AI The Heartstone woke before the world changed.
One moment Aurora Carter stood ankle-deep in the damp grass of Richmond Park, cold seeping through the cracked leather of her boots, breath smoking in the winter dark. The next, the pendant beneath her jumper gave a soft, living throb against her sternum.
She stopped so abruptly that Nyx drifted through her shoulder.
A cold shiver knifed down her spine. “Sorry.”
Nyx re-formed beside her, tall and not quite solid, a cut-out of deeper night against the black trunks of the oaks . Their violet eyes glimmered with an old, unhappy patience. “It is not I who should concern you.”
Aurora hooked a finger under the silver chain and drew the pendant out. The crimson stone, no bigger than her thumbnail, pulsed with faint inner light. Warmth bled into her palm. Not hot. Not yet. But insistent, like a second heartbeat trying to teach hers a new rhythm.
Ahead, Isolde Varga stood between two ancient oaks that had no business looking like standing stones and yet did. Their trunks rose too straight, bark furrowed in patterns that made Aurora’s eyes water if she stared too long. Silver hair spilled down Isolde’s back to her waist, bright as moonlit water. The hem of her pale dress stirred in a wind Aurora couldn’t feel.
The half-Fae turned. Her lavender eyes caught the thin moonlight and held it.
“The hungry door remembers its key,” she said.
Aurora closed her fingers around the Heartstone. “Could you try saying that in a way that doesn’t make me want to run in the opposite direction?”
Isolde’s mouth curved. “You may run. The road will still be beneath your feet.”
“Fantastic. Love that.”
Nyx made a sound like leaves scraping over stone. It might have been amusement.
They had been walking for ten minutes by Aurora’s phone and nearly an hour by the ache in her calves. Richmond Park had thinned around them in ways that made no geographical sense. The road noise had faded first, swallowed by mist. Then the city glow vanished. The oaks grew older, wider, their roots twisting up from the earth like sleeping knuckles. Wildflowers bloomed in the frost—bluebells, foxgloves, marigolds, flowers Aurora couldn’t name with petals like glass and throats full of faint green fire.
No footprints marked Isolde’s path through the wet grass.
Aurora had noticed that early and had been determined not to mention it, because there were only so many unsettling details a person could acknowledge before she either adapted or started screaming. She had done enough screaming in her life. Adaptation was cleaner.
The grove opened without warning.
One step took them between the oak-stones. The air tightened around Aurora’s skin, a thin membrane pressing through her clothes, her hair, her teeth. The Heartstone flashed bright red. For a breath she saw something overlaid on the world: a shimmering distortion like heat over tarmac, only vertical, immense, and threaded with colours no normal human eye had ever needed to process. The Veil, she thought, though the word came not as knowledge but as recognition, a name whispered behind her ribs .
Then the pressure snapped.
Aurora staggered into a clearing blazing with summer.
Warm air wrapped around her. Wildflowers carpeted the ground in impossible abundance, nodding beneath a sky that was still night but deeper, cleaner, pricked with stars too large and too close. The moon hung low and sharp as a blade. In the centre of the clearing rose a ring of stones, not oak this time but black basalt veined with gold . Between two of them, the air had torn.
Not opened. Torn.
The rift hung taller than a door and wider than a lorry, its edges rippling like burnt paper. Beyond it lay amber light.
Aurora’s hand went automatically to the dagger hidden inside her jacket. The Fae-Forged Blade pressed cold against her ribs through its sheath, a slender leaf of moonsilver that never warmed no matter how close she kept it to her body. Isolde had given it to her with the same serene expression she might have worn handing over a cup of tea.
A gift, she had said.
Aurora had learned to distrust gifts that could cut through magical wards and demons alike.
The pendant pulsed again, harder. It tugged—not physically, not exactly, but some part of her leaned toward the rift before she told it not to. The air smelled of honey, hot bread, crushed grapes, woodsmoke, roasting meat. Her stomach clenched with sudden hunger so sharp it embarrassed her.
“I ate before we came,” she muttered.
