The Demon that would claim my soul at the end of all days could not, in its immortal, festering existence, have expected the wish I would lay before its rotting altar. Yet still it accepted—with a perverse expression that twisted across features carved from shadow and bone, what I knew without doubt was a smile splitting like a wound across the darkness. And so did I smile back at that ancient hunger, feeling my teeth catch the lamplight like tombstone markers in a graveyard wind.
When I awakened from the nightmare, gasping in the suffocating darkness of the dormitory I shared with the others, I reached desperately for the fragments of what dream had clawed through my sleeping mind. But it scattered like ash through my fingers, leaving only the taste of brimstone and the echo of something unspeakably vast laughing in the hollow spaces between my ribs. The orphanage walls pressed close around me, their paint peeling like dead skin, their shadows pooling thick as old blood in every corner where hope had long since withered and died.
Later, when we gathered for the D&D campaign that had somehow birthed that terrible, forgotten dream, I looked across the scarred wooden table at my friends—no, my family, the only family the cruel world had left us—and felt the weight of ending settle on my shoulders like a burial shroud. The fluorescent light above us flickered with the persistence of a dying heartbeat, casting our faces in intermittent pools of sickly illumination that made us look already half-departed, already ghosts haunting our own brief existence.
"Would you join me in this adventure for real?" I asked, my voice barely above a whisper, knowing somehow that the words carried more weight than any of us could understand. "Forever unable to break free as comrades."
Their smiles bloomed in the artificial twilight—eleven faces lit by a joy so pure it hurt to witness, knowing how soon it would be extinguished. "Yes!" they shouted in unison, their voices echoing off the water-stained walls of our makeshift sanctuary, this cramped common room that had become our entire universe.
We were, in the words of those beyond these crumbling walls, losers. Unwanted children deposited like refuse in this backwater town where even the streetlights seemed to flicker with shame. The orphanage loomed around us like a mausoleum for the living—its corridors endless and cold, its rooms filled with the ghosts of all the children who had passed through before us, leaving behind nothing but the lingering smell of institutional soap and unspoken despair. We had been raised on borrowed books with broken spines, on stories that promised adventures we would never live, loves we would never find, homes we would never know.
But here, in this circle of mismatched chairs and threadbare hope, we had forged something precious from our collective abandonment. We had made ourselves a family from the scraps the world had discarded, binding our wounds with shared laughter and whispered dreams. And this—this would be our last game before the inevitable scattering that awaited us like a pack of wolves in the winter darkness.
I could already see it, playing out like scenes from a funeral: letters that would grow shorter and arrive later, voices that would fade from memory until we couldn't quite recall the way Sarah laughed when she rolled a critical hit, or how Marcus would gesture wildly when describing his barbarian's rage. Soon enough, I had no doubt, winter's cruel embrace would claim me—perhaps pneumonia in some city alley, perhaps the simple, grinding poverty that killed more dreams than any dragon ever could. The others would scatter like dandelion seeds in a hurricane, each blown toward their own particular darkness, their own small deaths in anonymous places.
The melancholy settled over me like a familiar coat, worn thin at the elbows but still providing some meager protection against the cold. As the clock on the wall—its face cracked like a broken mirror—ticked inexorably toward 11:58, I felt something deep within my chest begin to tear, some fundamental seam in the fabric of my being starting to unravel.
The fluorescent light above us began to strobe faster, casting our shadows in frantic, dancing shapes against the walls. The air grew thick, almost viscous, tasting of copper and ozone and something else—something ancient and hungry that had been waiting in the spaces between seconds for this moment.
At exactly 11:58, I felt the tearing become complete, and I let out a scream—not the simple cry of pain or fear that children make, but something far deeper and more primal. It was the sound described across the yellowed pages of ancient texts, referenced in Revelations when speaking of souls cast into the sulfurous pits of eternal damnation. It was the sound of something being violently separated from everything it had ever known or loved.
And my family—my beautiful, doomed family—screamed with me. Eleven voices joined mine in a chorus of anguish that seemed to shake the very foundations of the orphanage, causing the windows to rattle in their frames and the walls to groan like living things in pain. None of us were children playing a game anymore; we were souls being torn from moorings we had never realized we possessed.
In that moment of absolute agony, the dream returned to me with crystalline clarity. I remembered the Demon's burning eyes, its promise whispered in a voice like grinding bones: Take them with you. Take your family where no one can ever separate you again. Take them to where stories become flesh and imagination becomes reality—but know that the price is everything you are, everything you were, everything you might have been.
But before I could fully grasp the implications, before I could understand what bargain I had struck in my sleeping desperation, it ended. The screaming stopped as abruptly as it had begun, leaving only the soft hum of the dying fluorescent light and the distant sound of our own labored breathing.
Yet something had changed. Something fundamental had shifted in the architecture of existence itself.
I felt it first—the sensation of being stretched impossibly thin, like taffy pulled to its breaking point. The vast majority of my soul was seized by the Demon's hungry claws, and I could sense the others suffering the same violation—their essence being claimed as payment for the bargain I had struck in darkness. Only the thinnest gossamer threads of what I had been remained—not tethered to my failing body, but cast loose into the void, thrown like seeds across impossible gulfs of space and dimension, through layers of reality that had no names in any human language. My body simply ceased, collapsing in my chair around that scarred table, eyes vacant as a broken window in an abandoned house. Around me, eleven other shells did the same.
I traveled—oh, how that fragile remnant of myself traveled—through corridors of shadow and starlight, past the dying echoes of worlds that had never learned to hope, through the spaces between thoughts where ancient hungers waited with infinite patience. This gossamer fragment fell through dimensions like Alice through a rabbit hole lined with broken mirrors, each reflection showing me what I had been, what I was becoming, what had been devoured in the Demon's feast.
And finally, after an eternity that lasted perhaps three heartbeats, our flickering soul-fragments settled—exhausted, diminished, barely a whisper of what we had once been—into new vessels of something unknown, something that hummed with alien substance we could not name or comprehend, in a world that tasted of electricity and possibility and something darker still.
There I slept, along with eleven other displaced souls, my memories of orphanage walls and fluorescent lights burning bright and unforgiving in this alien form. I slept, and dreamed, but could never escape the faces I had worn in that other life, the names I had answered to, the particular quality of loneliness that had bound us together like chains of ice.
But even in sleep, even in transformation, even in this new world that promised adventures we had only dared imagine, something deep within us remembered.
I slept, and the shadows gathered around me like old friends come to witness the Demon's debt fully settled. I slept, and somewhere in the space between dreams and waking, I began to understand that escape was never truly possible—that I had simply traded one form of imprisonment for another, one kind of orphanage for a more beautiful, more terrible cage.
The adventure was beginning, just as I had wished.
Just as the Demon had promised.
Just as our souls had always known it must.