AI The air tore like wet silk , and then London was gone .
Rory stumbled forward a half-step, her boots trading the cool, wildflower-tangled turf of Richmond Park for ground that yielded like sun-warmed sponge. Behind her, the rift in the Veil hissed shut to a hairline fracture, leaving only a faint, shimmering distortion hovering in midair where ancient oak standing stones had stood seconds before. Against her collarbone, the Heartstone Pendant gave one final, feverish throb of heat on its silver chain, its thumbnail-sized crimson gem pulsing like a caught coal before settling into a steady, watchful warmth .
She drew a breath to steady herself and nearly choked on the sweetness of it.
The air didn’t belong to winter, or to Earth. It hung thick and syrupy in her throat, layered with the dizzying perfume of crushed figs, burnt sugar, cardamom, and damp, fertile loam. Rory blinked up, lifting a hand to shield her eyes, though there was no sun to blind her. Above them stretched an unbroken vault of warm amber sky, luminous from horizon to horizon, as though they stood inside the belly of a colossal lantern blown from honeyed glass.
Beside her, Nyx drifted forward. On Earth, the Shade’s six-foot-two frame usually knifed cleanly through alleyways and lamplight, anchored by crisp darkness. Here, under an omnidirectional amber glow that cast almost no natural shadows, their edges frayed like ink dropped into warm water. Tendrils of living night curled and evaporated from their shoulders before pulling tight again into a tall humanoid silhouette. Faintly glowing violet eyes narrowed against the golden haze.
"So loud," Nyx murmured. Their voice, thin and dry as a whisper carried on a midnight wind, barely cut through the ambient hum of the landscape.
Rory tilted her head, listening. At first she thought it was wind moving through grass, straight black hair brushing her shoulders as she turned. Then her mind sorted the sound into pieces. It was the low, thrumming vibration of millions of unseen wings, coupled with a wet, rhythmic creaking—the sound of things growing too fast.
"A kitchen never sleeps when the master is hungry," Isolde said softly .
The Half-Fae stepped past Rory, her waist-length silver hair catching the amber light until it looked spun from pale gold. At five-foot-five, she was slight, almost weightless in her movements. Rory glanced down and felt a familiar prickle of unease along her spine: where her own scuffed delivery boots sank half an inch into the dark purple moss carpeting the ridge, Isolde’s bare feet didn't bruise a single frond. She left no footprints at all, gliding down the slope as if walking an inch above the skin of the world .
Rory adjusted her grip on the Fae-forged blade in her right hand. Without moonlight to wake its luminescence, the slender, leaf-shaped moonsilver dagger looked starkly dull against the lush vibrancy around them, a sliver of winter trapped in amber. Its hilt bit into her palm with a relentless, unnatural chill . Right now, she welcomed the cold.
"Stay close to the ridge," Rory said, falling in beside Nyx as they followed the seer down into the valley. "If that rift shifts, I want a clear sightline back to it."
They had emerged onto an ancient, untended terrace—wilderness, if something so aggressively abundant could be called wild. Below them tumbled a labyrinth of colossal orchards and untamed vineyards that seemed to predate cultivation itself . As they descended beneath the first canopy, Rory’s sense of scale warped.
The trees towered like cathedral pillars, their trunks twisted in braided spirals of translucent, rose-tinted bark. Beneath that glassy rind, Rory could actually see the sap moving—thick ribbons of luminous gold surging upward in slow, rhythmic pulses, like blood pumping through giant arteries. Overhead, broad leaves the color of tarnished copper whispered together, filtering the amber sky into a rich, drowsy bronze.
Rory reached out, stopping her fingertips an inch short of a low-hanging bough. Clustered along the wood were fruits shaped like blown-glass pears, each swollen to the size of a human head. Inside their taut, pellucid skins, dark crimson nectar swirled around seeds that glowed like tiny embers. As her body heat neared the branch, the stem twitched. Slowly, deliberately, the heavy fruit bent lower, offering itself to her palm. A tiny bead of syrup squeezed through a pore in its skin, releasing a sudden, concentrated burst of scent.
Rory froze.
