Run: 2026-09-23-01M37PVN8HQDJ9EC6JEFVXCG8X

The pendant burned. Rory pressed her palm flat against her sternum, felt the crimson stone throbbing through her jumper like a second pulse, and then the tunnel folded shut behind them with a sound like a cork leaving a bottle. Her ears popped. Her knees hit something soft. Soil. Warm, black, loamy soil that gave under her weight like bread dough. She pushed herself upright and the sky hit her all at once. Amber. Not sunset-orange or the sodium glow of a London night, but a deep, syrupy gold that poured down from everywhere at once. No sun hung in it. No clouds. The light just *existed*, thick enough that she half expected it to drip off the edges of things. "Well." Rory wiped her hands on her jeans and left two dark smears. "That's not Richmond." "No." Nyx's voice slid past her ear, thinner than usual, a draught through a keyhole. "It is not." She turned. The Shade stood a few paces behind her, or tried to. In the Grove, in her flat, in every alley they'd shared, Nyx had been a crisp cut-out of midnight with violet embers for eyes. Here the edges of them wavered. Their silhouette bled at the shoulders and fingertips, fraying into the gold like ink in bathwater. "You're fuzzy." "There are no shadows here." Nyx lifted one hand and studied it. The fingers came and went. "The light has no source. It falls from every direction. I have nowhere to stand." "Can you hold together?" "I have held together for nearly four centuries." Their eyes narrowed to violet slits. "I will manage an afternoon." Isolde had already walked ahead. She moved down the slope in a long silver drift of hair, her bare feet brushing the soil, and Rory watched the ground behind her. Smooth. Unmarked. Rory glanced at her own trainers, sunk an inch deep, then at the ragged trail of prints she'd left since landing. "Must be nice," she muttered. "It is neither nice nor unkind." Isolde didn't turn around. "The earth only remembers what it can hold." "Right. Brilliant. Cheers." The hillside fell away in terraces, each one a green step lined with vines, and the vines were wrong in a way Rory couldn't name until she got close. The trunks twisted thick as her thigh, bark gnarled into shapes that looked like knuckles. The leaves were broad and veined with gold. And the grapes— She stopped in front of a cluster and stared. Each one was the size of a plum and so dark it looked bruised, skins stretched glossy and taut. They hung heavy enough to bow the branches. When she leaned in, she heard them. A low, contented hum, like a hive, like a fridge at three in the morning. "They're making noise." "They are ripening." Nyx drifted up at her shoulder, a smudge of cold in the heat. "Listen closer." She did. Under the hum ran a faint crackle, a fizz, the sound of sugar splitting and fermenting inside the skins. As she watched, one grape swelled a fraction more. The skin went tight as a drum. A single bead of juice wept from its stem and fell, and where it struck the soil a tiny green shoot pushed up, unfurled two leaves, and stopped. Rory stepped back. "Okay. I'm not touching anything." "Wise." Isolde had paused at the terrace edge, her lavender eyes fixed somewhere past the valley. "Though wisdom starves as quickly as folly, in a house where the table never clears." "Was that a warning or a fortune cookie?" Isolde smiled and said nothing, which Rory had learned meant *both*. The smell reached her next. It had been there since they landed, she realised, rising around her so gradually she'd mistaken it for the air itself. Caramelised sugar. Woodsmoke. Roasting fat, garlic gone golden in butter, something sharp and citrus beneath it, fresh bread splitting open. Her mouth flooded. Her stomach cramped so hard she put a hand to it. She'd eaten before they left. A full plate of Yu-Fei's leftover char siu, rice, a spring roll she'd nicked off the counter when Yu-Fei wasn't looking. She should have been fine for hours. She was ravenous. "Rory." Nyx's whisper had an edge now. "Your hand." She looked down. Her fingers were three inches from a low branch of the vine, reaching for a grape. She didn't remember lifting her arm. She yanked it back and shoved the hand in her pocket. "That's—" She swallowed. Her throat clicked. "That's grim. It's in the air, isn't it? The hunger." "It is the air." Isolde turned at last, and something like pity softened her ageless face. "Everything in Dymas wants to be eaten. It is the only purpose the land understands." Rory drew the Fae blade from the sheath at the small of her back. She didn't need to. Nothing was attacking. But the moonsilver bit into her palm with that familiar winter chill, sharp enough to ache, and the ache cleared her head. The hunger didn't vanish. It retreated a few steps and sat down to wait. "Better," she breathed. "Keep it