pendant burned against her chest.
Aurora clawed at her collar, fingers finding the silver chain, the Heartstone's pulse rapid and insistent against her sternum. Heat bled through her shirt, through her skin, settling somewhere deep in her ribs like a second heartbeat.
"Company." Nyx's whisper came from everywhere and nowhere, their shadow-form rippling along the wall of the narrow alley.
Three figures materialised at the far end. Not human. Too tall, too still, eyes catching the distant streetlight with an amber sheen that had nothing to do with reflection. Their steps made no sound on the wet tarmac.
"Near." Isolde's voice drifted from behind Aurora, soft as wind through rushes. "So very near, the door you seek."
"The door's behind them." Aurora's hand found the Fae blade at her hip. Cold even through the leather sheath, moonsilver hungry for what stood between them and the Richmond standing stones. "Any chance they'll let us pass?"
"Flesh walks in Hel unfettered." Isolde's lavender eyes stayed fixed on the approaching figures. "But flesh that carries Fae steel and Shade-bound companions draws attention."
The tallest figure raised one long-fingered hand. Not in greeting.
The air split.
A sound like tearing silk , like gasping breath, like the moment before lightning strikes. Reality peeled apart where the figure gestured, and amber light spilled through the wound in the world. The smell hit Aurora next: honeyed wine, woodsmoke, and beneath it, something rotten-sweet. Overripe fruit left in the sun.
The Heartstone's pulse shifted. Slower. Deeper. Matching the rhythm of the light bleeding through the tear.
"Oh." Isolde's composure cracked, just for an instant. "Oh, clever beasts."
"Clever how?" Aurora asked.
"The door finds you." Silver hair drifted around the seer's face, stirred by winds that didn't exist on Earth. "You need not seek Dymas. Dymas seeks you."
The amber widened. The tear became a threshold, and beyond it lay impossibility.
Nyx solidified beside her, their humanoid form coalescing from shadow, violet eyes burning faintly. "The Veil thins at their touch. They carry Hel's authority."
"Can we fight them?"
"We can try." The Shade's voice carried no confidence. "Or we can walk through that door and trust Gluttony's appetite exceeds its caution."
The figures advanced. One step. Two. Patient as starvation.
Aurora drew the Fae blade. Its luminescence caught the amber light, two otherworldly glows wrestling in the damp London air. The moonsilver sang in her grip, cold and sharp and eager.
She stepped through the threshold.
The world inverted.
Gravity forgot her for one sickening moment. Then it remembered, differently, pulling from a direction her inner ear couldn't quite parse . Aurora's boots found ground that wasn't ground, something yielding and springy, and she stumbled forward into amber-tinged air.
The sky stretched above her, warm and honeyed, no sun but light nonetheless. It emanated from everything and nothing, as if the atmosphere itself remembered brightness and chose to radiate it. No clouds. No stars. Just endless amber that darkened to copper at the horizons, and those horizons sat too close, curved wrong, as if she stood inside a vast bowl.
"Lovely." Nyx materialised at her shoulder, their shadow-form more solid here, edges sharper, presence heavier. "I feel the old bindings. Aldric's memories stir."
"Anything useful?"
"1643 was a different Dymas. Or the same Dymas, wearing a different face." Their whisper carried an edge she'd never heard before. "The Princedom changes. The hunger endures."
Isolde stepped through last, and the threshold sealed behind her with a sound like lips meeting. The seer's bare feet made no impression on the yielding ground. Her pale eyes swept the landscape with something that wasn't quite fear, wasn't quite wonder .
"Time bends here." She turned slowly, silver hair floating in the strange amber light. "An hour within might be a day without. Or a year. The Fae grove's trick, amplified and twisted."
"That's concerning."
"That's Dymas." Isolde's lips curved, not quite a smile . "Everything concerns, here. Nothing forbids."
The landscape defied geometry.
They stood on a path of crushed gemstones, ruby and topaz and stones Aurora couldn't name, winding between structures that shouldn't stand. Towers of crystallised wine rose to the amber sky, their surfaces weeping slow rivulets of dark liquid that pooled at their bases. Trees with bark of twisted liquorice held canopies of broad purple leaves, each one heavy with dangling fruit that pulsed with inner light. The air tasted of cinnamon and decay.
"Stay close." Aurora moved forward, the gemstone path crunching beneath her boots. "Watch each other's backs."
Nyx drifted beside her, their form flickering between solid and shadow. "The shadows here... they listen. They remember. I can feel them pulling at my edges, trying to fold me into their architecture."
"Can you resist?"
"For now." The admission cost them something. "But I am bound to the mortal plane. This place knows what I am. What I was. It hungers for both."
