AI The Heartstone pendant grew warm against Rory's sternum, a heartbeat of crimson light pulsing through her jacket. She pulled it free, the silver chain catching the amber glow of a sky that had never known the sun. Above them, the heavens of Dymas stretched in bands of molten gold and bruised violet, the light of a dying star trapped in eternal twilight.
"This way," Nyx said, and their voice came from everywhere and nowhere, a whisper that seemed to rise from the cracked earth beneath Rory's boots.
She followed. She always followed, these days. The Shade moved ahead of her, a silhouette given temporary weight , their form flickering between solid and smoke. They had found the rift together three nights ago, in the cellar beneath Silas' bar, where the Veil had worn thin as old parchment. The pendant had led them there. The pendant had led them here.
Rory's boots sank into soil that drank at them, rich and black and faintly luminescent. Fungi clung to the trunks of trees that twisted overhead, their bark the color of burnt copper, their leaves broad and translucent as stained glass. Each leaf caught the amber light and threw it back in fractured patterns, so that the forest floor shimmered with moving constellations. She reached out to touch one. It was warm, almost feverish, and when she withdrew her hand, her fingertips glowed faintly green for a moment before the light faded.
"Don't touch the flora," Nyx said, not turning around . "In Dymas, everything hungers. Even the beauty."
They had brought Isolde with them. The seer walked slightly behind, her silver hair catching light that didn't exist, her pale lavender eyes reflecting depths that had nothing to do with the grove around them. She moved without sound, left no footprints in the loam, and spoke only when the silence grew too heavy.
"The trees remember," Isolde said now, her voice like wind through dry reeds. "They remember the first feast. They remember the hunger that followed."
Rory's wrist twitched. The crescent scar there, pale against her skin, seemed to ache in this place. She had not thought of Evan in weeks. She tried not to think of him at all. But the scar remembered, even when she didn't.
The path opened into a clearing, and Rory stopped breathing.
Before them stretched a vineyard unlike any she had known. The vines grew not in rows but in spirals, in fractals, in patterns that hurt to follow too long. The grapes hung in clusters the size of her fist, their skins shifting through colors she had no names for—colors that existed in the corner of vision, that vanished when looked at directly. Some were deep as wine, others pale as bone, others striped with veins of liquid gold.
And the air tasted of them. Sweetness so thick it coated her tongue, richness that made her stomach clench with wanting. Rory's mouth watered. She had not eaten since breakfast, hours ago, days ago, time moved strangely here. The hunger rose in her like a tide, and she gripped the Heartstone pendant to anchor herself.
"Careful," Nyx said, and for the first time, their whisper carried something like fear . "The fruit here doesn't grow for eating. It grows for wanting."
Isolde stepped forward, and where her bare feet touched the soil, wildflowers erupted in her wake. They bloomed in impossible colors, petals that unfolded like origami, releasing scents that made Rory's head swim. The seer's eyes were closed , her face tilted toward the amber sky, and when she spoke, her voice came from everywhere at once.
"Three paths diverge where the gluttonous king holds court. One of wine, one of flesh, one of forgetting. Choose with your stomach , and you will be consumed. Choose with your heart, and you will be changed. Choose with your mind—"
She opened her eyes. They were wrong, Rory realized. The pupils were slit, vertical, feline. "—and you will remember what you have lost."
The wind moved through the vines, and Rory heard it then. Not music, exactly. Something beneath music. The sound of a thousand mouths opening, of satisfaction and hunger intertwined, of a feast that had never ended and never would.
"Which path do we take?" Rory asked.
Nyx turned to look at her, and their form flickered , shadows pooling and reforming in the shape of a face that might have been Aldric's, three centuries ago, or might have been something older. "The one that leads to what you need," they said. "Not what you want."
They moved deeper. The vineyard gave way to an orchard where the trees bore fruit that was not fruit—shapes that suggested apples, pears, things that had once been fruit, now grown strange and swollen with too much sweetness. The air grew thick, humid, tasting of ripeness and rot in equal measure. Rory's jacket clung to her back. Her blue eyes, usually so sharp, found it difficult to focus on any single tree, any single branch.
