AI The portal tasted of burnt sugar.
Aurora knew that made no sense, but the moment she stepped through the rent in the air, sweetness coated her tongue and smoke caught at the back of her throat. Her boots sank into soil the colour of dark cocoa. Heat pressed against her face, not London heat, not summer-on-pavement heat, but the breath of an open oven filled with fruit, wine, roasted meat, and flowers too rich to name.
Behind her, Nyx slid out of the shadow of a twisted oak root that had not been there a second ago. Their form gathered itself from strips of blackness, shoulders first, then the long slope of their head, violet eyes opening like banked coals.
Isolde arrived last.
She did not step through the portal so much as appear on the other side of it, silver hair falling straight down her back, lavender eyes fixed on the amber sky. No mud clung to the hem of her pale dress. No print marked the damp ground beneath her bare feet.
Aurora turned.
The portal hung between two ancient trees that were not trees.
Their trunks rose in ribbed columns of reddish bark, glossy and veined, with wide leaves shaped like cupped hands. From the branches dangled fruit like lanterns, translucent skins pulsing with orange light. One split open with a wet sigh. Thick golden syrup drooled down the bark and gathered in a hollow at the roots.
The tear in the Veil behind them trembled , a vertical wound edged in silver. Through it, Aurora glimpsed Richmond Park’s winter-bare grass, the standing stones of Isolde’s grove, and a slice of grey English sky.
Then the wound puckered shut.
Silence did not follow.
Dymas breathed around them.
Somewhere beyond the trees, metal rang against metal. Farther off, a crowd roared. Birds with long spoon-shaped beaks skimmed over the canopy, their wings beating with the leathery slap of wet parchment. Beneath it all ran a deep glug-glug-glug, like something enormous drinking underground.
Aurora touched the Heartstone Pendant at her throat. The crimson gem, no bigger than her thumbnail, pulsed against her skin, warmer than blood.
“Well,” she muttered, “that’s new.”
Nyx tilted their head.
“Your heart beats outside your body now.”
“It’s jewellery.”
“It disagrees.”
Aurora shot them a look and hooked a finger under the silver chain, lifting the pendant away from her collarbone. Its faint inner glow brightened toward the orchard ahead, then dimmed when she turned back towards where the portal had vanished.
Isolde watched the motion with a small, unreadable smile.
“The little red tooth remembers the mouth that spat it out.”
“Could you be normal for ten seconds?”
“Time has no manners here. Ten seconds may take offence.”
Aurora exhaled through her nose. The air carried cinnamon, charred fat, fresh bread, crushed mint, and something sour underneath, almost hidden. Rot. Old wine left too long in a warm cellar.
She lowered the pendant.
“Fine. We follow the tooth.”
Nyx drifted past her, shadow-feet barely disturbing the soil.
“Dymas welcomes hunger. It distrusts restraint.”
“Good thing I skipped breakfast.”
“No,” Isolde murmured, moving beside Aurora. “That was unwise.”
Aurora stopped looking at the sky and looked at her instead.
The half-Fae had her face turned toward the orchard. Her pale fingers hovered over a cluster of wildflowers growing beside the path. Each flower had a small tongue where a stamen should have been. They lapped at the air, tasting.
Aurora took a step away from them.
“Lovely.”
One of the flowers bent towards her boot.
Nyx’s shadow stretched across it.
The whole patch recoiled into the ground with a chorus of tiny slurps.
“Ta,” Aurora told them.
“You are welcome, Rory.”
Isolde began to walk.
The path revealed itself one footstep at a time, not by moving, but by noticing itself . Leaves peeled back. Vines uncoiled. The soil hardened into flat stones patterned with spirals and open mouths. Aurora kept one hand close to the Fae-Forged Blade tucked inside her jacket. The moonsilver dagger sat cold against her ribs, the chill sharp enough to cut through the realm’s heavy warmth .
They moved beneath the lantern fruit.
Juice dripped from above in slow, shining strings. Where it struck stone, it hissed and turned into beetles made of amber. The beetles clicked their glassy legs together and marched in neat lines towards the deeper grove.
Aurora crouched beside one.
Its body held a tiny trapped face.
