THE NECRONOMIKIDS

art and story by Justine Norton-Kertson

Max huddled over the folding card table, tongue poking out in concentration as he scribbled in his spiral notebook. A single bare bulb swung overhead, casting jittery shadows across the wood-paneled basement walls. The scent of Tang and musty board games filled the air.

The others sat around waiting—Sam idly tossed dice into an old popcorn bucket, Jenny flipped through her Grimworld character sheet, Tyler slouched so far back in his chair he was practically horizontal. Little Pete, Max’s younger brother, sat cross-legged on the shag carpet, chewing the cap of his marker and staring at Max like he was watching a bomb technician.

“Okay, okay,” Max said as he finished the last jagged line with a triumphant flick of his wrist. “New content drop.”

Sam groaned dramatically. “Dude, you promised no more homebrew. Tyler’s still mad about the Skeleton Bees.”

“They swarmed for like, six straight sessions,” Tyler muttered. “My paladin has PTSD now.”

“This is different,” Max said, holding up a battered, black-bound book. The cover was peeling and the title—The Necronomicon: Annotated Student Edition—was half-obscured by stickers for a long-defunct library.

Jenny raised an eyebrow. “Where’d you get that?”

“School library was chucking old stuff. Found it in the discard bin.”

Tyler squinted. “Isn’t that, like... Satanic?”

“Nah, it’s fake. It’s from a horror story. Lovecraft made it up.”

He flipped it open to a dog-eared page. The text inside was a mess of looping symbols, strange diagrams, and half-translated footnotes. Someone, years ago, had scrawled their own interpretations in the margins—in glitter pen, no less.

Max beamed. “I figured we could use it to make new monsters. Real nightmare fuel.”

The others leaned in. Handwritten in Max’s spidery block letters were creature names like The Bleeder Prince, The Hollow-Maw, and The Whistling Father, each accompanied by twisted sigils that didn’t quite sit right on the page.

Sam grinned. “Dude, these are metal as hell.”

Tyler laughed. “Bet you’re too chicken to make ‘em official.”

Max’s cheeks flushed. “Am not.”

“Prove it,” Tyler said, drumming his fingers on the table. “Make ‘em real monsters.”

Max smirked, unsheathing his favorite red pen—the one he always used for writing boss stats—and began copying the first sigil onto the Grimworld monster sheets. The pen moved like it knew the way without him. The moment the final curve closed into a circle, the basement shivered.

Just a little. A tiny, almost unnoticeable quake—barely enough to rattle the dice in the bucket, to swing the bulb a fraction more wildly.

They froze.

“Earthquake?” Little Pete squeaked.

“Old house,” Sam said, waving it off. “Probably just the furnace kicking on.”

Max stared at the page. The ink seemed... wetter than it should be. He shook it off and grinned. “Alright,” he said, voice cracking with excitement. “Roll for initiative.”

The expedition began, like all good ones did, with too many snacks and not enough plans. Max sketched the dungeon map with quick, excited strokes, his red pen slashing across gridded paper. The dungeon entrance was at the edge of the Murkwood—his renamed version of the empty field two streets over. A cave system led to a shrine, where the “new monsters”—the ones from the Necronomicon—waited.

“Okay,” Max said, pushing his Coke bottle glasses up his nose. “You see the first guardian. It's—uh—The Hollow-Maw. Think giant leech, but, like, smarter.”

Sam immediately threw a pencil at him. “You just stole that from Dungeons of Doom II!”

“Nuh-uh! Hollow-Maw’s different. It, like, absorbs your secrets.”

Tyler, bouncing a baseball between his palms, grinned. “We beat it by lying, right?”

Jenny rolled her eyes. “Technically... if it feeds on truth, that tracks.”

Little Pete scribbled notes furiously in his composition book, even though he was only a level 1 Bard and was statistically useless. They dove into the session—laughing, arguing, throwing Cheetos at each other during bad rolls. Max described the Hollow-Maw with gleeful horror: rows of whispering teeth, a tongue that tasted memories, slithering walls that pulsed with half-remembered fears.

“Sam’s character is grabbed by the tongue!” Max crowed.

Sam waved him off. “I punch it in the uvula.”

