AI The Veil gave way with a sound like a spoon dragging across an empty plate. Aurora felt it peel over her arms and throat, a cool, oily slide that left a taste of copper at the back of her mouth, and then the last of London’s winter fell away behind her heel.
Ahead, Dymas opened.
The first thing she saw was the sky: not black, not blue, but amber . It was the warm gold of honey held against a window, thin and deep at the same time, and it did not sit above the world so much as spill across it. The light had weight . It pressed against Aurora’s shoulders, warmed the wet ends of her hair, made the small pendant at her throat pulse in sudden answer.
No one spoke. That was how she knew they had entered something that had never been theirs.
They came down a stair that was no stair at all, only a series of shelf-like ledges cut into red earth and strewn with petals so thick they squeaked. Below, vineyards spread in broad terraces. The vines were black-trunked, their leaves a deep blue-green and glossy as if they had been rubbed with oil. Grape clusters hung low, too large, too heavy, some bursting open and weeping violet juice down trellises shaped like fingers. The smell reached her before the first row did: figs, cinnamon, roasting sugar, old wine, meat browning in butter, everything too much, too close, as if someone had taken a kitchen, a garden, and a banquet hall and folded them into the air.
Aurora kept her hands visible, one near the silver chain of the Heartstone, the other resting on the edge of her coat where the Fae blade lay hidden under its folded sleeve. The moonsilver had glowed faintly in the Richmond moon, a cold leaf in the dark. Here, with no moon to answer it, it was only an icy shape against her ribs. She was glad of the cold.
“Stay between us,” Isolde said.
She did not look back as she said it. The half-Fae seer stood at the head of the path, her waist-long silver hair moving although no breeze touched the amber sky. Her pale lavender eyes swept the orchard beyond the vines, and her lips curved with the careful blankness of someone who had promised not to lie and had not promised to tell anything else.
Nyx came last, which made Aurora’s chest tighten. The shade was rarely behind anyone. In solid form he stood at six foot two, a humanoid silhouette cut from night and trimmed with violet fire, but here the light was wrong. Dymas had no proper shadow for him to slip through. The darkness pooled thin under the vines, not enough to hide him or feed him. Nyx’s edges blurred, and for a moment he seemed as though he might be smeared across the ground.
“This is not a shadow,” Nyx said, voice a whisper carried on wind. It came from everywhere and nowhere, brushing her ear. “It is hunger wearing the shape of shade.”
“Then don’t feed it,” Aurora said. Her voice sounded flat in the rich air, swallowed almost before it left her mouth.
They moved deeper.
The path carried them under a trellis where clusters of black pears hung from golden threads. The threads hummed faintly, a high sweetness like crystal struck with silver. One pear split as Aurora passed, not falling, opening in slow wet folds to reveal pale flesh that steamed. The scent hit her: warm vanilla, clove, something animal and fresh, and her stomach gave a traitorous clench.
She looked away.
“Good,” Isolde murmured, without seeming to . “The table is set, but the meal is not offered.”
Aurora thought of Evan, how he used to put food on the floor and call it kindness when she was hungry. She thought of Eva’s flat in London, the way a kitchen could be safe only when someone else did not decide what it was for.
“Does everything here want to be eaten?” she asked.
Isolde’s no-footprints made the petals silent; even Dymas did not seem to claim her. “Only what forgets it is meat,” the seer said.
A cold finger traced Aurora’s small crescent scar. She rubbed it without thinking, and the motion drew her attention to the vines ahead. Between two rows, a figure moved in a white coat that had once been bright. It was human-shaped, but its movements were too smooth, too patient, like someone acting out a memory of work. A silver tray balanced on one hand, and from somewhere above its head floated a second tray, as if it had learned how to ignore its arms. The figure’s face was soft and blank, the eyes wet and distant, and when it glanced toward them, Aurora saw the inside of a wrist marked with a sigil.
A ward, she realized. Not protection. A leash.
Nyx’s silhouette flickered . “They are not the Gluttony,” he whispered. “They are its menu.”
The words landed with ugly clarity. Aurora looked down the row and saw more white figures working, lifting, kneading, plucking fruit from trees that grew from stone pots carved into open mouths. In the distance, between orchard terraces, she caught the gleam of a feast hall, its roof held up by columns of braided bread. Silver bells hung under the eaves, and when a breeze of hot oven air moved them, they made a sound like knives being sharpened .
The pendant grew warm against her collarbone, then hot.
Aurora pressed her fingers to it. The deep crimson stone, small as a thumbnail, pulsed with an inner light. It was not just near a portal. It was reacting to something in Dymas itself, some old hunger answering its own name.
“There,” she said, before she could decide not to.
