u/DreamDesigner28

Hello everyone I know the Tcg is basically cancelled but while it was up I never got the chance to actually play, all I did was the basic game. So I would like to maybe purchase some ready decks or cards but they seem to have gone extinct.

So does anyone know where I can search for something like that, maybe even if someone has a drive of the card images I could make a print and play version as a last resort.

Hello guys, I am sure you are aware of the new fan format Bakugan Melee made by Jett Kuso, where you use the gate cards. I have some suggestions for making the bakucores a more useful gimmick in that format. I am open to discussion so let me know your thoughts:

As usual each player will need 3 gate cards and 3 Bakugan, but will also get a random assortment of 3 bakucores. Each bakucore will have a built in effect based on its type that you can choose to use instead of the stat boost:

1. Helix core - nullifies all bonuses and leaves the Bakugan with only their base B power.

2. The Magic Shield changes the attribute of your bakugan to one of your choosing.

3. The Green fist allows you to place the opened Bakugan(the one on the field) of your opponent to any other card in the field.

4. The Shield gives you a bonus roll, even if the first roll was successful. (This way you can make a double stand easier or throw another Bakugan during a battle for a double team)

5. The Flaming fist negates one bakucore of your opponent.

During the game, outside of battle you can use a bakucore only once and only one bakucore for each battle. So each battle you get a bakucore effect but it could be negated by a flaming fist.

Additionally you could just use the stat boost of the bakucores instead if the selection of bakucores you got aren't really helpful. But you must choose, you can't have both the built in effect and the stat boost only one of the two.

Additionally you could use the very first trainer gate cards that didn't have stats on them as character cards that double the B power only of the specific Bakugan on the card or the specific attribute on the card.

So this was my way of trying to fit ability cards that I like into the bakucores and hopefully allow you to have more fun until the eventual Gen 4 comes out next year for the 20th anniversary. If you have any suggestions feel free to share.

I wished for a brother,

I wished for a friend.

One of them came,

but without the other,

it was not the same.

As years passed by,

I wondered,

"Will my brother be my friend?"

But soon I realised

that the only thing we had in common

was our last name.

I wished for a brother,

I wished for a friend.

One of them came,

but without the other,

it was not the same.

As years passed by,

I wondered,

"Will my brother be my friend?"

But soon I realised

that the only thing we had in common

was our last name.

I wished for a brother,

I wished for a friend.

One of them came,

but without the other,

it was not the same.

As years passed by,

I wondered,

"Will my brother be my friend?"

But soon I realised

that the only thing we had in common

was our last name.

I wished for a brother,

I wished for a friend.

One of them came,

but without the other,

it was not the same.

As years passed by,

I wondered,

"Will my brother be my friend?"

But soon I realised

that the only thing we had in common

was our last name.

I wished for a brother,

I wished for a friend.

One of them came,

but without the other,

it was not the same.

As years passed by,

I wondered,

"Will my brother be my friend?"

But soon I realised

that the only thing we had in common

was our last name.

I wished for a brother,

I wished for a friend.

One of them came,

but without the other,

it was not the same.

As years passed by,

I wondered,

"Will my brother be my friend?"

But soon I realised

that the only thing we had in common

was our last name.

I wished for a brother,

I wished for a friend.

One of them came,

but without the other,

it was not the same.

As years passed by,

I wondered,

"Will my brother be my friend?"

But soon I realised

that the only thing we had in common

was our last name.

I wished for a brother,

I wished for a friend.

One of them came,

but without the other,

it was not the same.

As years passed by,

I wondered,

"Will my brother be my friend?"

But soon I realised

that the only thing we had in common

was our last name.

Hello, everyone can I link my stories from Wattpad here, if not how do you guys even promote your stores, especially if they are complete now?

​

I just woke up from one of the strangest nightmares I've had in a long time, and I'm curious if anyone has any ideas what it could mean.

I went to bed around 3 AM and woke up just before 5 AM, but in that short time it felt like I had three separate dreams that blended into one another.

In the first dream, nothing seemed particularly scary. I was in some normal setting, but every so often the TV would randomly switch to an extremely graphic gore movie. I remember saying I didn't like it. There was also an elderly woman in a wheelchair who seemed either paralyzed or senile. She wore old raged clothes or maybe hospital clothes(for patients) and had long black hair. She never spoke or moved—only her eyes did. I didn't think much of her at the time.

The second dream took place somewhere that felt like either a cruise ship or an oil rig. There was some kind of story about exploring new lands, but one of the people there was a strange man. At first I thought his name was Homer Simpson, but he corrected me and said it was Homer Springfield.

He told me his mother was sick, evil, or possibly possessed, and that she could make things move with his mind. His mother turned out to be the same old woman from the first dream. Again, she didn't really do anything, and Homer wasn't a major part of the story, so I didn't pay much attention to him.

The gore movie on the TV kept appearing throughout this dream as well. Oddly, every time it came back I became more used to it. I even started casually referencing it in conversations with other people in the dream, which felt strange because I had disliked it at first.

In the third dream, I was back in that same cruise ship/oil rig setting. We were traveling in something that looked like the inside of a train or airplane. Homer Springfield was sitting next to me, except now he looked about ten years younger and was extremely muscular.

I asked him about his mother, and he said he had "dealt with it." But when I looked ahead, the old woman was still sitting a few seats in front of us in her wheelchair.

Suddenly Homer started going crazy. He leaned onto me and began pushing me off my seat. I grabbed onto something to stop myself from falling. When I asked what he was doing, he said he couldn't control himself—or maybe just his arm. He said his mother(the old lady) was controlling him. He was so heavy that I could barely move.

I grabbed onto a lever to pull myself away, but then an overwhelming wave of weakness came over me. It felt incredibly real, almost like I was drifting between the dream and waking up. I think I was actually trying to move in bed at the same time, but my body felt too weak to respond.

The scene suddenly changed, and I was being examined by a female medical professional. I told her I'd been there several times before and asked if she remembered me. She said she couldn't possibly remember everyone who came aboard.

I listed the previous times I'd been there—once about a year ago, another a few months ago, and now again—but she still didn't remember.

My roommate was there too and said he'd also been on the ship during one of the earlier dreams. I asked about Homer Springfield, and they simply told me he was crazy.

Then I noticed the old woman sitting silently in the corner of the examination room. They casually explained she was just there for a check-up.

Eventually everyone left the room, leaving me alone. I lay down because I still felt dizzy. In the dream I looked up something on my phone about blood and dizziness and muscle weakness and it came up that magnesium helps.

Without seeing anyone enter, I heard a deep male voice—like one of the doctors—ask if I wanted magnesium. I said yes without thinking but then it hit me. No one else has entered the room. It was just me and the old lady. I got suspicious and tried to finally acknowledge her and ask her whether she said that.

Still lying down, I started sitting up and turning around because the voice sounded like it had come from behind me. As I turned, I asked:

"Is the therapeutic treatment from you in the back?"

Before I could fully turn around and see the old woman, a voice answered:

"The therapeutic treatment, yes. From the back, no. From everywhere."

Then it started screaming "FROM EVERYWHERE" over and over directly inside my head.

I collapsed back onto the bed in the dream and instantly woke up. The sun was just beginning to rise.

The ending was by far the most disturbing part. It didn't just feel like I heard a voice—it felt like it was inside my head. Echoing. Has anyone experienced anything similar or have any thoughts on what this dream could symbolize?

Struggle is a gift.

For what greater privilege is there
than the chance to become
who we once dreamed we could be?

In struggle lies the answer—
the answer to every hope,
every prayer,
every dream carried by the child within us.

The one who looked upon the world with wonder.
The one who saw potential in the future.
The one who saw potential in us.

The version of ourselves
that dreamed our current selves into being.

For dreams are not granted.
They are forged.

Forged in the fire of effort,
tempered by hardship,
strengthened by persistence.

And in that fire,
the soul is given its chance to shine.

For where else should a light reveal its brilliance
if not in the darkness?

Let the fire burn.
Let the struggle come.

For every challenge endured,
every setback overcome,
every wound carried forward,
feeds the flame.

And when that flame burns bright enough,

every adversary becomes a lesson,
every scar becomes a reminder,
and every struggle becomes a memory
to be proud of.

Struggle is a gift.

For what greater privilege is there
than the chance to become
who we once dreamed we could be?

In struggle lies the answer—
the answer to every hope,
every prayer,
every dream carried by the child within us.

The one who looked upon the world with wonder.
The one who saw potential in the future.
The one who saw potential in us.

The version of ourselves
that dreamed our current selves into being.

For dreams are not granted.
They are forged.

Forged in the fire of effort,
tempered by hardship,
strengthened by persistence.

And in that fire,
the soul is given its chance to shine.

For where else should a light reveal its brilliance
if not in the darkness?

Let the fire burn.
Let the struggle come.

For every challenge endured,
every setback overcome,
every wound carried forward,
feeds the flame.

And when that flame burns bright enough,

every adversary becomes a lesson,
every scar becomes a reminder,
and every struggle becomes a memory
to be proud of.

Here is Part 1 for context.

So anyways...

I opened the door.

I know. I know I said I wasn't going to. But it was 4 AM and I hadn't slept and I'd been sitting on the couch staring at that note for six hours and at some point your brain just stops generating reasons not to do the thing.

There was a man in the hallway.

Mid fifties, grey jacket, reading glasses pushed up on his forehead. He looked like someone's accountant. He looked like someone you'd see at a parent teacher conference and immediately forget. He was standing with his hands visible at his sides, deliberately visible, like he'd thought about that in advance.

"Daniel," he said. Not a question. Same as the man with the upside down book.

"Danny," I said.

"Right." He nodded like that actually meant something to him. "My name is Greer. Can I come in?"

I didn't move from the doorway. "You slid that note under my door at four in the morning."

"I've been in the building since yesterday," he said. "I was waiting for you to be ready."

"That's not less creepy."

"No," he said. "I know. I'm sorry. There wasn't a good way to do this."

I let him in. I made coffee. We sat at my kitchen table and he talked for a long time and I'm going to try to write down what he told me as accurately as I can because I want a record of it somewhere that isn't just my head.

· · ·

There is a group. Has been for a long time. Greer wouldn't give me a name for them, said names make things findable and findable is dangerous in their line of work. What they do — what they've been doing for about forty years — is track a specific cult. Follow them, document them, and when possible stop them.

The cult has a name for themselves but Greer wouldn't say that either. He called them the Order throughout the whole conversation, which I got the impression was his own word for them and not theirs.

The Order has been around for a very long time. Greer was vague on how long but said the oldest documentation his group had found dated back several centuries. They move. They rebuild. They lose members and recruit new ones and every few decades they get close enough to their goal that Greer's group has to intervene.

Their goal is a summoning.

Specifically — and this is the part where I had to put my coffee down — the summoning of something they call the Master. An entity from somewhere else. Greer said somewhere else very carefully, like he'd had arguments about the exact terminology before. Not hell. Not another planet. Somewhere else, with its own rules, its own geometry, its own version of what alive means. The Order has been trying to bring it through for centuries and has never managed it.

Not for lack of trying.

"The summoning requires a vessel," Greer said. "Someone born under specific conditions, or born into specific circumstances — they're not entirely sure themselves, from what we've gathered. Someone the pendant responds to."

I asked him what the pendant was.

He said it was a key. Old, older than the Order probably. They found it, didn't make it. It responds to certain people and not others and they've spent a very long time trying to understand why. For most of their history they've been trying to find the right vessel and use them and it's never fully worked. The summoning always fails. Things come through — wrong things, incomplete things, things that don't survive the crossing — but never the Master.

In 1997, he said, they thought they'd finally found the right one.

A child. Three months old. The pendant reacted to him in a way it had never reacted to anyone before.

I didn't say anything.