Tyler nearly choked laughing. Jenny rolled for an arcane blast. Little Pete—sweet, earnest Pete—stood up solemnly and announced he was casting a banishment spell he’d invented called “Seal of the True Name.”

Max blinked. “Uh... okay. Roll with advantage.”

The dice clattered. Natural 20. Everyone cheered. Max made a big production out of describing the creature's banishment—the sigil from Pete’s sheet glowing, sucking the Hollow-Maw back into nothingness. The whole basement buzzed with energy. It felt like winning. Like creation.

The next morning, Max biked to the field behind the old Mohawk Valley water tower, the real-world stand-in for the Murkwood. As he peddled up, he skidded to a stop. Where the grass should’ve been there was a hole. Ten feet across. Dark, gaping, like the earth had been punched in the face.

Max dropped his bike and crept to the edge. It wasn’t just a sinkhole—it was jagged, wrong, as if something had scratched its way out.

A low hum buzzed in the pit. Almost a purr.

He staggered back.

#

Over the next few days, more weirdness bloomed across the neighborhood. The Petersons’ golden retriever, Scout, went missing. No tracks. No blood. Just his collar, twisted into the shape of a spiral Max recognized from one of the new monster sigils.

The McKinley family's prized rosebush withered overnight. They didn’t just wither though. The leaves curled into brittle shapes that, when Jenny squinted, looked disturbingly like teeth. 

And at the old high school bus stop, someone—or something—had spray-painted a rune across the back of the bench. A perfect match for the “Banishing Mark” Max had drawn in red pen. Nobody admitted to doing it. The town chalked it up to teenage pranksters. Only Max and the others knew better.

They met again in the basement two nights later, a little more serious this time. Max laid out the map again. The original dungeons had been small. Safe. But now the paper felt... larger. Like it pulled your eyes deeper the longer you stared at it. Tyler fiddled with his baseball. Sam cracked his knuckles like he was prepping for a fight. 

Jenny crossed her arms. “Maybe we stop. Just in case.”

Max hesitated. The excitement still gnawed at him. This was theirs—they made this. Their own world, their own monsters. It felt amazing. “It’s just a game,” Max said, forcing a grin.

Pete nodded quickly. “Yeah! And we’re winning!”

Sam whooped. “Let’s nuke more freaky leech-things!”

Max stared at the map. He didn’t mention that when he looked at it now, he could see something new in the margins—lines he didn’t remember drawing, curling into a sigil that pulsed when he blinked.

Roll for initiative.

***

They noticed it the third time Max ran a session. Or rather—Jenny noticed it.

“Wait,” she said, pointing to the battle map, her finger hovering over a crudely drawn river that hadn’t been there two sessions ago. “That’s not where the drainage ditch is.”

Max looked up, confused. “Sure it is. It’s the Murkwater Creek. You guys crossed it last week.”

“In the game,” Jenny said, slow and sharp. “But it’s there now. For real.”

The others shifted awkwardly.

Tyler threw a Dorito into his mouth. “It’s just a ditch, dude.”

“No,” Jenny insisted. “The town’s not supposed to have a creek there. It’s new. And the old McKinley field—it’s totally sunk in, like some kind of sinkhole.”

Little Pete perked up. “Like the Hollow-Maw!”

The table went quiet.

Max wiped his palms against his jeans. The air felt thicker in the basement somehow, and the bulb overhead swung without a breeze.

“So what?” Max said after a beat, trying for casual. “Coincidence. Or we’re just... being creative.”

Jenny gave him a hard look.

“You said that Necronomicon was fake," she said. “You said it was just some made-up book.”

“It is.”

“Then why is your monster manual writing reality?”

No one answered.

Sam laughed nervously and shook the dice like maracas. “Maybe we’re just wizards now. I call dibs on being Gandalf.”

But Jenny didn’t laugh. Neither did Max. Because deep down, he’d noticed something, too. His campaign notes—once full of scribbled ideas, bad puns, and misspelled monster names—had changed. When he flipped back through his spiral notebook, the ink wasn’t his shaky print anymore. It was smooth, elegant. Ancient-looking. The words shifted when he wasn’t looking, crinkling into shapes he couldn’t fully read.