Not a human face. Too many teeth. No eyes. Still, the mouth moved against the inside of its shell.
“Absolutely not.”
She straightened.
Nyx leaned close, their violet gaze following the amber beetles.
“Harvest servants.”
“You’ve been here before?”
“No. I remember its shadow.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It was not meant to comfort you.”
They continued.
The orchard thinned, and the world opened into terraces.
Aurora had seen vineyards in films and on the labels of expensive bottles her father used to pretend he didn’t buy. These climbed the sides of impossible hills, each row stacked above the next in green-gold curves, vanishing into an amber haze. Vines as thick as pythons twisted around black trellises. Grapes hung in clusters the size of fists, swollen and luminous, some red, some purple, some pale as pearls. Workers moved between them with knives and baskets.
Not workers.
Souls, perhaps. Or things wearing human misery.
A woman in a chef’s jacket hacked at a vine with a cleaver, her hair pinned beneath a stained cap. A man in a three-piece suit crawled behind her, gathering fallen grapes in his cupped hands. A child-sized figure with an old woman’s face stirred a copper vat as tall as a bus. Steam rose from it in perfumed clouds.
The woman with the cleaver saw them.
Her eyes fixed on Aurora’s throat.
The cleaver stopped.
All along the nearest row, heads lifted.
Aurora’s fingers closed around the pendant.
“Nyx.”
“I see them.”
Isolde kept walking.
“Do not eat. Do not drink. Do not accept salt from a smiling hand.”
Aurora’s mouth had gone dry despite the wet heat.
“Anything else?”
“Compliments cost more than insults.”
“Right. Hel etiquette. Brilliant.”
The woman in the chef’s jacket stepped from between the vines. Her skin had the grey sheen of dough left under a damp cloth. A black iron collar circled her neck, engraved with symbols that glowed a dull orange.
She held out a grape.
It glimmered ruby red, fat with juice.
“First taste is free.”
Aurora looked at the grape, then at the woman’s collar.
“Nothing’s free.”
A grin split the woman’s face too wide.
“Clever girls still starve.”
Nyx’s form expanded behind Aurora, their outline fraying into smoke.
“She declined.”
The woman’s grin vanished.
Around them, the vines rustled. Grapes knocked together with soft, wet taps. The man in the suit lowered his basket and put one hand over his mouth, as though holding back words .
Isolde turned her lavender gaze on the woman.
“The Prince keeps his larders full and his promises lean.”
The woman’s eyes flicked to Isolde. Something passed through her face — recognition, terror, envy, all chewed together.
“Seer.”
“Knife.”
“Exile.”
“Apron.”
The woman barked a laugh. It broke midway and became a cough. She spat black seeds into her palm.
Aurora stepped between them before either could turn the exchange into something with teeth.
“We’re looking for the road.”
“There are many roads.”
“The one the pendant wants.”
The woman’s gaze dropped again. This time hunger sharpened her face.
“That little heart’s got no business swinging on a mortal neck.”
“Loads of people have opinions on my accessories.”
“Loads of people died for less.”
Nyx moved without moving. One moment they stood at Aurora’s shoulder; the next, their shadow fell across the woman’s boots, long and thin as spilled ink.
“Point.”
The woman jerked her chin toward the terraces.
“Down past the vats. Cross the orchard of marrow pears. Don’t step where the ground burps. Keep your hands out of the butterflies.”
Aurora blinked.
“The what?”
The woman tossed the grape into her own mouth and bit down. Red juice ran over her lower lip.
“You’ll hear them singing.”
They left the vineyard with the workers’ eyes on their backs.
The path dipped. Heat gathered in the hollow below, where copper vats bubbled in rows beside a slow river the colour of dark ale. The river did not flow over stones; it rolled over bones. Pale knuckles, ribs, jawbones, and femurs churned beneath the surface, polished smooth by the current. On the far bank rose kitchens without walls: hearths blazing blue, spits turning on their own, chopping boards where knives rose and fell in perfect rhythm over piles of vegetables that twitched.
Aurora slowed at the first vat.
A ladder leaned against it. Steam rolled over the rim. The smell made her stomach clench with want so sudden and ugly she put a hand on the copper side to steady herself, then snatched it back before the heat could burn her palm.