“Dymas cares little for what you have done,” Isolde said. “It asks what you desire .”
Aurora looked at the amber tear. “And this is definitely the least stupid way to find out who sent me the pendant?”
“The least is a poor word. The way remains.”
Nyx slipped closer to the rift. Their edges frayed in the gold light, shadow thinning to smoke. “Dymas,” they whispered. “Gluttony’s garden. Belphegor’s domain. Old feasts. Older bargains.”
Aurora swallowed. “You’ve been?”
“I have been near.” Nyx’s violet gaze stayed fixed on the opening. “Near was sufficient.”
That did nothing helpful to her pulse .
Behind them the grove rustled, though there was no wind. Flowers turned their heads toward the rift. Aurora had the unpleasant impression of being watched by every petal.
She drew the Fae blade.
The dagger slid free with a sound like ice cracking. Moonlight caught along its leaf-shaped edge, kindling a pale luminescence that made the gold-veined stones seem to flinch. Cold bit into her palm. It steadied her better than any deep breath could have.
“All right,” she said. “In, look around, don’t eat anything, don’t sign anything, don’t touch anything that looks like it wants to be touched.”
Isolde’s smile sharpened. “Wisdom wears plain boots.”
“Taking that as a compliment.”
Aurora stepped through before she could talk herself out of it.
Heat swallowed her whole.
For one vertiginous second, she fell sideways through colour. Amber, crimson, green-gold, a darkness ribbed with silver. Sound stretched into a single low note that hummed in her bones. The Heartstone burned against her chest. The dagger froze in her fist.
Then her boots hit stone.
She dropped into a crouch, blade up, shoulders tight. Her vision swam. The air was thick, fragrant, humid enough to cling to her face. She blinked until the world assembled itself.
Dymas lay beneath a warm amber sky.
Not sunset. Not exactly. The light had the richness of late afternoon poured through honey, gilding everything it touched. Aurora stood on a terrace of pale stone at the crest of a hill. Behind her, the rift shimmered between two pillars carved in the shape of open mouths, their tongues extended to form the threshold. Nyx emerged as a spill of black smoke and gathered themselves with visible effort. Isolde followed last, serene and untouched, her bare feet leaving no mark in the thin dust.
Below them, the realm unfurled in impossible abundance.
Vineyards cascaded down the hillsides in regimented green waves, each vine heavy with grapes the size of plums. Some were deep purple, some translucent gold, some glowed faintly from within like captured lanterns. Orchards spread beyond, trees bowed under fruits Aurora had never seen: pear-shaped things with ruby skin and blue leaves; clusters of silver berries chiming softly in the breeze; enormous figs split open to show interiors bright as sunset. Between orchards ran canals of clear water, and along their banks bloomed herbs in thick, fragrant drifts. Basil, mint, rosemary, and stranger scents—pepper and smoke, lemon and rain, something savoury that made her mouth flood.
Farther off rose a city.
At least, Aurora thought it was a city. Towers of cream stone and copper domes climbed from the valley floor, threaded with terraces, bridges, hanging gardens. Smoke curled from a hundred chimneys. Great halls stood open to the amber sky, their roofs supported by columns carved like fruiting trees. She heard music from that distance, faint but layered: strings, drums, laughter, the clash of dishes, voices raised in song or argument or both.
Above the city, something vast and winged turned slow circles in the golden air. Not a bird. Too many joints.
Aurora lowered the dagger by an inch. “Bloody hell.”
The words felt too small, but they were what she had.
A warm wind moved up the hill and brought the smell of baking sugar. Her stomach cramped again. She hadn’t been this hungry since university, when she’d lived on toast and stubbornness through exam season. The hunger felt personal, intelligent. It knew the exact hollow places in her.
Nyx’s shadow-body flickered . “Guard your wanting.”
Aurora glanced at them. Their outline had hardened in the Dymasian light, more humanoid than usual, though the edges still smoked. “That a general life tip or specific to the demon buffet realm?”
“Yes.”
