AI The Heartstone warmed against Rory’s throat before the trees changed.
One moment Richmond Park pressed close around them: damp grass, black branches, a clipped winter wind that worried the cuffs of her jacket. The next, the oaks ahead stood in a ring where no ring had been the last time she had blinked, their trunks twisted into upright slabs, bark grown flat and dark as old iron. Frost silvered the ground outside the circle, but inside it the grass shone green enough to look painted on.
Nyx slipped from the shadow of a hawthorn, tall and narrow, violet eyes dim under the hood of their own darkness.
“The door woke before your hand touched it.”
Rory closed her fingers around the pendant. The thumbnail-sized crimson stone pulsed once beneath her palm. Heat seeped through skin, through bone, not fire-hot, not painful. A living thing taking a breath.
“I didn’t do anything.”
“You wore a key into a lock.”
Behind her, Isolde Varga moved across the frosted grass without bending a blade. Silver hair fell to her waist in a smooth curtain, bright against the dim morning. Her pale lavender gaze rested on the oak stones, then on Rory’s hand at her collar.
“A mouth opens for fruit,” Isolde murmured. “For a knife, it learns caution.”
Rory glanced down at the leaf-shaped dagger strapped beneath her coat. The moonsilver hilt had chilled through the leather sheath and into her ribs since Isolde had given it to her. Even now, the cold bit with a clear edge.
“Is that meant to help?”
Isolde’s lips curved, but the expression held no comfort.
“Help wears many skins. Some have teeth.”
“Right. Fantastic.”
The ring of oak stones parted without sound.
A gap appeared where bark should have sealed tight, not a doorway carved in wood, not exactly. The air between two trunks grew glossy. It sagged inward, amber light pooling across its surface like honey poured over glass. Beyond it, something moved in bright layers: sky, leaves, steam, colour.
The pendant gave another pulse . Rory sucked in a breath through her teeth.
Nyx leaned close to the shimmer, their edges fraying into smoke where the amber touched them.
“Dymas.”
The word trembled through the grass.
Rory remembered the name from too many half-answers and half-threats. Gluttony. A realm of Hel. Prince Belphegor’s domain. Feasts, orchards, contracts written in hunger.
She should have stepped back.
Instead, the scent reached her.
Warm bread. Roasted citrus. Rain on dark soil. Wine crushed fresh from the grape. Spices she didn’t know the names of curled through the cold air and hooked behind her ribs. Her stomach tightened so sharply she pressed a fist against it.
“Bloody hell.”
“Not all of it.” Nyx’s whisper brushed her ear. “Only one table.”
Isolde crossed first.
No ripple marked her passage. No flare. The amber swallowed her silver hair and left no trace.
Rory looked at the frost behind her, at the distant smear of London beyond the parkland, at the safe grey sky she had hated all morning.
Then she stepped through.
Heat wrapped her.
Not summer heat. Kitchen heat. Oven doors opened. Bodies gathered close. Steam breathed against her cheeks and dampened the hair at her temples. Her boots sank into red-gold moss that gave underfoot like sponge cake, though it sprang back without a mark. Above her stretched an amber sky with no sun, only a glow diffused through layered clouds the colour of burnt sugar. Vines hung across the air in looping bridges, heavy with black grapes and pearl-white fruit shaped like lanterns. Far below, far above—Rory could not tell which—waterfalls poured upward from floating terraces and broke into glittering mist.
She turned once, slow.
The portal hung behind them as a vertical slit of winter-dark between two trees that were not the oaks of Richmond Park any more. These trunks were pale, almost translucent, their sap glowing in veins of gold. Their branches bent under fruit that looked like glass apples filled with red sparks.
Nyx emerged last, pulling themselves free from the shadow cast by Rory’s body. For a moment, Dymas’ amber light thinned them to smoke and violet eyes. Then they gathered into a solid shape.
They did not like this place. Rory saw it in the way their shoulders stayed too still.
Isolde waited a few paces ahead, barefoot on the moss, untouched by the heat.
“Keep your hunger named,” she said. “An unnamed beast answers every bell.”
Rory swallowed. Her mouth had filled with saliva.
