AI The portal opened in the hollow of an old oak that had no business standing upright.
Its trunk bent in three places, blackened by age and weather, yet white blossoms covered every crooked branch. The flowers turned their faces away from the London dawn and toward the split in the bark, where amber light leaked through in slow, sticky threads.
Aurora Carter stood at the edge of the Fae Grove with her fingers wrapped around the Heartstone Pendant.
The crimson gem warmed her palm through her glove. Not hot. Not burning. Alive.
Behind her, Isolde Varga moved between the wildflowers without bending a stem. Her silver hair drifted around her waist though no wind touched the clearing. The standing stones — ancient oak pillars that had petrified into shapes like hunched watchers — held the boundary in a rough circle, their carved knots glowing faint green.
Nyx lingered beneath the oldest yew, their body a tall spill of shadow against the grey morning. Violet eyes hovered where a face should have been.
“Does every doorway to Hel look like a diseased tree?” Rory asked.
The bark groaned.
A slit widened in the trunk. Beyond it, no hollow waited. No roots. No damp earth. Only a vast amber sky and the edge of a stone path tiled in colours Rory had never seen on Earth.
Isolde lifted one pale hand.
“The hungry door wears the face that tempts the key.”
Rory glanced down at the pendant.
“Right. That cleared it up.”
Nyx’s voice drifted past her ear, thin as breath across glass.
“It recognises Dymasian craft. The Heartstone called, and something answered.”
“Something?”
The shadow at Nyx’s shoulders rippled.
“Doors seldom open from one side.”
That landed in Rory’s ribs and stayed there.
She adjusted the strap of her delivery satchel. The Fae-Forged Blade sat hidden inside, wrapped in a strip of cloth from one of Silas’s old bar towels. Moonsilver against stained cotton. Ridiculous, and somehow the most practical thing she had done all week.
Isolde stepped toward the opening.
“Cross with purpose. Linger between, and the between lingers in you.”
“Lovely. So no dawdling in the nightmare tree.”
Rory sucked in a breath that smelled of wet leaves, fox musk, and winter mud. Then she stepped through.
The world turned soft.
For a blink, her boot touched nothing. The air wrapped around her body like warm honey. Sound stretched until the scrape of her jacket became a long metallic cry. Her scarred left wrist prickled, the old crescent mark tightening as if invisible thread had looped beneath her skin.
Then stone struck under her soles.
She stumbled forward onto a bridge.
Not a bridge in any London sense. No iron railings, no graffiti, no traffic rumbling underneath. This one arched over a chasm filled with mist the colour of apricot flesh. The path beneath her feet had been laid from translucent tiles, each one holding a trapped image: grapes swollen with purple light, fish with golden bones, pomegranates split open to reveal seeds like tiny red eyes, hands kneading dough, mouths open in laughter or hunger.
The amber sky pressed low overhead. No sun burned in it. Light seemed to come from everything at once — the air, the stone, the distant orchards climbing impossible terraces, the rivers that moved in slow loops through fields below. Far away, towers rose like stacked wedding cakes, tier upon tier of white marble , copper domes, and hanging gardens. Vines crawled over them in thick emerald ropes. Fruit larger than carriages dangled from branches that grew out of balconies.
Rory forgot to move.
A scent hit her next.
Roasted figs. Charred meat. Sugar crust melting under flame. Yeast and wine and cinnamon and saltwater and something mineral, like lightning had struck a butcher’s block. It flooded her mouth. Her stomach clenched hard enough to make her bend a little.
“Nope.” She pressed her fist to her abdomen. “That’s rude.”
Nyx slid out of the air behind her, their shape tearing free from the seam between realms. They stood taller here. More solid. Shadows clung to them in layered folds, but Dymas gave their edges a strange gloss, as though oil floated over black water.
Isolde emerged last. The portal closed behind her with the soft pop of a cork leaving a bottle.
She did not look around in wonder. She looked at the ground.
“Do not eat what offers itself first.”
Rory lifted her head.
Across the bridge, a silver platter rested on a pedestal that had not been there a moment before.
On it sat three small pastries glazed with honey. Steam curled from them in delicate ribbons. Each had been shaped like a rosebud, petals crisp and golden, and the smell — butter, apple, clove — struck Rory straight in the childhood: her mother’s kitchen after rain, Brendan Carter reading case files at the table, Radio Cymru murmuring beneath the hiss of the kettle.
Her fingers moved before she told them to stop.
