AI The oak stones were not stones at all, Rory decided, once she stood close enough to touch one.
They rose from the grass in a crooked ring, taller than men and dark as old tea, their surfaces ridged and whorled with bark-grain though they carried the cold patience of rock. Lichen glimmered in the grooves like crushed stars. Between them, wildflowers bloomed in defiance of December: bluebells, foxgloves, buttercups, blossoms she had no names for, all nodding though no wind moved through Richmond Park.
Beyond the ring, morning had been grey and ordinary. Mud underfoot. Bare trees. Dog walkers in quilted coats somewhere out of sight. Inside the ring, the air smelled of crushed mint, rain on hot stone, and something sweet enough to make her teeth ache.
The Heartstone pendant warmed against Rory’s sternum.
She closed her hand around it through her jumper. The thumbnail-sized gem pulsed beneath the fabric, slow and steady, like a second heart with better nerves than hers. Its deep crimson glow bled between her fingers.
“Is it supposed to do that?” she asked.
Isolde Varga turned her pale lavender eyes on Rory. Her silver hair fell to her waist, untouched by the damp. She left no mark in the grass where she stepped, not even a bent blade. In London, Rory had learned to distrust anyone who moved too quietly. With Isolde, distrust felt like bringing a butter knife to a sword fight.
“The fruit blushes before the knife,” Isolde said.
Rory stared at her.
Nyx, standing half in the shade of an oak stone and half outside it, gave a sound like leaves being dragged over pavement. Rory had begun to understand that as amusement. Today they had chosen a nearly solid shape: tall, humanoid, shoulders blurred at the edges, their body a silhouette made from stacked darkness. Two faint violet eyes hovered where a face should have been.
“That means yes,” Nyx whispered.
“Brilliant,” Rory muttered. “Imagine if someone just said that.”
Isolde’s mouth curved, not quite a smile. “Then they would rob you of preparation.”
“Cryptic warnings do wonders for my blood pressure.”
Nyx tilted their head. “Your pulse is elevated.”
“Thank you, living shadow FitBit.”
The banter helped. It always did, in the small, stubborn way a match helped in a cathedral at midnight. It made the impossible put on a human coat. Rory could almost pretend she was not standing in a hidden grove in Richmond Park with a half-Fae seer and a former human sorcerer turned shade, about to cross a metaphysical barrier into Hel.
Almost.
At her hip, under her coat, the Fae-forged blade rested in its sheath. It had been cold when Isolde placed it in her hand and remained cold now, a thin bite through leather and cloth. Moonsilver, leaf-shaped, faintly luminescent in moonlight. Good against demons, Isolde had said. Can cut through wards. Rare. Coveted.
Rory had said thank you, because her mother had raised her properly, and then had gone into Silas’s bar bathroom and dry-heaved for five minutes.
Now Isolde lifted one pale hand.
The ring of oak stones answered.
A shimmer unstitched the air between them. It looked, at first, like heat rising from summer pavement. Then it thickened into a distortion that made Rory’s eyes water: the trees beyond bent the wrong way, flowers doubled and vanished, the grey London sky folded over itself like wet paper. Through the gap came warmth . Not comforting warmth . Kitchen heat. Orchard heat. The close, living breath of something vast and hungry.
The pendant thudded against her palm.
“Dymas,” Nyx said. The word slid through the grove and made the flowers bow their heads. “Gluttony’s garden.”
Rory swallowed. Her throat had gone dry, which seemed unfair given the air now smelled of ripe pears, roasted meat, honey, yeast, and wine .
“Belphegor’s realm,” she said.
“One of his gardens at the edge,” Isolde corrected, or perhaps she didn’t. “The prince does not open his pantry to every mouse.”
“Comforting.”
Isolde stepped forward first, silver hair trailing behind her like moonlit water. The distortion took her without ripple. One instant she stood among winter flowers; the next she was a pale figure beyond the shimmer, tinted amber.
Nyx flowed after her, their form thinning into smoke as they passed. Shadows stretched from the oak stones to touch them, reluctant to let go.
Rory remained where she was.
The sensible part of her—the part that had got decent marks at Cardiff, that knew how to read tenancy agreements, that kept spare change in three different coat pockets—suggested turning around. There would be buses. Coffee. Yu-Fei shouting because she was late for deliveries. Eva texting fifteen question marks. A day with rain in it. A day with no demon realms.
The pendant warmed again, insistent.
Rory thought of Evan’s hand around her wrist, of how impossible leaving had felt until she had done it. She thought of arriving in London with one bag and a bruise hidden under her sleeve. She thought of the crescent scar on her left wrist, pale against her skin, from a childhood fall through greenhouse glass; proof that wounds closed, though they did not vanish.
“Right,” she told herself . “In and out. Don’t eat anything. Don’t make eye contact with the furniture, probably.”