A path curled away from the portal, paved with flat white stones set into the moss. Each stone bore a symbol etched in gold: a pomegranate split open, a cup overflowing, a fork with tines like claws, a mouth ringed by thorns.
“Cheery.”
Nyx’s head tilted.
“These stones remember feet. Step where others stepped.”
“What happens if I don’t?”
A laugh rolled across the orchard.
It did not come from any throat.
The grapevines shivered. Lantern-fruit chimed together, delicate as cutlery tapped against glass. Somewhere deeper in the realm, a bell rang once, then again, then a dozen times, all out of rhythm. The ground seemed to answer with a slow rumble beneath the soles of Rory’s boots.
Isolde turned her pale eyes toward the path.
“Some questions were plated for someone else.”
“Meaning don’t test it.”
“Meaning eat not from a stranger’s hand, walk not from a stranger’s road, and count not the teeth in a smiling house.”
Rory looked at Nyx.
“She does this all the time?”
“Only when the truth wears barbs.”
“Brilliant.”
They moved.
The path sloped between rows of trees whose leaves shifted colour as Rory passed: emerald, copper, bruise-purple, then a deep red like fresh chilli oil. The air hummed. Not insect-hum. Not machine. More like a crowd in another room, thousands of voices buried behind walls, each in mid-conversation. Now and then a word surfaced.
Sweet.
More.
Mine.
Rory kept one hand on the pendant and the other near her coat, fingers close to the Fae blade’s hilt. The Heartstone had settled into a steady warmth . It pulled—not hard, not like a leash, but the way a familiar smell pulled a hungry person down a street.
A fruit dropped from a branch ahead.
It landed on the path without breaking. Round, golden, no bigger than a plum. Its skin split open in four neat petals, revealing dark custard within, glossy and steaming. The smell hit Rory’s tongue before she breathed it: vanilla, coffee, orange zest, something buttery that made her knees loosen.
Her hand moved.
Nyx caught her wrist.
Their fingers felt like cool silk wrapped around smoke.
“Name it.”
Rory stared at the fruit. The steam curled into shapes. Her mother’s kitchen in Cardiff. A chipped blue mug. Rain on the window. A plate of Welsh cakes dusted with sugar. Then Golden Empress after closing, Yu-Fei boxing up sesame prawns because Rory had missed dinner again. Eva laughing with a mouth full of noodles.
Her throat tightened.
“It’s not mine.”
The fruit blackened.
Not rotted—collapsed. It folded in on itself with a hiss, petals curling into ash, custard shrinking to a dark bead that sank between the stones. The smell vanished, leaving only wet leaves and hot minerals.
Nyx released her.
“Good.”
Rory rubbed her wrist, where her crescent scar had gone pale.
“Could’ve led with ‘the snacks read your mind’.”
“The realm listened before we arrived.”
Isolde walked on, silver hair drifting though no wind moved.
“The banquet begins at the door. The first course asks no permission.”
They passed under an arch of braided vines. Beyond it, the orchard opened into a valley that made Rory stop dead.
Gardens sprawled across floating shelves of land, each at a different height, linked by bridges of bone-white root and latticed gold. Rivers the colour of pomegranate juice wound through fields of blue wheat. Steam rose from pools where pale fish circled with human hands instead of fins. Huge copper pans hung suspended in the air above terraces, each big enough to bathe a bus, bubbling with sauces that stirred themselves with oar-sized spoons. On a distant hill, a city climbed in tiers: domes like overturned bowls, towers shaped like stacked goblets, windows glowing furnace-orange. Smoke rose in scented ribbons and formed brief shapes in the sky—boars, roses, open mouths—before dissolving.
Rory forgot to breathe.
No sketch in any occult book, no pub-backroom warning from Silas, no feverish scrap of dream had prepared her for Hel looking beautiful.
Not safe. Never safe. Beauty here had hooks. She felt them catch in her ribs all the same.
“What is that city?”
Nyx followed her gaze.
“Belphegor’s court sits beyond it. Kitchens beneath, dining halls above, contract chambers between.”
“Contract chambers?”
Isolde bent beside a flower that had opened at her approach. Its petals were thin slices of translucent fruit, red veins shining inside them.
