Some doors creak as you open them. Others sigh. Some take a good deal of effort to shoulder open. Some simply stand ajar, waiting for you to notice.
And sometimes, you don’t notice a door until its already pulled you through.
Welcome to The Archrym—a vast and mythic universe; a wellspring of innumerable pocketworlds.
In the Archrym, the hidden doors between worlds are referred to as “ghost gates”, and if something feels slightly off right now, it’s because your eyes are currently tracing the threshhold.
On the other side, an endless sea of colored light stretches out across the sky, energizing the elements from which everything in The Archrym is made up—from the grungy and dreamlike surrealist cyber-sprawl of The Archrym, to the bioluminescent forests and salt-stained airship ports of The Varabaru, to the phantoms living deep within the red haze surrounding the dark and whimsical Hazelands.
Some worlds glow with multiple moons. Some drown in haze. Some swallow their own histories whole. Each has its own rules, its own magic, its own culture, and its own lies. Some are aware of their connection to The Archrym, and some are not.
Here, you’ll find stories from wondrous places. Tales of a young queen who dances too long in the face of danger, a captain sailing to a phantom realm bent on trading his present for the future that was stolen from him, a reporter coming face to face with the wyvern-mounted revenant who’s been terrorizing her small town.
Aside from serialized narratives that wind in and out of The Archrym’s myriad pocketworlds, I also plan to bring you fragments of lore, glimpses of canon, and beyond-the-page author commentary.
The tone is generally whimsical and lyrical, but if you linger, you’ll start to feel the shadows creeping along the edges. These are WhimDark tales, liable to catch in your chest and follow you into quiet hours.
If that’s the sort of adventure you fancy, then this is your invitation to take your first step through the ghost gate. Just know that once you’re through, there’s no going back.
And don’t expect me to light the way for you.
—P. S. Patton