AI The portal bit Aurora’s hand the moment she shoved it through, and the Heartstone Pendant flared hot enough to make her curse.
Nyx caught her wrist before she could pull back. Their fingers felt like cold smoke given bones, firm for one breath, mist the next. Behind them, Isolde stood among the oak standing stones of her hidden grove, silver hair still as hanging silk , pale lavender eyes fixed on the tear in the Veil.
“Don’t snatch from a hungry door.”
“Lovely. Advice after the maiming.”
Aurora flexed her fingers. No blood. The skin across her knuckles glimmered with a faint amber sheen, as if something had licked her and left varnish behind.
The rift hung between two ancient oak stones, a vertical wound in the air. Its edges shimmered like heat above tarmac, but within that distortion turned a deeper colour, warm gold, bruised red, and the wet black of ripe plums split open. The hidden grove pressed close around them. Wildflowers bloomed where frost should have killed them, bluebells beside foxgloves beside small white blossoms that leaned away from the portal as if they had sense.
Aurora’s other hand closed around the moonsilver dagger at her hip. Isolde’s gift sat cold through the leather sheath, an insult to the heat pulsing from the Heartstone against her chest.
“Last chance to say this is a dreadful plan.”
“All doors into Hel are dreadful.” Isolde’s mouth curved without warmth . “Some sing before they swallow.”
Nyx tilted their head. Violet light stirred where eyes should have been.
“This one hums.”
Aurora heard it then. Not a hum. A throat. Low, pleased, patient.
“Of course it does.”
She stepped through before caution grew teeth.
The world turned inside out.
For one breath she tasted every meal she had ever eaten, burnt toast in Cardiff, her mother’s leek soup, cheap noodles after lectures, Golden Empress dumplings with chilli oil on her thumb. Then those flavours broke apart into others she had no names for, sugar sharp as glass, meat smoked over funeral wood, wine with a pulse .
Her boots struck black marble .
Aurora staggered, caught herself on a carved pillar, and almost pulled her hand away again. The pillar felt warm. Not sun-warmed stone. Skin-warm. She looked closer and saw veins of red running through it under the polished surface, slow and faint, like embers trapped in bone.
Nyx slid from the portal without a sound, their shadow-body stretching too tall before settling into a humanoid form. Isolde followed last. She left no footprints in the dusting of gold pollen that coated the floor.
The portal shrank behind them to a trembling oval, framed by nothing, held open by the Heartstone’s crimson glow.
Aurora swallowed. The air tasted thick. Honey, iron, bruised herbs, roasting fat, damp soil after digging a grave .
“Well,” she said, because saying nothing felt worse. “Dymas?”
Isolde’s gaze moved over the vaulted hall ahead.
“The mouth of it.”
They stood beneath an archway large enough to swallow a cathedral. Beyond it stretched a corridor built from impossible excess. Black marble floors reflected amber light from no visible flame. Walls rose in layers, not flat but carved into niches holding bowls, cups, spoons, knives, plates, ladles, and thin-pronged forks of ancient design. Some looked Roman. Some looked older. Some looked grown rather than forged, their handles curled like roots and finger bones.
Vines crawled across the ceiling. Their leaves shone dark green, and heavy fruit hung between them, oval and red, each one beating with a soft thud-thud.
Aurora stared.
“Those are hearts.”
“Fruit,” Isolde corrected.
“They’re beating.”
“Many fruits do, here.”
Nyx drifted closer to the wall. One violet eye brightened as they studied a silver cup set into a niche.
“Names on them.”
Aurora stepped nearer, keeping her hands to herself. Thin script crawled around the rim of the cup, not etched but moving, letters rearranging as she looked .
Martha Bell, 1897. Took bread from her children to feed a longing that never named itself.
The words vanished.
A new name formed.
Thomas Adebayo, 1974. Ate praise until no voice remained in the room but his own.
Aurora’s stomach tightened.
“Helbound souls.”
Isolde’s silver hair brushed her sleeve as she passed.
“Contracts have crockery. Sin loves inventory.”
“Does Belphegor know we’re here?”
“The Prince of Gluttony knows when a crumb falls in his realm.”
Aurora looked down at the gold pollen on her boots.
“Fantastic.”
The corridor widened, and the group moved deeper.