"They prepared for four years," Greer said. "Longer than they'd ever prepared before. They wanted it to be right. In 2001 they were ready."

"And your group stopped them," I said.

He looked at his coffee. "We were too late to stop the ritual. We weren't too late to pull you out of that field."

· · ·

He told me the rest of it. The farmhouse, the fire, the eleven bodies. What had caused the fire wasn't indeterminate — Greer's group caused it, deliberately, to destroy whatever the Order had built there. The ritual site, the equipment, the records they could find.

But not the pendant. The Order got the pendant out before the fire. Greer's group didn't know that for years.

And the ritual — the one they'd interrupted — hadn't fully failed. It had done something. Something had started and then stopped midway, which according to Greer was in some ways worse than it completing or not starting at all. Like a door that had been opened a crack and never properly closed.

I thought about the dream. The heat. The ringing. The moment right before I always wake up where everything goes white.

"The monsters," I said. "The things that show up when I'm — when I get pushed too far. What are those."

Greer was quiet for a moment. "Bleedthrough," he said. "The door isn't fully closed. When you're under enough stress, when your — he paused. When whatever the ritual opened in you gets activated enough, things come through. Small things. Not the Master. The Master is something else entirely."

"How do you know about them," I said. "The things that show up."

"Because we've been watching you for eight years, Danny," he said. "We've been keeping you off their radar as best we could. When something came through we cleaned it up."

I sat with that for a while.

"The parking garage," I said.

"That was a problem," he said. "We weren't fast enough. The Order was closer to you than we realized. They'd already found you."

"Why didn't you just tell me," I said. "Eight years. Why didn't you just knock on my door eight years ago and tell me?"

He looked at me like that was a question he'd been asked before. Maybe by himself, many times.

"Because knowing activates it," he said. "Because stressed is bad and terrified is worse. Because the safest version of you has always been the version that thinks the nightmares are just nightmares."

He said it quietly. He didn't say it like it was a good answer. He said it like it was the one they'd gone with and had never fully made peace with.

I asked him what happens now.

He said the Order knew where I was. The parking garage had confirmed it for them and now there was no going back to the version of my life where I didn't know any of this. He said his group wanted to move me somewhere safe, somewhere they could control the environment, while they figured out the next step.

I told him I needed to think about it.

He left me his number on a piece of paper. An actual piece of paper, handwritten. He said don't put it in your phone.

I haven't called him yet.

That was two days ago.

· · ·

I should have called him.

I want to be very clear about that looking back. I should have called Greer the next morning and said okay, let's do this, take me somewhere safe. Instead I went to work because I didn't know what else to do with myself and sitting in my apartment alone felt worse than pretending everything was normal.

That was a mistake.

Priya was back. Sitting at her desk, completely normal, said good morning without looking up. I sat at my desk. I answered emails. I ate lunch at my desk. I was almost convinced I could just — keep doing this. Keep going through the motions until Greer's people figured something out and dealt with it without me having to be involved.

I was walking to my car at 5:30 when the van pulled up.

It happened fast. I want to say I fought or ran but it was just — fast. A sliding door opening, hands, something pressed against the side of my neck that wasn't quite pain but made my legs stop working, and then I was inside and the door was closed and we were moving.

Priya was in the front seat.

She didn't look back.

· · ·

I don't know how long we drove. No windows in the back. My hands were zip tied and my phone was gone and I was doing that thing where your brain just keeps cycling through the same three thoughts because it can't hold anything more complicated than that. I'm in a van. They took me. I should have called Greer.

We stopped. They walked me inside somewhere. A building, industrial, the kind with high ceilings and concrete floors and the specific smell of a place that's been empty for a long time. They put me in a chair in the middle of a large room and zip tied my wrists to the armrests and left me there with two people standing at the door who didn't respond when I talked to them.

After about an hour, Vera walked in.

She looked exactly the same as she always had. Perfect posture. Hair pulled back. That smile that doesn't reach anything.

"I owe you an apology," she said. "The parking garage was clumsy. That wasn't how we wanted this to go."

"Let me go," I said.

"We will," she said. "After."

She pulled up a chair and sat across from me like we were having a meeting and explained it the same way you'd explain a business proposal. The Order had been waiting a long time for this. The vessel — me — had been outside their reach for over twenty years and they'd made their peace with rebuilding slowly. The pendant was ready. The site was ready. They had everything they needed except me, and now they had me, and they weren't asking me to do anything, not really. The ritual didn't require my cooperation. Just my presence.

"What happens to me after," I said.

She paused for just a fraction too long.

"You'll be free to go," she said.

I nodded like I believed her.

"The thing in the garage," I said. "The thing in my hallway. You saw those."

"Yes," she said.

"And you still want to open a door bigger than that."

"Those were accidents," she said. "Uncontrolled. What we're doing is controlled. We've been preparing for this for a very long time, Daniel."

"His name is Danny," said a voice from the door.

Greer walked in with three other people behind him and everything happened very fast after that.

· · ·

I'm not going to pretend it was some kind of heroic rescue because it wasn't. It was loud and chaotic and the two guys at the door went for Greer's people and someone knocked my chair over and I hit the concrete floor face first with my wrists still zip tied to the armrests which is exactly as bad as it sounds.

I lay there on my side with a split lip and watched shoes move around the room and tried to figure out which direction was up.

Then the shooting stopped and Vera was standing over me and she had the pendant in her hand.

I don't know where Greer was. I don't know what happened to his people. All I know is it was suddenly very quiet and Vera was crouching down and she put the pendant against my chest and I felt it — immediately, like a current, like putting your hand on something electrical — I felt it connect to something in me that has no name and no location and no business existing.

"You don't have to do anything," she said quietly. "You just have to feel it."

And around the room — I could hear them now, I hadn't noticed them come in — the rest of the Order. I don't know how many. The chanting started low, almost below hearing, and I knew that sound. I'd heard it my whole life. I'd been waking up from that sound since I was a kid.

The pendant got hot.

The heat spread through my chest and down my arms and the room started doing something wrong at the edges, the shadows moving against the light instead of with it, the air getting a texture it shouldn't have. And I could feel it on the other side. The thing Greer had called the Master. It was there the same way a storm is there before it arrives, the same way you know something is behind you without turning around. Patient. Vast. Completely aware of me in a way that nothing that size should be able to focus on something as small as a person in a chair on a concrete floor.

Vera was saying something but I couldn't hear it anymore over the ringing.

And I made a decision.

· · ·

The thing is — and I've been sitting here for three hours trying to figure out how to write this part — the door was already open. Greer told me that. It had been open since 2001, cracked, never closed properly. And I'd spent my whole life feeling the draft from it and pretending it was just anxiety. Pretending the nightmares were just nightmares. Pretending the thing that moved in the dark when I was scared was just adrenaline or acoustics or cheap ceramic mugs and weird angles.

I stopped pretending.

I didn't open the door wider. I want to be very clear about that because I think it matters. I didn't let the Master through. I didn't do what the Order wanted. What I did was — I pushed back. I put my hand on the door from my side and I shoved, and what came through instead wasn't what they were waiting for.

It was the things that had been bleeding through my whole life whenever I got scared enough.

All of them. All at once.

I can't describe what happened in that room after that. I'm not being dramatic, I genuinely can't. I closed my eyes the same way I close them in the dream and I kept them shut and I just — held on. The chanting broke apart. There was screaming, a lot of it, and sounds that weren't screaming and sounds that weren't anything I have a word for. The floor shook. The pendant burned against my chest so badly I have a mark there now, a red welt shaped like nothing I can identify.

And then it stopped.

Complete silence.

I opened my eyes.

· · ·

The room was empty.

Not damaged, not destroyed. Just — empty. The Order, Vera, all of them. Gone. No bodies. No blood. Just an empty concrete room and an overturned chair and me on the floor with my wrists still zip tied to the armrests and a burning mark on my chest.

Greer found me twenty minutes later. He came in with his people and cut the zip ties and sat on the floor next to me and didn't say anything for a while which was exactly the right call.

Eventually he asked if I was okay.

I said I didn't know.

He asked what I'd done.

I said I didn't know that either.

He looked around the empty room for a long time. Then he said, very quietly, "they're not dead are they."

I thought about the thing on the other side of the door. The patience of it. The size of it. The way it had been waiting since 2001 and had made absolutely no indication that waiting bothered it in any way.

"No," I said. "I don't think so."

· · ·

I'm writing this from a different city. Greer's people have a place, I won't say where, and for now it's where I am. Jess knows I'm okay, I called her, I told her it was a family emergency which felt both like a lie and strangely accurate.

The pendant is in a box on the table across the room. Greer wanted to take it and I said no. I'm not sure why. It just felt wrong to let it out of my sight, which I'm aware is not a totally healthy impulse but I'm extending myself a lot of grace right now.

The mark on my chest hasn't faded. Greer's people have looked at it and nobody will tell me what shape it is. They look at it and then they look at each other and then they change the subject and I've decided I don't want to know yet. One thing at a time.

The nightmares have stopped.

That's the thing that keeps me up at night more than any of the rest of it. Not gone, I don't think. Just — quiet. The same way the room was quiet after. The same way you can tell the difference between a sound that has ended and a sound that is being held.

Something on the other side of that door knows my name now. The real one, not Danny Wren. The one from before the farmhouse and the field and the family that found me and gave me a life I didn't know I was running out of time to enjoy.

D. Cassel.

Vessel confirmed.

I don't know what comes next. Greer has theories and his people have files going back forty years and none of it has made me feel better or safer or more prepared. But I'm still here. The Order is — wherever they are. And the door in me is still cracked open the same way it's always been, the same draft, the same dark on the other side.

The difference is now I know what's standing on the other side of it.

And I think it knows I know.

I'll update when I can. If I can.

Don't open your door to anyone you don't know.

— Danny

My name is Tom.

I'm thirty-one years old, and I've been sitting at this desk for the past two hours staring at a piece of paper I found tucked under my coffee mug this morning.

It contained a cryptic message with the kind of handwriting your grandmother might have —neat, unhurried, almost kind-looking.

The kind that belongs on a birthday card.

It says:

Do you want to join them?

Yes / No

I wish I could say, I didn’t know what that was and that ignoring it would make it go away. But that would be a lie.

I want to tell you my story before I answer. I think that's important. I need someone to know what happened—what I allowed to happen—before I make this final choice. I've been carrying it alone for over twenty years, and I don't think I can do that anymore.

So. Here it is.

I was ten years old when it started, and I was the kind of kid that the world seemed designed to overlook.

We lived on the outskirts of a small town in rural Pennsylvania—the kind of place where everyone knows everyone's business and also no one talks to anyone. My parents were good people, genuinely good, but they were exhausted people. My dad worked double shifts at the plant. My mom cleaned houses across three townships and came home with her hands raw and her eyes already half-closed. By the time I heard the front door open each night, I was supposed to be in bed. Most of the time I was. Sometimes I'd creep to the top of the stairs just to hear their voices moving through the kitchen below, the soft domestic sounds of two people winding down. That was almost enough.

At school, I was invisible in the way small, quiet kids are. I would keep to myself and not bother anyone and in turn they wouldn’t bother me. That was the case for a while, until he showed up.

His name was Billy Marsh, and I won't bother describing him at length because you already know him. Every school has one. He had a group of three others who followed him around like pilot fish, feeding on whatever crumbs of cruelty he left behind. For some reason I became his favorite target. Maybe because I was small, shy and easily overwhelmed. Maybe they thought I was easy entertainment.

I tried very hard not to show I was bothered, which only made the crying worse when it came.

The teachers knew. Of course they knew. Mrs. Herrold, my homeroom teacher, had the particular skill of looking directly at something terrible and then finding something urgent to examine on the ceiling. I stopped expecting anything from adults around that time.

What I did have—the one thing that was entirely, uncomplicatedly mine—was a Ben 10 ball.