Nyx’s hand formed around her wrist. Cold shadow pressed against her glove.
“Carter.”
Rory stared at the pastry. Her throat worked.
“I know.”
The nearest rosebud pastry opened.
Not unfolded. Opened.
Its crisp petals split around a wet, pink centre. A tongue slid out, thin and glistening , and tasted the air.
Rory stepped back.
“Absolutely not.”
The platter trembled . The other pastries cracked open, each one revealing tiny teeth set in honeyed flesh.
Isolde passed them without a glance.
“The realm greets strangers according to appetite.”
“My appetite doesn’t have teeth.”
“Yet.”
Rory looked at Nyx.
“Was that a joke?”
Nyx’s violet eyes narrowed .
“I hoped not.”
They crossed the bridge single file. Mist breathed up from the chasm, warm and damp, carrying whispers that almost became words. Rory kept one hand on the satchel and the other around the pendant. The Heartstone pulsed in a steady rhythm, tugging toward the city of towers.
As they walked, the bridge changed underfoot.
The images inside the tiles stirred. A painted vineyard became a living one, tiny figures moving between rows, cutting bunches from vines that bled dark wine. Another tile showed a banquet hall with a table so long its end vanished into shadow. Guests sat shoulder to shoulder, but their plates were empty. Each guest lifted a fork and knife and carved into the empty porcelain , again and again, scraping, scraping, scraping.
Rory stopped on that tile.
A woman inside the glass looked up.
Her face pressed against the underside of Rory’s boot.
Rory jumped away, pulse kicking in her neck.
The woman’s mouth moved. No sound reached through the stone. She wore a chef’s jacket, stained red from collar to cuff, and her hair had been twisted into a bun with two silver skewers. Her eyes tracked Rory with blistered desperation.
Nyx crouched beside the tile.
“Contracted soul.”
Rory swallowed.
“She’s alive?”
“Alive enough for the bargain to hold.”
The tiny woman struck the glass with both fists. Her mouth formed a word.
Help.
Rory’s fingers tightened around the satchel strap until leather creaked.
Isolde’s voice came from ahead.
“A blade cuts wards, not bargains.”
Rory looked up sharply .
The seer stood halfway across the bridge, silver hair glowing in the amber air. Her pale lavender eyes rested on Rory, soft and merciless.
“You saw me reach for it?”
“I saw you bleed where no wound had opened.”
Rory forced her hand away from the satchel.
“Does everyone here speak in riddles, or is that your private brand of irritating?”
The corner of Isolde’s mouth curved.
“In Dymas, plain speech gets eaten first.”
The bridge ended at a gate made of intertwined grapevines as thick as ship ropes. Leaves the size of dinner plates fanned out above them, casting green shadows over the road. Clusters of grapes hung low, each fruit glossy and black, each one with a pale pupil floating inside its skin.
The grapes turned to watch them.
Rory stopped beneath the arch.
“No touching. Got it.”
One grape detached from its stem. It fell without sound, landed near her boot, and split.
Inside lay a pearl.
Then the pearl blinked.
Rory stepped over it.
Past the gate, Dymas opened.
They entered an orchard that stretched beyond sight. Trees grew in spirals, their trunks twisting upward like braided bread. Some bore fruit she recognised — pears, oranges, plums — though none behaved properly. Pears hummed in chords when the wind moved through them. Oranges pulsed with inner fire, skins glowing and dimming like banked coals. Plums hung heavy and translucent, each one containing a sleeping face curled within the flesh.
Other trees carried things no orchard should have carried.
Crystal bottles. Silver fishbowls. Loaves shaped like sleeping infants. Masks made of sugar. A ladder of ribs. A cluster of tiny bells that rang whenever Rory breathed near them.
The road itself had been paved in crushed shells and pink salt. It crunched beneath her boots, releasing sharp bursts of brine.
Somewhere ahead, music played.
Not one tune. Dozens. A harp picked out a delicate line, then brass horns shoved through it, drums thumped like fists against a door, flutes trilled above the lot, and underneath ran a low chant in a language Rory felt in her teeth.
She rubbed her jaw.
“This place was designed by someone who never heard the phrase ‘too much’.”
Nyx walked beside her, their feet leaving no mark in the salt.
“Gluttony does not mean hunger. Hunger has an end.”
Rory watched a low branch bend toward Isolde. A ripe fig split apart near the seer’s shoulder, offering red seeds and thick nectar. Isolde breathed on it.
The fig shrivelled to ash.
Rory lifted a brow.