The map pulsed faintly at the edges.

And when he added new places—new dangers—they stuck.

A few nights later, they met again for an “emergency” session. Not to fight monsters. Not this time. This time it was to talk about what was happening.

Jenny crossed her legs and proposed the unthinkable: stop playing. “We pack it all up,” she said. “Burn the map, rip up the monster sheets, trash the Necronomicon. We end it.”

Tyler laughed, tossing a baseball into the air. “You’re kidding, right? We’re like gods now. We could fix stuff. Or make it cooler. Imagine—no math homework. No school bullies.”

Max hesitated. The power buzzed inside him like a third rail. Dangerous. Addictive. “But we haven’t done anything bad,” Max said. “We can control it.”

Jenny snorted. “Control? Tyler wanted to summon Cthulhu to eat Principal Hart.”

Tyler grinned. “Still kinda want to.”

Jenny slammed her hand down on the table hard enough to rattle the dice. “We don’t know what we’re messing with, you guys! It’s not just the field and the creek. My mom’s garden? Dead overnight. The town’s stoplight at Main and Church? Blinks out Morse code now. Saying HELP.”

Little Pete piped up. “Maybe... maybe if we draw nice things?”

They all turned to look at him. He shrank under the attention but held up his notebook. It was smaller, a cheap little spiral bound, the pages crinkled and smudged with marker.

“I made a monster too,” Pete said proudly. “For backup.”

Max reached out and gently slid the notebook over. One glance, and he felt his stomach turn cold. The creature Pete had drawn didn’t look like a dragon or a goblin or anything recognizable. It was a tall, spindly thing—human-shaped but wrong. Limbs too long. A blank face, save for a weeping wound where the mouth should have been. The caption, scrawled in Pete’s careful printing, read:

The Bleeder Prince.

“Pete,” Max said, voice carefully neutral. “Where did you get this idea?”

Pete shrugged. “It was in the book. I just copied it. I thought maybe... it could protect us.”

Jenny snatched the notebook from Max and skimmed it, her face tightening. “This isn't protection,” she said. “This is an invitation.”

Max swallowed hard. The sigil Pete had drawn beside the Bleeder Prince pulsed faintly, even on the paper, like it was breathing.

Tyler, of course, couldn’t resist. The next day, he grabbed Max after school, sneakers slapping against the cracked blacktop of the parking lot. “Come on,” he said, grinning. “One little test.”

Max hesitated. “What kind of test?”

Tyler tilted his head toward the row of kids loitering by the bike racks—the school’s reigning bullies, led by Jared Costa, whose main hobbies included shoving, spitting, and stealing lunch money. “Scare ‘em,” Tyler said. “Draw something mean. Just a little monster. Nothing deadly. Just enough to freak them out.”

Max bit the inside of his cheek. He could see it so clearly—Jared and his cronies running in terror, getting a taste of what it felt like to be powerless.

One drawing. One little scare.

He nodded.

Later that night, Max sat at the gaming table, sketching carefully on a sheet torn from his notebook. He didn’t even have to think about it. The creature unfurled under his pen like it had been waiting: long-fingered, faceless, mouth a dark slit that dripped ink.

He whispered the name without meaning to, “Manhole Man.”

At the last stroke of the sigil, the house shivered. The bulb overhead flickered. Max squeezed his eyes shut.

The next morning, the school buzzed with rumors. Jared and two of his friends had vanished—during school hours. Last seen hanging around the bike racks. In their place, at the far edge of the parking lot, a manhole cover sat ajar, steam curling up like breath. If you walked by it—and you listened very closely—you could hear whispering from the dark below.

***

The manhole whispered for days. Kids dared each other to walk past it after dark. Most didn’t get closer than ten feet. Those who did reported hearing their names called from below, or promises made in voices that sounded almost—but not quite—like their friends.

Jared and his crew were gone. Just… erased. No missing posters. No announcements at school. No patrol cars combing the streets. It was as if the town itself had forgotten they existed.

Max tried to forget too. But at night, lying awake in his room, he could still hear that faint, wet whisper, carried on the breeze. He didn’t tell the others about it. Didn’t tell them how every time he passed the manhole, he thought he saw something in the darkness—something with long fingers and no face.