“A hungry soul signs with a full mouth. Ink tastes better when regret comes late.”
Rory watched the flower lean toward Isolde like a listening ear.
“People from Earth work here?”
Nyx’s outline tightened.
“Some cook. Some serve. Some become recipes.”
A clatter rang out nearby.
Rory’s hand snapped to the dagger.
At the edge of the path, half-hidden behind stalks of blue wheat, a line of silver beetles marched across a flat stone. Each one carried a crumb larger than its body. They moved in perfect formation toward a crack in the earth, where orange light pulsed from below. As Rory crouched, one beetle turned its polished head. Its face was not a beetle’s face at all but a porcelain mask with painted red lips .
“Visitors,” it chirped.
The others stopped.
“Visitors.”
“Visitors.”
“Empty hands.”
“Warm blood.”
“Unseasoned.”
Rory straightened so fast her knee cracked.
“Nope.”
Nyx drifted between her and the beetles. Their shadow spilled over the path. The insects scattered, crumbs abandoned, porcelain faces clicking in alarm.
“Small mouths gossip to larger ones.”
“Then let’s not become the local hot topic.”
“Too late,” Isolde murmured.
The humming in the valley shifted.
Rory heard it then: a distant rhythm beneath the bells and voices. Chopping knives. Thousands of them. Cleavers striking boards in perfect time. The sound rolled from the city, sharp and endless, like rain made of metal.
They continued along the white stones. The path curved toward a bridge woven from roots as thick as Rory’s waist. It stretched over a gorge filled not with water, but with slow-moving cream-coloured fog . Shapes drifted beneath it: tables set with candles, a staircase twisting downward, a woman in a red dress walking upside down with a tray balanced on one hand. Each image slid through the mist and vanished.
Rory kept to the centre of the bridge.
The roots flexed underfoot, warm and faintly pulsing.
“Is the bridge alive?”
The root beneath her boot tightened.
Isolde did not look back.
“Everything that feeds grows. Everything that grows feeds.”
“Can we get one straight answer before lunch?”
Nyx’s violet eyes flicked toward her.
“Lunch may answer you first.”
Rory gave them a look.
“That was almost a joke.”
“I have been trapped between realms since 1643. Standards decay.”
A laugh escaped her before she could stop it. Small. Too loud in the strange air. The bridge answered with a tremor, and from the fog below rose the smell of roasted lamb, mint, charred onions. Rory’s stomach clenched again, less pleasant this time, almost painful.
She bit the inside of her cheek.
Blood touched her tongue. The hunger loosened.
At the far end of the bridge, an arch stood alone, carved from black basalt and veined with amber. No wall supported it. Through the arch lay another stretch of garden, but the colours beyond looked deeper, richer, as if someone had turned up the world’s saturation until it bruised the eye.
Symbols crawled across the basalt. Rory leaned closer before sense stopped her.
The marks were not carved. They were tiny mouths. Lipless, tooth-lined, whispering over one another.
“Payment.”
“Portion.”
“Pledge.”
“Guest-right.”
“Guest-wrong.”
The Heartstone flared hot.
Rory gasped and yanked the pendant away from her skin. Crimson light leaked between her fingers.
Nyx spun toward the arch.
“Hide it.”
“From what?”
The mouths fell silent.
All at once.
No knives. No bells. No buried voices in the air.
The valley held its breath.
Isolde’s face turned sharp in the amber glow. For the first time since Rory had met her, the seer looked less like a woman grown from moonlight and more like someone standing in the path of a blade she had already seen fall.
“From the one who smells a door left open.”
A sound came from beyond the basalt arch.
Not footsteps .
A wet, leisurely scrape, as if something dragged silk through syrup.
Rory shoved the Heartstone beneath her shirt. It burned against her sternum, but she kept her hand clamped over it. Nyx spread wider, shadows crawling across the white stones. Isolde reached back and touched two fingers to Rory’s wrist, right over the old crescent scar.
“Do not offer your name.”
The scrape stopped.
A figure stepped through the arch.
At first Rory thought it was a man, tall and broad, dressed in a chef’s white coat buttoned to the throat. Then she saw the coat had been stitched from table linen, embroidered napkins, scraps of wedding dresses, all yellowed at the seams. His skin shone the soft pink of raw prawns. His eyes were black seeds set too far apart. A silver tasting spoon hung from a chain around his neck, and when he smiled, his teeth folded out in two rows.
