AI The standing stones were not stones.
Rory understood that the moment Isolde led them between the ancient oaks and the air changed. From a distance, the boundary of the grove had looked like a loose ring of weather-blasted monoliths, grey under the Richmond Park dawn, lichen clinging to their sides. Up close, in the thin blue hour before sunrise, bark grain curled through them. Knots blinked like closed eyes. Roots sank into nothing and came out of nowhere else, braiding through leaf mould that had never known winter.
Wildflowers grew underfoot in riotous colour despite the frost silvering the grass beyond the trees. Bluebells, foxgloves, primroses, flowers Rory didn’t know and didn’t trust, all open-faced and listening. Their perfume lay too sweet on the tongue.
Isolde Varga walked ahead without disturbing a single petal.
Her silver hair fell to her waist, bright as spilled moonlight. She left no footprints in the damp earth. That bothered Rory more than it should have. There were demons, rifts in the Veil, a living shadow at her back, and a thumbnail-sized crimson stone pulsing against her breastbone like an anxious second heart. Still, the absence of footprints kept snagging her attention.
“Do we need to worry about time in here?” Rory asked.
Her voice sounded wrong in the grove. Softer. As if moss had grown around the edges of it.
Isolde turned her pale lavender eyes on her. “Need is a door with many hinges.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It is the only honest one.”
Beside Rory, Nyx gave a whispering sound that might have been amusement. In the weak dawn, they held a mostly human shape, tall and dark and indistinct, their edges unraveling whenever the wind moved. Violet eyes glowed faintly inside the silhouette of a face.
“Time dislikes being counted here,” they murmured. Their voice slid through the leaves like a secret. “Best not to offend it.”
“Brilliant.” Rory touched the Heartstone through her jacket. The silver chain had gone warm enough to notice. “I’ll add time to the list of things I’m not meant to annoy.”
“You would need a longer list,” Nyx said.
She shot them a look. “Helpful.”
Nyx inclined their head, their shoulders briefly dissolving into smoke.
Isolde stopped before two oaks that leaned toward one another, their upper branches fused into an arch. Between the trunks, the air shimmered .
Not like heat over tarmac. Rory had seen that plenty during summer delivery shifts, weaving through London traffic with takeout steaming in the insulated box. This was finer. A trembling in the world’s skin. If she looked straight at it, there was nothing but trees beyond. If she glanced from the corner of her eye, the space between the oaks was thin as soap film, gleaming with colours that had no business existing before sunrise.
The Veil.
Her mouth went dry.
The pendant pulsed harder. Warmth seeped through cotton and skin, spreading over her ribs. The crimson gem gave off a faint inner glow, dark and alive, like a coal buried under ash.
Isolde lifted one hand. Long fingers hovered before the shimmer without touching it.
“The mouth opens when hunger remembers its teeth,” she said.
Rory exhaled slowly . “That’s Hel on the other side?”
“One of its tables.”
“Dymas,” Nyx whispered. “Gluttony.”
The word sank into the moss. The flowers seemed to lean closer.
Rory had thought she was ready. She’d done fear before. Fear with a man’s hand clamped around her wrist hard enough to bruise. Fear in a Cardiff flat with the walls too thin and no one knocking. Fear on the night bus to London with one bag and a phone full of missed calls. She knew how to make herself cold inside. How to think around panic instead of through it.
But the Veil shimmered before her, and beyond it waited an entire realm built on appetite.
Her left wrist prickled where the old crescent scar sat pale against her skin. She rubbed it once with her thumb, then let her hand fall.
The Fae-forged blade rested inside her coat, sheathed against her ribs beneath the pendant. Isolde’s gift. Moonsilver, slender and leaf-shaped, always cold. Rory could feel that cold now, a narrow line against the spreading warmth of the Heartstone.
Cold and heat. Fae and Hel. Two impossible things touching her skin.
“Rules?” she asked.
Isolde’s smile held no comfort. “Do not eat what is offered. Do not drink what is poured. Do not thank a host whose name you do not know. Do not praise a flavour unless you wish it to follow you home.”