#

They kept playing. Because what else could they do? They told themselves it was fine, that it wasn’t their fault. That if they were careful, if they stuck to harmless maps—mazes, treasure rooms, puzzles—they could control it.

Max crafted a new dungeon: The Tower of Endings.
No monsters, no blood. Just traps and riddles.

Jenny still looked at him like she was watching a car skid toward a cliff.

Tyler was all in. He wanted more power. Bigger maps. Weirder dungeons.

Little Pete just wanted to play. His notebook never left his side now, dog-eared and frayed, the drawing of the Bleeder Prince always tucked in the back.

The night it happened, they were halfway through the Tower campaign. Tyler’s barbarian was solving a riddle about doors and keys when Pete spoke up, almost too quietly to hear, “I summon the Bleeder Prince.”

The dice froze mid-roll. Max’s pen slipped from his hand. He looked up slowly. “What did you say?” he asked.

Pete blinked innocently. “I thought—he could help.”

Jenny slammed her palms on the table. “No! Pete, we can’t! We don’t even know what that thing is!”

Pete looked down, ashamed, but the air had already changed. The bulb above them dimmed to a weak, red glow. The basement walls seemed to breathe in and out, faintly. And from somewhere deep beneath them—beneath the town—a slow, wet sound echoed up.

Drip.

Drip.

Drip.

After that it started small. Max’s mom forgot who he was for a full five minutes, blinking at him like he was a stranger in her kitchen. The Wilsons’ baby was found sitting alone in the middle of Main Street at dawn, unharmed but muttering about "the prince with red hands." All the clocks on their block began running backward.

The graffiti returned—more sigils, more runes—but now they weren’t static. They shifted when you looked away, crawling like insects across the brick walls. At school, kids began to hum tuneless songs under their breath without realizing it. Songs Max could swear matched the meter of the spells they used in Grimworld. At night, the trees bent toward the houses, their branches scratching faint, deliberate patterns into the roofs.

The town leaned, somehow. The angles of streets and sidewalks twisted. Things disappeared—pets, bicycles, whole mailboxes—sucked into blank spots where nothing but mist remained.

And always, always, the whispering manhole. Louder now. Hungrier.

Max called a meeting. Back in the basement. Back at the table. He spread the Necronomicon on the center and slammed his hand down on it. “This ends now.”

Jenny nodded, fierce relief in her eyes.

Tyler just crossed his arms. “Maybe it’s already too late.”

Pete fidgeted with the corner of his notebook.

Max looked at them—their faces pale in the flickering light, the childhood still clinging to their frames even as something older and darker seeped into their eyes. “We end the game,” he said. “We end everything.”

Jenny nodded. “We burn it. The map. The notes. The book. All of it.”

Pete’s lip trembled. "But my monster—"

"Your monster isn't real," Max said, hating himself a little for saying it so harshly. "It never was."

Pete flinched like he’d been slapped.

Max turned to the others. "No more sessions. No more drawings. No more... doors."

They agreed. Sort of.

Sam and Jenny packed up their sheets. Tyler lingered over his dice, fingers tracing the numbers. Pete clutched his notebook to his chest.

That night, Max dreamt of the Bleeder Prince. He stood on the empty streets of their town, the sky split open above him like torn fabric, leaking stars like blood. In the center of Main Street stood the Bleeder Prince—tall, faceless, skin shimmering like wet paper in the moonlight.

It raised one hand and pointed. Not at Max. At the town. At everyone.

Max woke gasping. The house was silent. Except for one sound:

Drip.

Drip.

Drip.

He pulled back his curtains. Across the street, the Petersons’ house sagged inward at the roofline, like it was breathing out its last breath. The mailbox was gone. The stop sign bent into the shape of a spiral. The mist pooled thick in the gutters. He swore he saw a figure standing just beyond the streetlight—a shape too thin, too still, with hands that dripped something dark onto the concrete.

Max slammed the curtains shut.

In the morning, Little Pete was gone. Not “missing.” Gone. His bed was empty. His name scraped off the family photos. His drawer in the dresser was half-open and filled with dust.

