The Hands That Keep the Tavern Open
Updated: Sep 7
A Labor Day tribute to the workers of the Tavern of Realms
Step into the Tavern of Realms and there is plenty to distract you. Light moves across stained glass. Travelers bring the weather of distant worlds in on their clothes. Somewhere beyond the main hall, machinery hums beneath the floorboards, keeping arrangements that most guests would probably prefer not to understand.
Then someone sets a drink in front of you, and the smell from the kitchen reminds you how long it has been since you ate.
That is where I want to spend this Labor Day: with the people who make the Tavern somewhere worth arriving.
In The Living Crossroads, keeping this place open involves cooking, cleaning, repairing, serving, and paying attention. Much of it happens between the moments that become stories. A traveler leaves a table, and someone clears it. A mechanism begins to wear, and someone notices. The last guests of a long shift arrive hungry, and someone goes back to the pot.
The Tavern owes a great deal to those someones.
Alice: A Familiar Kind of Tired
Before Alice became the Keykeeper, she worked in a café on Earth. She already knew what it meant to spend hours on her feet, keep track of several things at once, and remain patient when she was running short on energy herself.
Some of that experience turns out to travel very well.
At the Tavern, she serves tea, gathers abandoned cups, wipes tables, and listens to travelers who need someone to hear them. There are receipts to file and payments to sort, although the currencies make the job considerably stranger. Being responsible for the place also means noticing the work still waiting when the room begins to empty.
I like those moments with Alice because they let us see her learning to belong through participation. She gets to know the Tavern by working in it. The people sitting at its tables become familiar, and their comfort becomes something she has a hand in making.
The Key adds a remarkable responsibility to her life. There are still glasses to wash at the end of it.
Nerissa: Knowing the Room
Behind the bar, Nerissa brings the steady competence that makes a busy room manageable.
She pours drinks, wipes the counter, and tallies payments in coins, crystals, and assorted objects that would cause problems in an ordinary cash register. While her hands are occupied, she keeps watching the room. She notices unfamiliar faces and changes in behavior without making every guest feel inspected.
That attention is part of hospitality. A good bartender has to know when someone needs service, when they need space, and when a conversation is becoming everyone else's problem.
Nerissa's calm has experience behind it. Alice can turn to her because she knows the work and understands the place. Their friendship grows alongside the practical business of serving customers and cleaning up afterward, in the time they spend close enough to notice when the other is tired.
There is something reassuring about finding Nerissa behind the counter. You get the impression that someone has a clear idea of what is happening, even if you have only just arrived and are still trying to identify your drink.
Ivor: Feeding a Crossroads
The kitchen announces Ivor's work long before he appears in the doorway.
There is heat from the stove, steam rising from a pot, and the smell of a meal reaching the main hall. For a traveler far from home, that can be the first familiar thing about the Tavern.
Cooking here takes judgment. Ingredients come from different realms, and the people eating them bring different expectations. Ivor has to turn that variety into meals, keep the kitchen moving, and do it again when another group comes through the door.
His size and boisterous humor make him hard to miss. The care in his work is sometimes quieter: precise movements, another serving for a late arrival, an extra biscuit slipped onto Leo's plate. He pays attention to the people he feeds.
There is a scene in the first book where Ivor finally heads to his quarters, exhausted after hours of cooking, having served stew to travelers who arrived late. That small detail matters to me. The meal is comforting because someone put in the work, and that person is tired when it is finished.
I hope the guests enjoyed every spoonful. I also hope they brought their bowls back.
Quill: The Work Beneath the Floorboards
Down in the lower corridors, Quill works among brass mechanisms, scrolls, tools, and the glowing map of connected realms.
They maintain the Tavern's mechanical systems, reinforce wards, and calibrate the infrastructure that keeps dimensional travel functioning. Their spider-bots bring another scale of activity to the building, with small moving parts that require attention of their own.
It is skilled work with an unusual measure of success: upstairs, people can carry on with their evening.
A guest enjoying a drink has little reason to think about what needed adjusting below the floor. Quill has to think about it anyway. Maintenance asks for patience with details, including the ones that have not become a problem yet.
Their workshop is also a place where curiosity gets welcomed. In their time with Leo, Quill makes room for questions and discovery alongside the repairs. Teaching takes attention too, especially when there is already plenty on the workbench.
The Tavern is fortunate to have someone who wants to understand how it all works and is willing to keep looking after it.
Eterna: Caring for the Whole Building
Eterna's work reaches through the Tavern.
As its sentient caretaker, she manages wards, illusions, and dimensional stability. She monitors the systems that let a building full of visitors from different worlds function as a shared space. Much of that attention stays outside a guest's awareness, beneath the ordinary experience of being warm, sheltered, and able to sit down safely.
Her presence gives that immense responsibility a voice, occasionally a rather dry one.
What interests me about Eterna is how closely the technical and personal sides of her role meet. The systems she tends support a community she has come to care about. A stable gateway means someone can make a journey. A working ward protects a room full of people whose names she knows.
Alongside Quill's repairs and the bustle upstairs, her care helps make an impossible place dependable enough for everyday life.
A Seat for the People Who Made It Possible
For Labor Day, I wanted to give these parts of the Tavern a little more space: the kitchen during service, the bar after a rush, the workshop while a repair is still in pieces.
They are part of why the place feels lived in. People spend their time and skill making it welcoming, and that effort deserves to be seen. It deserves rest, too. Caring deeply about a place does not make anyone's energy endless.
So here is to the cooks, bartenders, cleaners, technicians, caretakers, and everyone whose work helps other people get through the day. Especially those spending this holiday on a shift.
And if I could arrange one thing for the Tavern's crew, it would be a quiet stretch with the repairs finished, the counter clean, and a meal waiting for the people who usually serve it.
Ivor should get to eat while it is still hot.
Till the next rift,
Author
Meet Alice and the Tavern's crew in The Key at Closing Time, the first book of The Living Crossroads.
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