He inhaled.
The air tugged toward him. Leaves bent. The fog in the gorge streamed in ribbons around his legs. Rory felt the pull at her lips, her nostrils, her chest, as if he could sip the breath straight from her lungs.
“Well,” he crooned, voice rich as melted chocolate poured over knives . “Something warm wandered in.”
Nyx’s shadow rose between them.
“Stand aside, cellar-thing.”
The creature’s black eyes slid over Nyx.
“Smoke with a bone-name. Old. Bitter. Overkept.”
Nyx’s outline tore at the edges. Violet flared.
Rory’s fingers closed around the Fae blade beneath her coat. Cold shot up her arm, clean and cruel. It cut through the smell, the heat, the hunger.
The creature’s nostrils widened.
His smile changed.
“Ah.”
Isolde’s hand tightened on Rory’s wrist.
“Knives should sleep until plates arrive.”
Rory kept her voice level, though sweat slid down her spine .
“We’re not here to eat.”
The creature leaned forward, spoon swinging.
“No one arrives in Dymas without an appetite.”
“I deliver food for a living. Doesn’t mean I lick every box.”
The creature blinked.
Nyx went still.
Isolde’s mouth twitched.
Then the thing laughed.
It bent at the waist, shoulders shaking, teeth clicking open and shut. The laugh rolled over the bridge and into the gorge, where the fog below churned and showed flashes of crowded tables, red hands, goblets raised in salute.
“Sharp little mortal. Salted at the edges.”
Rory drew the Fae blade halfway from its sheath.
Moonlight did not exist in Dymas, yet the moonsilver glowed with a thin white line that made the amber air recoil. The creature’s laugh snapped shut. Its gaze fixed on the blade, and hunger drained from its face, replaced by calculation.
“Fae cutlery at a Hel threshold. Poor manners.”
“Then don’t make me set the table.”
Nyx moved, not forward, but around, their shadow sliding over the basalt arch and smothering half the whispering mouths. The creature’s head twitched, tracking them.
Isolde lifted her chin.
“Three came by road, none by invitation. Three seek passage, not platter. The old guest-law still has bones.”
The creature bared its folded teeth.
“Guest-law feeds hosts too, exile.”
“Only when guests sit.”
Rory looked from Isolde to the creature.
“We’re not sitting.”
“Not drinking,” Nyx added.
“Not signing anything.”
“Not naming,” Isolde breathed.
The creature’s spoon swung once. The metal reflected Rory’s face, but not as she was. In the spoon-bowl, she wore a crown of red fruit and smiled with juice running down her chin. Her bright blue eyes looked empty.
She angled the blade.
The reflection split.
The creature hissed. Steam leaked between its teeth.
Beyond him, past the arch, the path continued into a garden of impossible abundance. Trees bent under meat-fruit wrapped in crackling skin. Fountains spilled wine into channels lined with oysters. Golden birds perched on sugar-cane reeds and sang in voices that sounded like children calling from another room. Farther still, the tiered city glimmered, and above it hung a palace shaped like an open mouth, its gates two vast teeth of ivory.
Rory’s fear sat beside wonder, shoulder to shoulder. Neither moved aside for the other.
She stepped toward the arch.
The creature did not shift.
Nyx’s voice thinned to a blade’s edge.
“Move.”
The cellar-thing lowered its head until its black eyes met Rory’s.
“What name shall Dymas remember when the little knife passes?”
Rory smiled without showing teeth.
“Carter.”
Isolde’s fingers left her wrist.
Nyx made a sound like wind crossing a grave .
The creature’s nostrils flared. It tasted the air, searching the missing pieces.
“No first name?”
“You didn’t ask nicely.”
The Fae blade slid another inch free.
The basalt mouths whimpered.
The creature stepped aside. One foot, then the other, each movement leaving a damp print that steamed on the white stones.
Rory walked past him through the arch, the blade cold in her hand, the Heartstone hot against her chest, and the garden beyond opened around her with a thousand scents reaching like fingers.