I know how that sounds. I know.

But you have to understand that I didn't have much. My parents' money went to bills and groceries, and any leftover was gone before it was ever really there. My birthday present that year was the ball, and my dad had driven forty minutes to the next town to find one because our local store didn't carry it. He'd wrapped it in newspaper because we were out of wrapping paper, and he'd drawn a bow on top in marker. He was sheepish about it. He said, it's not much, bud. I told him it was the best present I'd ever gotten. I meant it.

I played with that ball every afternoon in our patchy backyard. I wasn't athletic—I mostly just bounced it and caught it and bounced it again—but it was mine, and the repetition of it was calming. The slap of rubber against my palms. The way the cartoon face spun as it rose and fell.

One day, I was sitting outside after school, doing exactly that. Just bouncing. Just breathing. I was happy, until I saw a couple of familiar faces.

They came from down the road—four of them, Billy in front. I saw them and felt the familiar drop in my stomach, that cold pre-storm feeling, and I thought: not here. This is my yard. This is the one place.

They surrounded me. One of them—Marcus, Billy's second-in-command—shoved me from behind and I stumbled forward, and Billy caught me by the front of my shirt and laughed like I'd done something funny. They took turns. Shoving, tripping, calling me names I won't repeat. I tried to fight back. I actually swung at Billy, which surprised both of us. His expression went from amused to something colder, and then he hit me hard enough that I sat down on the grass without meaning to.

My vision swam. My lip was bleeding. I was crying—silently, wretchedly, in that way that's almost worse than sobbing.

Billy picked up my ball.

He looked at it for a moment, then at me, then at the tree line about fifty yards behind the house.

He threw it in a long, arcing overhand. It disappeared into the dark between the trees.

They left laughing.

I lay on the grass for a while, just existing in the particular misery of that moment—the taste of blood, the fading laughter, the late-afternoon sky going purple above me. Then I got up, wiped my face with my sleeve, and looked at the trees.

My father had told me about the woods. Not casually—he'd sat me down about it once, in his serious voice, the one he saved for important things. He'd grown up in that town, and his father had grown up there too, and the warning passed down through them like an heirloom: stay out of those trees, and especially the dead ones. Don't go near them, don't touch them, don't breathe the air around them if you can help it.

I asked him once what would happen if someone did.

He got quiet in a way that scared me more than any answer would have. The trees take things, he said finally. And they don’t give them back.

I thought about that warning while I stood at the tree line with a split lip and a hollow chest.

And then I walked into the woods anyway.

The forest was deeper than it looked from outside—that's the only way I can describe it. The sounds from the road disappeared almost immediately, replaced by a dense, pressing quiet. The undergrowth was wrong, somehow. Brown and matted even though it was only October, like something had been slowly drawing the life out of the soil for a long time.

I searched for almost forty minutes, calling for my ball under my breath like it could hear me. I found nothing. No flash of rubber between the roots, no cartoon face staring up from a bed of dead leaves.

At some point I realized I'd gone farther than I intended. The light had changed, going from dim to something closer to dark, and I turned in a slow circle trying to orient myself.

That's when I smelled it.

Cinnamon. Sweet and warm and completely out of place in the cold October air. Like walking past a bakery on a winter street. I stood there inhaling it, and something in my chest unknotted slightly—some coiled fear loosening despite itself. It's okay, the smell seemed to say. You're okay. This is fine.

I never found the ball that night. I made my way back to the house by following the distant rectangle of the kitchen light, went upstairs, and got into bed without eating dinner.

I lay there in the dark with dried blood on my chin and let myself cry properly—the ugly, airless kind—until I ran out.

Somewhere in that exhaustion, I fell asleep.

I dreamed about a version of my life that didn't exist.

In the dream I was still me, still Tom, but I was someone. People at school looked at me when I walked in, and it wasn't to laugh. I raised my hand and had the right answer. I walked down the hallway and someone fell into step beside me and we talked the way kids talk when they're comfortable with each other, easy and thoughtless. There was a girl with dark braids who laughed at something I said. There was sunlight coming through the cafeteria windows and falling on a table where I sat with other people, people who wanted me there.

It was the best dream I'd ever had. It was also, somehow, clearly a dream—it had that too-clean quality, like a photograph that's been over-processed. But I didn't care. I didn't want it to end.

The alarm ended it.

I came back to my ceiling, to the gray morning light, to the familiar weight of dread in my stomach. School today. Billy today. Mrs. Herrold's eyes finding the ceiling today.

Then I smelled cinnamon, and I noticed the note.

It was sitting on my bedside table—a small square of white paper, folded once. The handwriting was neat and even, and it said:

Did you enjoy your dream?

Yes / No

There were two little boxes next to the options, like a survey.

I looked around my room. Nothing was disturbed. The window was closed and latched. My door was shut. I lived alone in the house most of the time—my parents left before I woke up, came home after I went to bed—but still. Someone had been in my room.

I should have told someone. I understand that now.

Instead I picked up the pencil that was sitting beside the note—I hadn't noticed the pencil—and I checked Yes.

I set it back on the table, got dressed, and went to school.

That day, Mrs. Herrold announced a history quiz.

I felt my stomach drop through the floor. I hadn't studied. More than that—I had genuinely no idea what unit we were on. I'd been surviving her class by being invisible, and it had been going fine until this moment, in which she announced she would start by calling on students individually to answer oral questions. I watched her eyes find mine the way a hawk finds a mouse, across the grass, at a distance, with complete patience and certainty.

I fumbled through my notebook. My notes were sparse and disorganized, fragments of half-heard lectures, none of it useful. My hands were already sweating. She'd been clear about what another failing grade would mean—repeating the year, a conference with my parents, my mother coming in from her cleaning job to sit in a plastic chair and hear about her son's failures while her hands were still red from bleach.

I couldn't do that to her. I couldn't.

I was still rifling through my notebook when I found the note.

Same handwriting. Same format.

Do you want my help?

Yes / No

I stared at it. Mrs. Herrold was three students away from me. Two.

I checked Yes.

There's no gentle way to say this: I lost the day.

Not blacked out—that implies darkness, unconsciousness. It was more like a jump cut. Mrs. Herrold was one student away from me, and I was sweating through my shirt, and then I was walking out the front door of the school at three-fifteen with my backpack on and the afternoon sun in my face and no memory of anything in between.

Eight hours. Gone.

I stood on the school steps trying to reconstruct something. Anything. Lunch? The hallways between classes? The quiz itself? Nothing. A smooth blank where the day should have been.

Had I blacked out from stress? I told myself that. I actually told myself that, because the alternative was—

"Hey."

I turned. A group of girls my age were clustered near the bike racks, all of them looking at me with expressions I didn't recognize at first. It took me a moment to identify it.

Warmth. They were looking at me with warmth.

"You were really fun today," one of them said. "We didn't know you were like that."

I opened my mouth and closed it. They smiled, a little uncertainly, and moved on.

Mrs. Herrold passed me on the steps. She paused.

"Good work today, Tom," she said. "Keep it up."

I walked home in a daze. Somewhere in my lost eight hours, I had gotten an A on the quiz. I had apparently been fun. I had apparently been like that, whatever that meant.

The logical thing—the sane thing—was that the stress of the moment had caused some kind of dissociative episode, and my muscle memory and whatever buried competence I possessed had carried me through the day on autopilot. People did that. There was probably a name for it.

I got home. The house smelled like cinnamon again, though my mother wasn't home, hadn't been home, there was no food cooking.

Upstairs, on my desk:

Are you happy?

Yes / No

I was happy. It was the strangest thing. Despite everything—the lost day, the unanswered questions, the wrongness of all of it—I was happy. I checked Yes and went to bed.

The euphoria lasted four days.

Whatever I'd been during my lost day—charming, capable, someone worth knowing—it faded back into me, dissolved, and I was regular Tom again by the following Monday. The girls at the bike rack looked through me. Mrs. Herrold graded my next assignment with her usual tired disappointment. Billy and his friends were worse than before, maybe because the four-day respite had made me soft, had let me briefly believe in a version of myself that didn't have to absorb their cruelty.

I was sitting at my desk after a particularly bad afternoon—Billy had knocked my tray in the cafeteria, soup and all, and then stood there with his hands spread wide like what? while everyone laughed—when I found the note.

Do you want them to stop?

Yes / No

I checked Yes so hard the pencil nearly tore through the paper.

Nothing happened. I waited for the lurch, the jump cut, the day-disappearing blankness. Nothing. School ended and I walked home the same as always, same grief, same weight.

But the next day, Billy wasn't there.

Neither was Marcus, or the other two. All four of them absent, and their absence spread through the class like a held breath nobody knew they'd been holding. Kids who'd never spoken to me in their lives met my eyes in the hallway in this tentative, newly-curious way, like they were checking whether it was safe to approach now that the largest predator had left the ecosystem.

I didn't question it. I was ten and I was relieved and I didn't question it.

They never came back.

With my newly found freedom, I started speaking with my peers more. One in particular had made a lasting impression on me.

Her name was Sarah Voss, and I want you to understand that she was genuinely kind to me for a while. I think that matters. I think the truth of those months is important, even knowing how it ended.

She started talking to me about three weeks after Billy disappeared. It began the way all ten-year-old friendships begin: proximity and shared boredom. She sat nearby in Mrs. Herrold's class, and one day she asked to borrow my eraser, and somehow that turned into a conversation about the Ben 10 cartoon, and she mentioned she had a Winx ball of her own, and the next afternoon we were in the park behind the school passing it back and forth.

We weren't a thing—we were ten, we didn't have language for what we were—but she was the first person my age who had ever voluntarily spent time with me. The first person who'd ever asked about my opinion of something and then actually listened to the answer. We talked about TV shows, about which teachers were secretly nice and which ones were performing nice, about what we wanted to be when we grew up. She wanted to be a marine biologist. I told her that sounded incredible. She said, you're the first person who didn't laugh at that.

Those afternoons were the best part of that whole year.

Then I heard what she said.

I wasn't supposed to. I was coming around the corner of the school building and she was on the other side with a group of her more popular friends, and she didn't know I was there, and she said:

—he's kind of a dork, but I feel bad for him, so.

Who would actually like someone like that for real though.

I stood on the other side of the brick wall and just breathed for a moment, very carefully. Then I walked back around the building and went the long way home.

I thought about every afternoon in the park. I reviewed them like evidence, looking for the tells I'd missed—the politeness that was actually pity, the patience that was charity, the laughter that was managed rather than real. I found them all. Retroactively, they were all there.

I sat at my desk and didn't do my homework.

The note was there when I looked up:

Do you still like her?

Yes / No

I sat with it for a long time.

Then I checked No.

Sarah didn't come to school the next day.

I noticed, but I didn't connect it. She'd been absent before. People got sick, had dentist appointments, had family things.

She wasn't there the following day either.

Or the week after that.

I asked Mrs. Herrold, casually, where Sarah was. She got a strange look on her face and said the class had been informed that Sarah had moved away unexpectedly. Family circumstances. She was sure Sarah would thrive wherever she ended up.

There was no moved-away energy in that classroom. This was different. This was absence with no explanation underneath it. This was a name that nobody said anymore.

I started finding notes asking about other people.

Do you still like Mike?

Do you still like Mrs. Herrold?

Do you still like your neighbor, Mr. Fitch?

I hadn't thought about Mike in months—we were in a school project once and never talked after. I'd never had strong feelings about Mr. Fitch either way. I left those notes blank for a while, until the day Mr. Fitch said something mean about my father in a conversation I overheard, and I went home burning with a specific anger that I'd never felt before, and there was a note waiting:

Do you still like Mr. Fitch?

I checked No.

He was gone within a week. Car accident, someone said. He'd moved away, someone else said. Retired suddenly. Nobody could agree on an explanation and nobody seemed particularly bothered about agreeing.