Then she stepped through.
The world turned inside out.
For one breath, Rory hung in a place with no up and no down, only pressure and gold light and the ringing note of a glass being stroked . Something brushed over her skin like silk fingers testing fruit. The scar on her wrist burned cold. The blade at her hip answered with a thin, chiming vibration.
Then her boots hit earth.
Not earth. Soil, yes, but black and glossy as chocolate ganache, springing underfoot with a softness that made her think of graveyards and overwatered houseplants. She staggered, caught herself, and sucked in a breath that nearly floored her.
The air was delicious.
There was no other word for it. It poured into her mouth and nose with layers: citrus peel, smoke, butter, crushed herbs, hot bread pulled apart by hand, dark wine, salt, peaches bursting at the skin. Her stomach cramped with sudden hunger, though she had eaten toast an hour ago. Not enough toast, apparently. No amount of toast would have been enough in this place.
“Do not feed the wanting,” Isolde said from beside her.
Rory pressed her lips together. “Wasn’t planning to.”
Her voice sounded small.
Above them, the sky burned warm amber from horizon to horizon, not bright like Earth’s sunlit sky but glowing, as if the entire world sat beneath a glass of honey . No sun hung overhead. Light came from everywhere and laid a gilded sheen over the landscape.
They stood on a terrace cut into a hillside. Below, Dymas unfurled.
Rory had seen vineyards before, in photographs and on the labels of bottles she couldn’t afford. These were not vineyards. These were kingdoms of vine.
Rows upon rows spilled down the slopes, twisted trunks thick as ancient thighs, their leaves broad and glossy, their grapes hanging in impossible clusters: green as sea-glass, black as polished jet, red with a dim internal glow that made the Heartstone seem shy. Between the vineyards sprawled orchards where trees bowed under fruit too large and vivid to be real. Pears shaped like lanterns. Plums with skins like dusk. Apples white as bone and veined with gold. Farther down, gardens arranged themselves in spirals and knots, beds overflowing with flowers, herbs, and vegetables in colors Rory’s eyes did not know how to name.
And beyond that rose structures.
Kitchens, perhaps. Palaces pretending to be kitchens. Domes of copper and green glass. Chimneys like organ pipes breathing fragrant steam. Long halls open to the amber air, where figures moved around tables the length of train platforms. She heard laughter, knives on boards, the roar of ovens, bells, music from strings and horns, and beneath it all a low, wet pulse like something chewing in its sleep.
Wonder opened in Rory’s chest so quickly it hurt.
“It’s beautiful,” she said before she could stop herself.
Nyx stood to her left, solid enough that the amber light caught no detail from them, only edges. “Beauty is often bait.”
“Still beautiful.”
“Yes.”
Isolde looked down into the valley. No footprints marked the black soil behind her. “The mouth paints its teeth with sugar.”
Rory glanced at Nyx.
“They agree,” Nyx whispered.
A path wound away from the terrace, paved in irregular slabs of red stone. Each slab held fossils—or what looked like fossils—pressed into it: shells, leaves, tiny bones, curling script. Rory crouched despite herself and ran a finger over one. The stone was warm. The script shifted under her touch.
She jerked her hand back.
“What language is that?”
Nyx bent closer without bending, their upper body elongating. “Contracts.”
Rory straightened so fast her knee clicked. “Of course they are.”
The path led between two hedges heavy with berries. The berries shone like drops of lacquer, black-blue and wet. As the group passed, they trembled on their stems. One fell and split open on the path with a sound like a sigh. Ruby juice spread across the stone.
Rory’s mouth filled with saliva.
She dug her nails into her palm. The crescent scar on her wrist flashed white. Don’t feed the wanting. Easy enough to say when the wanting hadn’t put its hand down your throat and taken the wheel.
“Do all Hel realms do this?” she asked. Talking gave her tongue something else to do. “Attack you with ambience?”
“Each sin knows its own theatre,” Nyx said. “Dymas does not conquer by fear first. It offers.”
“First?”
Their violet eyes slid toward her. “Fear comes when the offering ends.”
A shiver moved under Rory’s coat despite the warmth .
They descended into the vineyard. The vines arched overhead as they walked, braiding themselves into a tunnel. Leaves whispered against one another. Grapes hung low enough to brush Rory’s hair, plump and translucent. Inside one red grape she saw not seeds, but a tiny scene: a banquet table ; candles; a woman raising a goblet to lips stained crimson. Rory blinked and the grape was only fruit again.
“Did you see that?” she whispered.
“I see many things,” Isolde said.
“Super helpful, cheers.”
The path narrowed. On either side, the soil bulged around the roots. Some roots resembled fingers. Some resembled tongues. Rory kept her eyes forward.
Then they heard singing.
