Run: 2026-09-23-01M37P8F3XF7Q71A1RQEEJJDSZ

The rift closed behind them with a sound like a cork easing out of a bottle. Rory didn't turn around. She'd promised herself she wouldn't, back in the alley behind the Golden Empress, when the air above the bins had started to shimmer and the pendant at her throat had gone warm as a held hand. Turning around meant looking for the way home, and looking for the way home meant admitting she wasn't sure there was one. So she looked up instead. The sky was the colour of honey held to a window. No sun, no clouds, just a warm amber glow that seemed to come from everywhere at once, pooling in the air like light through a jar of marmalade. It was the most beautiful thing she'd ever seen, and something about it made the back of her neck prickle. "Nyx?" "Here." The voice came from somewhere to her left, thin and scattered, like wind finding the gaps in a fence. "Mostly." She turned. Nyx stood a few paces off, or tried to. Their silhouette kept losing its edges, fraying at the shoulders and knitting back together, and it took Rory a second to understand why. There were no shadows. Not under her feet, not beneath the low stone wall beside them, not anywhere. The light fell from every direction and left nothing dark behind. "You're struggling." "I am *unaccustomed*." The violet glow of their eyes steadied a little, two small lamps in a smudge of dusk. "There is nowhere here to stand inside. I must hold myself together by will alone." A pause, and something that might have been dry humour. "It has been some centuries since I needed to." Isolde had already walked ahead. She stood at the edge of a slope where the ground fell away, her silver hair lifting in a breeze Rory couldn't feel, and she did not look back when she spoke. "Come and see what hunger builds when it is given a kingdom." Rory went. The valley below stretched to the horizon in terraces, each one stitched with vines so heavy with fruit they bowed to the soil. Beyond the vineyards lay orchards, and beyond the orchards, gardens laid out in shapes too deliberate to be natural: spirals, knots, what looked from this distance like an enormous open hand, every finger a row of something flowering red. Threads of smoke rose here and there, pale and straight in the still air, and even from the ridge she could smell them. That was the first thing that really frightened her: the smell. It came up the slope in layers. Roasting meat and caramelised sugar. Bread just split open, still steaming. Something sharp and green, like crushed basil. Beneath it all, faint enough that she almost missed it, was the scent of butter and currants on a hot griddle, and suddenly she was seven years old in her mother's kitchen in Cardiff, standing on a chair to watch Welsh cakes brown. She pressed her thumb against the crescent scar on her left wrist, hard, the way she used to when she needed to stay in a room. "It knows what you miss," Isolde said, without looking at her. "Every guest is a returning one." "That's not cryptic at all," Rory muttered. But she noticed, filing it away, that Isolde hadn't said *it's a trick*. Isolde couldn't lie. If the smell were a fabrication, she would have found a slippery way to say so. Instead she'd said *returning*. They went down the terraced path in single file, Isolde first, Rory second, Nyx a wavering presence at her back. The soil between the vines was dark and soft, rich as chocolate cake, and Rory's trainers sank into it with every step. She glanced down at the prints she left behind, then ahead at Isolde's path. There was nothing. Not a mark. The seer walked over the loam as though it were glass. Rory had known that about her, the way you know facts about people from a story someone else told. Seeing it here, in a place where everything else seemed so eager to hold on, made her stomach tighten. The grapes were the size of plums. Rory stopped beside one cluster without meaning to. The skins were so dark a purple they were nearly black, and each one wore a bloom of silvery dust. When she leaned closer she saw her own face reflected in a dozen curved surfaces, and in every one of them she looked hungry. "Don't," Nyx whispered, very close to her ear. "I wasn't going to." "Your hand was." She looked down. Her fingers were half-raised, maybe an inch from the fruit. She lowered them slowly and shoved them into her jacket pocket, where her knuckles met the hilt of the Fae blade. It was cold, cold as it always was, a clean bright shock against her skin, and she held onto it the way she'd held her scar. "Thank you," she said quietly. "I was a man once who ate what he should not have," Nyx said. "Metaphorically speaking. I remember the look." Further down, the vines gave way to the orchards, and there they found the first of the tables. It stood alone in a clearing between the trees, long enough to seat forty, covered in white linen so crisp it looked carved. Every place was set. Silver cutlery gleamed. Crystal goblets stood filled with something dark red that didn't ripple when Rory's footsteps shook the ground. At the centre, a roasted bird larger than a swan sat glistening on a platter, its skin crackled gold, steam curling up from it in lazy ribbons. No one was sitting at the table. No one had been, as far as she could tell. The napkins were still folded into perfect crowns. "Who's it for?" Rory asked. Isolde tilted her head, lavender eyes half-lidded, and for a long moment she seemed to be listening to something far away. "For whoever arrives," she said at last. "And for whoever never leaves." Rory walked the length of the table, careful not to touch it. At the far end, beside the last place setting, lay a small card in looping copperplate. She crouched to read it without picking it up. *Course the Ninth of Nine Hundred. Prepared in gratitude. — M. Delacroix, Contracted 1887.* 1887. She read it twice. Someone had signed their name to this, like a chef on a menu, and dated it by the year they'd sold themselves. "There are kitchens here," she said slowly, "and there are people working in them." "There are *souls* working in them," Nyx corrected, and their voice went thin and bitter. "Bargained down from the mortal side. Master cooks, bakers, vintners. They make beautiful things forever for a prince who is never full." "Belphegor." Rory didn't know how she knew the name, only that it had arrived on her tongue like the aftertaste of something too sweet. The pendant flared against her collarbone, a single warm pulse, and then settled. Isolde turned at that, fast, and for the first time since they'd arrived she looked at Rory directly. "The stone remembers its orchard," she said. "Be careful whose name you teach it." Before Rory could ask what that meant, a bell rang. It came from somewhere deep in the valley, low and round and resonant, and it went on longer than any bell should, until she felt it in her teeth. The trees answered. Every branch in the orchard shivered at once, and fruit began to fall, not dropping but *drifting*, pears and figs and pomegranates coming down slow as snow. They landed in the grass without bruising. A few rolled toward Rory's feet and stopped there, arranged in a neat half-circle, as though offered. Somewhere beyond the trees, voices rose. Not screaming. Cheering. Hundreds of them, maybe thousands, and beneath it the clatter of pans, the hiss of oil, the rhythmic thunk of knives on wood. "A competition," Isolde said softly. "They are beginning." Rory's heart was going hard, but her mind had gone clear and cold, the way it did on the worst delivery nights, when the address was wrong and the rain was sideways and she had to think three moves ahead. She looked at the fruit at her feet. She looked at the table no one sat at. She looked at the path of her own footprints stretching back up the hill, the only record anywhere in this place that she'd been here at all. "Everything here wants something from us," she said. "The food wants eating. The tables want filling. It's all one long invitation." "Yes," said Isolde, and there was approval in it. "Then we don't accept anything." Rory drew the Fae blade from her pocket. Under the amber sky it didn't glow. There was no moon here to wake it, and somehow that made its coldness feel more precious, a piece of a night that existed somewhere else. "We don't eat, we don't sit, we don't sign. We find what we came for and we walk out hungry." Nyx drifted up beside her, their outline fraying and reforming. For a moment, standing close to her, they seemed to find something to hold onto. The small, stubborn darkness between her body and the blade, perhaps. Their eyes steadied. "Hungry," they agreed, in that voice like wind through a keyhole. "I can manage that. I have had four hundred years of practice." The bell rang again. The trees trembled. Rory stepped over the offered fruit, careful not to brush a single pear, and started down toward the voices.