AI The standing stones were not stone.
Rory realized it only after she put her hand to one of them and felt a pulse answer beneath her palm, slow and stubborn as a buried heart. From a distance they looked like ancient oaks petrified upright, bark ridged into knots and hollows, roots sunk deep into the winter-dark grass of Richmond Park. Up close, the grain shifted when she wasn’t looking directly at it. Faces seemed to press from inside the wood, cheekbones and closed eyes and mouths full of leaves.
“Don’t stare too long,” Isolde said.
Rory snatched her hand back.
The half-Fae stood barefoot on the damp earth, silver hair falling to her waist in a spill bright enough to catch what little moonlight slipped through the branches. Her pale lavender eyes were fixed on the gap between two of the standing oaks. No footprints marked the ground behind her. Wildflowers crowded around her ankles despite the January cold—bluebells, foxgloves, white roses opening and closing as though breathing in their sleep .
“Why?” Rory asked.
“Because some doors remember hunger.”
“That is not an answer.”
“It is the truest one you will receive.”
Nyx gave a sound like wind worrying at a cracked window. Amusement, maybe. They waited where the shadow of a twisted hawthorn lay thick across the grass, tall and almost solid tonight, violet eyes dim in the dark slit of their face. Their edges frayed and gathered, frayed and gathered, as if their body could not decide whether it belonged to the world.
Rory touched the Heartstone pendant through her jumper.
The deep crimson gem had gone warm against her sternum the moment they’d stepped through the hidden fold in Richmond Park and into Isolde’s grove. Now it burned with a steady heat, not painful, but insistently alive . The thumbnail-sized stone glowed through the fabric in faint red beats. Not her heartbeat. Something slower. Older.
She had spent the morning delivering prawn dumplings and soy-glazed aubergine through sleet-slicked London streets, cursing bus lanes and cyclists and men who tipped two quid on a seventy-pound order. Now she stood in a Fae pocket between worlds, about to walk into Hel.
Her life had developed an alarming habit of escalating without consulting her.
“Last chance to be cryptic in a helpful direction,” Rory said.
Isolde’s mouth curved. “In the amber realm, every feast has a bill. Do not eat what is offered. Do not praise what is beautiful without knowing whether it listens. Do not bargain with chefs.”
“Chefs?”
“Especially chefs.”
Rory looked at Nyx.
Nyx tilted their head. “Dymas is not fire and chains. Mortals imagine Hel too simply.”
“Brilliant. Hate a surprise theme.”
“You wanted the source of the pendant’s call,” Isolde said. “Beyond this threshold, it sings loudest.”
“I didn’t say I wanted it. I said ignoring it seemed likely to get me killed.”
“Wisdom often arrives dressed as reluctance.”
Rory exhaled through her nose, then checked the blade at her hip.
The Fae-Forged dagger sat in the sheath Isolde had given her, light enough to feel imaginary until Rory touched the hilt. Moonsilver, leaf-shaped, always cold. Even through leather, it chilled her fingers. When she drew it halfway, moonlight caught the edge and the metal answered with a faint milky glow, like frost beneath water.
“Will that cut whatever’s on the other side?” she asked.
“The blade cuts what resists being cut,” Isolde said.
“Again, almost useful.”
Nyx drifted closer. “If the portal collapses, find shadow. I can move us through if the Veil has not sealed completely .”
“And if it has?”
Their violet eyes flickered . “Then run toward the music, not away from it.”
Rory stared at them. “You’ve all been saving up the worst possible travel advice, haven’t you?”
But her hands had steadied. Complaining helped. It put the fear somewhere useful, gave it a chair and told it to behave.
Isolde lifted one pale hand.
The gap between the standing oaks shimmered .