I began to understand what the notes were.

I stopped answering after that.

I was eleven by then, and I know what you're thinking—you were just a child, you didn't know—but I want to be honest with you: I knew. Not fully, not in words, but in the way children understand things they don't have language for yet, in the stomach rather than the mind. I knew that the notes asked about people and the people went away and somewhere in the forest there was a dead tree that my father had warned me about with a specific fear that I now understood wasn't superstition.

I knew. And I had checked No at least four times.

The notes kept coming. I stopped answering them. They accumulated in my desk drawer, growing into a small stack—questions about classmates, about teachers, about my parents once (I burned those immediately). The smell of cinnamon became something I associated with dread, the way you learn to dread the sound of a particular ringtone after it only ever brings bad news.

I finished elementary school. I started middle school. The notes kept coming, but less frequently, like whatever was sending them understood that I'd grown wary and was giving me room.

The question changed, in seventh grade. One morning I found a note that said:

Do you wish to see them again?

Yes / No

Just that. No names.

I knew who it meant.

I folded the note and put it in the back of my desk drawer and didn't look at it for seventeen years.

Life continued.

I went to high school. College. I left Pennsylvania and didn't go back for a long time. I became, through no particular grace of my own, a reasonably functional adult. I had friends—real ones, the earned kind. I had a job I didn't hate. I had an apartment with too many plants and a cat named Gerald who didn't like me but tolerated my presence, which is its own kind of relationship.

The notes stopped when I moved. Or I stopped noticing them. I'm not sure which.

My mother got sick in my late twenties, and I came back to Pennsylvania to help. That was when I found the box—a cardboard box in my old closet, underneath three other boxes, sealed with tape that had dried and cracked. My name on the outside in my own childhood handwriting.

I almost threw it out.

Inside was the stack of unanswered notes. Thirty or forty of them, all the questions about people whose names I'd not let myself think about for years. And underneath all of them, the seventh-grade note, the different one.

Do you wish to see them again?

I sat on my childhood floor and I thought about Sarah Voss showing me that afternoon light in the park, explaining about marine biology with her hands moving through the air. I thought about how the note I'd checked No on had felt like power—like finally, finally having something to push back with after years of swallowing everything—and how that feeling curdled immediately into something I couldn't name and had been quietly living with ever since.

I missed her. The Sarah of those afternoons, before the overheard words—that person was real too, even if the friendship was complicated, even if her kindness was mixed with something less kind. Real people are like that. They hold contradictions. I'd been too young to understand that.

I took out a pencil.

I checked Yes.

I was standing in the forest.

I don't know how else to describe the transition—one moment I was on the floor of my childhood bedroom, the next my feet were on dead leaves and the air was very cold and I could smell cinnamon so strongly it was almost overwhelming, thick and sweet and wrong.

It was night. The moon was full and sitting low, and it lit the clearing enough that I could see the tree.

My father had called it dead and withered, and it was, but that didn't capture it. The tree was enormous—it must have been seventy, eighty feet tall—and it was the specific dead that predates memory, the dead that feels like it was never alive, that was always this. Its branches were bare and white and angular, and they spread in all directions like the tree was trying to cover as much sky as possible. The bark was deeply furrowed and extremely light, and there was something moving in those furrows—shadows that shifted wrong, that moved independently of the moonlight.

The tree was so pale that it almost illuminated its surroundings.

The ring of dead ground around it stretched maybe thirty feet in every direction. Nothing grew in that ring. Not leaves, not moss, not mushrooms. Just dark soil and small things half-buried in it, things I didn't look at closely until I was already close enough to see what they were.

They were personal objects.

A shoe. A child's jacket. Something that might have been a toy. And among them, half-buried, the deflated and faded shell of a Ben 10 ball.

My ball.

It had been here the whole time. Whatever I'd thrown into those trees hadn't been lost—it had been taken. Brought here.

And at the base of the tree, arranged in a rough circle, were the people I'd crossed off.

Sarah. Marcus. Billy and the other bullies. Mr. Fitch. Three or four others I recognized only slowly, faces that matched half-memories of names I'd checked No on in moments of anger or hurt or thoughtlessness. They were seated against the roots, slumped slightly, their eyes closed.

They were breathing.

I felt a surge of wild relief—they're alive—and then I got closer and I understood.

They weren't alive. Not exactly. Their chests rose and fell with a slowness that wasn't sleep—too slow, too measured, like a metronome set to the wrong speed. Their skin had a quality I can only describe as dormant, like something packed away for winter. And they were smiling. Every one of them, smiling with a serenity that didn't belong on sleeping faces.

Sarah was nearest to me. Her hair was shorter than I remembered, cut to about her jaw, and I realized with a lurching shock that she was older—she'd aged, was maybe thirty, not eleven. Whatever this place was, time moved inside it. They'd been here all those years and they'd aged and they'd never woken up.

I reached out to touch her arm.

The bark of the tree moved.

It was the only word I had for it. The furrows shifted and rippled, and in them I saw something—faces, maybe, or the suggestion of faces, pressing outward from beneath the surface. The cinnamon smell intensified until it was sickening. And I felt something land on my hand.

A note. Settling onto my skin like a leaf.

Do you want to join them?

Yes / No

I dropped it. I stumbled backward. I turned and I ran—I ran the way you run in nightmares, knowing the distance is wrong, that the trees are too far apart and too close together—and then I came back to myself on the floor of my bedroom with carpet burn on my palms and my mother calling from downstairs that dinner was ready.

I never told anyone.

That was three years ago.

My mother recovered. I helped her through it and then I went back to my apartment and my job and Gerald, who still tolerated me, and I tried to live my life like someone who hadn't stood in a clearing full of people he'd condemned with a pencil check.

The notes started again six months after I got home.

Same handwriting. Same format. Always found in inexplicable places—under my coffee cup, folded into my jacket pocket, once tucked inside a library book I'd just bought sealed. The smell of cinnamon on every one of them.

Do you want to join them?

Every morning. The same question.

I've been checking No for three years. I mark it firmly, and the note disappears by afternoon, and the next morning there's another one.

But this morning—this morning I found two notes.

The first was the usual question.

The second was different. I hadn't seen a new question in twenty years.

It said:

The ones you left there are waking up. Are you ready?

Yes / Yes

If you’re reading this, it means I’m not hallucinating. I really made it back, at least for now. He told me I had 24 hours, maybe less. I want to let you know my experience and warn you in case I don’t make it back a second time. I don’t know who you are or how you stumbled upon this, but you need to listen. I’m not supposed to be here—I shouldn’t be anywhere. I died. I remember the impact, the twisting metal, the silence that followed. But I never moved on.

Something found me in that in-between place. It gave me a choice.

I don’t know if I made the right one. Maybe I did. Maybe I doomed myself.

All I know is… I’m still here. And I have a job to do.

This is my story:

I don’t remember much about the crash, but apparently, I had died. I was having an out-of-body experience, floating next to the wreckage, watching my lifeless body. Before I could register what was happening, someone appeared in front of me. He was tall, well-dressed, and somewhat skinny, with red skin, black hair, and horns curling from his head.

I froze, my breath catching in my throat. What… what are you?!

The figure smiled, an effortless, almost amused expression.

“Me? Im a collector, investor and an innovator – he paused – And I can tell you and I are gonna be good friends.”- added with a sinister smile.

There was something about the way he spoke—calm, measured, too confident—that made my stomach twist. I gasped. "Are you the Devil? Am I going to Hell?!"

His golden eyes gleamed with something unreadable. "Not quite, my friend." His voice was warm, almost inviting. "I am the Archdemon Mephistopheles, and I’m here to help you."

Help me? Yeah, right. A demon appearing at the exact moment of my death, offering help? No, this was a trick. This was where it all fell apart. Hell. Damnation. Eternal suffering.

I swallowed hard. “Help me how? You want my soul?”

Mephisto chuckled, stepping closer—just enough for me to see the faint glow of embers swirling in his pupils. “We demons get a bad rep, you know. But, well…. some of it is true. I can grant wishes. I can bring you back to life, so you can live happily ever after with your wife and daughter.”

It was too good to be true. My mind screamed trap, but there was something… something in his voice. It felt convincing, comforting, like I was talking to an old friend. Was he hypnotizing me? Was my response even mine, or was my faith already determined?

"Why would you do that?" I asked, my voice shaking. "Why help me?"

His smile deepened, but his eyes never changed. "You have something I want. And I," he gestured grandly, "am a sucker for a good deal."

"A deal? For what? My soul? My undying loyalty?"

Another laugh. "Oh, no, no, nothing so dramatic. I like to be fair with my trades. All I need from you is to collect a handful of souls for me. Sixteen, to be exact."

The air felt heavier.

"What?!" My voice cracked. "You want me to kill for you? No way! Forget it! Crawl back to whatever hellspawn you came from!" Mephisto didn’t react. If anything, his expression softened, like he was indulging a child throwing a tantrum. "Let’s not call it ‘killing.’ Think of it as… collecting. And besides," he added, feigning a look of concern, "I would never ask you to harm an innocent soul. What kind of monster do you think I am?"

"Then who?" I asked, my fists clenching.

“All I need is for you to clean up a dungeon full of creatures and bring me their souls. You’d be a hero, really—ridding the world of pests.” – he replied, obviously pleased with himself

My pulse pounded in my ears. “I’m no fighter. I don’t know how to slay creatures, I cant ”- I replied, my voice barely a whisper

“Ah, but you won’t be alone! I’ll grant you a small fraction of my power to get you started, It will be like we are fighting together. You know, teamwork” – he smiled wider – “And the dungeon? It’s full of weapons and items—just look for the shiny ones.”

I hesitated. He was making it sound easy. Too easy.

"And after that?"

His eyes gleamed. “After that? You’re free to go. I’ll bring you back to life, and your daughter will have her daddy again.”

My throat tightened. Jessica. My baby girl. She was going to be seven next week. My wife. My love. My perfect life, everything I fought so hard to build and right when I had it —ripped away in an instant.

I had done everything right. I worked hard, built a home, stayed out of trouble. And yet here I was, staring at my own corpse while this… thing stood there, offering me a way out, to get back what I lost.

My hands clenched into fists, I asked "And will I ever have to see you again?"

Mephisto’s grin widened, smooth as silk. "Only if you want to."

He extended a hand. "So… do we have a deal?"

I stared at him, at the wreckage, at my own lifeless body. It wasn’t fair. I deserved another chance. Anger engulfed my thoughts and with a determined voice I said: “Okay. Get me my life back.” Before shaking his hand and sealing my fate.

Mephisto smiled, his sharp teeth glinting: “Good choice”

I don’t remember closing my eyes. One moment I was shaking his hand and the next, I was… here. I was standing in a hallway. It stretched endlessly in both directions, dimly lit by an eerie reddish orange glow that seemed to seep from the very walls. The air was thick, like I was breathing through syrup, and it reeked of sulfur and decay. The stench of the dungeon clung to my throat and made me want to puke. My limbs aching, my mind foggy I fell on my knees. The floor was cold and dusty, I felt bugs start to crawl up my legs. I was about to pass out, this was it, what was I thinking making a deal with a hellspawn. Then I felt it. For a second, something pulsed inside me, an unnatural heat crawled through my skin seeping into my veins, into my bones. It was Mephisto’s power. It felt good, it felt amazing. My senses sharpened. The air no longer strangled me; the filth, the stench, the crawling insects—they were nothing now. But already, I could feel it fading. The power was bleeding away, slow but steady. I had to move. Fast. I turned, expecting to see Mephisto standing there, watching, waiting.

But I was alone.

The only thing that greeted me was the glint of metal. A pile of weapons. Armor. Trinkets scattered across the floor like discarded relics from forgotten battles. I crouched, running my fingers through the rubble. Most were broken—rusted, shattered, useless. I tossed aside splintered bows and dull daggers until my hand closed around something barely intact—a long blade. It was dulled and chipped, but whole.

