Sam sat alone in the collapsing tavern, surrounded by the devastation of abandoned dreams.
Half the doors had been extracted by Dr. Vex’s organization, their creators convinced that separation meant survival. The remaining worlds flickered like dying candles, their stories too fragmented to sustain themselves. Marcus had left an hour ago, following his rescued world to “secure facilities.” Jin had vanished into his extracted sci-fi universe. Even Maya had been persuaded to evacuate when her romance world began showing signs of structural failure.
Only Elena remained, sitting across from Sam in the rubble of what had once been the tavern’s heart.
“I could have gone,” Elena said quietly, her pale face streaked with obsidian dust. “Dr. Vex offered to extract my world too. Said horror always had commercial potential.”
“Why didn’t you?”
Elena gestured toward her door, which still glowed with steady light despite the chaos around them. “Because running away from fear isn’t the same as conquering it. And this place…” She looked around at the cracking walls, the dead doors, the fragments of crystallized memory scattered across the floor. “This place taught me that some things are worth being afraid for.”
Sam nodded, understanding. They’d had their own chance to leave—Dr. Vex had offered to help them relocate their fantasy world to a “more stable environment.” But walking away felt like betraying everything the Tavernkeeper had tried to show them.
Stories aren’t possessions to be hoarded. They’re living things.
“Elena,” Sam said slowly, an idea beginning to form. “What if we’ve been thinking about this wrong? What if the hunger isn’t the problem—it’s the solution?”
Elena raised an eyebrow. “Explain.”
Sam stood up, walking to the center of the chamber where the Tavernkeeper had made their final sacrifice. The obsidian floor here was warm to the touch, and if they listened carefully, they could hear something like a heartbeat emanating from deep below.
“The tavern is alive,” Sam said. “It’s been trying to connect all our stories from the beginning, but we kept insisting on boundaries. Doors that only we could open. Worlds that only we could enter. We treated connection like contamination.”
“Because mixing genres usually creates chaos,” Elena pointed out. “Horror and romance don’t traditionally—”
“Don’t they?” Sam interrupted. “What’s more horrifying than losing someone you love? What’s more romantic than choosing to face terror together?”
Elena’s eyes widened as she caught on. “You’re talking about actual integration. Not just letting the worlds touch, but letting them become part of each other.”
“The Tavernkeeper fed the tavern pieces of themselves to keep our worlds separate,” Sam said, excitement growing in their voice. “But what if separation was never the goal? What if the tavern has been starving because we’ve been feeding it isolation instead of connection?”
They turned to face Elena’s door. “Your horror world—what if instead of being a place where you go to face your fears alone, it became a place where people could face their fears together? Where the monsters become manageable because love makes you braver?”
Elena stood up slowly. “And your fantasy world with the uphill river—what if the magic that defies natural law could flow into other worlds? What if magic itself became the force that connects different stories?”
“Exactly.” Sam’s heart was racing now. “But we can’t do it with just two worlds. We need…”
They looked around the dying tavern, at the handful of remaining doors that their creators had been too paralyzed or too stubborn to abandon. A classroom world where plague-sick children waited for help that might never come. A Western town where the sun set in all the wrong directions. A dozen other broken dreams that Dr. Vex had deemed “commercially unviable.”
“We need all of them,” Sam finished. “Even the broken ones. Especially the broken ones.”
Elena grinned, and for the first time since Sam had met her, the expression held no shadow of fear. “You want to feed the beast connection instead of isolation.”
“I want to feed it collaboration instead of ownership.”
“It could work,” Elena said thoughtfully. “But we’d have to convince the remaining creators to give up control of their worlds completely. To let them become part of something bigger.”
Sam walked to the nearest flickering door—the plague classroom. Through its window, they could see the teacher sitting among her dying students, holding their hands as they struggled to breathe.
“Ma’am?” Sam called through the door.
The teacher looked up, her face streaked with tears. “Are you here to evacuate us? The extraction people said my world didn’t meet their standards.”
“I’m here to offer something different,” Sam said. “What if instead of saving your students alone, we could give them friends from other worlds? What if the cure for their plague came from a magic system powered by love, or from a sci-fi medical technology that runs on emotional connection?”
The teacher stared at them in amazement. “You mean… integration? Cross-world contamination?”
“I mean collaboration. Your students don’t have to face this alone. None of us do.”
For a long moment, the teacher was silent. Then, slowly, she smiled.
“They would like that,” she said quietly. “They’ve always been braver together than apart.”
She pressed her hand against her door from the inside. “I give permission. Let other worlds help mine.”
The effect was immediate. The plague classroom’s sickly yellow light shifted, becoming warmer, more welcoming. Through the window, Sam could see the children sitting up straighter, as if sensing that help was coming.