It drifted from ahead, a man’s voice, rich and tired and heartbreakingly human.
“Sweet marrow, sweet rind,
leave hunger behind...”
Rory stopped.
At a bend in the path stood a low stone building half swallowed by vines. Its windows glowed orange. Outside, under an awning of woven branches, a man in a white chef’s coat worked at a table. He was perhaps fifty, brown-skinned, with greying hair tied back and sleeves rolled to the elbow. He chopped herbs with astonishing speed, blade tapping a clean rhythm. Around his neck hung a strip of parchment marked with symbols that writhed when Rory looked at them.
A contract.
He looked up.
For one wild second, Rory hoped he was just a chef. A person. Someone who had taken the wrong shortcut after a shift and ended up in Hell’s allotment.
His eyes found the pendant at her throat, then Isolde, then Nyx. His face closed.
“Visitors,” he said. His accent was London, softened by years elsewhere. “You’ll want the road to the lower halls. Keep to the red stones. Don’t step on the grass if it asks you.”
Rory stared. “If it asks?”
As if summoned, the grass beside the path leaned toward her and whispered in a hundred tiny voices.
Rest. Rest your feet. Lie down. Only a moment. We are soft. We are kind.
Rory moved closer to the centre of the path.
The chef gave a humourless smile. “Like that.”
Isolde inclined her head. “Harun of Whitechapel. Your soup once made a prince weep.”
His chopping faltered. “And that weeping added nine years to my term.”
Rory’s stomach turned. The smells, the colours, the lush abundance—all at once she saw the machinery underneath. Not gears. Appetites. Everything here consumed or was consumed , garnished and praised while the knife came down.
“How long have you been here?” she asked.
Harun resumed chopping. “Long enough to stop counting honestly.”
“Were you—” She hesitated. “Did you agree to this?”
His eyes flicked to the parchment at his throat. “Everyone agrees in Dymas. That’s the art of it.”
Nyx’s shadow stretched thin across the stones, though there was no sun to cast it. “We seek the old larder gate.”
Harun went still.
Around them, the vines hushed. Even the grass stopped whispering.
“No one seeks that by accident,” he said.
“No,” Rory replied, because she was tired of riddles doing all the heavy lifting. “We’re very deliberately making bad decisions.”
That earned a real look from him, sharp and assessing. Then, unexpectedly, a bark of laughter.
“Human?”
“Unfortunately consistent.”
“Then listen, consistent human. Follow the path until the fountain of milk. Do not drink. Turn left where the fig trees applaud. Do not bow. You’ll see three doors: gold, green, and plain oak. Take the oak. If you smell your mother’s cooking, run.”
Rory’s heart gave a painful little knock. “Why?”
Harun’s face softened, and that was worse than any warning. “Because Dymas learns quickly .”
A bell rang somewhere down in the valley. The sound rolled through the vines, deep and bronze. Harun flinched. The parchment at his throat tightened like a living thing.
“Go,” he said. “Before I’m asked what I told you.”
Isolde moved on at once, silver hair swaying. Nyx followed. Rory lingered half a breath.
“Can we help you?” she asked.
Harun looked at her as if she had offered him a childish drawing in a burning house.
Then his gaze dropped to the blade hidden at her hip. The moonsilver must have shown somehow, or perhaps everyone in Hel could smell a weapon made to cut their rules.
“Not today,” he said quietly. “But remember my name correctly, if you live.”
“I will.”
“Then go, Aurora Carter.”
She had not told him her name.
Rory backed away, cold sliding down her spine , and hurried after the others.
The vineyard opened into a plaza paved with cream-coloured stone. In its centre rose a fountain, not of water but of milk, cascading in thick white sheets from the mouths of marble beasts. The scent of it was warm and sweet, spiced with nutmeg. Silver cups lay scattered invitingly around the rim.
Rory did not drink.
Her throat still worked.
At the fountain, she looked back. The terrace where they had entered was already gone, hidden by vines or distance or the realm changing its mind. Above, the amber sky deepened toward orange. A flock of birds crossed it in formation. No—utensils. Forks and knives with wings, flashing bright, migrating toward the copper domes.
“This place is taking the mick,” she said, because if she said what she meant—I’m frightened, I’m hungry, I don’t know if we can find our way back—her voice might crack.
Nyx drifted nearer. “Stay close to me when shadows gather.”
“Do shadows gather here? I thought you were the shadow expert.”
“All light makes shadow,” they whispered. “Dymas simply seasons it.”
They passed the fountain and found the fig trees.
They were enormous, older than cathedrals, their pale trunks twisting upward into canopies of hand-shaped leaves. As Rory approached, the leaves began to clap. Softly at first, then louder, thousands of green palms striking together in polite, terrible applause.
Bravo. Bravo. Bravo.
