After class, the uneasy quiet of the campus felt worse than the clamor. I decided to look for Mira.
I found her where the stone starts to crumble, at the old chapel. It was more vine than building now, the ivy climbing like it was trying to pull the whole structure back into the ground. Most people didn't come here anymore. Too quiet. Too forgotten. But Mira always did like places that looked like they were trying to disappear, places where the world might just leave you alone.
She sat on the ledge of a broken window, knees pulled up, arms draped over them like she was holding herself together with sheer will.
I said her name.
She didn't look up. Not immediately.
But her shadow did. It shifted—half a breath before she moved, a ripple across the mossy stone. Like it heard me first, reacting to a frequency I couldn't perceive.
I stopped walking, a prickle of unease running up my spine.
Her voice cut through the stillness, cool and sharp, without her turning. "What do you want, Ash?"
"I want to talk."
"Too late," she dismissed, a brittle edge to the words.
"I didn't know what the board would do."
She laughed then—a sharp, bitter sound, entirely devoid of amusement. "Don't insult me."
"I didn't," I said, stepping closer. "Not on purpose."
That got her to look at me. Her eyes were glass now. Reflective. Like there was too much in them to stay contained, too much horror mirrored back.
"You brought it," she said, her voice a low thrum of accusation. "You set it in front of us like a loaded weapon. You watched us pick up the pieces. And now Leo's voice plays on a loop like some kind of punishment. So don't act surprised."
I stepped closer. A phantom wind seemed to shift around me, brushing my clothes, but never touched her. "It was already here," I insisted.
"Waiting. I didn't make it."
"No," she agreed, her voice flat. "But you woke it up. And you fed it."
She stood. The chapel wall behind her cracked slightly, a thin line spreading across the ancient stone, as if something shifted, groaned, beneath the very foundations. I pretended not to notice, my gaze fixed on her.
"I keep thinking about his voice," she said, her tone distant, haunted. "The way it slowed down.
Warped. Like it was being stretched apart just so we'd listen longer. A torment designed for me."
I said nothing. There was nothing that would make it better. No words of comfort for a grief twisted into something monstrous.
Her hand brushed the stone beside her. There was a patch of vibrant green moss there, but it shriveled and turned brown beneath her touch, crumbling to dust. Her fingers pulled back, leaving a dead stain on the vibrant green.
"The worst part," she said, her voice barely a whisper, "is I believed it was real. For a second, I thought… maybe." The raw vulnerability in that statement was more chilling than any of her anger.
I forced the words out, tasting ash. "I'm sorry."
Her eyes met mine, cold and empty. "I don't care if you are."
Then she stepped off the ledge, fluid as smoke, and moved toward me. Her shadow followed again—half a step ahead, a dark, living thing.
She leaned in close, her voice low, not angry, just inevitable, like a prophecy being delivered.
"The game doesn't pause, Ash. We do."
Something ancient resonated in her tone. Like she was quoting a truth older than language itself, a universal law.
Then she walked past me without another word, her footsteps silent on the crumbling path.
I stayed there, rooted to the spot, long after her shadow dissolved into the campus bustle. Because something in me believed her. And that chilling certainty was worse than anything the board had shown us so far.
***
University Library – Sublevel Archives
The library basement smelled like mildew and dust older than we were, a heavy, academic must. Most students didn't even know it existed. It wasn't listed on any map, and the door down was marked "Staff Only." But Theo's never cared about rules that aren't locked, especially when a puzzle presents itself.
I followed the faint sound of frantic paper shuffling and found him in the far corner, a small, intense island of chaos. He was buried in a ring of open books and loose pages. Notes scrawled across napkins, printouts, and—God—his arm. He'd written on his own skin in blue ink: Glyphs. Names. Arrows. A desperate attempt to map the unmappable.
He didn't look up when I walked in, muttering to himself.
"Theo," I said, my voice cutting through his singular focus.
He mumbled something that might have been "Hey," or might have been a curse under his breath. He barely registered my presence, still lost in the maze of his research.
"What is all this?" I asked, stepping over a stack of forgotten, leather-bound tomes.
He finally turned a page, eyes bloodshot but manic with a fierce, intellectual energy. "Trying to figure out what we're dealing with. Before it figures us out."
I stepped closer, drawn by the sheer volume of his obsession. Some of the books were in Latin, their titles indecipherable. One was handwritten, its parchment brittle, the ink faded with centuries. Most were cracked at the spine like they'd been opened too many times—or never before, now awakened by a forgotten, terrible need.
"I thought you didn't believe in curses," I said, gesturing to the arcane symbols scattered around him.