Rory stared. “A flavour can follow me home?”
“In Dymas,” Isolde said, “even sweetness has feet.”
Nyx’s shadow lengthened over the flowers, though the sun had not yet risen. “Stay close to shade where you can. The light there is greedy.”
“Everything there is greedy,” Isolde said.
“Right.” Rory swallowed. “Fantastic. Let’s go.”
She stepped through before she could give herself time to be sensible.
The world folded around her.
For one stretched second she stood nowhere. Pressure closed over her ears. Her teeth hummed. She tasted honey, salt, hot metal, and the bitter edge of burnt sugar. Something vast brushed against her—not touching, not exactly, but noticing . The Heartstone flared.
Then her boot sank into warm grass.
Rory stumbled and caught herself with one hand on her knee. Air flooded her lungs, thick and golden and so rich she nearly coughed. Behind her, the portal sighed twice as Nyx and Isolde emerged.
She straightened.
The sky was amber.
Not sunset amber. Not London smog lit by streetlamps. The whole vault of heaven glowed the colour of warmed whisky, deepening toward copper at the horizon. No sun hung overhead. Light came from everywhere and nowhere, soaking the world until every surface gleamed.
They stood on a hillside above a valley that should not have fit inside any map.
Vineyards spilled over the slopes in perfect , impossible terraces, each row heavy with grapes the size of plums. Some were green as jade, some black as ink, some translucent with tiny sparks drifting inside them. Orchards spread beyond, trees arranged in spirals and crescents, branches bowed under fruit Rory could not name. Pears with pebbled gold skin. Pomegranates split open to show seeds like rubies. Pale melons veined with blue light. Something like an apple turned slowly on its stem as if trying to watch her pass .
Farther down, gardens unfurled in geometric knots around long canals. The canals did not carry water. One ran deep red and glossy as wine. Another shone cream-white and gave off the smell of vanilla. A third bubbled with a dark liquid that steamed, and the steam smelled exactly like coffee from the Golden Empress at six in the morning, when Yu-Fei would slap a paper cup into Rory’s hand and tell her she looked like a corpse .
Her stomach clenched.
She had not eaten breakfast.
That thought arrived sharp and sudden, far louder than it should have. Her mouth watered. The air pressed flavours against her—roast meat, butter, cinnamon, frying garlic, fresh bread torn open with bare hands. Under it all ran something darker, animal and wet.
“Don’t,” Nyx said.
Rory blinked. “I’m not doing anything.”
“You were leaning.”
She looked down. She had taken two steps toward the nearest vine without noticing.
The grapes trembled on their stems. One split, skin parting with a soft sigh. Juice welled up, thick and purple-black, and rolled down the fruit like a tear.
Rory stepped back.
“Subtle place,” she muttered.
Isolde drifted past her, silver hair untouched by the warm breeze. “Dymas does not whisper hunger. It sings opera.”
From below came the clang of a bell.
The sound rolled across the valley, immense and bronze, followed by cheering. Rory turned toward it.
Beyond the orchards rose a city of kitchens.
At first her brain refused the scale. Towers climbed from the valley floor, but instead of battlements they wore chimneys, vents, copper pipes, iron cranes with hanging cauldrons big enough to bathe in. Bridges linked the towers, crowded with figures carrying trays under domed silver covers. Open-air amphitheatres spread between the buildings, each packed with long banquet tables. Fires roared in pits the size of ponds. Smoke rose in fragrant columns and twisted into shapes—stags, roses, open mouths—before dissolving into the amber sky.
The city glittered. Copper roofs, tiled courtyards, glasshouses steaming with humid light. It was beautiful.
It was obscene.
Everywhere, things were being prepared, carved, poured, plated, devoured. Even at this distance Rory caught flashes of movement too frantic to be celebration. Lines of pale figures in stained aprons hurried between the towers. Some wore chef whites. Some wore chains fine as jewellery at their throats or wrists. A man dropped a tray on a bridge, and something with too many arms rose from a chair at the nearest banquet table. The man fell to his knees before Rory could see more.
