AI The air tasted of overripe plums and scorched sugar the moment the rift spat them out. Aurora stumbled forward, boots sinking into warm, loamy soil that pulsed faintly beneath her soles like a living thing digesting a meal. She caught her balance against a vine thicker than her thigh, its bark glossy and veined with threads of molten gold. The Heartstone Pendant against her sternum flared once, a single hot throb , then settled into a steady, anxious rhythm.
“Definitely not Richmond Park,” she muttered.
Behind her, Nyx unfolded from the shadow of the rift like ink bleeding into water. Their silhouette sharpened into something almost human—tall, cowled, the edges of their form fraying into smoke whenever the amber light caught them wrong. Isolde stepped through last, silver hair catching the strange glow and turning it into liquid starlight. The half-Fae left no prints in the soil. The earth simply refused to acknowledge her passage.
The sky above them burned a deep, honeyed amber, as if the sun itself were drowning in molasses. No clouds moved. Instead, vast translucent threads of what looked like caramel drifted lazily between colossal fruiting trees, catching the light and scattering it in slow golden spirals. Everywhere, things grew in impossible abundance. Grapes the size of fists clustered along trellises that twisted into living arches. Pomegranates split open on their own, revealing seeds that shimmered like rubies dipped in syrup. The scent of baking bread, roasting meat, and something darkly floral hung so thick Aurora could have chewed it.
She swallowed hard. Her stomach growled despite the warning twist in her gut.
“Gluttony,” Isolde said softly, tasting the word like a forbidden sweet. “Dymas. The realm that devours its guests with kindness.”
Nyx drifted forward, violet eyes flickering. Their whisper carried on a breeze that smelled of cinnamon and smoke. “The pendant led us true, then. A Hel-gate hidden inside your little mortal park. How convenient.”
Aurora touched the crimson gem at her throat. It was warmer here, almost feverish. “Convenient or bait. I’m not feeling particularly trusting right now.”
They stood at the edge of an overgrown path that might once have been a road. Marble flagstones, veined with rose quartz, lay half-swallowed by thick roots and flowering creepers. Some of the flowers turned their heads toward the newcomers as they passed, petals unfolding to reveal tiny golden eyes that blinked once before closing again. Aurora’s skin prickled.
The deeper they walked, the more the world revealed its teeth behind the beauty.
A low table appeared beside the path, draped in silk the color of burgundy wine . Platters groaned under glistening fruits, roasted fowl with skin so crisp it still crackled, flagons of something that steamed gently and smelled like every good memory Aurora had ever forgotten. A single silver cup sat in the center, already filled. She could see her reflection in the liquid—eyes too wide, scar on her wrist standing out like a pale crescent moon against her skin.
Her mouth watered so fiercely it hurt.
“Don’t,” Isolde warned, voice threading through the air like silver bells . She did not look at the table. “To eat here is to sign a contract in sugar and marrow. The souls who tend these orchards were once lawyers, poets, chefs. They bargained for one more taste. They are still bargaining.”
Aurora tore her gaze away. The effort left her temples throbbing.
Nyx had no such struggle. The Shade simply flowed past the feast without slowing, though their form seemed to stretch hungrily toward it for half a second before snapping back. “I have not tasted anything in four centuries,” they whispered. “I find I miss the idea of missing it.”
The path widened. Ahead, the orchard gave way to a sunken amphitheater of black volcanic glass. Tiered seats circled a vast open floor where cooks—human in shape but with skin the color of burnt caramel and eyes like glowing coals—worked over flames that burned violet and gold. The air rang with the clatter of knives, the sizzle of fat, laughter that bordered on screams. A enormous boar, its hide lacquered with honey and studded with almonds, rotated on a spit the size of a small yacht. Chefs carved slices from its still-living flanks; the boar continued to squeal in apparent ecstasy.
Aurora stopped at the top of the amphitheater steps. Her stomach cramped with sudden, violent hunger.
“Rory,” Nyx said. The Shade’s voice had gone softer than usual, almost gentle. “Look up.”