“Helpful.”
Isolde drifted to the terrace edge. “Every table has teeth here.”
Aurora looked down at the stone beneath her boots. The terrace was carved with reliefs: vines, plates, cups, hands reaching. At first it seemed decorative. Then she saw the hands were not all human. Claws, paws, delicate Fae fingers, skeletal grips, all stretching toward laden platters at the centre of each panel. Some wrists wore manacles. Some fingers were bitten to the bone.
Unease threaded through the wonder .
She turned slowly , taking stock because panic was useless but inventory saved lives. Portal behind them. Terrace exposed. One path down the hill, paved in hexagonal tiles glazed green and gold. Low walls to either side, beyond them a steep fall into vineyard rows. No immediate guards. No obvious demons unless the many-jointed thing overhead counted, and she very much hoped it was sightseeing .
At the start of the path stood a stone plinth bearing a silver tray.
On the tray sat three small cups filled with dark red liquid.
Aurora stared. “Absolutely not.”
The cups chimed.
Not from movement. From offense.
Isolde’s lavender eyes gleamed. “Hospitality knocks with soft knuckles.”
“It can keep knocking.” Aurora stepped around the plinth.
As she passed, the scent rising from the cups changed. Wine, at first. Then coffee, strong and sweet the way Yu-Fei made it when Golden Empress had been slammed with orders and Rory looked dead on her feet. Then her mother’s cawl simmering on a rainy Cardiff evening, leeks and lamb and pepper, comfort pressed into steam.
Aurora’s throat tightened so fast it hurt.
For half a second she was nineteen again, standing in her parents’ kitchen with textbooks spread across the table, her father arguing case law in the sitting room over the phone, her mother humming as she chopped carrots. Before Evan. Before London. Before the word Hel had meant anything other than an expression.
Her hand moved toward the nearest cup.
Cold snapped against her palm. The Fae blade. She had gripped it hard enough for the hilt to bite.
Aurora jerked back. “Sneaky little bastard.”
The cups stilled.
Nyx watched her with those faint violet eyes. “It found memory.”
“It can give it back.”
She started down the path.
The tiles warmed underfoot despite her boots. As they descended, the vineyards rose around them, leaves whispering in a language of dry green. Grapes hung close enough to touch. Their skins were taut, luminous, beaded with dew though the air was warm. One brushed Aurora’s sleeve and burst without pressure.
Juice splashed onto the path.
It steamed.
Where the red drops struck the tile, tiny mouths opened in the glaze and lapped them up.
Aurora froze. “Did the floor just—”
“Yes,” said Nyx.
“I hate that you don’t even sound surprised.”
“The floor is hungry.”
“Of course it is.”
Isolde moved ahead, untroubled, silver hair swinging. She did not disturb a single leaf. Aurora watched the place where her feet met the path. No dust shifted. No tile-mouth opened. The realm either did not notice her or knew better.
A sound rose from the vineyard to Aurora’s left.
Singing.
Low, rhythmic , many voices together. Not the polished music drifting from the city, but work-song, roughened by labour . Aurora edged toward the wall and peered through the leaves.
Between the rows moved a line of people in linen tunics, baskets strapped to their backs. Human, mostly, though one had curling horns and another’s skin shimmered faint green. They clipped grapes with small curved knives and laid them carefully into baskets already overflowing. Each wore a collar of polished copper. Each collar was linked by a thin chain to the vine nearest them.
A woman glanced up.
She was perhaps fifty, with brown skin weathered by sun and hands stained purple to the wrist. Her eyes met Aurora’s. For one second, something like warning flared there .
Then the vine beside her tightened.
The chain jerked. The woman gasped and bent back to her work.
Aurora’s grip shifted on the dagger. “Helbound souls?”
Nyx’s voice thinned. “Contracts take many shapes.”
“Can we cut them free?”
Isolde answered without looking back. “A blade may sever iron, silver, spell, and skin. It cannot sever a promise still being swallowed.”
Aurora hated that answer . Mostly because she understood enough of it.