Roast chicken. Her mum’s leek and potato soup. Golden Empress dumplings fried crisp at the bottom. Coffee after a night shift. Toast with too much butter. Every meal she had ever needed and not had.
Her throat tightened.
“Nope.”
She stepped back.
Nyx faced her, violet eyes narrowed .
“What did it show you?”
“Lunch.”
“Liar.”
Aurora wiped her damp palm on her jeans.
“Not now.”
Isolde came close enough that her silver hair brushed Aurora’s sleeve. She did not touch her.
“Hunger wears beloved faces first.”
Aurora swallowed. Her left wrist prickled where the crescent scar sat pale against her skin. She rubbed it with her thumb.
The vat behind them bubbled harder.
A voice rose from it.
“Rory?”
Her spine locked.
Nyx’s head snapped toward the sound.
The voice came again, soft and wet around the edges.
“Rory, love, come here.”
Aurora stared at the vat. Steam thickened, shaping itself into a woman’s face with kind eyes and lines at the mouth. Jennifer Carter. Her mother as she had looked in the kitchen back in Cardiff, sleeves rolled, wooden spoon in hand, hair frizzing from the heat.
Aurora’s boots scraped stone.
Isolde’s voice cut across the steam.
“Names are hooks.”
The steam-face smiled.
“Don’t listen to her. You’ve gone thin. Let me feed you.”
Aurora’s hand found the Fae blade under her jacket.
The cold hilt bit into her palm.
“My mum never called me love when she was worried.”
The steam-face sagged.
Aurora drew the dagger.
Moonlight did not exist in Dymas, yet the blade glowed faintly, a sliver of winter caught in her grip. The vat shrieked before she touched it.
Nyx wrapped an arm of shadow around Aurora’s waist and pulled her back as the copper belly split open.
Broth exploded across the stones.
Where it splashed, mouths opened in the ground and snapped at the air. Teeth clacked. Steam howled. Something pale and jointed thrashed inside the collapsing vat, then poured out with the liquid — not a body, not whole, just limbs and spoons and hair and ladles fused into a crawling heap.
Aurora lifted the dagger.
Nyx’s shadow speared forward first.
The heap reared, a dozen mouths opening along its length.
“Salt,” it gurgled. “Bone. Name. Name. Name.”
Isolde stepped to the riverbank and plucked a long rib from the ale-dark current. The bone came free clean and white. She drew a symbol in the spilled broth with its tip.
The heap struck the line and convulsed.
“Old pot, cracked lip, greedy belly,” Isolde chanted, each word crisp as bitten ice. “You were fed. You were full. Be empty.”
The creature folded in on itself.
Not collapsed. Folded. Limb into ladle, spoon into hair, mouth into mouth, until nothing remained but a lump of grey paste steaming on the path.
Aurora held the dagger out, breath sawing through her chest.
Nyx released her.
“You knew that thing?”
“It used my mum’s voice.”
“I will kill it again.”
“It’s paste.”
“I can be thorough.”
Aurora almost laughed. It came out as a cough.
From the kitchens without walls, knives stopped chopping.
Every blade turned in the air, points angled toward them.
Aurora lowered her voice.
“We should move.”
Isolde dropped the rib back into the river. It sank with a satisfied plunk.
“The kitchens dislike wasted appetite.”
“Of course they do.”
They crossed a bridge made of interlocked forks.
The tines shifted beneath Aurora’s boots, flexing like fingers. She kept her gaze on the far bank and did not look down, not after one gap opened wide enough to show the bone river below rolling a human skull in its brown foam. Nyx drifted alongside the bridge rather than on it. Isolde walked ahead, weightless, the fork-tines stilling beneath her feet as if unwilling to touch her .
Halfway across, music began.
It came from beyond the bridge, thin and sweet, a chorus of tiny voices singing in a language Aurora did not know. The melody entered through her ears and settled behind her eyes. For one breath, the amber sky rippled into blue. The heat cooled. Her shoulders loosened.
Nyx hissed.
The sound tore the song’s fingers out of Aurora’s skull.
Ahead, the path vanished into an orchard unlike the first.