No one else remembered him. Not their parents. Not Sam. Not Jenny. Not Tyler. Only Max. And somewhere deep inside, he knew: the Bleeder Prince had not been summoned.

He had been invited.

And Pete had been the first offering.

***

The first sign that the Bleeder Prince had truly arrived was the sky. Not the storm clouds themselves—they could’ve been explained away—but the color.

Red. Not sunset red, not a painterly dusk. Blood red. It dripped down in lazy, viscous drops that splattered the asphalt like dark paint. It hissed when it hit the ground, leaving rust-colored stains that no rain could wash away.

Max watched it from the cracked sidewalk outside the comic shop. The closed comic shop—the one that used to buzz with life every Saturday, now silent behind its metal grate.

The air tasted metallic. 

Everywhere he looked, things were wrong. The swing sets at the park swayed in perfect unison, creaking to a rhythm Max couldn't hear. The local grocery marquee, which used to advertise sales on ground beef and Coca-Cola, now simply said: THE BLEEDER COMES.

The town wasn’t dying. 

It was being rewritten.

The adults were worse. They moved like puppets—normal one second, then stiff, faces slack and empty. Some repeated the same phrase over and over, like stuck cassette tapes:

“Isn’t it a beautiful day?”
“Isn’t it a beautiful day?”
“Isn’t it a beautiful day?”

Max watched Mrs. Preston, the librarian, stand motionless at the crosswalk for twenty full minutes, mumbling to herself, tears streaking her face but no real expression behind it.

The world was caught between two states: reality and something... else.

And the cracks were widening.

In the basement, Jenny slammed the Necronomicon onto the table so hard the dust jumped. They were down to three players now. Sam hadn't shown up. His parents had moved out overnight, house emptied like it had been abandoned for years. Only Jenny and Tyler remained, sitting around the table with pale faces and trembling hands.

Max felt their eyes on him—waiting, accusing, desperate.

Jenny flipped open the Necronomicon to a page they’d never bothered to read before. A back page, tucked behind the fake copyright notice, scrawled in a different hand than the rest.

She read aloud:

“Each sigil is a lock. Each map a gate. Every session a sacrifice. Play, and the world is the gameboard.”

Tyler's mouth twisted into a grimace. “What the hell does that mean?”

Jenny slammed the book shut. “It means we’ve been opening gates every time we played. Every monster, every dungeon. Every map.”

Max swallowed hard. He knew what came next.

Jenny leaned across the table, voice low and razor-sharp. “What aren’t you telling us, Max?”

The guilt pressed down so hard he almost couldn’t breathe. He pulled his spiral notebook out of his backpack and laid it on the table. The others recoiled slightly, as if just seeing it could hurt them.

Max flipped to the last page. The ink was darker than it should’ve been. Almost alive. The lines writhed if you stared too long. Across the page was a map of a city-wide dungeon. The streets mapped into labyrinthine corridors. The houses marked as “chambers.” The mall at the center—a boss room.

Tiny sigils lined the edges, more complex than anything they’d drawn before. Some Max didn’t even remember writing.

At the top, in neat block letters: SESSION ZERO: THE WORLD RAID.

Jenny sucked in a sharp breath. “You planned this,” she whispered.

Max nodded, feeling sick. “Before Pete... before the manhole,” he said. “Before the Bleeder Prince. I thought it would be epic. Like... one huge campaign. The whole town as our dungeon. I was gonna DM it at Halloween. Make it the biggest thing we ever did.”

Tyler pushed away from the table so hard his chair clattered.

“Are you insane?!” he shouted. “You drew the final gate! You finished the damn ritual!”

“I didn’t know,” Max said, voice breaking. “I swear. I thought it was just a game.”

Jenny’s knuckles turned white as she gripped the edge of the table.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “You finished it. The Bleeder’s here because of you.”

Max didn’t argue. There was no point. He already knew it was true.

They sat in silence for a long time. The red rain smeared the basement windows. Somewhere outside, a police siren started—and abruptly cut off.

Tyler spoke first. “So... now what do we do?”

Jenny opened the Necronomicon again, flipping back to the scrawled notes. “There’s two options,” she said. “One: We play the final session. Complete the raid. Open the gates. Finish the world’s biggest campaign—and let whatever’s on the other side in.”