Each step changed the sound beneath Aurora’s feet. Marble became tile, tile became packed earth, earth became something soft that gave under pressure and sighed. She did not look down until the third sigh. The floor had turned to pale dough, smooth and dusted with flour, stamped by their passage. Her bootprints rose behind her, swelling shut like wounds.
“Not loving that.”
Nyx bent and pressed a long dark finger to the floor. The dough recoiled.
“It remembers shape.”
“Can it remember us elsewhere?”
“It already has.”
Aurora shot them a look.
“Your comfort needs work.”
“I am not comfort.”
“No, you’re a haunted draught with opinions.”
A faint whisper moved through the corridor. Not wind. Words, layered too densely to catch. It came from the bowls in the walls, from the red fruit overhead, from cracks between tiles that no longer existed.
Hungry.
Honoured.
Again.
More.
Aurora’s pendant warmed. Not the sharp bite from the portal, but a pulse matching the fruit above .
Thud-thud.
Thud-thud.
Her own heart stumbled out of rhythm.
Isolde stopped at a junction where three passages split apart. One smelled of wine and wet roses. One smelled of charred sugar. The third smelled of old copper and mint.
The half-Fae lifted one hand, fingers spread, and the air around them glittered. The Veil existed here too, Aurora realised, not as a wall but as a scar through everything . A faint shimmering distortion hung along the left passage, bending the light, making the walls seem both close enough to touch and far enough to chase.
“That way leads towards a rift point.”
“Earth?”
“Once.”
Aurora’s mouth went dry.
“Once?”
“Doors change when fed.”
Nyx turned towards the middle passage.
“The pendant leans there.”
Aurora glanced down. The Heartstone had tilted on its silver chain, pulled towards the smell of charred sugar. Its deep crimson gemstone glowed from within, a small trapped coal against her black shirt.
“Of course the mysterious Hel necklace has preferences.”
“Not preferences.” Isolde touched the edge of the pendant with one pale finger and drew back before skin met stone. “Appetite recognises appetite.”
“That makes me sound worse than I am.”
“Does it?”
Isolde’s smile sharpened and disappeared.
Aurora moved into the middle passage before the seer could add another riddle that would crawl under her skin and nest there.
The corridor changed again.
The walls opened into an orchard beneath a vaulted ceiling so high it lost itself in amber haze. Trees grew from shallow pools of dark wine. Their trunks twisted in pale spirals, ivory bark banded with gold. Leaves rustled though no breeze touched them. Fruit hung in clusters, some clear as glass with seeds floating inside like tiny black eyes, others furred, others scaled, others shaped like sleeping birds with folded wings.
A path of crushed pearl wound through the orchard. When Aurora set her boot upon it, the fragments chimed.
Above, something huge moved behind the haze. A long shadow . A curl of horn. Gone before she found it.
Nyx spread into a wider shape, edges fraying.
“Old roots.”
“Dymas is younger than hunger,” Isolde said. “And older than manners.”
Aurora reached for a low branch before sense caught up with her. The glass fruit swayed towards her hand. Its skin rang with a fine note. Inside, the black seeds swivelled and fixed on her.
She froze.
The fruit split with a delicate crack.
A scent spilled out, buttery pastry and sea salt and the exact brand of tea her father drank while marking case notes at the kitchen table. Her throat closed so hard it hurt.
Nyx’s shadow-hand closed around her wrist.
“No.”
Aurora yanked her hand back. The fruit sagged, disappointed, then sealed itself with a sound like a kiss.
Isolde watched her, lavender eyes unreadable .
“The first taste is always kind.”
“Was that bait?”
“It offered what you missed.”
“That’s a yes in Fae.”
“That is a yes in every tongue with teeth.”
Aurora wiped her palm on her jeans though she had touched nothing. Her crescent scar on her left wrist tingled under Nyx’s grip.
“Do not let this realm personalise itself,” Nyx murmured. “Dymas butters the blade.”
“Noted. No snacks.”
A laugh moved through the orchard.
It came from several places at once. High in the branches. Beneath the wine pools. Inside Aurora’s own mouth, as if her teeth had learned amusement.
She drew the Fae-Forged Blade.
The moonsilver dagger slid free with a cold sigh. Its slender, leaf-shaped edge drank the amber light and returned a paler glow. The orchard leaned away. Leaves turned their undersides. The wine in the pools quivered .
Isolde’s gaze flicked to the blade.