She did.
Hanging above the amphitheater, suspended on chains of braided sugar-glass, were cages. Inside each one sat a soul—some still recognizably human, others swollen and grotesque with endless feasting. Their mouths moved constantly. Some chewed air. Some wept syrupy tears that dripped down to feed the flowers growing beneath the cages. One woman, once perhaps a celebrated food critic judging by the tattered press pass still pinned to her chef’s whites, met Aurora’s eyes. She smiled with teeth made of hard caramel and beckoned with sticky fingers.
“Come taste,” the woman crooned. “Just one bite. The Prince is generous.”
Aurora’s scar itched fiercely. She rubbed her left wrist without thinking, feeling the raised crescent left by a glass shard when she was nine. The memory grounded her. Cardiff. Her mother’s kitchen. The smell of bara brith instead of this cloying, suffocating sweetness.
She turned away. “We’re not here for the show. The rift map Isolde saw pointed to a temple at the heart of Dymas. Something about a reservoir of primordial hunger. If the Veil is thinning there like she thinks—”
“It is,” Isolde said. She stood a little apart, pale lavender eyes distant. “I cannot lie. I can only walk you to the edge of truth. The reservoir feeds every indulgence in this realm. If something is poisoning the flow, the imbalance will tear new holes between worlds. Your London will drown in want.”
Nyx drifted closer to Aurora, close enough that the chill of their shadow-form brushed her cheek like cold breath. “And you still believe the pendant was a random gift?”
She didn’t answer. The Heartstone had grown almost hot. Every time she breathed, it tugged gently forward, as if sewn to her sternum by invisible thread. A gift from an unknown benefactor, the note had said. She had found it on her pillow after the night Evan had put her in hospital for the last time. She had never questioned its timing. Until now.
They left the amphitheater behind. The path narrowed again, forcing them to walk single file between walls of living grapevines. The grapes whispered as they passed, tiny voices inside each fruit begging to be plucked, tasted, crushed between teeth. Aurora kept her hands in her jacket pockets. Her nails bit into her palms.
Isolde walked in front, silver hair trailing like moonlight on water. She left no footprints, but the vines still bent toward her, offering their ripest clusters. She ignored them with the serene disinterest of someone who had long ago grown past mortal appetites.
Behind Aurora, Nyx moved like a second shadow. Occasionally their form would brush a vine and the entire plant would wither for three heartbeats before remembering how to grow again.
“You feel it too,” Nyx whispered near her ear. “The pull.”
“I feel like I haven’t eaten in three days and someone’s waving a Sunday roast under my nose,” she answered tightly . “It’s not subtle.”
“It is not meant to be. Dymas does not hide its sin. It celebrates it until celebration becomes torment.”
A sound drifted toward them—music, but wrong. Harps and violins played in perfect harmony, yet the notes stretched too long, sliding into frequencies that made Aurora’s teeth ache. The music wanted her to dance . Her feet itched to obey.
She gritted her teeth and kept walking.
The path opened without warning into a vast circular courtyard paved with polished obsidian. At its center rose a temple built entirely of sugar and glass. Spiral columns twisted upward like candy canes left too long in the heat. The roof was a single enormous spun-sugar dome, translucent enough to show silhouettes moving inside—enormous, languid shapes that might have been courtiers or might have been something far worse. Warm amber light spilled from every arched window, and the scent of vanilla, cardamom, and sizzling butter rolled out like a physical wave.
Aurora’s knees almost buckled.
Isolde raised one delicate hand. “Here. The reservoir lies beneath. Can you not feel the hunger breathing?”
Aurora could. It was a vast, slow inhalation that pulled at her bones. The Heartstone Pendant flared so brightly she had to squint. Its crimson glow reflected in the obsidian tiles, turning them the color of fresh blood.
Nyx coalesced more solidly beside her, taking on weight and depth until their boots left faint prints of darkness on the stone. “I remember temples like this,” they said, voice thinning to a dry leaf skittering across pavement . “In my mortal life. We built them to contain what we could not control. They never worked.”