Tyler’s face paled. “Two?”

Jenny’s mouth twisted. “We refuse to play. Break the loop. But if the gates don’t finish opening, they’ll collapse. Hard. Like... dropping a skyscraper on top of a house.”

Max closed his eyes. Neither choice was good. Play and doom the world. Refuse and destroy it. The trap was perfect. Built from the thing they all loved most. Their own imaginations. Their own need to create. Their own dreams of being heroes.

Each sigil is a lock. 

Each map a gate. 

Every session a sacrifice.

Max opened his eyes. The table in front of him blurred and refocused. In the corner of the basement, the shadow of a figure loomed—tall, spindly, faceless. Watching. Waiting.

The Bleeder Prince didn’t need to kill them. He needed them to finish the story. And they were so, so good at telling stories.

***

The dice sat untouched at the center of the table. For the first time in their lives, no one wanted to roll.

Max wiped his palms against his jeans. His fingers shook. His mouth tasted like copper. “We have to play,” he said, voice hollow. “But we don't have to play by the rules.”

Jenny narrowed her eyes. “Meaning?”

Max leaned forward. The shadow of the Bleeder Prince writhed in the corner of his vision, just outside the flickering reach of the basement light. “The Bleeder needs a completed story,” Max said. “A session that ends. A dungeon conquered. Heroes crowned.”

Tyler fidgeted with his dice bag, squeezing it like a stress ball. “So what,” he muttered, “we throw the game?”

Max shook his head. “No. We rewrite it.”

Jenny tilted her head. “You mean... sabotage our own campaign?”

“Exactly. We don’t fight monsters. We don’t win treasure. We don’t play the way it expects us to. We burn every room down behind us. We break our characters, tear up our inventories, forget the quest halfway through.”

Tyler blinked. “But... we always try to win.”

Max looked him dead in the eyes. “Not this time.”

They pulled their old character sheets from the game folder. Max’s wizard, Vexor the Silent, who had crafted impossible spells. Jenny’s rogue, Shade, who never missed a backstab. Tyler’s barbarian, Krag Skullhammer, who once punched a dragon into unconsciousness. Each one a carefully constructed hero. Each one, now, a liability.

One by one, they took Sharpies and began blacking out their stats. Spells deleted. Skill trees collapsed. Inventories scribbled into oblivion.

Vexor: -5 Intelligence. No spells.

Shade: Missing one eye. Permanent -6 Dexterity.

Krag Skullhammer: Cowardly. Cannot rage.

Jenny stared at her ruined sheet. “It’s like killing ourselves,” she whispered.

Max nodded. “That’s the point.”

They set the map on the table—the sprawling replica of their town, now half-eaten by the creeping sigils.

Max described the first room—the town square, now a pit of writhing teeth under a bleeding sky. Their characters staggered into view, broken, confused, alone.

“Shade trips,” Jenny said immediately. “She falls into the pit.”

“Vexor... forgets why he's there,” Max added, rolling a die without looking at the result. “He wanders into traffic.”

“Krag... drops his sword and cries for his mom,” Tyler said, choking on an ugly laugh.

Max narrated the disaster as solemnly as a funeral procession.

“The Bleeder watches,” he said. “Amused. Curious. Growing impatient.”

Room after room, they sabotaged the story. In the mall food court, they raided Orange Julius instead of fighting the “Mallrats of Madness.” At the cursed cemetery, they dug up the wrong graves, wasting time, letting the fog thicken around them. In the high school gymnasium, instead of solving the “Labyrinth of Lockers,” they collapsed the walls on themselves and crawled through the wreckage.

Every move was stupid, reckless, wrong. And every wrong move frayed the world around them a little more. The Bleeder Prince's shape blurred and twitched at the edges. The basement lights flickered faster. The sigils on the walls cracked and bled.

But they couldn’t escape the final room. The water tower. The dungeon’s boss chamber. Max’s X on the map. It loomed ahead, both in the game and in the real world. 

They knew—even if they somehow survived this—it would never truly be over. The Bleeder would leave its mark. They would leave a part of themselves behind. 

