The realm of Algoron awaits.

The Doors That No One Built
(Monday Oct 26, 2026)

Being an account set down by Master Odric Pennywhistle, Correspondent at Large, who has asked his editor to print it exactly as written, and who has not asked for his fee.

Gentle reader, you know me for a light hand. I have written about weeping towers and haunted inns and a duchess with a secret, and I have made jokes about all of them. I will not be making any jokes this time. I have tried. They will not come.

It began with five letters, arriving in the same week from five corners of Algoron. I did not believe them. Then I went to see for myself.

In the deep sands of Althainia, a caravan master swears that a stretch of cliff he has passed a hundred times now holds an arch. Not a cave. An arch, cut clean into the rock and tall enough to pass a ship through, its stone black with fire. Grey ash drifts out of it on windless days. He says the ash is warm, and that his camels will not walk within a mile of it.

In the wastes of Arkania, near where the Red Moon broke and fell, the scholars of Arkane sent three apprentices to copy the runes on an arch that had not been there the season before. Two came back. They say the runes moved while they copied them. They say that by the second night, the runes were spelling out the name of the third apprentice. They will not say what became of him.

In Icewall, the hunters of a frozen village found an arch sheathed in blue ice a hand thick, and in that ice, the marks of enormous claws. The hunters are hard folk who do not frighten easily, and they made a point of telling me one thing twice. The claw marks are on the inside of the ice.

In the jungles of Tropica, vines as thick as a man's waist grew over an arch in a single night. The birds there have stopped singing. Not quieted. Stopped. A guide who led me close enough to see it would go no further, and when I asked him why, he said only that something on the other side was breathing, and that it had been breathing for a very long time.

And in the mountains of Shokono, the monks of a high shrine say the temple bells have begun to ring on their own, always in the hour before dawn, always answered by thunder out of a clear sky, and always from the same direction: up the mountain, where a stone arch now stands in the rain.

Five doors, reader, one on each continent, and no mason alive who will admit to building any of them.

I took these accounts to the oldest library in Arkane, where an archivist of great age, who would not give me her name, brought out a book bound in something I chose not to ask about. She read to me from it. Long before the kingdoms, she said, before any of our crowns were forged, each great land belonged to a single dragon. Not a dragon of the kind we know. A sovereign. A thing that held a continent the way you or I might hold a cup. Those sovereigns are gone. But the book says their thrones were never destroyed. They were only left empty, and the doors to them were sealed.

"Sealed," I said, "until when?"

She closed the book. "Until something old enough to open them decided it was time."

I would like to tell you that this is where the story ends. It is not. On my last night in the desert I watched a dragon come down out of the dark and land before the arch of ash. It stood there a long while, perfectly still, the way a man stands at the door of a house he grew up in. Then it walked inside, and the arch swallowed it, and the ash stopped falling. It has not come out. The ash began again the next morning.

The dragons know what these doors are, reader. I am certain of it now. And I am certain of something worse: that whatever waits on the other side was here before us, has been patient longer than we have been alive, and does not think of us at all.

So I offer you the only advice I have. If you come upon an arch where no arch stood, do not stand before it. If the stone is warm, walk away. If you hear breathing in the rock, do not answer it. Let the dragons have their doors. And let kings keep their crowns, while they still can.

Master Pennywhistle has asked his editor for an assignment indoors, somewhere with very thick walls. He reports that he has not slept well, and that the ash on his boots is still warm.