Sam couldn’t stop staring at the dead door. Twenty minutes ago it had been glowing with warm golden light. Now it looked like a piece of charcoal—black, lifeless, wrong.
“It’s probably nothing,” Maya said, but her paint-stained fingers kept twitching toward her own door, the one marked with intertwined hearts. “Doors need maintenance sometimes. Right?”
She was trying to convince herself as much as anyone else. Sam noticed how she’d positioned herself between the dead door and her romance world, as if her body could somehow protect it.
Jin looked up from his napkin contraption, lab coat wrinkled from hours of hunching over equations. “There could be a logical explanation. Power fluctuations, dimensional instability, quantum—”
“Oh, shut up with the quantum,” Elena said from her spot by the fireplace. She’d closed her horror journal, but her pale fingers still gripped it like a lifeline. “Some things are just wrong, and you feel it in your bones.”
Marcus didn’t look up from his economics textbook, but Sam noticed his shoulders had gone rigid. “You’re all overreacting. One door goes dark, so what? There are dozens of others.”
“So what?” Maya’s voice pitched higher. “Marcus, what if it was your door? What if everything you’d built just… disappeared?”
That got his attention. Marcus glanced toward his golden-runed door, and Sam saw him swallow hard. “It won’t be. My world is solid. Stable. I’ve planned everything.”
“Planning doesn’t matter if the infrastructure fails,” Jin muttered, then caught himself. “Not that I think it will. The Tavernkeeper has been running this place for—” He paused. “How long has the Tavernkeeper been running this place?”
They all looked around, but the Tavernkeeper had vanished between the tables, the way they always did, appearing wherever they were needed most.
“I’ve been coming here for three years,” Maya said. “They were here when I started.”
“Five years for me,” Jin added. “Same thing.”
Elena shrugged. “I don’t keep track of time, but they’ve always been here. Always helping.”
Marcus finally closed his textbook with a sharp snap. “Twelve years. The Tavernkeeper was here on my first visit, and they looked exactly the same as they do now. Never aged a day.”
A chill ran down Sam’s spine. “That’s… unusual, right? For someone who looks human?”
“Nothing’s human here,” Elena said quietly. “That’s the point. This is where impossible things become possible.”
But as she spoke, another sound cut through the tavern’s buzz—a woman’s scream of anguish from somewhere across the room. They turned to see a regular Sam didn’t recognize, a middle-aged woman in a teacher’s cardigan, standing before what looked like a classroom door with tears streaming down her face.
“My students,” she whispered. “They’re… they’re sick. All of them. There’s some kind of plague, but I never wrote a plague. I would never—” She pressed her hands against the door’s window, staring at whatever was happening inside her world. “Children are dying, and I don’t know how to stop it because I didn’t create it.”
The Tavernkeeper appeared beside her as if summoned by distress itself. They placed a gentle hand on her shoulder. “Show me,” they said.
The woman opened the door, and through it Sam could see rows of small desks in a cheerful classroom. But the children sitting at those desks looked wrong—pale, listless, with dark circles under their eyes.
“When did this start?” the Tavernkeeper asked.
“This morning. Yesterday they were fine, laughing and learning like always. But today…” The woman’s voice broke. “I built this world for them. A place where learning was adventure, where every child could succeed. It was supposed to be safe.”
The Tavernkeeper stepped through the door into the classroom. Sam watched them move between the desks, touching each child’s forehead with infinite gentleness. The children looked up with hope, as if sensing help had arrived.
But when the Tavernkeeper returned to the tavern, their face was grim.
“I can’t fix this,” they said quietly. “The sickness isn’t part of your world’s story. It’s… something else. Something that doesn’t belong.”
The woman stared at them in shock. “But you can fix anything. You always know what to do.”
“I…” The Tavernkeeper’s confident facade cracked slightly. “I need to think about this. Give me some time.”
But they didn’t sound confident. They sounded lost.
The woman nodded and closed her door, but Sam could still hear the faint sound of children coughing on the other side.
“Okay,” Marcus said, his voice tight with control. “That’s two problems. The dead door and the plague door. Anyone else notice any changes to their worlds?”
Maya bit her lip. “My last romance subplot got… darker than I intended. The love triangle turned into actual violence. People are getting hurt when they should be falling into each other’s arms.”
Jin’s face went pale. “My latest space station has developed structural problems. Critical system failures that violate the engineering specs I designed. It’s like the physics of my world are… shifting.”
Elena laughed, but there was no humor in it. “My monsters are getting scarier. Which sounds good, except I’m not making them scarier. They’re changing on their own, becoming things I never imagined. Things I don’t understand.”
All eyes turned to Marcus. He was staring at his golden-runed door with undisguised worry.
“Marcus?” Maya prompted.
“My kingdom’s history changed,” he said finally. “Events I wrote, political alliances I carefully crafted—they’re different now. A war I never included is mentioned in old documents. A king I killed off years ago apparently had a son I never created.” He looked up at them with haunted eyes. “Someone else is writing in my world.”
The silence that followed was deafening. Around them, the tavern continued its normal bustle, but their corner felt isolated, quarantined by growing dread.
“This isn’t coincidence,” Sam said. “Five different worlds developing problems they shouldn’t have, plus the Tavernkeeper acting confused…”
“The Tavernkeeper has never been confused,” Maya said firmly. “They always know exactly what to do.”
“But they didn’t recognize me when I first introduced myself,” Sam pointed out. “And they couldn’t fix the plague. When was the last time any of you saw them unable to solve a problem?”
Jin’s scientific mind was already working. “If we assume the problems are connected, what’s the common variable? What links our worlds to each other and to the dead door?”
“The tavern itself,” Elena said softly. “We all access our worlds through here. If something’s wrong with the tavern…”
Marcus stood abruptly, his chair scraping against the floor. “I need to check my world. Right now.”
“Marcus, wait—” Maya started, but he was already striding toward his door.
He pressed his hand against the golden runes, and the door swung open. Through it, Sam could see a magnificent throne room with soaring columns and tapestries that told the stories of a thousand years.
Marcus stepped inside, and they watched him approach a massive bookshelf filled with historical texts. He pulled out a thick volume, flipped through the pages, and then went very, very still.
He returned to the tavern with the book in his hands, his face white as parchment.
“What is it?” Jin asked.
Marcus held up the open book. The pages were covered with text in an elegant script, but as Sam watched, new words were appearing at the bottom of the page, writing themselves in invisible ink.
“My world’s history is still changing,” Marcus said quietly. “While I was standing here talking to you, three more events appeared that I never wrote. Including…” He read from the page. “Including the mysterious disappearance of the kingdom’s founder, whose name has been stricken from all records by royal decree.”
“Who was the founder?” Sam asked.
Marcus met their eyes. “I never gave them a name. I just called them ‘the Tavernkeeper’ in my notes.”
The implications hit them all at once. Sam felt the floor seem to shift beneath their feet.
“We need to find them,” Sam said. “Right now.”
But as they turned to scan the tavern, they realized the Tavernkeeper was nowhere to be seen. And in the distance, they could hear the faint sound of another door falling dark.