And someone, someday, would find the book again. Maybe not here. Maybe not for years. But evil, once written, lives.

Max rolled the final encounter. “The Bleeder Prince emerges from the top of the tower,” he said. “He is everything you fear and everything you forgot. He drips the memories you loved most.” He paused. “And he asks you a question.”

Tyler swallowed hard. “What question?”

Max lifted his gaze to them.

“He asks: What will you sacrifice?”

The table went silent. The red rain pounded harder against the windows, the storm outside merging with the storm inside.

Jenny stared at her crumpled character sheet. “Shade,” she said, voice steady, “offers her past. Every happy memory. Every smile. Every birthday.”

Tyler wiped his nose on his sleeve. “Krag offers... his courage. He’ll never fight again. Not even in dreams.”

Max felt tears prick at his eyes. “And Vexor…” he croaked, “...gives up the magic. Forever.”

In the game, the Bleeder Prince accepted their offerings. One by one, it devoured what made them heroes. Their stats. Their gear. Their stories.

The map curled inward, blackening along the edges. The Necronomicon smoldered, pages crisping to ash without flame. And the Bleeder Prince screamed. Not in rage. Not in triumph. In frustration. nBecause the final story was broken. Incomplete. It had no victorious ending to consume. Only loss. Only emptiness.

The basement buckled around them. The table cracked down the center. The lightbulb popped, showering them with sparks. Sigils peeled from the walls, curling into themselves like burning leaves. The Bleeder Prince shrieked one last time—and was dragged backward, out of the world, out of the town, out of their lives.

When the dust settled, the basement was dark. Cold. Empty. The map was gone. The Necronomicon was a pile of gray dust. Only the faint smell of iron and ink lingered.

Max, Jenny, and Tyler staggered upstairs into a town that was almost normal again. The streets no longer twisted. The houses stood straight. The red rain had stopped. The sun—golden, fragile—peered through the thinning clouds.

But things were not the same.

They would never be the same.

Not for them.

Tyler was the first to leave. He barely said goodbye—just clutched his ruined character sheet to his chest and walked off down the street, kicking stones like he used to before all this began.

Jenny lingered. She looked at Max, her face hollowed out in ways he didn’t have words for. “You feel it too, right?” she said.

Max nodded. He could still hear the echo of dice rolling in his head. Still see Pete’s smile as he held up his monster drawing. Still feel the weight of what they had broken to survive.

Jenny didn’t say goodbye. She just squeezed his shoulder once, hard, and walked into the sunrise. Max stood alone on the cracked driveway. Above him, the faint outline of the water tower loomed—empty now, but still there. Waiting. Watching.

He dug into his pocket and pulled out his old D20. The one Pete had given him. The numbers were worn almost smooth from years of rolls. He turned it over in his palm. And for a heartbeat, he swore he saw a sigil reflected in the faint scratches.

***

A few weeks later, they sat back down at the table together one last time. No dice towers. No character minis. No snacks or music. Just Max, Jenny, and Tyler—ashen-faced, hollow-eyed, surrounded by the wreckage of the town's memories and their own ruined childhood.

The map was gone.

Sam was still gone. And little Pete…

The Necronomicon was ash.

Sure, things had mostly gone back to normal. But somehow, the game still wasn’t over. It clung to them, stitched into their bones, thrumming under their skin with every heartbeat. They didn’t need sheets or dice anymore. The world was the board now. And the final session had already begun.

Max picked up his old D20, the one so worn the numbers had faded to white ghosts. He closed his hand around it. Jenny and Tyler nodded. No words needed. They knew what to do. Somehow, they needed to finish breaking it.

Jenny went first. In the story, Shade—the rogue she had built, loved, and lived through—stepped forward in the Tower of Endings.

Max, as DM, spoke in a cracked whisper, “The Bleeder Prince offers you a boon. Knowledge. Power. Immortality.”

Jenny shook her head. “Shade rejects the boon,” she said. “She cuts the thread that binds her to memory.”

Max flinched. Because he felt it. A thread inside him snapping.

Jenny closed her eyes. When she opened them again, tears streaked her cheeks. “I can’t remember my mom’s face,” she whispered.

