Own Every World.
Forever.

The first crossings. Every tale in this volume opens at the bar and closes at the bar, and in between somebody goes through the back door.

These are the ones about grief mostly. People who walked in carrying a weight they'd stopped being able to name, and got sent through to the exact world that would make them decide what to do about it. Xerves doesn't hand out worlds that go easy on you. He hands out the ones that ask the hard thing plainly and then wait.

Some of these he lived himself, out on the other side of the door. Some of them spilled out two tables over and he only had to overhear. Either way he tells them the same, warm and unhurried and never overselling, a man who has seen enough worlds that nothing shocks him and grief still gets him every time.

Read them in any order. The door doesn't care which one you needed first.

In Corriveau, love that is sworn aloud has to be paid for in years off the end of your own life, and only one of you ever pays. The one who pays goes silver. The one who is loved keeps the hair they were born with.

Nobody can see the cost, or how much anyone has left. These are the people living inside that.

A couple who have loved eleven years unbound, finally holding the certificate that asks which of them will go silver for the other. A marriage sworn cheap to feel nothing, that doesn't hold. A Keeper who comes to prove a widow never paid, and learns her husband dyed his own silver head brown for thirty years so the ledger would name her the one who loved.

A man who reads a stranger's white hair as great love and buys her a drink, and gets the whole story wrong. Two people who kneel to swear deep and feel the words refuse, and understand, without a number, that one of them is near the end. A house girl who opens the wrong door in the cellar and finds what her mother's dark hair actually cost.

Each one drops you all the way into a single couple and a single impossible choice, and each ends somewhere you didn't expect.

The forger who fakes devotion for a living and won't fake it for the woman he loves. The lovers who run for the border just to love the way another country lets them, both paying, both going silver, matched. The one married by a god the city stopped believing in and denied by the book the city runs on now. The widower who fills two cups every morning and will never learn how many of his own years he spent keeping her alive.

Every one stands on its own. Open to any number and you're fully inside it in a paragraph.

Together they turn the same cruel machine over and over, the sworn love that costs everything and the free love that protects nothing, holding it up to a new light each time.

These are aching, human stories about deciding who goes silver so the other can be loved, and about doing that math blind, on faith, with a life you were never allowed to count.

His brother Danny is dead, and someone has to close out the house. So he goes back.

He hasn't been to that house in years, but the key sticks exactly where his hand expects it to, and the light switch is right where he reaches without looking, and the neighbor keeps starting to call him the wrong name. In the one photo of the two brothers as boys, there's only one boy. The death certificate has been amended, and the date on the amendment is wrong in a way that makes his hands go cold.

The Understudy is a thirteen-part suspense series that starts as a grief story and slowly stops being one. Each part turns on its own twist and ends on its own cliffhanger, and the deeper he digs into how his brother really died, the less the answers look like anything he was prepared to find.

Somebody lied about Danny. He means to find out who, and why.

He should have asked a different question.

Everyone is born under a sign, and the sign gives you one power for life. Nobody tells you the power comes with a bill.

Born Under is twelve standalone stories, one for each sign, each about an ordinary person and the price of what they are.

A mother who can shield anyone but herself, on the night a stranger comes to the door for her son. A father who can only reach his boy by hurting him, and feels every second of it. A con artist wearing a dead man's face, who realizes the face gets loved and he never did.

A hunter who goes blind the instant she aims, and a daughter standing somewhere behind her. A nurse who can save one dying patient only by lowering the other. A widow who slips into her comatose husband's dream every night and can no longer feel her own body in the chair.

No chosen ones. No saving the world. Just twelve people at the exact moment their gift asks for everything, in kitchens and hospitals and driveways that look exactly like yours.

Every story runs on the same rule. The power is real, the power is a curse, and the two are the same thing. You do not get the shield without being the one left exposed. You do not get to be certain without going blind to everything else. You do not climb without paying in years and scars you cannot hide.

Read them in any order. Read one and put the book down. They will still be sitting with you.

There are three rules about the Catalog. Don't try to find out who made it. Don't try to stop reading it. And whatever you do, don't try to prove it wrong. By the end of this story the narrator has broken all three.

He's the last person you'd expect to fall for it. He rolls his eyes at horoscopes and conspiracy theories, corrects people with Wikipedia links, believes in systems and cause and effect and the boring machinery of how things actually work. When Doug from the office brings up a website that lists things before they happen, he eats his sandwich and does not mean it when he says it sounds interesting.

Then an entry names his apartment. Then it names his mother, and the exact words she'll use, before she knows she'll use them. So he does what a person who trusts evidence does. He builds a spreadsheet. He drives to an intersection to watch a prediction come true. He runs WHOIS searches at midnight trying to trace a domain that has less tracking than a personal blog. Every test confirms the same thing, and confirming it is worse than never knowing.

The five parts follow the descent one honest step at a time. Finding it. Logging it. The entry about his mother that empties every framework he owns. His whole life shrinking as he starts planning around the entries, then obeying them. And the ending, where a real refusal fails not because the Catalog forces his hand but because it knew exactly what he'd choose, and he walks into a bar and hands the link to a stranger the way Doug once handed it to him.

This is the origin story of the world, told from inside one ordinary life. It's about the moment trust arrives for something you can't explain, and what it costs, and the quiet horror of a future that's already written and reads exactly like your own handwriting.

A vial surfaces on the black market that shouldn't exist. Not blue, not gray, but pure amber, the rare gold sleep that carries genuine contentment, and this one is stronger than anything the trade has seen. A single drop delivers days of settled, unhurried peace. The kind most people never feel awake, let alone buy in a bottle. The broker who samples it knows immediately that whoever dreamed this is worth a fortune, and that every faction in the world is about to come looking for the source.

The source is a retired schoolteacher, seventy-two, living alone in a small coastal town where extraction is banned. She has never bought or sold a vial in her life. Her husband died eight years ago, and after a long time in the dark she arrived at something quieter than happiness. Acceptance. Gratitude. Peace she earned the hard way. She does not know her sleep is extraordinary. She does not know it's being taken from her while she naps after lunch, or that her ordinary afternoons have become the most valuable commodity in the world.

The series follows the vial outward and the hunters inward. A broker rationing his supply. An authenticator tracing the dream back to its origin and flagging what she'd rather not see. An activist who believes sleep should belong to everyone. A billionaire collector who wants to own peace itself. And in the middle of all of it, an old woman gardening, waking a little more tired each day, until the world arrives at her door and the question stops being who owns her sleep and becomes whether human peace can be owned at all.

Ten parts, each readable on its own, each a new angle on the same widening theft. Read in order they close on a decision no faction sees coming.