At first it looked like heat rising off tarmac in summer, a distortion of branch and moon and dark beyond. Then the air thinned. Rory saw something behind it that was not Richmond Park: a sky the color of honey held over flame, warm amber and endless, crossed by slow-moving ribbons of darker gold. The scent came next. Not brimstone. Not rot. Spice, yeast, roasting meat, crushed grapes, wet soil after sun. Richness piled on richness until her stomach clenched with sudden hunger.
The Heartstone flared hot.
Rory swallowed. “That’s cheating.”
“Yes,” Isolde said softly .
The portal opened like an eye.
They stepped through.
For one breath, Rory was nowhere.
The world became pressure and color. Something brushed over her skin with the delicate insistence of cobwebs. She glimpsed, or thought she glimpsed, a vast translucent membrane stretched between impossible distances, shimmering with hairline cracks and points of light. The Veil. She had no supernatural sight, not really , yet the pendant burned and the Fae blade iced her hip and for a heartbeat she saw the boundary between worlds like oil on black water.
Shapes moved along it.
Watchers, maybe. Wardens. Or things pretending to be.
Then gravity remembered her.
Rory stumbled onto warm grass and caught herself before she went to one knee.
Air rolled over her, heavy as velvet .
She looked up.
Dymas opened around them in terraces of impossible abundance. They stood on a hillside covered in grass so green it looked lit from within, each blade tipped with dew that reflected the amber sky in tiny burning beads. Below, vineyards unfurled in geometric rivers across the valley, vines climbing silver trellises taller than houses. Grapes hung in great clustered globes—purple-black, translucent green, ruby red, some glowing faintly from inside like lanterns. Orchards marched beyond them, trees bowed under fruit Rory could almost name and fruit she absolutely could not: peaches with blue skins, pears shaped like bells, pomegranates split open to reveal seeds that pulsed like coals.
Farther still rose a city.
No, not a city. A banquet pretending to be architecture.
Domes of copper and glazed ceramic swelled above walls the color of baked bread. Towers spiraled like spun sugar, delicate bridges laced between them. Broad avenues shone white-gold beneath streams of figures too distant to make out. Smoke curled from a hundred chimneys, carrying scents that shifted with each breath—cinnamon, charred lemon, butter, blood-hot iron, caramelizing onions, sea salt, wine.
Rory’s mouth watered so violently she bit her tongue.
Pain grounded her. Copper cut through sweetness.
Beside her, Nyx became a smear on the grass, then gathered upright. Their outline trembled . In this amber light, their shadows did not fall in one direction. They stretched in several, each pointing toward a different unseen sun.
Isolde stepped through last. The grass bent beneath Rory’s boots and whispered beneath Nyx’s drifting weight , but it did not mark Isolde at all. She looked diminished here, Rory thought, and then immediately revised it. Not diminished. Sharper. A silver needle in a golden room.
Behind them, the portal winked between two upright black stones that had not been there a moment ago. These were true stone, glossy and veined with red, carved with symbols that shifted when Rory tried to read them. The air between them shimmered faintly.
The Heartstone’s glow settled into a steady throb .
“Welcome,” Nyx whispered, “to Dymas.”
Something in the grass answered.
Rory looked down.
Small white flowers had turned their faces toward her. Their centers were not yellow but tiny mouths, petaled lips parting in soundless song. As she watched, one sighed out a thread of scent—fresh bread, exactly like the bakery near Cardiff Market where her mother used to buy bara brith on Saturdays. The memory hit with such force that her throat tightened. Rain on her hood. Her father’s hand warm between her shoulder blades. Jennifer laughing because Rory had icing on her nose.
She took a step back.
The flowers leaned after her.
“Rory,” Isolde said.
“I’m fine.”
“You are homesick.”
“I’m always homesick. That doesn’t get special points.”
“Here, it does.”
Nyx’s form spilled low over the flowers. The little mouths closed at once, petals shivering.
They began down the hillside.
