Do Not Open the Door at the End of the Hall

He pressed both hands flat against the door frame — not the door, the frame — and said something in a language I did not recognize. Not Veldric. Not any of the six guild-certified ritual languages I have studied. Something older, or different, or both. The door slammed shut. The light went out. The copper smell dissipated. And when I looked at Wassim afterward, standing in the sudden dark of the hall with his hands still raised, I saw that the chalk marks Aksel had drawn on the frame the night before — the ward-lines, the protection phrases in old Veldric — were gone. Completely gone. Not smudged or disturbed. Gone, as though they had never been there.
Aksel saw it too. He looked at Wassim for a long moment, and then he looked at me, and I understood what he was not saying. Wassim had not disrupted the ward-lines closing the door. He had used them. He had drawn on them, redirected them, spoken them back in a different tongue to do a different thing. The chalk phrases Aksel had put on the frame the previous night — protection, containment, keep-out — Wassim had read them as instructions. As a key.
Which meant he had known, the night before, when he went straight to bed without checking the rooms, that the door was coming. That the creature was coming. That the anchor would be set in that specific frame.
Rasha was still on the floor. Aksel was still in his corner. And Wassim turned to face me in the dark hall and said, very quietly, that he would explain everything. That he had not lied to us, exactly. That he had simply not told us what the job actually was until he was certain we were capable of surviving it.
I believed him.
I am still deciding whether that was wise.

0 likes

About the Author

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

Full author profile

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