It didn't smell like fruit anymore. It smelled like warm butter melting into griddled Welsh cakes in her mother’s kitchen in Cardiff. Underneath that rose the sharp, savory sizzle of ginger, garlic, and char siu hitting the iron woks at the Golden Empress after a six-hour shift in the London rain. Saliva flooded her mouth so violently her jaw ached. Her stomach contracted into a hard, hollow knot, sudden and vicious, as if she hadn't eaten a bite in ten days.
Her left hand rose halfway to the fruit before she caught the small, white crescent scar on her wrist flashing pale against the bronze gloom . She snatched her arm back as if burned.
"It reads you," Rory breathed, wiping the back of her wrist across her mouth, her heart hammering against her ribs. "Bloody hell. The fruit reads what you want."
"Not what you want," Isolde corrected, turning her pale lavender eyes back toward Rory. Her ageless face remained serene, untouched by the heavy humidity beading sweat along Rory’s hairline. "What your marrow remembers lacking. Here the orchard tends the gardener, and the feast sharpens its knives on the tongue. Keep your teeth behind your lips, little courier, or leave your years to sweeten the dirt."
Rory swallowed hard against the phantom ache in her belly. "Right. Don't eat the weird Hel pears. Got it."
"Everything here is bait," Nyx whispered, drifting closer to the glassy trunk. They shifted partially incorporeal, letting a ghostly hand pass directly through a curtain of velvet -furred vines hanging from the canopy. Where Nyx's shadow-flesh intersected the greenery, the vines shivered, recoiling slightly as if tasting cold ash instead of mortal warmth . "Old magic. Older than the courts down in the valleys. The soil itself is soaked in appetite."
They pressed deeper into the grove, where the orchard gave way to a sunken gorge choked with primordial grapevines. Each woody cane was as thick around as a pillar in a Tube station, knotting over their heads to form crooked archways. Bundles of grapes the size of plums hung in glittering chandeliers—some midnight-black and dusted with silver bloom, others pale as pearls and faintly chiming whenever a breeze stirred them, ringing like delicate crystal goblets clinking at a distant banquet.
Wonder and revulsion tangled in Rory’s chest with every step. She had expected Hel to look like ash and brimstone, jagged rock and screaming pits. Somehow, this relentless perfection was worse. Nothing rotted here. When an overripe pomegranate burst on the mossy ground ten paces ahead of them, splitting with a soft, wet *pop *, the spilled rubies didn't draw flies. Instead, tiny, blind creatures that looked like curled white porcelain shrimps emerged from the dark soil, delicately gathering the glowing seeds and dragging them down into silk -lined burrows.
A narrow stream wound along the bottom of the gorge, babbling softly over smooth black stones. Rory crouched beside the bank, careful to keep her boots clear of the margin. The liquid rushing past wasn't water. It ran thick and burgundy-dark, foaming pink at the eddies, radiating a heady warmth spiced with cloves and fermented plums. Down in the translucent depths , long, ribbon-finned eels made of what looked like spun amber ribboned lazily against the current.
"Spiced wine," Rory muttered, squinting down the winding channel. "An actual river of mulled wine. My flatmate downstairs would weep."
She started to stand, then paused. Half-submerged beneath an overhanging shelf of bloated, saffron-colored mushrooms, the pale stones lining the streambed looked wrong. They were too smooth, arranged in neat, repeating curves. Rory leaned closer, bright blue eyes adjusting to the wine-dark refraction.
Not stones. Porcelain. Thousands of broken, gilded banquet plates, layered like fish scales into the mud over centuries, mingled with tarnished silver goblets choked with roots. And tangled farther back under the bank, wrapped tightly in hair-fine feeder vines that pulsed with rose-gold sap, lay a carved marble statue of a kneeling man, his jaw unhinged wide to catch the trickle of nectar dripping from a split gourd overhead.
Except marble didn't have knuckles worn raw from clawing at roots, and statues didn't wear the rotted remnants of seventeenth-century wool coats.
Wait. Rory squinted harder. The figure wasn't flesh anymore—calcified into chalky white mineral by whatever dripped from the vines, wholly absorbed into the architecture of the grove—but the hollow desperation frozen into his upturned face made Rory’s breath catch.
