The metal pipe slipped from my hands and hit the concrete with a hollow clang.
The man on the floor couldn’t answer. His legs had bent in directions legs were never meant to go, dragging himself forward on scraped elbows, leaving two wet streaks across the dark warehouse floor. One of his shoes had come off.
"I-I think... that’s enough..." My voice barely made it out of my throat.
His fingers stretched toward me, driven by nothing but instinct, like something chasing after what it already knew was gone.
"Please..." he gasped, his face caved in on one side, one eye swollen shut and leaking tears. "P-Please... she’s sick... I still need to pay for her medicine..."
Life had a dark, twisted sense of humor.
It kept throwing mirrors in front of me, making sure I saw every ugly piece of my own past in the people I was breaking. The only thing that ever changed was which side of the reflection I stood on.
I staggered back until my shoulders hit the cold brick wall. "T-there is no other way. There isn’t.."
A boot slammed into my shoulder, shoving me forward onto my knees.
"What are you standing around for?" The man behind me sounded bored. "Finish the fucking job."
"Knew we couldn’t trust him."
"Fucking amateur."
"He’s gonna get us all killed."
The low, bitter whispers spread through the dark warehouse. I had become a liability.
My hands shook so hard I could barely wrap my fingers back around the pipe. The grip was warm and wet. I tried not to think about why. "I can’t."
The warehouse went dead silent.
Then someone laughed, a sharp, dull sound, and the cold steel of a gun barrel pressed right into the back of my skull.
"You’re going to see things like this in this line of work. It isn’t always going to sit right with you, but that’s how it is. You’re new, so I’ll give you a pass this time. Just get it done."
I looked down at the man sobbing into the dirt. I was crying too.
...
I never believed in miracles. But they were real. Every gift came with a price, and this world always took.
People only ever saw the moment everything changed. The promotion, the victory, the escape that should’ve been impossible. To them, it was just luck, or maybe fate.
They never really thought about what they were leaving behind. The years they’d lose, the life they’d gotten used to, and all the little things they’d probably only notice were gone much later.
So if a miracle ever found its way to me, I wouldn’t waste time asking why I’d been chosen. I’d ask what it wanted
Because every miracle demands a sacrifice.
***
Years later, the apartment was clean. Almost painfully so.
It held a bed, a desk, a kitchen I barely used, and a shelf of tournament trophies, mostly fighting games and competitive chess. Neither made me famous, but together they did well
I made enough money to live well, especially after three years working a government job in Virginia. It wasn’t exactly the kind of work I could talk about, but the pay was good. Good enough that I could walk away without worrying about money.
I lay back on my bed, scrolling through my phone until I stumbled across a wiki for some obscure dark fantasy game I’d never even heard of.
The site was a mess. Half the pages were unfinished, entire locations had barely a sentence or two, and some of the monster descriptions were so badly translated I couldn’t tell what they were supposed to say.
Still, I kept reading.
The game was set centuries after something called the Realization, when the old world had basically fallen apart. Gates started appearing all over the place, cities went missing, and then the Horrors showed up.
The Horrors were probably the part that interested me most.
Some were just monsters. Others were smart enough to talk, think, and apparently pretend to be human. One entry even claimed that a Horror had learned how to use a smartphone.
I snorted at that.
I kept scrolling anyway.
There were bits about something called the SIGIL, some historical event called the Great Convergence, and a person known as the First Arbiter. Most of the pages were either missing information or written so vaguely that I gave up trying to piece everything together.
Then I found a page that wasn’t listed anywhere else.
THE FALSE WORLD
It had one paragraph.
"If you enter through a Gate, don’t assume you’ll come back to the same world."
That was it.
The rest of the page was random.
I stared at the screen for a few seconds, then scrolled back up and started reading from the beginning.
The game looked like it had been forgotten years ago.
For some reason, I couldn’t stop reading.
Five minutes turned into thirty.
Finally, I dropped the phone onto my chest and stared up at the blank ceiling.
"I’ll check it out tomorrow."
I got up, walked into the dark kitchen, and drank a glass of tap water over the sink.
"I don’t really feel much these days," I muttered to the empty room.
Returning to the bed, I sat on the edge and picked up the phone out of habit. Screen illuminated: 18 unread messages. Every single one from the same contact.
Little Gremlin
8:12 PM: Don’t embarrass me tomorrow.
8:13 PM: Actually, just show up. 8:14 PM: Seriously.
8:26 PM: ...You’re not working again, are you?
9:01 PM: If you miss it I’m telling everyone you’re bald.
9:03 PM: MISS TODAY AND I’M GONNA BE VERY, VERY MAD 😠💢
A short, quiet laugh escaped my chest before I could stop it.
After everything, losing our parents young, the brutal mountain of hospital bills, the debt collectors, and the blood on my hands, I’d somehow pulled us out of the dirt. She had a future now.
"She’s getting bolder," I murmured, a faint smile touching my face.
I set the phone on the nightstand, lay back down, and closed my eyes. I’d be there tomorrow. I promised myself I would.
Sleep came fast, dropping me into the dark.
Then something grabbed me.
It wasn’t a dream. It felt like cold, invisible fingers wrapping around the back of my brain, violently dragging my consciousness down into a place I hadn’t agreed to go.
...What?
Darkness swallowed everything.
Cold air hit my skin first. A woman stood before a high window, her back turned. She slowly looked over her shoulder, her face calm, her eyes terrifyingly hollow.
"Are you sure this is the only way?" She already knew the answer. "You said we’d finally won."
Someone opened my mouth, but no sound came out. The world shattered like glass.
"You promised!" A younger voice screamed. A boy smiled through the blood staining his lips. "You promised this would be the last time!"
Snow replaced the darkness. Stone beneath my feet. A child’s hand clung desperately to my sleeve. The boy looked up, his eyes bloodshot, completely dry.
"Don’t go... Please."
The snow melted into ash. A soldier stood at rigid attention, his salute unwavering.
"Good luck, Commander."
A warm room. A woman smiling faintly as she tilted her head. "You look tired. You always look tired."
Fire consumed an entire city beneath a black sky. A quiet voice drifted through the flames: "How many? How many more?"
An old man laughed in the burning ruins. Not because it was funny, but because there was nothing else left to do. "We won..." His voice trembled. "We actually won."
A heavy, familiar hand rested gently on my shoulder. Warm. Comforting. A voice I couldn’t place, but desperately missed.
"You’ve done enough."
The void swallowed it all.
Something vital was missing from my chest, a core piece of who I was, stripped away. I couldn’t remember what it was. Only that losing it was the worst mistake I’d ever made.
Then, a single voice cut through the empty black. Unlike the rest, it didn’t belong to a memory. It spoke directly into my skull.
Quiet. Cold. Absolute.
"Wake up, stolen shell."