I exhaled sharply. This was it? This scrap of metal was supposed to save my life? Frustration bubbled up. "This?!" My voice echoed down the endless corridor. "This is the best I get?!"

Then—something inside me shifted.

A piece of that demonic power tore from my body and sank into the sword. The metal shuddered. The rust peeled away. Before my eyes, the dull edge sharpened itself, the chips and cracks knitting together as if time was reversing. When the transformation stopped, the blade was as good as new. Back to its former glory. Suddenly my body felt… heavier. Weaker. The air felt denser. I had given up some of the demonic energy keeping me together to restore the sword. But looking at it now—feeling the weight in my hands—I finally had a chance.

My joy however was short lived. Just as my blade got restored I heard a faint skittering. Slow, deliberate. I froze. My fingers clenched around the hilt of the blade as I turned my head just enough to catch movement in the shadows.

Our eyes met.

It was huge. A spider-like creature, as tall as me while standing on its eight legs. Its fur was a deep, sickly purple, and its blood-red eyes gleamed with hunger. Etched into its back, was a pentagram—burned into its flesh like some kind of cursed mark. It took a step closer. Then another.

I stumbled backward, nearly tripping over my own feet. It kept advancing. I had to think of something quick. Its body was massive, but its legs were rather thin. Brittle. I could cripple it. If I could just cut off its mobility, I had a chance. I crept forward, careful not to make a sound, gripping my sword tightly. I swung the sword with everything I had.

CRACK.

One of its legs snapped clean off.

The creature let out a piercing screech, its body convulsing in rage. I barely had time to react before it lunged. I threw myself back, just dodging its fangs, but my leg got caught on something. Its web. Sticky strands coiled around my ankle, tightening like a noose. I tried to yank free, but before I could, the creature was already on top of me. I swung once more but missed. Its leg slammed into my thigh, pinning me down, and searing pain tore through my body as one of its fangs pierced my calf. The venom burned as it entered my bloodstream.

I screamed.

Desperation took over. I gripped the sword tight and thrust it deep into the spider’s body.

The creature let out a horrific screech and recoiled, tearing its fangs from my leg in the process. My muscles snapped like rubber bands. The web ripped apart, but so did my leg. A chunk of my own flesh dangled from its fangs.

I didn’t wait. I forced myself up and ran.

Each step was agony. The pain was unimaginable. Bones grinding together. Blood gushing down my ankle. But I didn’t stop. I found a crack in the wall—barely wide enough to squeeze into. I threw myself inside and collapsed, panting, trembling.

The spider thrashed outside, it scraped against the stone but it couldn’t reach me, I was safe. But the pain, the pain was too much, I couldn’t take it anymore, I went into shock and fainted.

I woke up to silence. I searched for scars but found none, my leg was all healed up. No torn muscle, no exposed flesh. Just smooth, unscarred skin. Yet, something was wrong. The air felt heavier. My limbs, weaker.

The demonic power inside me—the one keeping me alive—had faded even more. My time here was running out, I had to act fast. I grabbed my blade and crawled out of my hiding place, heart pounding, my body still aching. The dungeon was different now. No longer just one endless corridor—now there were turns. Rooms. Paths. Twisting tunnels. I moved carefully, scanning every shadow, every flicker of movement. I needed to find something smaller, something weaker. Something I could actually kill. You can imagine the excitement I felt, when I finally saw it – a rat like creature, barely larger than a dog and it hadn’t noticed me yet. I crept closer preparing to attack

– that’s when I felt it,

a sharp cutting pain on my right side. Unbeknownst to me as I was stalking my prey,

something else was stalking me.

I turned slowly and saw a group of three skeletons. Silent, expressionless and armed. I tried to defend myself but it was no use, they had stabbed me in my liver and my body went into shock. I could barely move my arms. They swung again piercing my gut and a third time piercing my chest. I fell back, the room turning dark, I was bleeding out. In the distance, I heard a roar and it was coming closer. My vision gave out, everything went dark, but I was still conscious, barely. I heard screams and a tussle. I heard bones breaking. Were they mine, or of the skeletons I don’t know. That’s as far as I remember before fainting again.

I don’t know how long I was out, but when I opened my eyes, all I saw was black. Absolute, suffocating darkness. I could hear drops of liquid dripping somewhere in the distance. Slowly. The air was dry, carrying a pungent stench of decay, yet it didn’t have the same crushing weight as before. My body felt… intact. Healed, at least to an extent—enough to move. The demonic power Mephisto had given me was almost nonexistent now, just a faint ember in the pit of my soul. And yet somehow I was still around and kicking. Still breathing.

Still alive.

I was sitting on something that creaked beneath my weight. A rocking chair? I pushed myself up, only to immediately step onto something soft and damp. My foot sank slightly into it before I pulled back, my pulse quickening. I pressed forward, feeling my way through the pitch-black void. The space was vast—I couldn’t find any walls.

As I navigated blindly, my fingers brushed against broken fragments of wood. A shattered table? A chair? I couldn’t tell. There were more of them, scattered all around. Then, my hand found something else. Was that skin?

I yanked my arm back instinctively, expecting to be attacked. But nothing happened. The thing didn’t move. Heart pounding, I forced myself to reach out again. My fingers ran over smooth, ice-cold skin. I felt a body, but there was no head. Whatever this thing was, it was long dead.

Where the hell was I? I needed to find a way out. Fast.

But as I took another step, my foot caught on something, and I collapsed forward. A sharp clattering sound echoed through the space as I landed on something solid. Something hard.

I knew that sound.

Warily, I reached down and traced the shape with my hands.

Skulls. Jaws. Long, brittle bones. Piles of them.

A cold shudder ran down my spine. Was I in the skeletons’ lair? The same creatures that had nearly killed me before? No… no, this was different. These weren’t animated soldiers. These were just remains. Leftovers. Leftovers from something much worse.

Before I could react, something grabbed me. Something big.

A massive arm wrapped around my torso, lifting me effortlessly off the ground. I gasped as a deep, raspy voice murmured: “You’re hurt, dear. You need your medicine.” - The voice was wrong—distorted. It was a mix between the voice of a woman and a growl of a wild beast.

I was carried through the darkness, cradled in a grip far too strong for me to break. My body was still weak, my blade was gone—I had no way to fight back. I was at the mercy of this… thing. She set me down gently. I was back on that rocking chair.

Then, something in her hand flickered. A dull red glow. It wasn’t bright, but it was enough for me to finally see my captor. She was massive—easily seven, maybe eight feet tall. Long, black, unkempt hair hung over her face. Her limbs were unnaturally long and meaty, her fingers ending in black, jagged nails. She was wearing an old white gown, riddled with holes.

But really, it was her face that made my stomach twist.

The skin didn’t fit. It sagged, loose and drooping, as if it had melted and barely clung to the bone underneath. The excess flesh hung over one eye entirely, while the other barely peeked through the folds. She tilted her head slightly, the motion making the skin shift and stretch in unnatural ways.

Then, she smiled.

Her teeth were crooked, uneven, like shards of broken glass forced into a grin. “That’s enough for now, dear,” she whispered “Soon, you should feel much better.” The amulet in her hand stopped glowing. Utter darkness surrounded us once more. I heard her footsteps retreating, fading into the void and leaving me by myself. And yet… she was right. I was feeling better. The pain was dulling. Strength was returning to my limbs.

Whatever that amulet was, it was healing me.

This pattern continued for what felt like an eternity. I would try to find an exit, but before I could even reach a wall, she would find me. Every time, she would patiently drag me back to that old rocking chair and say: "You’re hurt, dear. Come back."

"The outside is dangerous, my child. Stay where it's safe."

She never acted hostile—never raised her voice, never struck me. But her sheer size and her imposing presence… it was enough. Enough to keep me trapped. She treated me like I was her child. She would try to feed me, offering chunks of creatures she hunted in the dungeon, but I could never stomach them. So, she kept me alive with the amulet instead. Just enough to stay conscious. Just enough to keep me moving. Never enough to fight back.

I tried communicating with her a couple times, although my tries did not yield much success. Once, I told her I was feeling weak and needed more energy from the amulet. Her response, however, was rather disturbing:

"No, no, dear. Too much of a good thing is bad. It will turn you bad. It will turn you rotten." Her voice was soft, almost mourning. "Rotten and evil like the others. The ones before."

I hesitated. "The ones before… were they the skeletons? The corpses I found?"

She shook her head slowly. "The amulet… the demon… he turned them bad. Made them sick. Evil. I had to put them down. My children… my poor, poor children."

I swallowed hard.

"Are you talking about Mephisto?" I asked cautiously.

That was a mistake.

Her entire body stiffened. Her fingers twitched, nails scraping against the floor. Her head jerked up unnaturally, like a puppet being yanked by its strings.

"Evil." Her voice dropped into a harsh whisper. "Evil demon. Liar. Deceiver. Don't trust him. Don't trust him, my child."

For the first time, there was something sharp in her tone. Something dangerous. But just as quickly as it came, it faded. She slumped, murmuring an apology before leaving me alone again.

I was surviving. But this wasn’t living.

She hated Mephisto, that much was clear. But I needed to collect souls. I needed to escape. Time was slipping away from me and I needed to get back to my family, my real family.

I didn’t know how long I had been trapped. The darkness, the isolation—it was starting to get to me. But there was one thing I noticed. Every time she left to hunt, I would hear it. A faint, distant sound. The shifting of bricks. It was subtle. The sound of dripping liquid also made it difficult to hear. But with enough practice and concentration I got the hang of it. I didn’t have enough time to find the exit but I could run to the bone pile and back. Bit by bit, I moved bones from the pile closer to me, sharpening them against each other in secret. I couldn’t hold onto them—she would see and take them away—but I kept them nearby, within reach.

She wanted me to call her Mother, so that’s what I started calling her. I had to play along. I pretended to love her. I let her believe I was different from the others.

But then, one day, I got careless.

I had finally finished sharpening my weapons. I guess I was too excited as I didn't hear her approach this time. Out of nowhere her massive hand gripped my wrist, lifting one of my makeshift spears. "Sharp and dangerous, my child." - Her voice was calm, yet sharp -"What are you doing with these?" My heart pounded. My body went cold. I had to think. Fast.

"They’re a gift, Mother," I said quickly, forcing warmth into my voice. "For you. So you can hunt those evil monsters easier." Silence. Then, she let out a deep, pleased hum. "Oh, child… you are not like the rest, are you?" She patted my head, almost affectionately. "But Mother is strong. She doesn’t need these brittle bones."

And with that, she crushed every single one of my weapons with her bare hands. I was devastated. All that work. All that time. Gone. What now? Then, things got worse. One day, as I sat in my rocking chair, she returned from her hunt… but she wasn’t alone. With her was another body.

She sat it down next to me, her loose, sagging face pulling into something that resembled a smile. "You have been such a good boy, dear," - she said - "So I brought you a friend. What should we name him?" The person she had brought was no more than a corpse. Freshly killed, judging by heat that surrounded the body and by the smell of it. Perhaps she tried to save it, just like she did with me but wasn’t as lucky. She tried to revive him with the amulet, but it was too late, he was gone. Nevertheless, that didn’t stop her from acting like he was alive. She leaned close, her breath hot against my ear:

"Dear… I said, what should we name him?"

A cold sweat broke out down my spine.

“Ahh, Rey sounds like a good name Mother.” - I said with a shaky voice

Her jagged teeth gleamed in the dim light of the amulet. "Ah… wonderful, child. Let’s name him Rey." She giggled softly. "I hope you two get along."

And then, she left. I was barely holding it together. I was trapped. Barely alive. Going insane from the darkness and isolation. And now… now I had to talk to a corpse as my companion. But then, I noticed something.