Isolde walked through without acknowledging them. Nyx slid like spilled ink beneath the noise. Rory kept her chin up and did not bow, though the applause crawled over her skin and raised every hair. It sounded too much like approval. Like being watched by a room that had already decided what it wanted from you.
On the far side, the three doors waited freestanding in an arch of nothing.
Gold. Green. Plain oak.
The gold door was magnificent, carved with feasts and crowned mouths, its handle a ruby pomegranate. The green door breathed leaf-scent and birdsong through its seams. The oak door looked like something from a farmhouse: weathered planks, iron latch, a little warped at the bottom.
The pendant burned hot enough that Rory hissed and pulled it away from her skin.
“The portal?” she asked.
Isolde’s eyes had gone distant. “Behind the door that remembers the tree.”
“Plain oak, then.”
“Unless memory lies.”
“You can’t lie.”
“I am not a door.”
Rory exhaled through her nose. “I swear to God, one day I’m buying you a straight answer for Christmas.”
Nyx’s violet eyes fixed on the oak door. “There is shadow beneath it. Old shadow.”
Rory drew the Fae blade.
Cold snapped into her palm, clean and bracing. The dagger’s leaf-shaped blade caught the amber light and rejected it, shining with its own faint, moon-pale glow. The applause of the fig trees faltered. Somewhere far off, a kitchen bell rang once, harsh and alarmed.
The oak door’s latch lifted by itself.
From the crack beneath came a smell that stopped Rory’s breath.
Not roast meat, not honey, not wine.
Cawl simmering on the hob. Her mother’s kitchen in Cardiff. Leeks, lamb, pepper, steam fogging the window while rain ticked against the glass. Her father laughing in the next room. Safety, before she had known safety was a thing you could lose.
Her knees softened.
Run, Harun had said.
The door creaked open an inch.
Inside, a woman’s voice called, warm and Welsh and impossible.
“Rory love? You must be starving.”
For a moment, the whole realm narrowed to that voice.
Her hand tightened on the blade until the cold hurt. The wanting rose again, but this one had teeth sunk deep. Not hunger. Homesickness. Grief for a version of herself who had believed the world could be kept kind by locked doors and good intentions.
Nyx moved beside her, a column of darkness against the gold. “Aurora.”
The use of her full name cut through the spell like a slap.
Rory stepped back.
“No,” she said.
The voice inside the door sighed. “Don’t be difficult.”
That did it.
Anger came hot and ordinary, blessedly human. Rory knew that tone . She knew every polished variation of it, every hook hidden in concern. Don’t be difficult. Don’t make a scene. Don’t you trust me?
She raised the moonsilver dagger.
“I said no.”
She drove the blade into the seam of the door.
The world screamed.
Not loudly. Intimately. The sound went through her teeth and bones, through the crescent scar on her wrist, through the Heartstone blazing at her chest. The oak door split down the middle, not into splinters but into strips of curling script, contract-lines severed and writhing. Amber light poured out, then shadow, then a wind smelling of cold rain over London pavements.
Beyond the broken door stretched a passageway of black stone.
Ancient, narrow, descending.
No feast waited there. No mother’s voice. No comfort. Just darkness ribbed with faint crimson veins, pulsing in time with the Heartstone.
Rory lowered the blade, breathing hard.
Isolde watched her with eyes like lavender mist. “The hungry door has learned your name. You taught it refusal.”
“Lovely,” Rory said, though her voice shook . “Does that go on the invoice?”
Nyx slipped to the threshold and peered down. Their shape sharpened, as if the darkness below fed them outline. “This is the old larder gate.”
From the valley behind them came another bell. Then another. Across Dymas, kitchens answered one by one, a bright and frantic ringing. The winged knives in the sky turned as a flock.
Rory looked back at the impossible orchards, the applauding figs, the milk fountain, the vineyards heavy with jeweled fruit. Beautiful bait. A world with sugar on its teeth.
Wonder still lived in her, stubborn as a weed. Even afraid, even hunted, she could not deny the terrible splendour of it. Dymas sprawled beneath its amber sky, lush and ancient and alive, and for the first time Rory understood that Hel was not merely fire and punishment. It was artistry. It was longing weaponised. It was a banquet set so perfectly that you might not notice the chair had straps until you sat down.
She sheathed the Fae blade with numb fingers.
“Deeper, then?” she said.
Isolde stepped into the dark passage, leaving no footprint in the dust. “The seed goes under before it breaks the earth.”
Nyx followed, violet eyes fading into shadow.
Rory took one last breath of the sweet, dangerous air. Her stomach growled, embarrassingly loud.
“Not now,” she told it.
Then she closed her fist around the burning Heartstone and went after them, down into the old bones of Gluttony, while the bells of Dymas rang behind her like knives striking plates.