The cheering swelled again.
Rory’s wonder curdled.
“Helbound souls?” she asked quietly.
“Some contracted,” Nyx said. “Some careless. Some invited.”
The pendant beat once, hard.
Rory pressed a hand over it. The gem’s warmth had sharpened, almost painful.
Isolde watched her. “The little heart knows its cradle.”
“It came from here?”
“Dymas made its bones,” Isolde said. “But not all who nurse a child are its mother.”
Rory frowned. “Isolde.”
The seer’s lavender eyes held hers. “I cannot lie. I can only stand where the truth casts several shadows.”
Nyx shifted at that, their own shadow crawling over the grass like spilled ink. “Something watches.”
Rory’s hand went inside her coat and closed around the Fae blade.
Cold bit her palm. Not unpleasantly. Cleanly. The way winter air cut through panic. She drew the dagger an inch from its sheath. Moonsilver caught the amber light and answered with a faint, stubborn glow.
The grass around her feet shivered away from the blade.
“Well,” Rory said, “that’s interesting.”
“It remembers old quarrels,” Isolde said.
“Does everything here remember something?”
“Only what it has eaten.”
They started down the hillside.
The path appeared only once they moved, a ribbon of pale stone unrolling through the grass ahead of Isolde’s bare feet. Rory kept to the centre of it. The ground on either side looked soft enough to sleep on, and that made her trust it less.
As they descended, the valley grew louder. Bees the size of thumb joints moved through the flowers, their bodies striped black and molten gold. They hummed in chords. Tiny lizards with sugar-glass scales darted over sun-warmed rocks and left trails of spice scent behind them. A flock of white birds swept overhead; their wings were feathered , but their long beaks clicked like cutlery.
One landed on a nearby branch and looked at Rory with a bright, black eye.
The branch bent under clusters of small round fruit, yellow as summer. The fruit smelled of Welsh cakes hot from a griddle.
Rory stopped breathing.
For a moment she was in her mother’s kitchen in Cardiff. Rain on the window. Flour on Jennifer Carter’s hands. Her father’s voice from the hall, arguing a case on the phone even at home. Rory at twelve, stealing a cake too soon and burning her fingers, laughing with her mouth full.
The ache hit so hard she almost reached up.
Nyx’s hand closed around her sleeve.
Not skin. Their fingers were cool pressure, smoke pretending to be solid.
The bird opened its beak. Jennifer Carter’s voice came out.
“Cariad, you’re too thin.”
Rory went rigid.
Nyx hissed. Their violet eyes flared, and the shadow beneath the tree reared up like a wave. The bird shrieked, dropped the voice, and burst into a scatter of white feathers that became flakes of salt before they touched the ground.
Rory’s heart hammered against the pendant.
“Do not answer echoes ,” Isolde said from ahead.
Rory turned on her. “You could have mentioned that.”
“You had not yet met one.”
“That is exactly when warnings are useful.”
Isolde considered this, then inclined her head. “In Dymas, memory is a spice.”
Rory dragged a hand through her black hair and forced her breathing steady. Cool head. Think. The place was not random temptation; it was responsive. It sampled. It offered what would make refusal hurt.
“Right,” she said. “It’s reading us.”
“Touching the air around your wanting,” Nyx murmured.
“That’s disgusting.”
“That is Dymas.”
They went on.
The path carried them beneath an avenue of trees older than the city below. Their trunks were as wide as cottages, bark dark and ridged like cooled lava. From their branches hung silver ladles, copper pans, knives, cups, all grown into the wood by their handles. Wind moved through them, and the utensils chimed softly , a delicate kitchen music that raised the hairs on Rory’s arms.
At the end of the avenue stood an arch.
Unlike the living abundance around it, the arch was bare stone. Black, pitted, ancient. Vines crawled over most of it but did not cross the central seam, where symbols had been carved deep into the rock. Rory did not know the language. The letters curved and hooked like tongues.
The Heartstone burned.
She gasped and doubled slightly , fingers clamping over the pendant. Heat flashed through her chest, not enough to wound but enough to command attention .