"I don't," he muttered, not looking up, his fingers tracing a complex diagram. "But Mira's phone didn't warp itself. And that countdown on your screen? Not a software glitch. This is… applied metaphysics. Or a very advanced psycho-spiritual attack, if you want the secular term." He rubbed the side of his face, leaving a blue smudge, then gestured vaguely to a precarious stack beside him.
"Look at this. Folk games. Binding rituals disguised as children's stories. Rules masked as riddles. Half of them end in blood, fire, or vanishing." His tone wasn't panicked. It was worse—calm. Controlled. Like he was forcing logic onto something that didn't want to be understood, a desperate attempt to find a pattern in pure chaos.
"And you think the board is one of these?" I asked, a fresh wave of unease washing over me.
"I think the board is something that pretends to follow rules," he corrected, finally meeting my gaze.
There was something raw in his eyes—like sleep hadn't touched him since Mira's turn, but also a burning spark of intellectual hunger. "And I think Mira was its opening move to force us to play."
I remembered her shadow moving before she did. The distortion in Leo's voice. The way her hand flinched away from the Spiral Flame. "She hasn't been the same since," I murmured.
"No," Theo said, shaking his head. "Because I think part of her's still playing. Or being played." He sifted through more papers, pulling out a Xeroxed newspaper clipping, yellowed with age. Some local urban legend, a group of friends who went missing in 1976. One line was circled in stark red ink:
["They were last seen gathered around a strange table, described by neighbors as glowing. Local authorities found no bodies, only a peculiar residue resembling fine dust."]
"I cross-referenced missing students, unexplained disappearances, local ghost stories. You know how many start with a game?" Theo flipped a page, his fingers stained blue from the ink. "Too many. This isn't new, Ash. We're just the latest players. And this thing... it learns."
"And what are you hoping to find?" I asked, the hope in my voice fragile, almost non-existent.
He leaned back, rubbing his tired eyes. "I want to know the rules, Ash. Because if we don't figure them out, someone else is going to roll. And the next offering might be one of us." The chilling certainty in his voice resonated with my own deepest fears.
****
Ash's Apartment, Later that Day –
I locked the door behind me, but it didn't feel like it mattered. The room was too still. Too quiet. Like the air itself was waiting for something, holding its breath with me.
The radiator clicked once and then gave up entirely. I left my coat on, the chill in the apartment mirroring the one in my gut. Sat on the edge of the bed. Didn't move for a long while. Just breathed, trying to steady my own racing heart against the oppressive silence.
Sound was wrong. Off by half a beat. When I set my bag down, it hit the floor a full second before I heard the muffled thump. A subtle, terrifying lag, as if reality itself was struggling to keep up.
The lights hummed louder than usual, a high-pitched whine that grated on my nerves. One of them flickered overhead, trying to match the distorted rhythm of the countdown.
Which was still going. Relentless.
06:41:33
06:41:32
I didn't open the app. Didn't tap anything. It was just there—etched into the corner of my lockscreen like it belonged, a constant, crimson reminder of my dwindling time.
I set the phone face-down on the desk. It didn't help. The silence kept folding in. The kind that isn't really quiet—just full of invisible sound, whispers just beyond hearing, a vast, unseen presence that pressed in from the walls.
I opened the window a crack. Cold air rolled in like breath. I waited for the outside world to remind me it's still real. A car horn. A dog barking. A shout. Anything.
But nothing came. Just the distant, unsettling hum of the world, like a poorly tuned instrument playing a mournful, drawn-out note.
I made coffee. Let it burn. Didn't drink it. The apartment smelled like scorched grounds and dust, a bitter, lingering scent that coated my tongue.
I turned on the TV. Static. Flip the channel—news anchor mid-sentence. Their mouth moved, but I didn't hear it for a full second. Like the signal was bouncing off something too far away, something alien.
[ "—incident occurred just after twelve. Authorities are investigating—"]
Cut to black. Then a sudden, jarring burst of a commercial for a local car dealership. Too bright. Too loud. I snapped it off. The sudden silence was almost worse.
The room darkened without the screen glow. The oppressive silence stretched, thin and brittle, ready to crack.
I closed the curtains, plunging the room into deeper shadow. Sat on the bed again. Pressed my hands flat to the mattress. I could still feel the grain of the board—even though it wasn't here. The raised wood. The precise grooves. The phantom weight of the piece in my hand.
I knew what the Spiral Flame felt like. Even if I never touched it. Its raw, burning heat seemed to linger in the air, a silent echo of Mira's pain, a warning.
I lay back. Stared at the ceiling.