Beside her, Nyx went entirely rigid. Their shadowy outline snapped suddenly solid, six feet of dense, lightless matter blocking the amber glow. Their violet eyes fixed on the calcified coat cuff protruding from the moss.
"Contracted soul?" Rory asked quietly, rising to her feet.
"Trespasser, perhaps. Or a chef who sampled his prince’s stock without leave," Nyx said, though the wind-whisper of their voice had tightened to a razor’s edge. For a fleeting second, Rory remembered that Nyx hadn't always been shadow; whoever they had been four hundred years ago knew that cut of wool.
A soft chime echoed above them. A cluster of pearl-pale grapes directly over Nyx’s head trembled , dusting the air with a fine, glittering cloud of golden pollen. Rory watched a stray eddy of it drift past Isolde—who didn't even blink as the spores slid harmlessly off unseen Fae wards—and settle across Rory’s own sleeve.
Instantly, the hollow cramp in her stomach doubled. The memory of food vanished, replaced by something far simpler and more terrifying: a raw, animal certainty that she was starving to death, right here on her feet. The burgundy stream at her boots suddenly looked like salvation . Even the Heartstone Pendant under her shirt seemed to purr against her skin, coaxing her downward, welcoming itself home to Dymas. Beside her, she saw Nyx’s solid hand twitch slightly toward the chiming grapes, drawn by a four-century ache for mortal sensation.
*Think,* Rory told herself fiercely, locking her knees before she could kneel by the bank. *It’s in the head. Just glamour and pollen.*
Without hesitating, she flipped the moonsilver blade in her grip and pressed the flat of the leaf-shaped steel straight against the bare skin of her left wrist, directly over her crescent scar.
The cold hit her nervous system like a plunge through thin ice. Rory gasped sharply as the Fae-forged metal drank the syrupy warmth straight out of her blood, shocking her pulse back into a crisp, furious rhythm. The illusion of starvation shattered like thin sugar glass. The river was just enchanted swill again; the air smelled faintly sickly, overripe to the point of suffocation.
Moving fast, Rory reached out and hooked her free hand around Nyx’s elbow. Her fingers sank halfway through freezing smoke before meeting solid forearm. She tugged hard. "Nyx. Walk. Don't breathe it in."
Nyx blinked, their violet gaze snapping back to hers. With a sharp hiss like wind through dry reeds, the Shade dissolved into pure incorporeal mist for three strides, shedding the glittering pollen onto the moss before reforming at Rory’s shoulder. "Clever mortal," they breathed, shaken.
"Just used to dodging bad takeaway," Rory muttered, keeping the freezing flat of the dagger tapped lightly against her pulse point as they climbed out of the gorge.
Ahead of them, the gnarled grape archways thinned, giving way to an ancient outcrop of black basalt jutting out from the mountainside. Isolde stood waiting at its lip, silver hair streaming backward in a warm updraft rising from below.
Rory stepped up beside her, Nyx coalescing on her left, and the words died in her throat.
The primordial orchard they had just crossed was merely the overgrown rim of an immense, sunken caldera. Stretching out beneath the endless amber sky lay Dymas proper—miles upon sweeping miles of manicured excess. Terraced vineyards glowed in concentric rings of emerald and gold, fed by towering stone aqueducts that poured cascading waterfalls of pale honey and dark wine into gleaming reservoirs below. Farther down, nestled among sprawling gardens of luminescent flora, rose a city of copper-domed pavilions and open-air palaces. Even from miles away, Rory could see great plumes of fragrant violet and silver smoke coiling lazily from hundreds of towering chimneys, and catch the faint, unmistakable roar of music and laughter drifting up from feasts that looked vast enough to swallow half of central London.
Against her chest, the crimson Heartstone Pendant flared with a steady, unmistakable inner glow, pulsing gently in time with the distant roar of Belphegor’s domain.
"Those who come to dine rarely find the door again," Isolde murmured, gazing out over the gilded sprawl with her pale, unblinking eyes. "Yet what you seek sits at the longest table."
Rory looked down at the leaf-shaped moonsilver blade gleaming coldly in her hand, then out at the terrifying, breathtaking golden horizon. She rolled her shoulders back, letting the chill of the metal steady her breath.
"Good thing we didn't come for dinner, then," Rory said, and started down the stone steps into the valley.