“Careful. Courts remember stolen moonlight.”
“You gave it to me.”
“I did not say they blame fairly.”
The path led them to a low bridge arched over a narrow canal. The water below ran thick and dark, carrying petals, bones from small birds, and tiny silver spoons. On the far bank, the orchard ended at a pair of bronze doors sunk into a wall of living vine.
Each door bore a face.
Not a carved face. A sleeping one, formed from bronze skin and grapevine hair, cheeks full, lips stained purple. Their closed eyelids twitched as the group approached.
Aurora slowed.
“Please tell me door knockers count as furniture.”
The left face inhaled.
“Name your hunger.”
Its voice rolled over Aurora like warm syrup poured over stones.
The right face opened one eye. The pupil looked like a black olive .
“Name your debt.”
Nyx’s form thinned until the bridge showed through their ribs.
“Old wardens of the feast.”
Isolde stopped at the foot of the bridge.
“They demand entry price.”
Aurora kept the dagger low.
“And if we don’t pay?”
The left face smiled.
“Guests without appetite become garnish.”
The right face smiled wider.
“Guests without debt become meat.”
Aurora looked from one bronze face to the other.
“That feels legally suspect.”
“Law is a mortal spice,” the left face crooned.
“Rare here,” said the right.
Isolde lifted her chin.
“I hunger for an end not yet born. I owe three truths and one betrayal.”
The faces sighed, pleased. Vines uncurled around the door seams.
Nyx moved next.
“I hunger for a shadow that remembers my name. I owe a body to the dark.”
The bronze faces shuddered. The right one licked its lips.
“Old debt.”
“Rich debt.”
Then their eyes fixed on Aurora.
The Heartstone pulsed so hard it tapped against her sternum.
Name your hunger.
Name your debt.
She could have lied. A simple human lie. Food. Safety. Answers. None of them felt safe enough to speak aloud here.
Isolde’s warning hung unsaid between them. Fae could not lie, but human words still had weight in Hel.
Aurora tucked the dagger against her thigh and met the bronze faces’ gaze.
“I hunger for the truth about who gave me this pendant.”
The doors inhaled as one.
“And the debt?”
Aurora felt the old shape of Evan’s fingers around her arm, the Cardiff rain on a courthouse step, Eva’s voice through a phone telling her to run, her own name packed into a bag with three jumpers and no plan. Debt had many mouths.
She chose the one that mattered here.
“I owe no prince my obedience.”
The orchard went silent.
Isolde’s pale eyes widened by a fraction. Nyx’s shadow snapped tight around them.
The left bronze face stopped smiling.
“That is not a debt.”
“No,” Aurora said. “It’s notice.”
The Fae blade glowed brighter.
For one terrible breath nothing moved.
Then both bronze faces burst into laughter. The sound shook fruit from the trees. Glass globes shattered in the wine pools. Scaled plums split open and bled blue juice into the path.
“Bold morsel.”
“Sharp morsel.”
“Unseasoned.”
“Not for long.”
The bronze doors groaned apart.
Heat rolled out, carrying the roar of a crowd.
Beyond lay a banquet hall broad enough to house a town. Tables stretched in rings around a sunken arena, each table piled with impossible food, roasted beasts with jewelled eyes, towers of sugared bones, silver bowls of soup that whispered names from the steam, fruits that squirmed in their skins. Hundreds of figures feasted under amber chandeliers made from antlers and crystalised fat. Some looked human. Some had horns, tusks, feathers, scaled throats, mouths in the palms of their hands. Servants with blank golden masks moved between them, filling cups before anyone lifted them.
No one turned.
No one looked at the newcomers.
That was worse.
At the centre of the hall, down in the arena, a circular dais held a stone table split from a single slab of red marble . Upon it rested a shallow golden dish. In the dish, nestled on black salt, lay a second Heartstone Pendant.
Aurora’s own pendant dragged forward, chain biting the back of her neck.
“There.”
Nyx’s voice scraped thin.
“Twin flame.”
Isolde’s face had lost its riddle-smile.
“Not twin. Lure.”
The bronze doors slammed shut behind them.
Every masked servant stopped pouring.
Every mouth in the hall stopped chewing.
Hundreds of heads turned towards Aurora in one wet, hungry motion.
The golden dish in the arena cracked, and the second Heartstone opened like an eye.