The bulb above buzzed once, then died, plunging the room into absolute darkness.
Just the faint, rhythmic pulse of the countdown from my phone, a solitary crimson glow from the desk, a tiny beacon in the overwhelming dark.
I tried to sleep. I didn't.
***
I'm back in the common room.
But it's not the same.
The walls are too tall. The ceiling stretches into dark like it forgot where it ends, impossibly high. The fireplace crackles without heat, an illusion of warmth that offers no comfort. Shadows don't fall—they crawl, moving with a predatory intelligence, weaving themselves into menacing, shifting shapes that seemed to watch me.
There's no one else here. Just the lingering scent of fear and ozone, thick and cloying.
But the board is. Center of the room. Unplayed.
Untouched. Still humming. Not loud. Just… present.
Like a heartbeat you didn't notice until the room went quiet, and then it's all you hear, relentless.
I don't remember sitting down, but I'm on the couch now. The same seat I took the first night. Across from Mira. Before she rolled. Before we knew. Before she glitched.
I try to stand. My body doesn't move. Weighted down by an unseen force, pinned by an invisible dread that pressed against my chest.
The flames shift in the hearth—but it's not fire. It's light shaped like memory. Flickering wrong, showing distorted images: Leo's face, Mira's terrified eyes, the glint of Cal's blade. They dance, silent and horrifying, each one a fresh twist of the knife.
The board glows softly. Faint pulses beneath the wood. Like something beneath the surface is alive and breathing. Waiting. And judging. Its light pulsed in sync with my own frantic heartbeat.
Then I hear it.
Not a voice, not exactly. More like words forming directly inside my head, resonant and cold, echoing through the vast, empty space of the room and my mind.
"The next to break will not be the first."
The room seems to listen with me, every surface straining, leaning closer, suffocating. The board hums louder, not noise—but intention, a clear, malevolent will directed solely at me.
Something moves in the shadows, fluid and grotesque.
Not a person. Not quite. Just the idea of one. A silhouette stitched together from pieces that don't belong, a collage of my fears. A coat that might be Theo's. Hair that could be Mira's. A shape like Luna's smirk split wrong down the middle, a horrifying parody of recognition. It shifts, coils, seems to observe me with unseen eyes.
It doesn't speak. But I know it could. And if it did, it would tell me something horrific, something that would unravel my mind completely.
I try to call out. No sound leaves my mouth. Just vapor. Cold and slow, forming on my breath, visible in the dim, distorted light.
I look down.
There's a game piece in my hand. The Spiral Flame.
But it's ash now. Still glowing, a faint, angry red, its heat a brand against my palm. A symbol of destruction and lingering pain.
I let go. It doesn't fall. It floats, suspended for a moment like it's weighing me, judging my worth. Then it vanishes, absorbed into the oppressive darkness around me, leaving an aching void.
The board pulses again, a deeper thrum, a vibration that shakes the very ground beneath me.
Then everything collapses. The fire. The ceiling. The walls. The board itself.
The light in the room swallows itself, and the sound cuts out mid-breath, a final, deafening void.
I wake up gasping, thrashing, fighting against the twisted sheets around me like a shroud. The floor cold beneath my bare feet. The faint echo of that voice still ringing behind my eyes:
"The next to break…"
I check the clock. The countdown hasn't stopped. It glares at me, a constant, inescapable reminder etched onto the screen.
04:22:01
04:22:00
I stand, stretch, pace the small room, a desperate need for movement. Lights flicker above. Once. Then again. Then hold, their fragile glow seeming to mock the darkness of my mind. The silence of the night outside is unnerving. No sounds. No neighbors. No traffic. Just this… hush. Like the world's waiting to exhale, waiting for something to begin.
I splash cold water on my face. Look up.
My reflection looks back.
But a beat too late. A subtle, terrifying delay between my movement and its mirror. A chilling sign that the world is subtly out of joint, that I am subtly out of sync with it.
I close my eyes. Try to listen for nothing.
But I hear it anyway.
Breathing.
Not mine. Not close.
Just there. Like something in the walls. Or beneath the floorboards. Or maybe further—deeper. A vast, unseen presence that had settled in, a silent companion to my waking nightmare.
I hold still for a long time, straining against the silence, feeling the weight of that unseen listener.
And I understand something with a cold, absolute certainty that cuts through the fear and exhaustion.
Even when we're not sitting around the board…
Even when we're pretending to be normal…
Even when we sleep—
The game is still playing. And it's playing us.
We are all pieces on its board now, whether we choose to move or not.
---
END OF CHAPTER 3