The trees stood pale and smooth, their trunks the colour of bone marrow. No leaves grew on them. Instead, hundreds of wings hung from their branches.
Butterflies.
Each one as large as Aurora’s hand. Their wings were thin, buttery yellow, with red veins branching across them. They opened and closed in time with the song. Not flapping. Breathing. Their bodies were small silver knives.
“Keep your hands out of the butterflies,” Aurora murmured.
Nyx’s outline tightened.
“The vineyard woman possessed wisdom.”
“She also offered me Hel grapes.”
“Wisdom and malice share tables here.”
Isolde lifted one finger to her lips, though she had not been speaking.
A butterfly dropped from a branch.
It drifted toward Aurora’s face, wings whispering. The song grew louder. Shapes flickered in the patterns on its wings: a round table under restaurant lights, Eva laughing with her mouth full, Yu-Fei scolding someone in Cantonese from behind the counter, Silas polishing a glass with a face like thunder.
Home, stitched in yellow membrane.
Aurora stood still.
The butterfly hovered inches from her nose. Its knife-body angled toward her left eye.
Nyx’s hand rose.
Aurora caught their wrist.
“Don’t. It’ll set the whole tree off.”
Nyx’s violet eyes burned close to hers.
“Then duck.”
“No.”
She shifted her grip on the dagger, slow, slow enough that the butterfly followed the movement with its bladed body. Its song sharpened. Her pulse thudded in her ears.
Isolde whispered something that sounded like leaves dragged over stone .
The butterfly turned.
Just a fraction.
Aurora moved.
The Fae blade sliced through the air, not at the creature, but at the space beside it . The moonsilver edge caught a shimmer she had not seen until the cut opened it — a thread, almost invisible, stretching from the butterfly to her face.
The thread snapped.
The song stopped.
The butterfly fell to the path and hit the stone point-first. It stuck there, wings beating without sound.
All through the orchard, wings paused.
Aurora froze with the dagger extended.
Nyx looked from the severed thread to the canopy.
“Walk.”
“I was getting there.”
“Walk faster.”
They did.
The orchard stirred around them, hundreds of knife-bodies turning in place, but none descended. Isolde led them between the bone-pale trunks, her hair catching the amber light until it looked dipped in honey. Aurora followed with the Heartstone hot against her sternum and the Fae blade cold in her hand, heat and frost arguing through her bones.
At the far edge of the orchard, the land dropped away.
Aurora stopped so fast Nyx passed half through her shoulder before becoming solid again.
Below them spread Dymas.
Not the orchard. Not the vineyards. The realm.
A valley vast enough to swallow London lay under the warm amber sky. Terraces coiled around hills heavy with fruit. Rivers of wine and ale braided through fields of silver grain. Palaces rose in the distance, domes glazed like boiled sweets, towers shaped like stacked cakes, balconies dripping with vines and banners. Markets sprawled along wide roads paved in white stone. Stalls steamed. Ovens glowed. Fountains poured cream into marble basins where horned figures bathed their hands before sitting at tables long enough for armies.
At the valley’s centre stood a palace of dark red stone.
It did not shine like the others. It squatted.
Wide, low, immense, with chimneys that exhaled black smoke and windows lit from within by furnace-orange light. Around it, thousands of tables circled in rings, each set with plates, goblets, knives, and candles. Some seats held people. Some held demons. Some held things Aurora’s eyes refused to assemble. Above the palace gates hung a crest: an open mouth crowned with grapes.
The Heartstone pulsed hard enough to hurt.
Aurora pressed her fist against it.
“Let me guess.”
Isolde’s lavender eyes reflected the distant furnace glow.
“The sleeping prince dines with one eye open.”
Nyx’s shadow stretched long over the cliff edge, pointing toward the red palace like a blade.
“Belphegor.”
Aurora stared down at the impossible city of hunger and heat, at the roads threading towards the palace, at the feasts that never ended and the kitchens that never cooled.
A laugh rose from the valley, deep and rolling, joined by applause, breaking plates, bells, and the roar of a crowd at some unseen competition.
The sound climbed the cliff and wrapped around them.
Aurora tightened her grip on the Fae blade.
“Right. We find out why his realm spat a heart at me.”
The pendant answered with another warm, insistent beat.