Tucked beneath “Rey’s” stiff, cold fingers was a dagger. She must have overlooked it. It wasn't strong enough. Not yet. To really give it strength, I needed to infuse it with Mephisto's demonic power, the way I did with my first weapon. But the only way to obtain more demonic power was through the amulet.

I had to get it somehow.

I started planning. I got the dagger, buried it below the moist ground next to my rocking chair, and moved “Rey” further back. I broke the legs of his rocking chair so that even a small push would make him fall.

And then… I waited.

When the Mother came for our usual dose of the amulet, I threw a small rock at the other rocking chair and “Rey” fell over. "Mother!" I gasped. "Rey fell! He is hurt! I’ll hold onto the amulet—you check on him. You can trust me, Mother!" In an instant, she rushed to his side, leaving the amulet in my hands.

This was my chance.

I dug out the dagger and clutched the amulet tight, letting its power surge through me. And for the first time in a while, I felt Mephisto’s power fusing with my own again.

It felt good. It felt amazing.

I felt just like I did when I first entered the dungeon.

It wasn’t as subtle as I hoped however. The dim glow turned into a blinding, crimson light. The entire room lit up. For the first time, I saw everything clearly. The Mother turned around. In an instant, she lunged at me screaming "No, child! Don’t! It will corrupt you! It will make you undesirable!"

She smacked the amulet from my hands.

The light didn’t fade however, It was too late. The amulet was already activated. I had already gotten its power and imbued it with the dagger, so I lunged forward, slashing her in the torso. I could see I hurt her but this one slash wasn’t nearly enough to finish her off.

"I trusted you, child!" she shrieked. "You betrayed me! Just like the others! Now you are sick, wicked. But it’s okay… Mother will put you down."

She lunged.

Her claws slashed across my side, sending me flying across the room. Blood filled my mouth and some was dripping from my back and side. I had never imagined she was be this powerful. As soon as I got up on my feet, she was already up on my face, her drooping skin even more unsettling on the eerie red glow of the amulet. I managed to dodge her attack just in the nick of time and slashed at her ankles. She screamed in pain and lashed out, her sharp talon-like nails slicing clean through my right arm—severing both flesh and bone. Before I could react, she hurled me across the room again. The impact shattered what little remained of my unbroken bones. The pain was unbearable.

My arm was gone, and my dagger with it. My body was broken. I was done. And she was coming closer. Then I saw it—one of my bone spears. She must have kept it as a souvenir. It was just within arm’s reach. With the last of my strength, I grabbed onto it, channeling what little demonic energy remained in me, pouring nearly all of it into the weapon. If I had any chance of piercing her skin, this had to be it. But as the energy drained from my body and into the spear, the pain intensified, threatening to pull me into unconsciousness.

Then the Mother lunged.

I forced myself into position. At the last second, I drove the spear into her heart.

She crumbled beside me. From her body, a blue flame emerged—her soul, perhaps. It drifted toward me, then sank into my chest. A wave of relief washed over me, dulling the agony, if only for a moment.

I had collected my first soul.

As I laid there, staring at the crooked ceiling bathed in the dim red glow of the amulet, I blinked and was met with a blinding white light, I felt warmth on my skin and felt hot small pebbles beneath me. The air felt fresh and filled my lungs with vitality. I heard sirens and chatter. Where was I?

As my eyes adjusted to the light, I realized it was the sun. I was back on earth. Or… at least it seemed like it. I turned my head I was next to some cheap Motel; the people did not seem to notice me however. I turned right, my arm, my arm was back and my wounds gone. I was back to full health, or as close as I’ll ever get I guess. I heard slow clapping from behind and a chuckle? I turned around and there he was:

“Bravo, bravo I knew you could do it” – said Mephisto, standing there with a wide smile.

I was too disoriented from everything that happened, I couldn’t gather my thoughts to talk, to ask a question. Mephisto took a slow look around.

“Isn’t it nice here?”

“Is this Earth?” – I asked, expecting to be pulled back into the horrors of the dungeon.

“Well, of course,” he said, tilting his head slightly. “I figured you deserved a little reward after all that effort, wouldn’t you agree?”

A strange mix of emotions welled inside me—relief, exhaustion, suspicion. “I… I did it. I killed her. I got the soul.” – I said with a shaky voice.

“Indeed. Your first taste of victory. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves now, you still have 15 more souls to collect”

The people around us kept moving, carrying on with their everyday lives, oblivious to our conversation. “The people, the people around us can they see us” – I asked, barely keeping it together.

Mephisto chuckled. “Oh, of course not. I wanted a little privacy between us.” He stretched his arms, as if enjoying the atmosphere. “You have about twenty-four hours here, give or take. After that—duty calls.”

”So make the most of it will ya.” – He said tilting his head to one side and giving me a wink.

After that, he was gone. Not in a blink. Not in a swirl of shadows. He was simply… no longer there. Like he had never existed at all.

At that moment, I heard a voice in the distance calling me.

“Sir, sir, are you alright. Do you need help?”

I turned. A motel employee stood nearby, concern etched on his face.

For a moment, I hesitated. Then, without saying a word, I followed him inside. The rest of the staff greeted me. Despite me not saying a word to them, they welcomed me and gave me a room to stay in. Probably thought I was homeless or something. They were kind people. I guess that was the reason Mephisto brought me here, his idea of giving me a break. I still didn’t know where I was exactly, I was too tired to ask. In my room, I found a Laptop, the same one I’m using to type this message and next to the Laptop was this old book with beautiful engravings on its cover, Its pages were empty however and next to it was a sticky note that read:

“A little something to get you going. You got this.” – with an “M” at the bottom—one end of the letter curling into a devil’s tail.

I didn’t know what to make of it so I opted for the Laptop.

I arrived at the Motel around 11 AM yesterday. It’s currently 10.30 AM. I don’t have much time left, I hope I managed to remember all the important stuff. Whoever is reading this, this message is a warning.

Don’t trust Mephisto.

Death is a better fate than the one that awaits those who are foolish enough to make a deal with him.

I opened my eyes and immediately started panicking.

I couldn’t move.

At first I thought I was buried because everything around me was dark and cramped and cold, but then I heard chains move when I tried pulling my arms.

I was chained to a wall.

An actual stone wall. Huge blocks of rock, wet and freezing cold against my back.

The room was circular. I remember that clearly for some reason.

And I wasn’t alone.

There were others – chained around the room just like me but the place was so scarcely lit that I couldn’t make out any of their features.

Below us were stairs all converging down to the center of the room. And in the middle of the room was a raised stone slab.

Then I noticed the figures standing around it. Humanoid shapes that started moving towards us. Lit only by a single torch one of them was holding.

One by one they started dragging the others to the center.

At first, I could hear crying. Quiet crying. Like people trying not to be heard. Then it turned into screaming. As they approached the slab the screams got worse and worse until suddenly it just stopped.

This pattern repeated a couple of times until finally it was my turn.

As the figures approached, I could now make out what they were wearing. They had long Maroon colored robes with hoods covering their faces. On top of each hood was a sigil of some sorts – a golden eye.

I tried to say something but the words wouldn’t come out. They picked me up and dragged me to the center, I tried to resist but I couldn’t, my body didn’t cooperate.

The only thing I could do was observe as they put me on the stone slab and chained me.

I was frightened beyond my mind so I did the only thing I could. I closed my eyes.

I dont know what they were doing to me, but it started hurting, my voice came back and I started screaming as much as I can, not daring to open my eyes.

A wave of heat came over my body and the pain intensified.

My ears started ringing. Louder louder and louder.

Until...

…something hit me in the face.

I opened my eyes and there was a pillow over my face.

“Danny what the hell?”

“This is the third time this week!”

“Is everything alright?”

My heart was going insane.

I was sweating so badly the sheets were damp.

I got up, trying to adjust to the new setting. I looked at her without saying a word.

She sighed and sat back down on the bed.

“Same nightmare again?” she asked.

I nodded.

“Honey, maybe it’s time you finally see a therapist or something.” – she said

It was 6:47 AM. A Tuesday. I was already twenty minutes late for work.

“Thanks for letting me crash here for the night Jess” – I said

“I’m gonna head for work, see you later”

As I left her apartment I went straight into my car and I whipped out my laptop. I can’t hold it in anymore.

I need to write this down before I lose my nerve. Or before something else happens. I'm going to try to tell it in order, even though my hands are shaking and I've re-read the first paragraph four times already and deleted it twice. Bear with me.

My name is Danny. I'm twenty-nine years old, I work data entry for a logistics company, and until about three weeks ago, the weirdest thing about me was that I refused to own anything maroon.

· · ·

The robes are always the first thing.

Not faces — I never see faces. Just the robes. Deep, wet crimson, the color of something opened up. They crowd at the edges of wherever I am, which is always somewhere stone, always cold, always lit by something I can never look at directly. And they're chanting. Not words — or if they are words, they're in a language that feels like pressure behind my eyes when I hear it. The sound of it makes my teeth ache.

There are other sounds too. Other voices. From somewhere close and somewhere very far away at the same time, there's crying. Kids crying. The sound of it is the worst part because it doesn't stop, it just keeps going under the chanting like a second, sadder instrument.

I've had versions of that dream for as long as I can remember. Not every night. Maybe once every few weeks, sometimes more when I'm stressed. I've never thought much about it. Therapist I saw at twenty said it was probably an anxiety response, and honestly I believed her, because I've always been an anxious person. I don't like crowds. I don't like feeling cornered. And I absolutely, viscerally, irrationally cannot stand the color maroon.

Crimson too. Burgundy. That whole end of the red spectrum where it starts going dark and wet-looking. My college roommate Elliot thought it was hilarious. He bought a maroon throw blanket freshman year just to watch me flinch when I walked in the room. I always told him it was just a quirk. A texture thing. He eventually stopped because I think he could tell it wasn't entirely a joke to me even when I laughed about it.

Anyway. That's the background. Keep it in mind.

· · ·

About two months ago, a woman moved into the apartment across the hall from me.

Her name was Vera. Late thirties, dark hair pulled back very tightly, the kind of posture that makes you feel like you're slouching by comparison. She introduced herself on a Wednesday morning in the hallway, while I was fumbling with my keys. Very polite. Very still. She smiled in a way that involved all the right muscles but didn't feel connected to anything behind it.

I told myself I was being unfair. I told myself that I was just bad at first impressions. People seemed suspicious to me sometimes and that was my anxiety talking, not my instincts.

But she kept appearing. That's the thing I keep coming back to now. She kept appearing.

My usual coffee shop on Thursday morning — she was in line two spots ahead of me, ordering, not looking around. My gym, which I go to at an odd hour specifically because I hate people — she was on the treadmill by the window when I walked in. The grocery store on Sunday. The parking lot of my office building, getting into a grey sedan, on a Tuesday when I had to stay late. Not looking at me. Never looking at me. Just there.

I started keeping a note on my phone. I do this sometimes when anxiety is spiking — a log, something to show me whether a pattern is real or whether I'm building one out of nothing. I had seven entries in eleven days when I finally accepted that it wasn't nothing.

Then the others started.

· · ·

The man at the laundromat. Middle-aged, reading a paperback, never turned a page in forty minutes. I know because I was watching. He was three machines down from me and every time I glanced up he was at exactly the same angle. When I left he folded his book closed and I noticed he had it upside-down.

The teenager with the bike outside my building. She was there for four days straight, just sitting on the low brick wall across the street, earbuds in, watching her phone. Young enough that I felt stupid being nervous about her. Old enough that she made me nervous anyway.

My coworker Marcus started inviting me to lunch. Which sounds fine and normal except that Marcus and I have worked adjacent to each other for two years and exchanged maybe a hundred words total, and suddenly he was intensely interested in me. My routine. Whether I had family nearby. Whether I ever had blackouts or periods I couldn't remember. He framed it like small talk. Like the natural progression of a friendship. But by the third lunch I was giving him one-word answers and eating fast and making excuses to get back to my desk.