The woman in the vineyard did not look up again. The song continued, but now Aurora heard the strain beneath it, the places where voices cracked and were covered by others. The wonder of the hillside soured. The abundance remained—the impossible fruit, the golden light, the fragrant wind—but beneath it ran a jawbone, white and waiting.
They moved deeper.
The path curved into an orchard where the trees grew in spirals, trunks twisting around empty air. Fruits dangled at different heights, each variety giving off its own faint sound. Silver berries chimed. Blue-skinned pomegranates ticked like clocks. Long green pods hummed when the wind touched them. Aurora passed a tree heavy with pale peaches, each one blushing gently as she neared.
One peach split open along a seam.
Inside was not flesh but a tiny room.
Aurora stopped despite herself.
A table no larger than her thumbnail stood within the peach, set with a white cloth and a single golden plate. On the plate lay a crumb of bread. Beside the table sat a chair. In the chair, something small and gaunt turned its head toward her.
Its face was almost human. Its mouth was far too wide.
It smiled.
Aurora stepped back so quickly she bumped Nyx.
The peach sealed with a wet sigh.
“Nope,” she said. “No. We are not unpacking that.”
Nyx tilted their head. “This realm delights in nested hungers.”
“This realm needs therapy.”
A laugh came from above.
Aurora snapped the dagger up.
A boy lounged on a branch overhead, though she would have sworn the branch had been empty a heartbeat earlier. He looked twelve until he smiled; then his eyes gave him away, black from lid to lid and old as rot. He wore a waistcoat embroidered with tiny knives and held a pear in one hand. Juice ran down his wrist.
“Guests who do not eat,” he said. “Guests who do not drink. Guests who clutch moon-cold steel and wear a Dymasian heart. How rude. How interesting.”
Aurora’s pulse kicked. “We’re passing through.”
“Everything passes through.” He took another bite of pear. The crunch sounded like bone. “Some things are digested.”
Nyx’s shape stretched taller, shadow spilling across the tiles despite the amber light. “We seek no table.”
The boy’s black eyes flicked to them. For the first time, his smile faltered. “Shade.”
“Imp,” Nyx whispered.
“Steward,” the boy corrected, offended. “Assistant Under-Curator of Orchard Appetites.”
“Congratulations,” Aurora said. “We’re still passing through.”
His gaze dropped to the Heartstone at her chest. The pendant had slipped free of her jumper and glowed with a steady crimson light.
The boy stopped swinging his legs.
“Oh,” he said softly . Hunger sharpened his face. “Not passing. Summoned.”
The word landed badly.
Aurora kept her expression flat, the one she had used in tutorials when men twice her confidence tried to explain her own argument back to her. “By whom?”
The steward licked pear juice from his thumb. “If you do not know the host, perhaps you are the course.”
Aurora smiled without warmth . “If you don’t know the answer, perhaps you’re wasting my time.”
For a moment, the orchard went silent. Even the chiming berries hushed.
Then the boy laughed, delighted and horrible. “Sharp little mortal.”
“I get that a lot.”
“No, you don’t.” He leaned down from the branch, hanging upside down now, hair dangling. “You get underestimated. Different flavour.”
Aurora did not like that he was right.
Isolde had turned back at last. Her lavender eyes rested on the steward, and though she said nothing, the air tightened. The boy noticed. His smile peeled away.
“Exile,” he said.
“Seedling,” Isolde replied.
He flinched as if she had slapped him.
Aurora filed that away. Names mattered here. Titles mattered. Insults apparently had taxonomy.
The steward vanished in a shower of pear blossoms. His voice lingered after him, drifting between the trees.
“The road to the city fattens those who walk it. Mind your emptiness, Heart-bearer. Dymas fills all bowls.”
The blossoms fell around them. Where they touched the path, the tile-mouths opened and ate.
Aurora exhaled slowly . “Heart-bearer. That sounds official in a way I deeply resent.”
“The pendant has announced you,” Nyx said.
“Yes, I gathered that from the creepy fruit child.”
