The Obsidian Tavern

There is a tavern you find the way everyone finds it. Suddenly, on a bad night, without quite remembering the walk there. Low beams, a fire that never fully goes out, a drink already half poured by the time you sit down.

The keep's name is Xerves. He came in the front door once, same as you, cold and thirsty and carrying something he couldn't set down. He never quite left.

The front door opens onto the road. The ordinary one, with weather and mud and your own tired feet on it.

The back door does not.

The back door opens onto a different world every time it's unlatched, and never the same one twice. A drowned shore where the dead come back grown and full of you. A city that runs on borrowed light. A stretch of road where nobody can lie. Xerves has stopped asking who decides. He just works the door.

Here's the part that matters.

He notices people. That's the real gift, not the traveling. He clocks the shape of you before you've said a word, and when the back door opens, it doesn't open onto the world you'd have asked for. It opens onto the one you needed. Then he tells you what happened, plain, across the bar, and lets it land.

That's what these stories are. Somebody walks in carrying a thing. The door opens. They come back lighter, or heavier, or changed in a way they can't undo, and Xerves pours one for the road and tells you how it went.

Come in out of the weather sometime. He'll read you before you've finished the first drink, and we'll see which world you needed.