At first there was a path, or something like one: flat stones set into the grass, each round and pale as a dinner plate. They were warm under Rory’s boots. Too warm. She avoided looking at the faint red lines veining them. The air hummed with insects, but the creatures that darted among the wild herbs had glass wings and bodies like droplets of honey. Whenever one landed on a flower, the bloom shivered and changed color.
The valley breathed.
That was the only way Rory could think of it. Wind moved over the vineyards in slow waves, and the vines lifted their leaves like lungs taking air. Somewhere below, bells rang—not church bells, but glass, silver, ceramic, hundreds of tones cascading into one another. Laughter rose with it, distant and delighted. Applause followed. Then a roar, as if an unseen crowd had approved of something spectacular.
“Culinary competition,” Nyx murmured.
Rory shot them a look. “You’re serious.”
“Always.”
“You never look serious.”
“I have no face.”
“Convenient.”
They passed into the first vineyard.
The temperature changed at once. The hillside had been warm, but between the vines the heat turned intimate, damp, skin-close. Leaves brushed Rory’s sleeves. Grapes hung at shoulder height, swollen and perfect . Some were as large as plums. One cluster trembled as she passed.
A grape split.
The scent of red wine flooded the air, thick and dark, and a drop rolled down the skin like blood. Rory stopped.
Inside the split fruit was a tiny scene.
Not a reflection. A room.
A woman in an apron stood at a long table, kneading dough with furious concentration. Her hair was pinned in a messy bun. Flour whitened her forearms. Around her, horned figures watched from high-backed chairs, applauding politely each time she slammed the dough down.
The woman looked up.
Across whatever impossible distance lay between vineyard and room, her eyes met Rory’s.
Help me, she mouthed.
The grape sealed.
Rory’s hand went to the dagger. “What the hell was that?”
Isolde’s gaze remained on the cluster. “A contract ripening.”
“A person.”
“A soul.”
“That doesn’t make it better.”
“No,” Isolde said. “It makes it older.”
Rory stared at the grape until the purple skin blurred. “Can we get her out?”
Nyx’s shadow slid along the trellis, testing. The silver supports hummed. Their darkness recoiled with a hiss.
“Not without breaking the vineyard’s claim,” they said. “And not quietly.”
Rory laughed once, no humor in it. “Right. God forbid we be rude in Hel.”
Isolde turned those pale eyes on her. “Compassion is a blade. Draw it too early and you dull it on the first chain you see.”
Rory hated how much sense that made. She hated more that Isolde could not lie.
They moved on.
The vineyard grew stranger the deeper they went. Trellises braided overhead into tunnels. Leaves shifted from green to bronze to a deep red almost black. The grapes whispered now. Not words at first, just breathy fragments, sighs trapped in skins. Then voices emerged.
A child asking for water.
A man reciting measurements in French.
Someone praying in Welsh.
Rory clenched her jaw . The pendant pulsed hotter with every step, as though answering those trapped beats one by one . Her left wrist itched beneath her sleeve, the old crescent scar prickling. Childhood accident, her mother had always called it, because “the day you tried to duel a greenhouse” sounded less respectable. Rory rubbed it with her thumb until the sensation passed.
The tunnel opened without warning.
They emerged into an orchard.
Wonder struck her before unease could get its boots back on.
The trees were enormous. Their trunks rose in smooth twists of copper-brown bark, wide enough that three people holding hands would not have circled one. Branches arched high overhead, weaving into a canopy heavy with lantern-fruit. The fruits varied from branch to branch: golden apples with constellations freckled across their skins, crescent-shaped citrus that chimed softly when the wind moved them, dark figs leaking threads of blue light, white berries clustered like pearls.
Between the trees drifted fish.
Rory stopped dead.
They swam through the air in lazy schools, translucent bodies rippling, long fins trailing like silk . Each carried a flickering flame in its belly. One turned toward Rory, round black eyes curious, and opened its mouth. A bubble floated out. Inside the bubble was the scent of lavender and smoke.