“Handy.”
“Costly.”
“What did it cost?”
Isolde brushed ash from her sleeve.
“The fig remembered it had once been a flower.”
“That isn’t an answer.”
“It fed you enough to keep walking.”
Rory opened her mouth, then closed it. The smell of the ash had cut through the feast-scents, dry and bitter, and her stomach no longer clawed at her ribs.
They moved deeper.
The orchard sloped downward into terraced vineyards. Vines crawled over marble frames, looped through golden trellises, and dipped into irrigation channels filled not with water but with dark red wine . Barefoot workers moved among them. Some had horns curling behind their ears. Some had skin the colour of polished chestnuts, emeralds, blue porcelain . Some looked human.
Too human.
A man in an apron trimmed a vine with shears shaped like bird beaks. As the group passed, he glanced up. His gaze snagged on Rory’s face, then dropped to the pendant at her throat.
His expression changed.
Fear flashed first. Then hunger. Then calculation.
He cut his thumb on the shears.
The vine whipped round his wrist and sucked the blood away.
“Keep walking,” Nyx murmured.
Rory did.
The path narrowed between two vineyard walls. Leaves brushed her sleeves, damp as tongues. Grapes clustered close enough to graze her cheek, their skins swollen tight. Whispering rose from them.
Rory Carter.
She stopped dead.
Nyx turned.
“What did you hear?”
Rory stared at the nearest cluster. Each grape reflected her face, but the reflections wore different expressions: one laughed, one wept, one screamed, one stared with Evan’s bruising grip around its throat.
Her breath went thin.
“Nothing useful.”
A grape split with a wet click.
Evan’s voice spilled out, small and sour.
“Rory, don’t be dramatic. Come back and talk like an adult.”
Her hand went cold.
Another grape opened.
Her father’s voice followed, firmer, disappointed.
“A Carter does not run when the facts become inconvenient.”
Another.
Eva laughing, but wrong, stretched and sweetened until it turned cruel.
“London didn’t save you, babe. It just changed the scenery.”
Rory grabbed the vine.
The whispers swelled, dozens of stolen voices pressing against her skull.
Nyx seized the vine above her hand. Their shadow fingers sank into the leaves. Frost spread black across the green. The grapes burst one after another, spattering the salt path with sour juice and threads of pale pulp.
Rory yanked her hand back.
A thin cut crossed her palm where a tendril had bitten through the glove.
Blood welled.
The vineyard stilled.
Every leaf turned toward her.
Isolde’s pale eyes sharpened.
“Cover it.”
Rory clamped her fist shut.
From somewhere below the terrace, a bell rang once.
Then again.
The workers in the vineyard stopped cutting.
Nyx flowed closer, body widening, their shadow stretching across the path until the salt beneath them dulled.
Rory’s heartbeat hammered against the pendant. The Heartstone answered, pulsing faster, warm enough now to sting.
“I’m guessing blood on the floor counts as ringing the dinner gong.”
Isolde raised her hand. Her fingers traced a symbol in the air, and for a moment Rory saw the Veil — a faint shimmering distortion draped over the path, thin as soap film, trembling beneath the weight of Dymas.
“Not the floor. The realm.”
A low growl rolled through the vines.
Not animal. Not demon in any shape Rory knew how to imagine. It sounded like a stomach large enough to swallow streets.
The path ahead forked.
To the left, the terraces climbed toward a pavilion of green glass, where figures in white masks stirred copper pots over blue flames. To the right, the road descended into a market lit by lanterns shaped like peaches, each lantern containing a fluttering wing. Straight ahead, a staircase cut into the vineyard and plunged into a tunnel framed by carved mouths.
Rory flexed her bleeding hand inside the glove. Pain steadied her. It belonged to her. Dymas could dress hunger in silk and pastry and mother’s kitchen warmth , but pain came blunt and honest.
“Which way to the portal source?”
The Heartstone tugged hard toward the tunnel.
Of course it did.
Nyx stared at the carved mouths. Their violet eyes dimmed.
“Those teeth were human once.”
Rory examined the archway. The mouths had been carved into dark stone, lips peeled back, tongues forming the steps. Some smiled. Some grimaced. One mouthed silent prayers as amber moss grew between its teeth.
Isolde walked to the first step.
“The swallowed road leads to what fed the stone.”
Rory joined her and looked down.
Warm air breathed from below, thick with wine, smoke, and roasting marrow. Beneath those smells lay something metallic. Old coins. Old blood. Old locks.