Nyx moved in front of her, shadow spreading. “Carter.”
“I’m fine.” She hated how thin it sounded. She straightened anyway. “It reacted.”
Isolde had stopped before the arch. For the first time since Rory had met her, the seer looked grave rather than distant.
“What is this?” Rory asked.
“A pantry door,” Isolde said.
Rory looked at the towering black stones, the dead vines, the letters that seemed wet when the light struck them . “That is not a pantry door.”
“To a prince,” Isolde said, “all locked places are pantries.”
Belphegor. The name moved through Rory’s mind like something large turning in sleep.
Nyx leaned close to the carvings without touching them. Their form flickered , edges thinning. The amber light did not suit them. Rory could see it now. They seemed less substantial here, as if Dymas were digesting shadow by degrees.
“The ward is old,” they whispered. “Older than the kitchens.”
Rory drew the Fae blade fully.
The dagger’s cold flooded her hand and climbed her arm. Moonlight was faint in the amber realm, but the moonsilver held its own pale gleam. The carved symbols along the arch stirred. Not moved. Stirred, the way a sleeping dog might twitch at a sound.
Isolde watched the blade with unreadable eyes. “A leaf may open what teeth cannot.”
“That means cut it?”
“That means choose where to cut.”
Rory stepped closer. The stone breathed heat. The Heartstone thudded against her sternum in time with something beyond the arch.
Boom.
Boom.
Boom.
Not a heartbeat, she realised.
A drum.
No—many drums, slow and deep, echoing through a vast enclosed space. Beneath them came a murmur of voices. Thousands of voices, perhaps. Or one enormous voice speaking with thousands of mouths.
The air smelled different here. Less sugar. More earth. Salt. Old wine soaked into stone. Hunger buried so long it had become a mineral.
Rory lifted the blade.
The carvings nearest the point puckered away.
A laugh drifted from somewhere beyond the arch.
Soft. Delighted. Intimate as breath against her ear.
She froze.
Nyx’s shadow snapped around her ankles in a protective coil. “We should leave.”
“We just got here.”
“And the place has noticed.”
Rory looked back the way they had come. The amber valley shone below in all its terrible splendour. Vineyards rolled like green velvet . The feast city roared and glittered. Smoke sculpted itself into a crown, then into an open mouth, then tore apart on the wind. Every scent in the world seemed to rise at once, begging to be wanted.
She thought of the pendant arriving with no name, no explanation. A deep crimson gem from a realm of hunger, given to her like a gift or a hook. She thought of every time it had warmed near a tear in the Veil. Every time it had pulled her toward danger and, annoyingly, toward answers.
Her fear settled into something sharper.
“No,” she said. “We came to find out who sent this.”
Isolde’s smile returned, sad at the corners. “Some questions are cups. Some are wells.”
Rory set the edge of the Fae blade against the ward.
The cold metal touched black stone.
For a heartbeat, nothing happened.
Then the arch screamed.
Light cracked through the carvings, crimson and gold, bright enough to paint Nyx’s shadow in hard edges. The vines shrivelled back. The stone split along a seam too fine to see until it opened, and air rushed out from the darkness beyond—cooler than the valley, heavy with dust and old spices.
Rory held her ground, teeth clenched, blade trembling in her hand.
The scream faded into a long sigh.
The pantry door opened inward.
Beyond lay stairs descending into a dark hall lined with shelves. Not kitchen shelves. Not entirely. Glass jars glimmered in the gloom , each holding a suspended spark of colour. Clay amphorae leaned in ranks against the walls, sealed with wax stamped by unfamiliar sigils. Hooks hung empty from the ceiling, swaying though there was no wind.
And far below, something beat its slow drum.
The Heartstone’s glow deepened until red light spilled between Rory’s fingers.
Nyx stood at her shoulder, violet eyes narrowed . Isolde waited on her other side, serene and terrible, leaving no mark on the dust.
Rory swallowed the taste of honey and iron.
“All right,” she said, stepping onto the first stair. “Nobody touch the snacks.”