A fantasy audio drama from Ashfall Bend, West Virginia
Safe Passage
Hazel Merrick fixes coolers at a 24-hour store in West Virginia. She can also open doors between worlds, and someone is closing them. A fantasy audio drama with elves in the basement, a vampire in the doorway, and a cooler fan that ticks.
Hazel Merrick runs the overnight at a failing convenience store in Ashfall Bend, West Virginia, and for eleven years she has been calling the thing that happened on her twentieth birthday a migraine. It was not a migraine. She is the Doorwarden, the one living person who can open a crossing between worlds, and she has never once done it on purpose. Then an elven family runs into her store at three in the morning with everything they own in a duffel bag, a very polite man waiting in the parking lot, and a vampire marshal standing in her front door who will not come in and will not leave. Hazel puts her hand on the walk-in cooler. Safe Passage is working-class American fantasy. The magic is a job. The refugees are people with paperwork problems. The bureaucracy is run by the undead because they have the time. Somebody is closing every door in North America, and the closer Hazel looks at the work, the more it looks like hers. Ten episodes. Bring a bucket.
Season One
01 Nine Seconds
October 16, 2026 · 0:40:52
It is 3:14 a.m. at the Bend Market in Ashfall Bend, West Virginia, and Hazel Merrick is on the floor with the bill changer when a family runs in with everything they own in a duffel bag. They are elves. They are forty seconds ahead of the man collecting on their debt, and there is a vampire marshal standing in Hazel's front door who will not come in and will not say why nobody is going up to the mine tonight. Hazel has one other door. She has never opened it in front of a witness.
"I am cooking. You may be pursued at the table." (Roden)
02 What It Costs to Lie
October 16, 2026 · 0:40:15
The Sold family is in the basement and cannot stay there. A household of three with no papers shows up on a Registry census sweep, and the only way through is a live asylum interview with an examiner who can hear a heartbeat change from four feet away. The truthful answer to one question disqualifies them. The untruthful answer costs an elf a memory, permanently, and it is not random which one. Roden, who has done this once and did it badly, teaches Halvar how to choose what to lose.
"Say 'my brother' and you may lose the shape of his hands." (Roden)
03 The Report He Didn't File
October 16, 2026 · 0:43:57
A certification team arrives to unmake the Adit, and the schedule Hazel thought she had until Tuesday is now Saturday at six. Twenty-three people are in her basement and eighteen more are in church basements two counties away. Odessa Bell and the Guild will not put a hand on it. The Adit charges in time, one to four, and it never tells you which. Roden and Enni walk twenty-one people into a mountain while Hazel sits on a rail tie with her hand on a beam, and Emrys Kane does something on that hill that nobody expected from a marshal.
"I have watched people stand in doors. It does not go well for them." (Emrys)
04 Span
October 23, 2026 · 0:58:40
With the Adit gone, the only route that moves people is a condemned truss bridge over the New River that is only a bridge for forty minutes, twice a day, when the water outruns the wind. On the far side, Anvil Hollow has a parliament, a labor shortage, and a licensed intake officer named Kelda Brack who wants a form that does not exist in any world. Hazel goes to the Guild hall for the first time in four years to ask Odessa to teach her, and gets an answer Posy has to translate. Vessa has opinions about stairs.
"And you go into a mountain. On purpose. And then you are surprised." (Vessa)
05 The Fourth Sunday
October 30, 2026 · 0:39:24
Every fourth Sunday of the month, Roden takes a bus to Philadelphia with two photographs in his coat, and this month Posy is on the bus behind him with a fake clipboard and a cover story she never uses. What she sees across the street from a federal building takes her four hours to understand. Back in Ashfall Bend, Hazel feels the Mile 4 bridge begin to unmake itself mid-window, with a crossing in progress, and gets there with forty seconds to do the one thing she has never tried.
"I want it noted that I still believed in Tuesdays." (Hazel)
06 Two Hundred and Eleven
November 6, 2026 · 0:49:25
Two things happen in Philadelphia. Hazel goes to the Registry archive with a legitimate request and is handed the Doorwarden register: two thousand three hundred years, two hundred and eleven names, three lines each, and the last entry is hers. At the same time, her request pulls a sponsor thread, the thread is a forgery, and Registry Enforcement has Posy Lark's name and address by the end of Act Two. Running confirms the forgery. Staying means an interview she cannot survive. The third option is the one Roden offers, and it costs Posy the only life she has ever had.
"It is not a punishment, and it is important that you understand that, because it is worse." (Emrys)
09 The Merrick Protocol
November 27, 2026 · 0:52:19
Friday the second of October. Hazel has known since Philadelphia that there are eleven months missing from her own service record, and now she knows who held the ward while they were taken. Getting them back is memory work, which makes Vessa the only expert available, and Vessa's professional opinion of witch memory-work is contemptuous, technical and not free. What comes back does not come back as a montage. Meanwhile, a Registry analyst from Philadelphia walks into a convenience store at midnight, and a man who has not spoken to her in three years is standing at a hot plate.
"You have been walking around with a locked room in you and calling it grief." (Vessa)