Aurora drew the Fae-forged blade Isolde had given her weeks ago. The moonsilver dagger felt blessedly cold against her palm, its leaf-shaped blade faintly luminescent even in the amber glare. The chill traveled up her arm and steadied her racing heart.
“Stay close,” she said. “If anything offers me a tasting menu, stab it first and ask questions later.”
They crossed the courtyard together. With every step the pull grew stronger. Aurora’s vision began to swim with phantom images—plates of her mother’s cawl, steaming and perfect ; the buttery croissants from the French bakery near her old flat; the illicit late-night kebabs she and Eva used to share after too much wine. Every wonderful thing she had ever eaten paraded through her mind wearing new, irresistible clothing.
Her scar burned.
She focused on the pain, on the memory of glass cutting skin, of her father’s calm voice stitching her up while her mother cried in the next room. Real things. Sharp things. Things that did not lie.
The temple doors stood open, carved from a single massive block of toffee. They glistened. A droplet of something golden slid down one panel and pooled on the threshold like an invitation.
Isolde paused at the edge. For the first time, uncertainty flickered across her ageless face.
“Beyond this point,” she said, “my sight fractures. Too many futures bloom at once. Some of them end with you never leaving this realm. Others end with you becoming its new mistress. I cannot tell which thread we walk.”
“Comforting,” Aurora said.
Nyx drifted past them both, becoming incorporeal again. Their shadow-form slid across the toffee doors without sticking. “I will go first. Shadows are difficult to tempt with sugar.”
They vanished inside.
Aurora looked at Isolde. The half-Fae’s pale lavender eyes held a sorrow older than cities.
“You chose this path when you took the pendant, Rory Carter,” Isolde murmured. “Some gifts are also chains. But chains can be turned into keys if one is clever enough.”
Aurora tightened her grip on the cold blade until her knuckles ached. The Heartstone pulsed against her chest like a second, ravenous heart.
She stepped over the golden threshold.
Inside, the temple was cathedral-vast. Light filtered through the sugar-glass dome in rich, edible-looking shafts. Long tables ran the length of the hall, but these were not set for dining. Instead, they held strange contraptions—glass alembics bubbling with molten chocolate, copper stills distilling essences of longing and nostalgia, marble mortars grinding spices that smelled like every regret Aurora had ever swallowed.
At the far end, a great circular pool sank into the floor. Its surface was perfectly still, reflective as mercury. From its center rose a fountain carved to resemble an open mouth—lips of rose quartz, teeth of diamond. A thick, dark syrup flowed endlessly from between those teeth, cascading down into the pool. The liquid was the color of dried blood and smelled like every delicious thing that had ever ruined someone.
The reservoir.
Nyx hovered above it, form flickering. “It is sick,” the Shade whispered. “Look at the edges.”
Aurora approached slowly . The closer she came, the more the Heartstone burned. Around the rim of the pool, the dark syrup had crusted into black, flaky sores. Tiny threads of something wrong—something that looked almost like shadow given physical form—wriggled beneath the crust like maggots made of night.
She felt the wrongness in her own bones. A hunger that had nothing to do with food. A hunger for power, for escape, for the kind of forgetting that left nothing behind.
Her scar flared white-hot.
With a sudden clarity that felt like ice water poured down her spine , Aurora understood what the pendant truly was. Not a gift. A key. A focus. Someone had wanted a mortal with just the right combination of grief and cleverness to come here and see this corruption. To carry word back across the Veil.
She lifted the dagger. Moonlight from some impossible source caught the blade and made it sing.
“I think,” she said quietly, “we’ve been played.”
Behind them, the toffee doors began to melt shut with a slow, wet sound.
From the pool, the fountain-mouth smiled wider, syrup drooling from its diamond teeth in thick ropes.
And somewhere far above, in the amber sky of Dymas, Prince Belphegor’s laughter rolled like distant thunder, rich and sweet and terrible.