The growl behind them rose again. Leaves shivered. Grapes swelled. The vineyard workers began to move, not toward the vines now, but toward the path .
The man with the shears watched Rory’s closed fist.
His tongue slid across his lower lip.
Rory pulled the Fae-Forged Blade from her satchel.
The cloth fell away. Moonsilver caught the amber light and rejected it, shining with a cold glow of its own. The air around the dagger tightened. The nearest vines recoiled, leaves curling black at the edges.
Several workers stepped back.
Nyx’s shadow lifted like a cloak in a storm that had not arrived.
Isolde looked at the blade, then at Rory’s face.
“A gift unsheathed becomes a question.”
Rory set one boot on the first tongue-shaped step.
“Good. I’ve got loads.”
She descended.
The stairway swallowed the orchard sound one mouthful at a time. Music thinned behind them. The bell faded. The wet rustle of vines gave way to a slow drip from unseen stone.
The walls of the tunnel gleamed with mineral veins the colour of honey and bruises. Embedded in them were dining implements from different ages: bone spoons, bronze knives, porcelain chopsticks, steel forks, ladles big enough to scoop a person from the waist. Some trembled as Rory passed. Some twisted to follow the Heartstone.
Nyx moved ahead of her now, one hand against the wall without touching it.
“Old working. Older than Belphegor’s current kitchens.”
Rory kept the blade low.
“Dymas existed before its prince?”
“Realms grow rulers the way wounds grow scabs.”
“Graphic. Helpful, but graphic.”
The tunnel opened into a cavern.
Rory stopped at the threshold.
For the first time since crossing, no joke came.
The cavern held a lake of gold.
Not molten metal. Not water reflecting amber light. A vast, still surface stretched beneath a ceiling of hanging roots and crystal stalactites, its liquid skin thick and luminous, moving only where bubbles rose and burst with soft sighs. Islands floated upon it — round tables carved from black stone, each set for a feast. Empty chairs surrounded them. Thousands of chairs. High-backed, low stools, benches, thrones, child-sized seats, all facing inward toward plates piled with food that never cooled.
Above the lake drifted chandeliers made from antlers and rib bones, each tipped with a small flame that burned green. Between them, translucent shapes moved like jellyfish. Rory squinted and saw they were tablecloths, gliding through the air, their embroidered edges trailing like fins.
At the far side of the cavern stood a doorway made of red marble .
The Heartstone blazed in her grip.
A low hum rose from the lake. It vibrated through her boots, into her bones, up behind her eyes. The plates on the floating tables rattled. Goblets chimed. Knives turned their points toward the shore.
Isolde came to Rory’s side, her face lit gold from below.
“Here the feast remembered its first guest.”
Rory’s mouth had gone dry despite the wet heat.
“Was the first guest invited?”
Isolde watched a bubble swell beneath the lake’s surface until a face pressed against it from below — cheeks stretched, mouth open, eyes shut in bliss or agony. The bubble popped. The face vanished.
“No feast begins with permission.”
Nyx pointed across the lake.
“There. The marble door. The Heartstone pulls toward it.”
Rory looked for a bridge.
There wasn’t one.
Only a line of floating tables, each a few feet from the next, forming a broken path across the golden lake. Plates overflowed with impossible dishes: cakes lacquered in mirror glaze, roasted birds with jeweled eyes, bowls of noodles that moved like living hair, towers of fruit carved into cities, soups with stars turning in their depths .
The first table bumped against the shore.
A chair scraped back by itself.
Waiting.
Rory glanced at her cut palm, then at the blade.
“No eating. No sitting. No bleeding on the furniture. Anything else?”
The chair scraped back farther.
Nyx leaned toward the lake, their form flickering as the green flames caught them.
“The tables are listening.”
Rory stepped onto the first floating island.
The table dipped under her weight , then steadied. Plates shivered. A silver cloche lifted by itself, releasing steam that shaped into a woman’s hand and reached for her mouth.
Rory raised the Fae blade.
The steam recoiled.
Behind her, Isolde placed one bare foot on the table. No ripple touched the golden lake. Nyx followed, shadow spreading over porcelain , and every fork on the table bent away from them.
Ahead, the second table drifted closer with a soft knock.
From the depths beneath the gold, something enormous shifted.
The lake bulged.
Rory stared down as a dark shape passed under the surface, too wide to see all at once. Teeth scraped the underside of the table with a long, delicate sound.
Her grip tightened around the moonsilver hilt.
“Move.”