The Bleeder Prince recoiled, shuddering. 

The first gate sealed.

Tyler went next. Krag Skullhammer—the unbreakable barbarian—approached the final door, where victory waited.

Max’s voice, almost robotic now, “The Bleeder offers glory. Endless conquest. Infinite victories.”

Tyler laughed—a ragged, broken sound. “Krag lays down his hammer,” Tyler said. “He walks away. He refuses every triumph. Forever.”

The map beneath them trembled. The second gate sealed with a low, groaning sound, like stone grinding against stone.

Tyler clutched his arms around himself. “I don’t feel excited,” he said numbly. “About anything. Not even this.”

His dice bag fell from the table. No one picked it up. 

Max knew what he had to do. He was the DM. The architect. The one who had started this story. And he was the final lock. He stood.  Clutching the D20 so hard it cut into his palm.

“Vexor the Silent,” he rasped, “abandons the game. He forgets the party. He forgets the quest.”

He forgets...

He forgets...

The world cracked. The third gate sealed. The Bleeder Prince screamed—a howl of pure hunger and rage, folding in on itself, shrinking, collapsing into the places between dreams and forgotten things.

The tower shuddered.

The town trembled.

The game ended.

When Max opened his eyes, Jenny was gone. Tyler too. No footprints. No shadows. No names left behind. Only a faint, almost imperceptible sense of loss. Like a missing tooth you keep tonguing, not because it hurts, but because you want to remember what was there.

Max staggered outside. The streets were silent. Normal. Ordinary. nKids played hopscotch on the sidewalk. Sprinklers ticked lazily over neatly mowed lawns. The sky was a clean, washed-out blue.

And Max? Max walked among them like a ghost. People smiled at him. Teachers waved. But no one knew his name. Because he didn’t know it either. Not really. Not anymore.

He sat alone on the curb outside the empty lot where the water tower used to stand. He held the D20 in his hand, turning it over and over, feeling the faint grooves where numbers had once been. The die was completely blank now. Just a smooth, weightless memory.

Sometimes, late at night, Max dreamed of a boy with messy hair and a spiral notebook full of monsters. A boy no one else remembered. A boy named Little Pete. In those dreams, Pete still smiled. Still believed. Still rolled dice with fierce little fists and cheered for every critical hit.

And in those dreams, Max could almost hear it—a faint whisper beneath the wind, soft as moth wings. Roll for initiative.

But Max never rolled again. He just sat and listened. And remembered. Because that was all he had left.

***

The neighborhood looked the same. Just like it used to. Perfect, even. Lawns trimmed within an inch of their lives. Driveways scrubbed clean. Kids laughing on scooters, bright and hollow like wind-up toys. Max pedaled slowly down Elm Street, the late summer sun baking the pavement, sweat trickling down the back of his neck.

He passed the old park—the one where they used to set up miniatures on the picnic tables. The swings creaked in the breeze, empty. He passed the arcade—the windows dark, the neon "OPEN" sign flickering weakly even though the doors were locked.

He passed the comic shop—the new sign read TAX SERVICES in bold block letters. The owners didn’t even remember what used to be there. Maybe no one did.

Except Max. And even he... wasn't sure anymore.

He stopped in front of the library. It had been closed for months—budget cuts, the grown-ups said, though Max knew better. The boarded windows were covered in faded "FOR LEASE" posters. All but one. 

At the far-left window, tucked behind the dirty glass, something waited. An old, battered book. Its black cover flaking at the edges. Faint sigils drawn into the binding.

The Necronomicon.

Still there.

Still smiling.

Waiting for someone new.

Max didn’t get off his bike. He just sat there, gripping the handlebars until his knuckles turned white. A faint breeze stirred the pages behind the glass.

He pulled a battered keychain from his pocket—a small, plastic D20, the numbers worn smooth by years of games. He turned it over and over in his hand, frowning. It felt important. Vital. But no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t remember why. A name danced at the edges of his mind—something small, something precious—but it slipped through his fingers like smoke.

Max tucked the keychain back into his pocket. Kicked off the curb. And rode away without looking back. In dreams, sometimes, he rolls a 1—and hears something laughing in the dark.