Do Not Open the Door at the End of the Hall

Wassim was the only one standing when it was over. That is the part I keep returning to, even now, weeks later, sitting in our guild’s stone-walled archive with a cup of cold tea and a report I cannot bring myself to finish writing. Rasha was unconscious on the floor, her silver-threaded coat soaked through at the shoulder. Aksel was pressed into the corner furthest from the door, his eyes fixed on the middle distance with the particular blankness of a man who has seen something rearrange his understanding of the world. And the door — the door that had not been there the day before — was sealed shut, its frame scorched black, the strange pale light that had leaked beneath it finally, mercifully, gone. Wassim stood at the center of all of it, breathing hard, his hands open at his sides, and he said nothing. None of us did. That silence, I think, was the truest thing any of us managed that night.
We had come to the Kellrath Arms the previous afternoon, which is where I should really begin. The Kellrath Arms is not the kind of place that attracts trouble — or rather, it is not the kind of place that trouble is supposed to find, which is a different thing entirely. It sits on the narrow end of Coppergate Lane in the city of Veldris, a city built in layers, the oldest streets pressed so far underground that the people who live down there have not seen unfiltered daylight in two or three generations. The Arms is a middle-layer establishment: respectable enough for guild business, cheap enough for guild budgets, and staffed by a landlord named Orris who has a gift for pretending not to notice things. We had rented three rooms on the upper floor for a standard clearance job — a reported sighting of a Hollow Seam creature in the merchant district two streets over, the kind of work that pays adequately and rarely goes sideways. Rasha had done the intake. Aksel had checked the ward-lines around our rooms out of habit, the way he always did, muttering the old Veldric phrases under his breath while drawing chalk lines along the doorframes. Wassim had gone straight to bed. And I had sat at the small desk by the window and gone over the creature profile by lamplight until my eyes ached, reading about Hollow Seam creatures — how they fold themselves through gaps in physical space, how they smell faintly of copper and cold stone, how they prefer enclosed spaces and the dark areas beneath staircases — until the lamp oil ran low and I let myself sleep.
It was Aksel who found the door.
He came to my room at half past six in the morning, knocked twice in the short-long-short pattern we used when something was wrong but not immediately lethal, and when I opened up he was standing there in his guild vest, his pale hair still flattened on one side from sleep, holding his chalk in one hand and saying, very quietly, that there was a door at the end of the hall that had not been there the night before. I remember thinking, for just a moment, that I had misheard him. The Kellrath Arms has a short upper hall — six doors, three on each side, and a blank plastered wall at the far end beneath a mounted oil lantern. I had walked that hall four times the previous day. There was no door at the end of it.
There was one now.

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Grom Thar'Ghul – was the commander of the Iron Shadows — an elite orcish unit. He lost his eye in a battle against hydras. His warhammer “Bloodbreaker” is a legend.

— Grom Thar'Ghul

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Categories: Fantasy, Monster Hunter

Tags: 10min stories, atmospheric, creature, dark fantasy, fantasy, guild, magic, monster hunter, mystery, plot twist, short story

August 12, 2026

10min-stories