The path curved around a fountain shaped like an open mouth, water flowing upward from its tongue, defying gravity, cascading into the air and vanishing before it fell. Coins glittered at the basin's bottom, but they weren't coins. Teeth. Hundreds of human teeth, white and yellow and brown, each one inscribed with symbols that moved when Aurora looked directly at them.
"Offerings." Isolde's voice came distant, distracted. "Everything here requires payment. Taste, and you owe. Accept, and you're claimed."
"Noted."
The Heartstone's pulse had steadied, matching the slow rhythm of the amber light, comfortable as if it had come home. That disturbed Aurora more than any of the impossibilities surrounding them. The pendant belonged here. She didn't.
They pressed deeper.
The orchards gave way to vineyards, endless rows of black grapes hanging from vines that breathed, actual breath, slow and rhythmic , expanding and contracting against trellises of bone. The grapes pulsed in unison, and when Aurora leaned close, she heard something inside them. Heartbeats. Tiny frantic heartbeats, hundreds of them, thousands, an orchard of captive pulses.
"Don't." Nyx's hand closed on her arm, solid and cold. "The fruit invites. That's how Dymas feeds. You reach, you taste, you stay."
"I wasn't going to—"
"You were." Their violet eyes held steady . "Your hand moved. Your mouth watered. The realm speaks to the body, bypasses the mind. Here, instinct is the enemy."
Aurora swallowed. Her mouth had been watering. She hadn't noticed.
Beyond the breathing vineyards, the terrain shifted again. They entered a village, or the memory of one, buildings constructed from stacked feast tables and lashed-together casks, walls of cured meat that glistened with preserved fat, roofs of woven wheat sheaves that swayed in a breeze that carried the scent of baking bread and fresh death. Figures moved between the structures, humanoid but wrong, their proportions stretched, torsos too long, arms reaching past their knees, faces that were all mouth.
"Bespoken souls." Isolde watched the creatures pass, and they watched her back, their huge lipless mouths opening and closing in silent appetite. "They served the feast in life. They serve it still in death. Excess made flesh, their hunger eternal and eternally unsated."
One of the creatures paused, turning its massive mouth toward Aurora. It inhaled, and the Heartstone flared in response, its pulse suddenly urgent, its heat spreading through her chest like swallowed fire.
"Fresh meat." The creature's voice gurgled from somewhere deeper than its throat. "Fresh meat walks the path. Tastes of elsewhere. The Prince will want to see."
"The Prince can wait." Nyx shifted, their shadow-form expanding, violet eyes blazing . "We seek the Grove connection. The way between realms."
"All ways lead to the feast." The creature's mouth stretched impossibly wider, revealing row upon row of teeth like pearl beads. "All paths end at the table. You'll sit. You'll taste. You'll stay."
"We'll see about that." Aurora's grip tightened on the Fae blade. The moonsilver hummed, its luminescence flickering in response to the creature's proximity.
The thing laughed, a wet sound like choking. "Clever metal. Fae-bitten. But the Prince's table has held craftier knives than yours, little morsel."
It turned away, shuffling between the meat-walls of its village, and the other creatures followed, their silent mouths opening and closing in a rhythm that matched the breathing vines, matched the Heartstone's pulse , matched the amber light's slow heartbeat.
The path continued.
Aurora walked, and the realm of Gluttony walked beside her, around her, through her, testing her edges the way it tested Nyx's shadows. Isolde drifted in her wake, feet leaving no mark, silver hair catching light from no source, her riddles falling silent as they penetrated deeper into Dymas' domain.
The Heartstone blazed.
Ahead, the gemstone path ended at a set of iron gates, twice Aurora's height, worked into the shape of interlocking serpents whose jewelled eyes wept something red and viscous. Beyond the gates, the amber sky darkened to rust, and the air hung thick with sugar and smoke and the copper perfume of raw meat.
Music drifted from within. Flutes and drums and voices raised in something that wasn't quite song, wasn't quite scream .
"The feast." Isolde stopped, her pale lavender eyes fixed on the weeping gates . "The eternal feast. We've found what seeks us."
"The pendant's reaction." Aurora pressed her palm against the Heartstone, trying to quiet its frantic pulse . "It's not warning me. It's calling to something."
"Or someone." Nyx's form flickered, their voice carrying an unfamiliar tension . "We stand at the threshold of Belphegor's hall. Beyond those gates lies the Prince's table, and at that table sits every hunger ever denied."
The gates began to open.
Not by any visible hand. They simply swung inward, slow and stately, their serpent hinges screaming as the red tears wept faster, pooling on the gemstones and reaching toward Aurora's boots like living things.
And from beyond the gates, from the feast hall of Gluttony's Prince, a voice rolled out like honeyed thunder.
"Welcome, Heartstone-bearer." The words tasted of wine and whispered promises. "We've been expecting you."