Isolde resumed walking. “Names cling where blood has brushed.”
Aurora looked down at the Heartstone. Its warmth had become almost comforting , which made her want to rip it off and fling it into the nearest hungry hedge. But it had led her here. It had been given to her by someone who knew enough about Hel portals and Dymas to choose a key disguised as jewellery.
An unknown benefactor.
She was starting to suspect benefactor was too generous a word.
The orchard thinned. Ahead, the path ended at a balcony overlooking a lower road paved in red stone. Carts rolled along it, drawn by beasts like oxen assembled from smoke and muscle, their horns plated with brass. The carts overflowed with ingredients: sacks that wriggled, barrels that sang drunkenly, cages full of fluttering lights. Chefs in tall hats and blood-spattered aprons argued in half a dozen languages. One woman with four arms sharpened knives while marching. A man whose beard was made of blue flame tasted sauce from a ladle, wept, and punched his assistant in ecstasy.
Beyond them, the city gates stood open.
They were enormous, carved from dark wood banded with copper. Above the arch, letters burned in a script Aurora could not read yet somehow understood enough to feel warned by. On either side of the gates, fountains poured wine into marble basins. Figures crowded around them with cups, bowls, cupped hands, open mouths. Laughter spilled upward. So did sobbing.
And behind the city, rising from its centre, stood a palace.
Not the fairy-tale sort. This sprawled. It lounged. Domes swelled like ripe fruit. Terraces layered upon terraces, each laden with tables, gardens, pools, silk awnings. Golden windows glowed like watchful eyes. Smoke rose from kitchens vast as cathedrals. Even from this distance Aurora felt the pull of it—a promise of warmth , safety, satisfaction. Every craving answered. Every ache fed until it forgot its own name.
Her scar prickled.
She looked down at her left wrist. The small crescent-shaped mark, pale against her skin, seemed sharper in the amber light . A childhood accident, stupid and ordinary: broken glass, blood on the kitchen tiles, her mother’s frightened hands. It had healed. Some things did.
Some hungers didn’t deserve feeding.
Aurora closed her fingers over the scar, then let go and sheathed the Fae blade only halfway, keeping its cold within reach.
“We go to the gates,” she said. “We listen. We find out who’s expecting me. Then we leave.”
Nyx turned their violet gaze on her. “Few leave Dymas with the same hunger they carried in.”
“Good thing I’m adaptable.”
Isolde looked toward the palace. The amber sky gilded her profile, making her seem less a woman than a figure painted onto the edge of a prophecy. “The mouth opens. The tooth waits. The heart that beats in borrowed stone will learn which hand set it ticking.”
Aurora sighed. “One day, I’m going to ask someone a question and get a normal answer.”
“No,” said Isolde.
Nyx’s whisper curled around them, almost gentle. “Come, Rory.”
She glanced at them, surprised by the use of her name. Not Aurora. Not Heart-bearer. Rory, as if they stood in an alley behind Silas’ bar rather than on a balcony above a road in Hel.
It helped more than she wanted to admit.
Aurora squared her shoulders and started down the steps toward the red road. Heat rose from the city. Music swelled. Somewhere, bells rang, deep and jubilant, announcing a feast or a warning. The Heartstone pulsed in answer, steady as a drum beneath her collarbone.
With each step, Dymas opened around her—lush, golden, ravenous.
And despite the fear coiled tight in her gut, despite the hungry floor and chained workers and smiling things in fruit, wonder moved through her too. She had spent years trying to make her life smaller so it could not hurt her as badly. A flat above a bar. Delivery routes. Cash in hand. Exit plans. Sensible shoes by the door.
Now an impossible sky burned above her, and an ancient realm breathed in sugar and smoke, and somewhere inside its devouring splendour waited the person—or thing—that had reached across worlds to find her.
Aurora Carter walked toward the gates of Gluttony with a demon-killing blade at her side, a shadow at her back, a seer ahead of her, and her own stubborn heart refusing, for the moment, to be eaten.