close," Nyx murmured. They went down through the terraces. The vines gave way to an orchard, trees planted in rows so precise they looked ruled onto the land, and in the gaps between trunks Rory saw the first of the workers. A man on a ladder, picking fruit. Pears, she thought, until she saw them properly: pale gold, translucent, a tiny flame guttering in the heart of each one. He twisted them free one at a time and set them in a wicker basket with the care of someone handling eggs. He wore a white apron and a chef's jacket gone grey at the cuffs. A thin silver line circled his throat, not a chain exactly, more like a seam in the skin. "Hiya," Rory called. He didn't look down. His lips moved. She edged closer. He was muttering under his breath, and the accent landed like a slap. Mancunian. Flat vowels, clipped consonants. "—quarter-inch dice, sweat the shallots, don't let them colour, don't let them colour, deglaze with the white, reduce by half—" "Mate." She reached the foot of the ladder. "You're from Manchester?" His hands kept picking. Twist. Place. Twist. Place. "—reduce by half, mount with cold butter, season to finish, taste, taste, taste—" "He cannot hear you." Isolde's voice came gentle behind her. "He sold his ears for a perfect palate, I think. Or his eyes for a perfect knife. They always sell something." "He's a person." Rory's jaw set. "He's from *Manchester*." "He was," Nyx whispered. The Shade's frayed edges had gone very still. "Now he is staff." Rory stared up at the man another long moment. He finished the branch, climbed down two rungs, and started on the next as though she were a fencepost. She walked on because there was nothing else to do. Past the orchard the ground dropped into a valley, and through the middle of it ran an aqueduct. It stood on arches so tall Rory had to tip her head back to follow them, the stone pale and pitted and shot through with veins of something like rose quartz. Liquid ran along the channel at the top. She could hear it chuckling overhead, and a fine mist drifted down that smelled of honey and cloves. The arches were carved. She went to the nearest pillar and brushed the stone with her fingertips. Figures crowded every surface. Long tables, bodies leaning in, mouths open, platters raised. Figures with too many arms carving roasts. Figures with no faces at all, only open jaws. The detail was absurd, obsessive. She could make out individual grains of rice on a plate the size of her thumbnail. "How old is this?" "Older than the Prince who holds it." Isolde laid her hand beside Rory's, and her fingers didn't disturb the fine dust on the stone. "Belphegor dines at a table he did not build." "Who built it?" "Someone hungry." Rory opened her mouth to snap at her and stopped. Under her fingertips, the carving moved. Only a little. A figure at the table turned its stone head, a grinding of grit, and its blank eyes tracked from its plate to her hand. The mouth widened. She snatched her fingers away. The figure stayed turned. Watching. "Nyx." "I see it." The Shade had drifted up beside her, and their voice carried something she'd never heard in it before. Recognition, maybe. "I have seen this before." "When?" "The night I tore." Violet flickered deep in the smudge of their face. "In 1643, when the circle broke and I fell between. For a heartbeat, before the dark took me, I saw a gold sky and smelled cloves. I thought I dreamt it. I have thought so for three hundred and eighty years." Rory looked at them. At the frayed shoulders, the fingers coming and going. "You never told me that." "I did not remember it until now." Far off, somewhere beyond the next ridge, a bell began to ring. Deep, bronze, unhurried. Another answered it from the east, then a third, closer, until the whole valley thrummed with the sound. The mist from the aqueduct shivered in the air. Up and down the orchard rows, the workers stopped picking. Every one of them turned toward the ridge. They climbed down their ladders in perfect unison, lifted their baskets, and began to walk. "Supper bell?" Rory asked. "A feast." Isolde's lavender gaze had gone distant, fixed on nothing. "Some are called to cook. Some are called to eat. Some are called to be the meal, and none of them know which until the lids come off the platters." The smell thickened. Roast meat and burnt sugar and bread, and something else threaded through it now, rich and dark and dizzying. Rory's grip tightened on the blade until the cold burned. Her stomach howled. A fig hung from a low branch at the orchard's edge, split along one side, the flesh inside glistening pink and gold. Her free hand was already halfway to it. Cold closed around her wrist. Nyx's fingers, solid for once, pressed over the little crescent scar. "Aurora." The whisper was a breath against her ear. "Look at me. Not the fruit. Me."