Elena had moved to the next door—the chaotic Western town. She was speaking to its creator, a gruff older man who’d been watching his frontier world collapse with stoic acceptance.
“You built this place for people who don’t fit in elsewhere,” Elena was saying. “Outlaws, misfits, rebels. What if instead of being isolated at the edge of civilization, it became the crossroads where different types of people from different worlds could find each other?”
The man considered this. “You’re saying my town could be a meeting place? A trading post between realities?”
“I’m saying it could be exactly what it was always meant to be—a home for people who don’t have homes anywhere else.”
The Western creator pressed his hand against his door. “Do it.”
One by one, Sam and Elena moved through the tavern, speaking to each remaining creator. A fantasy realm with broken politics became a laboratory for new forms of government. A sci-fi world with failed technology became a place where emotion and logic learned to work together. A contemporary drama about family dysfunction became a healing space where people from all worlds could learn about love and forgiveness.
With each agreement, each willing surrender of individual control, the tavern’s heartbeat grew stronger. The cracks in the walls began to seal themselves. Dead doors flickered back to life.
But it wasn’t until the very end, when they’d spoken to everyone they could find, that Sam understood what was still missing.
“It’s not enough,” they said to Elena as they stood in the center of the tavern. Around them, doors glowed with new purpose, their worlds ready to connect. But the building itself still felt unstable, still hungry. “We need something more.”
Elena nodded toward Sam’s own door—the fantasy world with the uphill river that had started everything. “You haven’t offered yours yet.”
Sam stared at their door, at the world they’d struggled with for so long. The map in their pocket felt heavy with possibility.
“I built it to make sense,” Sam said slowly. “To have logical geography and coherent magic and political systems that actually function. But maybe…” They pulled out their crumpled map, looking at the river that flowed uphill. “Maybe it was never supposed to make sense alone. Maybe it was supposed to be the foundation that lets other worlds defy logic too.”
They approached their door and pressed both hands against its surface.
“I give you permission to become whatever you need to become,” they said to their world. “I give you permission to grow beyond what I could imagine alone.”
The change was instantaneous and profound. Sam’s door burst open, and instead of the familiar fantasy landscape, they saw something impossible—a river that flowed uphill, carrying boats from the remaining worlds. Cowboys from the Western frontier, plague survivors who had found healing through connection, children from the classroom world laughing as they sailed with new friends from other realities, all traveling together on waters powered by pure magic, pure possibility.
The tavern’s heartbeat became a thunderous rhythm of joy.
All around them, doors opened spontaneously. Not individual portals anymore, but windows into a vast interconnected space where the remaining stories flowed together like tributaries joining a mighty river. Where Elena’s monsters could be defeated by the plague teacher’s courage, where the Western town’s frontier justice could protect the broken fantasy kingdoms, where every abandoned dream could be healed by connection to something larger than itself.
The obsidian walls blazed with new light—not the cold reflection of separation, but the warm glow of stories sharing their strength with each other.
And in that light, Sam saw a familiar figure forming.
Not the old Tavernkeeper, faded and hollow from giving pieces of themselves away. But someone new. Someone built from the collaborative dreams of everyone who had chosen connection over isolation. Someone who belonged not to any individual world, but to the spaces between worlds where stories met and married and became more than the sum of their parts.
“Welcome,” said the new Tavernkeeper, their voice carrying echoes of every story that had ever been told in this place, “to the crossroads reborn.”
They smiled, and Sam could see fragments of every creator who had chosen collaboration reflected in their features.
“I suppose I should introduce myself. I am Xerves Jeeves—born from your courage, shaped by your choices, sustained by your willingness to share rather than hoard.” They gestured toward the connected worlds. “I am what becomes possible when stories choose each other.”
They gestured toward the open doors, toward the impossible vista of connected worlds stretching out in all directions.
“Welcome to what stories become when they stop being owned and start being shared.”
Through the largest door—Sam’s door, which had become everyone’s door—a new visitor stumbled into the tavern. A nervous young person clutching a half-finished manuscript, looking around with the same wonder Sam had felt on their first day.
Sam smiled and walked toward them, ready to offer the same gift the Tavernkeeper had given them—not a solution to their problems, but an invitation to become part of something larger than any individual dream.
“First time?” Sam asked.
The newcomer nodded, wide-eyed.
“Perfect,” Sam said, gesturing toward the infinite possibilities that stretched beyond the open doors. “Let me show you what your story becomes when it’s allowed to grow.”
And in the interconnected worlds that flowed like magic-powered rivers through the spaces between imagination and reality, the stories that had chosen connection over safety reached toward each other in the light, ready to become whatever they were brave enough to dream together.
Far away, in sterile preservation facilities, other worlds sat in perfect isolation—safe, unchanging, and slowly forgetting what it felt like to grow.