A tear hung between two trellises of saffron crocuses, a shimmering distortion in the amber air. It looked like heat above pavement, only it was cold to the eye and rimmed with a faint blue film that reminded her of the Veil she had just crossed. Around it, the vine leaves had curled into protective spirals. A ward lay woven through them, tight and brittle, and Aurora felt the Fae blade shift in its sleeve as if it had noticed first.
Isolde stopped. She did not touch it. “The door that was not watched is now,” she said.
“Wardens?” Aurora asked.
“They walked when the Veil was thin. Now they smell of frost and empty plates.”
Nyx drifted closer. His solid outline narrowed in the bright amber light, and he held a hand out without touching. The shadow beneath the ward thinned even more, and the shade seemed to recoil. “I cannot open it. There is no dark for me to cut through.”
“Isolde?”
The seer shook her head, silver hair flowing over one shoulder. “I see the lock,” she said. “I do not eat the key.”
Aurora pulled the dagger free. Moonsilver leaf blade, slender, always cold. In Dymas’s warm air it left a bead of frost on her thumb. The Fae blade had been given to her by Isolde for this: to cut through magical wards, to hurt demons. She wondered, absurdly, if it counted as a demon when it was a realm.
She stepped up to the crocuses and let the tip touch the ward.
The air gave a single, wet note, like a fork on a tooth. The blue rim shivered. Leaves blackened at their edges, not from fire but from the ward breaking its own promise . Aurora pushed the blade sideways, feeling for the seam, and it opened without weight . Behind it, the distortion widened into an arch.
Warmth rushed out.
It was not the honeyed warmth of the sky. It was oven warmth , human warmth , the breath of a room packed too full of eating. The smell of bread crust and burnt caramel washed over her, and with it came sound: laughter, glass clinking, a voice booming over a crowd.
A culinary competition? The thought was almost funny. In a place where people worked without eyes, someone held a contest.
Nyx moved to her shoulder. “Do not look too long,” he whispered. “The eye is the first appetite.”
But Aurora looked.
Through the arch, a garden spread below the next terrace, laid out like a kitchen counter. Herbs grew in rows of jade and flame. Peppers hung from vines like small lanterns, red and orange and white. Mushrooms fanned out in shelves, their caps dusted with flour that moved on its own. In the center stood a round table carved from a single slab of honeycomb. Plates rose and fell around it, and above them floated hands—no bodies, just hands—serving, testing, tasting, dropping crumbs that became beetles and scurrying before they hit the ground.
The pendant burned.
Aurora staggered back, and her shoulder hit a pear tree. The bark was warm and yielded, as if it had flesh beneath. She twisted from it, breath sharp.
“It knows what it wants,” Nyx said, and for once the whisper held no tease. His violet eyes were brighter, almost afraid. “It wants us to be hungry.”
Isolde stood very still, her face turned toward the arch but her body angled back. Aurora had learned to watch the half-Fae’s feet as much as her words. No footprints in the petal dust. No shadow under the amber light. She was there and not there, speaking like a person and moving like a question.
“The door is open,” Isolde said. “The room is not empty.”
Aurora looked through the arch again. The floating hands stopped moving.
For one long breath, the garden was silent. Then a tray tilted, sending a cascade of sugared figs across the honeycomb table. The figs rolled in neat rows, all of them aiming at Aurora’s feet. The sound of knives tapped once, somewhere inside the hall.
She grabbed the Fae blade tighter. The cold of it steadied her.
“Go back to the Veil?” Nyx asked, already moving to shadow himself behind a vine, though the light made his hiding poor.
Isolde’s lips moved, almost smiled. “The Gluttony does not release what it has already chewed.”
Aurora’s mind turned through choices. The arch behind them, if it still existed. The tear in front, pulsing with pendant heat. The floating hands beginning to rise. The blank-faced workers turning toward her, not running, only noticing, like diners remembering a new dish had been placed in front of them.
She did not like being anyone’s dish.
“Stay on the path,” she said, voice low . “If anything touches you, I cut it. If anything offers you food, you ask yourself whether you’re already hungry. If you’re not, you didn’t need to come here.”
Nyx let out a soft wind-laugh. “You sound like a delivery person.”
“I am a delivery person.” Aurora set her jaw. “And I hate leaving food on the doorstep.”
The figs stopped just short of her boots. The warm air thickened, and beyond the orchard rows the amber sky deepened toward a color Aurora had no name for: richer than sunset, closer to the inside of a mouth. A bell rang once, slow and enormous, and the vineyards answered by leaning toward it.
Aurora stepped through the arch.
Dymas opened wider, ancient and greedy, and for the first time in her life, Aurora Carter went looking for something on a plate that might be a way home.