Rory lifted a hand despite herself.
The fish came closer. Its cool side brushed her fingers, leaving dew on her skin. For one impossible second, delight rose through her clean and bright. No hook in it. No hunger. Just the absurd, aching beauty of a glowing fish swimming beneath an amber sky in a realm that should not exist.
She smiled.
Nyx watched her. “Not all wonders here are traps.”
“Just enough of them to make that an unhelpful statistic.”
The fish flicked its tail and rejoined its school.
Something cracked under Rory’s boot.
She froze.
At her feet lay a nutshell the size of a teacup, carved inside with minute script. She crouched, careful not to touch it, and saw tiny rows of names etched into the pearly interior. Hundreds of them. Some had lines drawn through. Others glowed faintly.
“Guest list?” she asked.
Isolde bent beside her, hair pooling over one shoulder. “Ledger.”
“For what?”
“For those invited to dine.”
“Invited,” Rory repeated.
“In Dymas, invitations can be inherited, stolen, purchased, or owed.”
The shell trembled .
A fresh name burned into the surface, letters forming in smoking strokes.
Aurora Carter.
Cold walked up Rory’s spine despite the humid air.
Nyx went very still.
“Well,” Rory said, because panic could sod off and wait its turn, “that’s pushy.”
The name brightened.
The orchard changed around them.
The chiming citrus fell silent. The air-fish scattered upward in a burst of ghostly fins. Far off, beyond the trees, music rose—strings and drums, quick and coaxing, the rhythm of a procession. Laughter threaded through it. Not distant now. Coming closer.
Isolde straightened. “The realm has noticed the pendant.”
“The realm can mind its business.”
“Realms of appetite have no manners,” Nyx whispered.
Rory stood and scanned the orchard. The path had vanished. Of course it had. Between one blink and the next, the neat line of pale stones behind them had become a scatter of mushrooms with caps like glazed buns. Ahead, the trees had shifted, trunks crowding tighter, branches lowering as if to listen.
The Heartstone pulled.
Not metaphorically. The chain tugged against the back of her neck, subtle but definite, drawing her toward the left where two vast trees leaned together. Between them hung a curtain of vines heavy with small red flowers. Beyond the curtain, a darker glow pulsed in time with the pendant.
Rory wrapped her fingers around the gem. Heat soaked into her palm.
“That way,” she said.
Isolde’s expression flickered . “The hungry road.”
“You couldn’t have called it something like ‘the scenic path’?”
“It is scenic.”
Nyx drifted past her, violet eyes narrowing. “And hungry.”
The music grew louder. Voices came with it, bright and many.
“Honored guest,” someone called from the orchard behind them. “Lost before the first course? How tragic.”
Rory turned.
Figures moved between the trees.
At first they looked human in the way mannequins looked human from across a dark room. Slender bodies in embroidered coats and silk gowns, faces powdered white, mouths painted berry-red. Then one stepped into a shaft of amber light, and Rory saw the horns curling back from its temples, the too-wide smile, the teeth lacquered gold. It carried a silver tray piled high with sugared fruits that steamed in the warm air.
More gathered behind it. Servants, courtiers, diners—demons, Rory supposed, though the word felt too blunt for creatures so polished. Their eyes fixed on her pendant. On her throat. On her hands.
“Lady Carter,” the tray-bearer crooned. “The kitchens have prepared for your arrival.”
“Have they?” Rory called back. “That’s awkward. I’m more of a takeaway person.”
The demon’s smile did not falter. “All hunger is welcome here.”
Nyx spread behind Rory, their shadow widening across the grass. Isolde stepped to Rory’s other side, serene as a blade in silk .
The tray-bearer’s gaze flicked to the Fae seer. Its nostrils flared. “Exile.”
“Gourmand,” Isolde replied.
The word landed like an insult sharpened over centuries. Several demons hissed.
Rory drew the Fae blade.