She saw movement in the branches. Shapes that might have been birds, or might have been something that had once been human, now adapted to this place of endless growing and endless hunger. They watched her with eyes that reflected the amber sky, and when one of them opened its mouth, Rory heard not a cry but a word, whispered so softly she almost missed it :
*Hungry.*
"Don't answer," Isolde said, but she was smiling, and her teeth were too white, too numerous. "They don't want food. They want company. They want to be remembered as they were, before."
Rory thought of Evan. She thought of the way he had looked at her when he was angry , the way his hands had found her throat, her wrist, the crescent scar he had kissed once and called hers. She thought of Cardiff, of the Pre-Law degree she had abandoned, of the life she had been supposed to build.
She thought of London, of Yu-Fei Cheung's restaurant, of the flat above Silas' bar where she slept with the Fae blade beneath her pillow and the Heartstone pendant against her heart.
"I don't want to be remembered," she said. "Not by them."
Nyx's form solidified for a moment, and Rory saw something like grief in the shadows that shaped their face. "Then we walk faster," they said.
The orchard opened into a garden, and the wonder of it stole her breath despite everything.
Flowers grew here that had no business existing. Blossoms the size of her head, layered in petals that moved independently, that opened and closed in slow rhythms like breathing. Colors that shifted when she looked away, that resolved into new hues when she turned back. The air was thick with perfume, with the scent of every flower that had ever bloomed, compressed and concentrated until it became almost physical, a presence she could taste, could feel coating her throat.
And there were paths. Dozens of them, winding between the blooms, each one marked by a standing stone carved with symbols that hurt to read. Rory approached the nearest and touched it. The stone was warm, almost alive , and beneath her fingers she felt a pulse , slow and deep, like a heartbeat.
"These mark the boundaries," Isolde said, appearing at her shoulder without sound. "Between what is offered and what is taken. Between the feast and the famine."
"Which one do we follow?"
The seer's lavender eyes met hers, and for a moment, Rory saw something ancient and tired and terribly sad. "The one that smells of home," Isolde said. "Even if home is a lie. Even if home is a cage."
They walked. The garden seemed to stretch without end, each turn revealing new wonders and new uneases. Fountains that flowed with liquid silver, with wine, with something that glowed faintly blue and moved against gravity. Statues of figures in attitudes of ecstasy, their faces blurred as if the stone itself refused to remember what they had been. A pavilion where a feast was laid out on a table that extended into shadow, the dishes empty but the plates still warm, the glasses still wet with condensation.
Rory reached for a goblet. Her fingers closed on cold metal, and she jerked back, but not before she felt it—the wrongness of it, the sense that something had touched her in return.
"Don't," Nyx said, and their voice was closer now, urgent. "In Dymas, to touch is to taste. To taste is to be tasted."
She pulled her hand back. The scar on her wrist burned, a warning or a memory, she couldn't tell which.
They found the door at the garden's heart. It stood alone, without wall or frame, a portal of dark wood carved with scenes of feasting and famine, of plenty and want, of the endless cycle that defined this place. The Heartstone pendant blazed against Rory's chest, crimson light pulsing in rhythm with her heartbeat.
"Beyond this," Isolde said, "is the court of Belphegor. Prince of Gluttony. He who consumes and is consumed. He offers what you lack, and takes what you have."
"What do we lack?" Rory asked.
The seer's smile was sad , knowing. "You will see."
Nyx moved to the door first, their shadow-form pressing against the wood, testing. "It opens for the hungry," they said. "For the wanting. For those who come seeking."
"And if we don't want?" Rory asked.
"Then it opens anyway," Isolde whispered. "In Dymas, want is not a choice. It is a condition."
The door swung inward, and the amber light of Dymas spilled through, carrying with it the scent of roasting meat and baking bread and wine so rich it made Rory's eyes water. She stepped forward, the Heartstone pendant warm against her skin, the Fae blade cold beneath her jacket, and the three of them crossed the threshold into the feast that never ended, into the hunger that could never be satisfied, into the heart of Gluttony itself.
Behind them, the door closed. Before them, the court of Belphegor waited, and the prince who had consumed a thousand souls and been consumed in return, and the truth of what they had come seeking, and what they would have to leave behind.
Rory took a breath. The air tasted of everything she had ever wanted, and everything she had ever lost.
She stepped forward.