The thing about that question — the blackout thing — was that I didn't have a clean answer. I have these gaps. Always have. My adopted parents told me I had a rough first couple years before they found me and that's why I don't have memories from before I was four. Standard trauma response. Totally explainable. I've never questioned it much because what would questioning it even get me?

But Marcus asked, and something twitched behind my sternum, and I said no, never and changed the subject.

· · ·

The first time something happened — something I couldn't explain away — was a Saturday afternoon in the third week of all this.

I was coming back from a walk. I do this sometimes when the walls of my apartment start feeling like they're leaning in. Just walk. No destination, no headphones. It helps. It was a grey afternoon, cold enough that there weren't many people out, and I'd managed to get genuinely calm for the first time in weeks when I turned the corner onto my street and almost walked directly into the man with the upside-down book.

He was just standing there. On the sidewalk. No pretense, no prop this time — just standing there looking at me with an expression I can only describe as anticipation.

He said: "You're not sleeping well."

Not a question.

I said something like excuse me? and moved to go around him and he side-stepped to match me and said, very quietly, very evenly: "It's going to get worse before it gets better, Daniel. We can make it stop. We can explain everything."

Nobody calls me Daniel. My name is Danny. It's on my mailbox as D. Wren. He said Daniel like he'd been practicing it.

I walked around him. Fast. Heart going absolutely insane in my chest. Didn't look back. Got upstairs, locked my door, stood in the kitchen breathing through my nose until my hands unclenched.

I sat there for a long time. And at some point — because the anger had nowhere to go — I picked up a mug and threw it at the wall.

It didn't break. It hit the wall and bounced, which is not what mugs do, and landed on the floor and spun and stopped. And there was a sound from the hallway. Not from Vera's apartment, not from downstairs — from the hallway itself, like something very large shifting its weight.

My neighbor Mr. Hale's dog started barking and didn't stop for twenty minutes.

I told myself the mug thing was cheap ceramic or weird angles or something. I believed it, mostly. The barking was harder to file away.

· · ·

A week after that I ran into Vera in the elevator and she told me, without any preamble, that I looked exhausted and I should try valerian root. Then she looked at my chest — not my face, my chest — and the elevator opened on the ground floor and she walked out without another word.

I'm not wearing anything at my chest. I never wear necklaces. My shirt was a plain grey crew neck. There was nothing to look at.

She looked, though. She definitely looked.

· · ·

I need to tell you about my parents. My adoptive parents, Peter and Lena Wren. They're good people. Genuinely good, the kind you don't appreciate properly until you're in your mid-twenties and have met enough other people to have a comparison. They adopted me when I was four. Found through the system, my file apparently sparse even by the standard of underfunded caseworkers. My mom used to say I arrived with nothing except the clothes I was in and a willingness to eat everything she put in front of me.

I called my dad two days after the elevator thing. Just to talk. He could tell something was off — he always can — and he asked if everything was okay and I said yeah, just stress at work, and then I said, casual as I could make it sound:

"Hey, did I ever have any medical stuff as a kid? Like, any history they gave you when you adopted me?"

There was a pause. Very short. Probably nothing. But I've known my dad for twenty-two years and he is not a man who pauses before answering normal questions.

He said no, the file was basically empty, which was common for kids from chaotic situations. He said I had some night terrors early on but grew out of them. He said I was a happy kid. He asked again if I was really okay.

I said yes. We talked about other things. He told me about the garden, about my mom's new book club. Normal things. Good things.

When I hung up I sat on the couch for a while and thought about the pause.

· · ·

Marcus resigned from my company on a Friday. Just — gone. Sent an email Thursday evening and cleaned his desk. His replacement started the following Monday, a woman named Priya who was perfectly normal for about three days and then started asking if I'd ever considered joining a meditation group because she thought I had a lot of energy that needed directing.

I ate lunch alone at my desk for two weeks after that.

The nightmares were coming more often. Not the dream — the crimson robe dream stayed the same, same stone room, same crawling hands, same chanting — but after it, in the shallow sleep that followed, I kept dreaming about something at my chest. A weight. Something small and warm. I'd reach for it and wake up with my hand on my sternum and nothing there.

· · ·

What happened on the Thursday three weeks ago — I'll try to be precise about this because the order matters.

I left work early. I had a headache that had been building all day into something genuinely unpleasant, the kind that sits behind one eye and pulses. I took the bus instead of walking. I was sitting near the back, head against the window, eyes mostly closed, when I realized the woman in the seat ahead of me was Vera.

I hadn't seen her get on. I hadn't seen her sit down. But there she was, back to me, spine absolutely straight, head not moving.

Two seats back from me, by the rear door: the teenager with the bike. No bike now. Earbuds in. Watching me over the top of her phone.

Across the aisle: a man I didn't recognize, but the way he was sitting — too still, too deliberate — made the back of my neck go cold.

I got off four stops early. So did all three of them.

I walked fast. Then faster. I turned down a side street and through a parking garage because I know the area and there's an exit on the other side that cuts through to a busier road. I could hear footsteps behind me — not running, not panicked, measured — and that was somehow worse than running would have been.

The parking garage exit door was locked. It's never locked. I stood there pulling the handle like an idiot until I heard the footsteps enter the garage behind me.

I turned around.

All three of them. Vera and the teenager and the strange man, fanned out maybe thirty feet away, not moving. Watching me.

And Vera — Vera was holding something. A small dark shape on a cord. She had it in both hands, held slightly outward, like an offering.

She said: "Daniel. We have something of yours. And you have something of ours. We just want to talk."

I told her she had the wrong person. I said it twice, loudly. My voice echoed in the concrete space.

She said: "You survived, Daniel. Against all probability, you survived. We've been trying to understand what you did for a long time. We're not here to hurt you. We're here because we need you to finish what you started."

The man behind her reached into his jacket.

And something happened in me that I don't have clean words for. It wasn't thought. It wasn't decision. It was more like a door that had always been in me, that I'd always walked past, swinging open on its own. All the weeks of stress and surveillance and bad sleep and confusion just cresting, and something underneath all of it answering.

I heard the thing before I saw it.

A low sound, bass-deep, that I felt in my molars more than heard with my ears. From the shadows behind the parked cars, from the dark space between the support pillars. Something moving that was too large to be moving in that space without touching anything, and yet it wasn't touching anything.

Vera dropped the pendant. I watched it hit the concrete and I watched the look on her face and it was not the face of someone in control of a situation.

I ran. Through the fire exit door that was now, inexplicably, open. Down the alley. Out onto the bright street. I didn't stop until I was through the door of a crowded café and had a table with my back to the wall and a coffee in front of me that I didn't taste.

Behind me in the garage: shouting. One scream, then silence.

Then nothing. No sirens. Nobody came out after me.

· · ·

I went home. I know I should have called the police. I know. What would I have said? I was followed? Cornered? By my neighbor and some strangers who said cryptic things and then I heard a sound and ran? They'd want to go to the garage and I didn't want to know what was in the garage.

I double-locked my door and sat on the couch and tried to think clearly.

Vera's apartment had been quiet since I got home. No movement, no sound. At around nine PM I very carefully looked through my peephole. Her door was slightly open. Not much — an inch, maybe two. In twenty-something years of apartment living I have never once seen a person leave their front door ajar in the evening.

I did not open it. I went back to the couch.

At some point I slept. And I dreamed the dream — the robes, the stone, the chanting, the hands — except this time, at the end, just before the bright and the heat, I looked down at my own chest and I saw it. A pendant. Small. Dark metal, shaped in a way I couldn't quite resolve, on a black cord. Warm against my skin even in the cold stone room.

And in the dream, something looked back.

Not at me. Through me. Something very far down and very patient, like looking through ice to see movement in deep water.

I woke up at three AM and lay there for a long time and eventually, because I needed to do something, I started writing this.

· · ·

I called my dad again this morning. I didn't make it casual this time.

I told him what was happening — not all of it, the version that would sound least insane — and I asked him directly: Was there anything in my file? Anything at all?

Another pause. Longer this time.

He said: "Danny. I need to tell you something we probably should have told you a long time ago."

They found me in 2001. A social worker in a rural county, responding to an anonymous tip about a property — a farmhouse, or what had been a farmhouse, because by the time anyone got there most of it had burned. There were adults on the property. Eleven of them. The official determination was a fire of indeterminate origin. The investigation went quiet fast, the way investigations sometimes do when someone above someone decides they should.

I was found in a field twenty meters from the building. Age approximately three or four. No ID. No one came forward to claim me. My file listed the case number from the rural county and nothing else.

My dad's voice was very steady when he told me this. He's a steady man. But I could hear something else underneath it, something he'd been carrying for a long time.

He said: "We never asked too many questions because we were afraid of the answers. We just wanted you to be okay. We just wanted you to have a normal life."

I told him I loved him. I told him I'd call him again soon. I hung up and sat with my coffee going cold and thought about a farmhouse burning in a rural county in 2001, and eleven adults who apparently didn't survive it, and one child found twenty meters away in a field.

Thought about a pendant, warm against cold stone.

Thought about a door swinging open in me when I'm pushed far enough, and the sound that comes from the dark places when it does.

Vera's apartment is empty. I looked through the open door this morning. Bare floor, nothing in the closets, the bathroom light left on over nothing. Like she was never there.

Priya didn't come in today. Called out sick.

I don't know what they are. I don't know what I did in that farmhouse in 2001 or what's been doing things in parking garages and building hallways when I'm scared enough and cornered enough to crack open. I don't know if they'll send more people, or the same people, or just wait.

But I'm posting this because I need someone to know. And because I know you'll believe me here, which is more than I can say for anywhere else.

If you're reading this and you know what a cult farmhouse fire in a rural county in 2001 might connect to — anything, any detail — please tell me.

And if you own anything in that dark end of red — maroon, crimson, burgundy — maybe just keep it out of sight for a while.

I don't entirely understand why I'm saying that. But I mean it.

UPDATE — 6 hours later

Someone slid a piece of paper under my door while I was writing the above.

It's a photocopy of what looks like a handwritten ledger entry. Old paper, old handwriting. There's a date — I can make out a year that ends in 97 — and a list of names I don't recognize, and at the bottom, circled in pen by whoever made the copy:

D. Cassel — vessel confirmed. Pendant transferred. Summoning incomplete. Primary subject unaccounted for. Pendant unresponsive since incident. Awaiting recovery of subject. He is the key, not the lock.

Under that, in different, newer handwriting:

We found you, Daniel. We're not the ones who want to hurt you. We're the ones who stopped them in 2001. Please open your door.

I haven't opened my door.

But I'm sitting here and I'm thinking about what vessel confirmed means, and what he is the key, not the lock means, and why a pendant that doesn't respond to them responds when I'm near it without even touching it.

I'm thinking about the thing in the deep water, looking back.

I don't think it's waiting for them.

I think it's been waiting for me to stop running from it.

I don't know what I'm going to do. But I'll update again when I know more.

— Danny

Here is Part 1 for context.

So anyways...

I opened the door.

I know. I know I said I wasn't going to. But it was 4 AM and I hadn't slept and I'd been sitting on the couch staring at that note for six hours and at some point your brain just stops generating reasons not to do the thing.

There was a man in the hallway.

Mid fifties, grey jacket, reading glasses pushed up on his forehead. He looked like someone's accountant. He looked like someone you'd see at a parent teacher conference and immediately forget. He was standing with his hands visible at his sides, deliberately visible, like he'd thought about that in advance.

"Daniel," he said. Not a question. Same as the man with the upside down book.

"Danny," I said.

"Right." He nodded like that actually meant something to him. "My name is Greer. Can I come in?"

I didn't move from the doorway. "You slid that note under my door at four in the morning."