Cold flashed through her palm. Moonless as the amber sky was, the moonsilver still glimmered, faint and stubborn. The demons’ smiles thinned. One took half a step back.
Good, Rory thought. Not enough. But good.
The vine curtain rustled behind her though no wind touched it. The red flowers opened, one by one, revealing black centers deep as keyholes. The pendant tugged harder.
Nyx leaned close, voice a thread at her ear. “Toward the music, not away, if the Veil closes.”
“The music is behind us.”
“No,” Isolde said softly .
Rory listened.
Beneath the approaching procession, beneath the bells and laughter and rustle of silk , another sound pulsed ahead through the vine curtain. Low. Rhythmic. Not drums.
A heartbeat.
The Heartstone answered it, warmth blooming against her fist.
Rory’s fear settled into a clean line.
She had crossed half a life to get away from men who smiled while deciding what she owed them. She had learned the shape of traps. She had learned that panic made poor choices and anger, properly handled, made excellent ones.
“Right,” she said. “We’re not staying for dinner.”
She slashed the Fae blade through the curtain.
The vines recoiled before the moonsilver touched them, shrieking in tiny floral voices. The cut opened onto a stairway descending under the roots of the orchard, each step carved from dark red stone slick with condensation. Warm air breathed up from below, rich with yeast, wine, and something metallic.
Behind them, the tray clattered to the grass.
“Lady Carter,” the demon said, all sweetness gone. “That passage is not for guests.”
Rory looked down into the pulsing dark, then back at its golden teeth.
“Lucky I wasn’t invited properly, then.”
She plunged onto the stairs.
The heat swallowed her first. Then the sound.
The heartbeat grew louder with every step, vibrating through the soles of her boots, up her bones, into the scar on her wrist and the pendant at her chest. Nyx flowed after her along the wall, almost invisible in the sudden dark. Isolde followed without a footfall , silver hair dimming to a ghost-pale thread.
Above, the orchard erupted.
Voices shouted. Branches cracked. Something heavy struck the entrance behind them, and red flowers rained down the stairs like drops of blood. Rory did not look back. The staircase twisted, narrowing until her shoulder brushed damp stone. Symbols glowed in the walls as she passed—knives, mouths, cups, crowns, a coiled serpent swallowing fruit.
Then the passage opened.
Rory stepped out onto a balcony cut into the side of a cavern so vast her mind refused it at first.
Beneath Dymas, under vineyard and orchard and banquet-city, lay a kitchen the size of a cathedral district. Bridges webbed the air between black stone pillars. Ovens yawned like furnace mouths along the walls. Copper vats big enough to drown buildings bubbled over green flame. Rivers of dark wine ran in channels through the floor, crossed by narrow bone-white planks. Thousands of figures moved below: chefs in blood-red aprons, chained souls carrying sacks of flour, demons with clipboards and cleavers, pale things with too many arms kneading dough on marble slabs.
And at the center of it all stood a heart.
Not a metaphor. A heart, enormous and crimson-black, suspended in a cage of gold roots. It beat slowly , each contraction sending waves of red light through the cavern. Tubes ran from it into the walls, into the ovens, into the vineyard roots dangling from the ceiling. With every pulse , the Heartstone in Rory’s hand flared.
Wonder and horror rose together, inseparable.
The realm was alive.
Or something alive was being used to feed it.
Rory gripped the cold dagger until her fingers ached.
Isolde came to stand beside her, lavender eyes reflecting the monstrous heart.
“The first table,” the seer murmured, “was set upon a wound.”
Rory swallowed, tasting sugar and iron. Far above them, the demons’ pursuit poured into the stairwell, their polished voices sharpened to knives.
Below, the great heart beat again.
The pendant answered like a child recognizing its mother.
Rory stared into the cavern’s red glow and understood, with a certainty that made her skin prickle, that she had not been brought to Dymas to witness a feast.
She had been brought to find what it was eating .