"I've been in the building since yesterday," he said. "I was waiting for you to be ready."

"That's not less creepy."

"No," he said. "I know. I'm sorry. There wasn't a good way to do this."

I let him in. I made coffee. We sat at my kitchen table and he talked for a long time and I'm going to try to write down what he told me as accurately as I can because I want a record of it somewhere that isn't just my head.

· · ·

There is a group. Has been for a long time. Greer wouldn't give me a name for them, said names make things findable and findable is dangerous in their line of work. What they do — what they've been doing for about forty years — is track a specific cult. Follow them, document them, and when possible stop them.

The cult has a name for themselves but Greer wouldn't say that either. He called them the Order throughout the whole conversation, which I got the impression was his own word for them and not theirs.

The Order has been around for a very long time. Greer was vague on how long but said the oldest documentation his group had found dated back several centuries. They move. They rebuild. They lose members and recruit new ones and every few decades they get close enough to their goal that Greer's group has to intervene.

Their goal is a summoning.

Specifically — and this is the part where I had to put my coffee down — the summoning of something they call the Master. An entity from somewhere else. Greer said somewhere else very carefully, like he'd had arguments about the exact terminology before. Not hell. Not another planet. Somewhere else, with its own rules, its own geometry, its own version of what alive means. The Order has been trying to bring it through for centuries and has never managed it.

Not for lack of trying.

"The summoning requires a vessel," Greer said. "Someone born under specific conditions, or born into specific circumstances — they're not entirely sure themselves, from what we've gathered. Someone the pendant responds to."

I asked him what the pendant was.

He said it was a key. Old, older than the Order probably. They found it, didn't make it. It responds to certain people and not others and they've spent a very long time trying to understand why. For most of their history they've been trying to find the right vessel and use them and it's never fully worked. The summoning always fails. Things come through — wrong things, incomplete things, things that don't survive the crossing — but never the Master.

In 1997, he said, they thought they'd finally found the right one.

A child. Three months old. The pendant reacted to him in a way it had never reacted to anyone before.

I didn't say anything.

"They prepared for four years," Greer said. "Longer than they'd ever prepared before. They wanted it to be right. In 2001 they were ready."

"And your group stopped them," I said.

He looked at his coffee. "We were too late to stop the ritual. We weren't too late to pull you out of that field."

· · ·

He told me the rest of it. The farmhouse, the fire, the eleven bodies. What had caused the fire wasn't indeterminate — Greer's group caused it, deliberately, to destroy whatever the Order had built there. The ritual site, the equipment, the records they could find.

But not the pendant. The Order got the pendant out before the fire. Greer's group didn't know that for years.

And the ritual — the one they'd interrupted — hadn't fully failed. It had done something. Something had started and then stopped midway, which according to Greer was in some ways worse than it completing or not starting at all. Like a door that had been opened a crack and never properly closed.

I thought about the dream. The heat. The ringing. The moment right before I always wake up where everything goes white.

"The monsters," I said. "The things that show up when I'm — when I get pushed too far. What are those."

Greer was quiet for a moment. "Bleedthrough," he said. "The door isn't fully closed. When you're under enough stress, when your — he paused. When whatever the ritual opened in you gets activated enough, things come through. Small things. Not the Master. The Master is something else entirely."

"How do you know about them," I said. "The things that show up."

"Because we've been watching you for eight years, Danny," he said. "We've been keeping you off their radar as best we could. When something came through we cleaned it up."

I sat with that for a while.

"The parking garage," I said.

"That was a problem," he said. "We weren't fast enough. The Order was closer to you than we realized. They'd already found you."

"Why didn't you just tell me," I said. "Eight years. Why didn't you just knock on my door eight years ago and tell me?"

He looked at me like that was a question he'd been asked before. Maybe by himself, many times.

"Because knowing activates it," he said. "Because stressed is bad and terrified is worse. Because the safest version of you has always been the version that thinks the nightmares are just nightmares."

He said it quietly. He didn't say it like it was a good answer. He said it like it was the one they'd gone with and had never fully made peace with.

I asked him what happens now.

He said the Order knew where I was. The parking garage had confirmed it for them and now there was no going back to the version of my life where I didn't know any of this. He said his group wanted to move me somewhere safe, somewhere they could control the environment, while they figured out the next step.

I told him I needed to think about it.

He left me his number on a piece of paper. An actual piece of paper, handwritten. He said don't put it in your phone.

I haven't called him yet.

That was two days ago.

· · ·

I should have called him.

I want to be very clear about that looking back. I should have called Greer the next morning and said okay, let's do this, take me somewhere safe. Instead I went to work because I didn't know what else to do with myself and sitting in my apartment alone felt worse than pretending everything was normal.

That was a mistake.

Priya was back. Sitting at her desk, completely normal, said good morning without looking up. I sat at my desk. I answered emails. I ate lunch at my desk. I was almost convinced I could just — keep doing this. Keep going through the motions until Greer's people figured something out and dealt with it without me having to be involved.

I was walking to my car at 5:30 when the van pulled up.

It happened fast. I want to say I fought or ran but it was just — fast. A sliding door opening, hands, something pressed against the side of my neck that wasn't quite pain but made my legs stop working, and then I was inside and the door was closed and we were moving.

Priya was in the front seat.

She didn't look back.

· · ·

I don't know how long we drove. No windows in the back. My hands were zip tied and my phone was gone and I was doing that thing where your brain just keeps cycling through the same three thoughts because it can't hold anything more complicated than that. I'm in a van. They took me. I should have called Greer.

We stopped. They walked me inside somewhere. A building, industrial, the kind with high ceilings and concrete floors and the specific smell of a place that's been empty for a long time. They put me in a chair in the middle of a large room and zip tied my wrists to the armrests and left me there with two people standing at the door who didn't respond when I talked to them.

After about an hour, Vera walked in.

She looked exactly the same as she always had. Perfect posture. Hair pulled back. That smile that doesn't reach anything.

"I owe you an apology," she said. "The parking garage was clumsy. That wasn't how we wanted this to go."

"Let me go," I said.

"We will," she said. "After."

She pulled up a chair and sat across from me like we were having a meeting and explained it the same way you'd explain a business proposal. The Order had been waiting a long time for this. The vessel — me — had been outside their reach for over twenty years and they'd made their peace with rebuilding slowly. The pendant was ready. The site was ready. They had everything they needed except me, and now they had me, and they weren't asking me to do anything, not really. The ritual didn't require my cooperation. Just my presence.

"What happens to me after," I said.

She paused for just a fraction too long.

"You'll be free to go," she said.

I nodded like I believed her.

"The thing in the garage," I said. "The thing in my hallway. You saw those."

"Yes," she said.

"And you still want to open a door bigger than that."

"Those were accidents," she said. "Uncontrolled. What we're doing is controlled. We've been preparing for this for a very long time, Daniel."

"His name is Danny," said a voice from the door.

Greer walked in with three other people behind him and everything happened very fast after that.

· · ·

I'm not going to pretend it was some kind of heroic rescue because it wasn't. It was loud and chaotic and the two guys at the door went for Greer's people and someone knocked my chair over and I hit the concrete floor face first with my wrists still zip tied to the armrests which is exactly as bad as it sounds.

I lay there on my side with a split lip and watched shoes move around the room and tried to figure out which direction was up.

Then the shooting stopped and Vera was standing over me and she had the pendant in her hand.

I don't know where Greer was. I don't know what happened to his people. All I know is it was suddenly very quiet and Vera was crouching down and she put the pendant against my chest and I felt it — immediately, like a current, like putting your hand on something electrical — I felt it connect to something in me that has no name and no location and no business existing.

"You don't have to do anything," she said quietly. "You just have to feel it."

And around the room — I could hear them now, I hadn't noticed them come in — the rest of the Order. I don't know how many. The chanting started low, almost below hearing, and I knew that sound. I'd heard it my whole life. I'd been waking up from that sound since I was a kid.

The pendant got hot.

The heat spread through my chest and down my arms and the room started doing something wrong at the edges, the shadows moving against the light instead of with it, the air getting a texture it shouldn't have. And I could feel it on the other side. The thing Greer had called the Master. It was there the same way a storm is there before it arrives, the same way you know something is behind you without turning around. Patient. Vast. Completely aware of me in a way that nothing that size should be able to focus on something as small as a person in a chair on a concrete floor.

Vera was saying something but I couldn't hear it anymore over the ringing.

And I made a decision.

· · ·

The thing is — and I've been sitting here for three hours trying to figure out how to write this part — the door was already open. Greer told me that. It had been open since 2001, cracked, never closed properly. And I'd spent my whole life feeling the draft from it and pretending it was just anxiety. Pretending the nightmares were just nightmares. Pretending the thing that moved in the dark when I was scared was just adrenaline or acoustics or cheap ceramic mugs and weird angles.

I stopped pretending.

I didn't open the door wider. I want to be very clear about that because I think it matters. I didn't let the Master through. I didn't do what the Order wanted. What I did was — I pushed back. I put my hand on the door from my side and I shoved, and what came through instead wasn't what they were waiting for.

It was the things that had been bleeding through my whole life whenever I got scared enough.

All of them. All at once.

I can't describe what happened in that room after that. I'm not being dramatic, I genuinely can't. I closed my eyes the same way I close them in the dream and I kept them shut and I just — held on. The chanting broke apart. There was screaming, a lot of it, and sounds that weren't screaming and sounds that weren't anything I have a word for. The floor shook. The pendant burned against my chest so badly I have a mark there now, a red welt shaped like nothing I can identify.

And then it stopped.

Complete silence.

I opened my eyes.

· · ·

The room was empty.

Not damaged, not destroyed. Just — empty. The Order, Vera, all of them. Gone. No bodies. No blood. Just an empty concrete room and an overturned chair and me on the floor with my wrists still zip tied to the armrests and a burning mark on my chest.

Greer found me twenty minutes later. He came in with his people and cut the zip ties and sat on the floor next to me and didn't say anything for a while which was exactly the right call.

Eventually he asked if I was okay.

I said I didn't know.

He asked what I'd done.

I said I didn't know that either.

He looked around the empty room for a long time. Then he said, very quietly, "they're not dead are they."

I thought about the thing on the other side of the door. The patience of it. The size of it. The way it had been waiting since 2001 and had made absolutely no indication that waiting bothered it in any way.

"No," I said. "I don't think so."

· · ·

I'm writing this from a different city. Greer's people have a place, I won't say where, and for now it's where I am. Jess knows I'm okay, I called her, I told her it was a family emergency which felt both like a lie and strangely accurate.

The pendant is in a box on the table across the room. Greer wanted to take it and I said no. I'm not sure why. It just felt wrong to let it out of my sight, which I'm aware is not a totally healthy impulse but I'm extending myself a lot of grace right now.

The mark on my chest hasn't faded. Greer's people have looked at it and nobody will tell me what shape it is. They look at it and then they look at each other and then they change the subject and I've decided I don't want to know yet. One thing at a time.

The nightmares have stopped.

That's the thing that keeps me up at night more than any of the rest of it. Not gone, I don't think. Just — quiet. The same way the room was quiet after. The same way you can tell the difference between a sound that has ended and a sound that is being held.

Something on the other side of that door knows my name now. The real one, not Danny Wren. The one from before the farmhouse and the field and the family that found me and gave me a life I didn't know I was running out of time to enjoy.

D. Cassel.

Vessel confirmed.

I don't know what comes next. Greer has theories and his people have files going back forty years and none of it has made me feel better or safer or more prepared. But I'm still here. The Order is — wherever they are. And the door in me is still cracked open the same way it's always been, the same draft, the same dark on the other side.

The difference is now I know what's standing on the other side of it.

And I think it knows I know.

I'll update when I can. If I can.

Don't open your door to anyone you don't know.

— Danny