As I dropped into the crack in the wall, I immediately found myself sliding down a steep incline. The rock was slick and wet. My feet scrambled against the stone, seeking to stop my fall or at least slow my descent, but years of erosion had rendered the surface smooth.

I reached out my hands as I fell, clawing for even the slightest ledge to grab hold of. All I managed to do was catch a fingernail against a small bit of rock, which pulled my nail backward until it snapped off.

That should have hurt, but by the time I realized what had happened, the pain was drowned out by something else.

As soon as my feet hit the water, my body became overcome with an intense sensation of fear. I don’t mean to say I was simply afraid in the way one would normally be in that situation. I felt a palpable reaction all over my body. If you have a fear of heights, you’ll understand how your body shuts down when exposed to a steep fall. It was like that but a hundred times more intense.

My stomach quivered. My legs turned to jelly; my arms felt like they were no longer under my control. The water was only knee-high, yet I was fighting for every breath. I couldn’t stand; I couldn’t swim.

I felt it on my skin like sunshine bearing down on me. Except it wasn’t a bright light. It was the darkness itself that pressed against my skin. The force was coming from something in the darkness to my right. My body refused to even breathe in that direction.

But what was it?

I could feel a power radiating from something in the darkness. I couldn’t even look in that direction with my eyes closed the feeling was so intense. Luckily, being able to feel the direction it was coming from meant that I could move away from it.

I struggled. I couldn’t walk, not at first. I was stumble-falling in the direction away from the pain, from the fear.

But why was I running?

A dark clarity rose from inside me. Thoughts were being put in my head.

Why was I splashing through the water so pathetically? Why not just stay and be consumed?

I had nothing to live for. My family—Mom, Dad, Grandma, Grandpa—they were gone. My death would mean nothing. What was I fighting against?

The others needed to escape to get back to their families, but I didn’t. I could give up. Just stop. What joy. I could just stop fighting. I was unimportant in the grand scheme. Heck, I was unimportant even in the lesser scheme. I was of no help. I was useless.

These thoughts rushed through my mind. I was powerless against them. I felt a crushing weight on my chest. It was like I would never be able to move on from this moment. I kept waiting for each thought to be my last.

And yet, my feet kept moving.

Why?

Stripped of my human desire to live, what was left that kept me moving away from the inevitable?

I struggled forward, tears in my eyes. I breathed only when I remembered to. Why was I even trying?

With every inch forward I trudged through the water, my mind cleared a little more. The pain, the fear, they began to ease. They didn’t disappear, not by a long shot. They became distant. They wormed their way back down where they had come from.

As I made it further from the area of influence of the darkness, I realized that I heard voices in the distance, back the way I had come from.

“I don’t know what to do,” Anna screamed. “Tell me what to do!”

“Anna!” I screamed. She didn’t answer me. I don’t think she even heard me.

“I can’t keep going,” she said, “I can’t keep going.”

“Follow my voice!” I screamed. She didn’t show any sign of hearing me. She kept muttering to herself.

I heard weeping further in the distance. It was Camden. The sound was interspersed with splashing as he struggled to move in my direction.

“Sean?” Dina yelled. “Where are you? Sean?’

Dina was talking to her dead son in the distance.

Even with my eyes closed, I could see my close allies on the red wallpaper. All of our statuses were lighting up like a Christmas tree. Every single status was flickering on and off. Not just the obvious ones like Unscathed or Incapacitated. Mutilated was flickering. So were Infected, Hobbled, Fight Scene, Off-Screen, and the rest. Even our Dead status flickered.

Being near the thing in the darkness was completely short-circuiting the very magic that made Carousel run.

We were all in a Chase Scene, but with what? An invisible force? An emotion?

“This way,” I screamed. “Come this way!”

I was still afraid to open my eyes. Whatever lurked in the darkness still held such power over me, even from a great distance.

“Why won’t he look at me?” Nicholas sobbed. “Why won’t he look at me?”

He was still back where we had been dumped out by the sound of it.

I heard splashing, someone fighting the water.

Did I dare attempt to go back and save them?

No. I limply rested on my knees. Tears rolled down my face. I couldn’t go back. I couldn’t.

“Sean, don’t run away from me like that. You can’t run away from Mommy.”

There was a pause like she was waiting for a response. I swear, in the distance, I thought I could hear the chains of a swing set.

“I know baby, but what if I can’t find you?” she asked. It sounded like she was reliving a memory or something like it. Her voice was soft, motherly. Nothing like the Dina I knew.

For a few moments, she was silent. I didn’t know what was happening in her mind, but it sounded better than what was happening in real life.

I sat and listened to the others struggle. I couldn’t bear to go back and find them. The radiating fear and pain were something I could never take willingly, as ashamed as I am to admit. Even from a distance, my Incapacitated status flared just by thinking about walking back in that direction.

“Sean! Don’t go, baby.” Dina screamed through tears. “Don’t go.”

Then there was silence. Whatever daydream she was caught in was over.

“I’ll find you,” she said quietly.

Her status on the red wallpaper was cleared. No Incapacitation, no injuries, nothing. Her Encouragement from Beyond trope appeared to be enough to snap her out of the mental panic that had befallen us.

She had stood up. I could hear her walking through the water.

“Hello,” she screamed.

“Over here,” I yelled back, forcing myself to remember to breathe.

“I’m here,” Anna said weakly. She had made it as far away as I was. She must have been twenty feet to my left.

“I’m okay,” Kimberly said softly. She was near Anna. I hadn’t heard her speak since we got down there.

“Come on,” Dina said. She was near Camden. He had gone from weeping to whimpering. For as close as he was to the force emanating in the distance, I couldn’t blame him.

I could hear Dina lifting him up.

“We’re not going to die here,” she said.

She was guiding him toward me in the darkness.

“Riley?” she said as she got close.

“Right here,” I said.

She brought Camden close. He had started breathing normally. I grabbed onto him when he got near and helped lower him down beside me.

“My brothers and sisters are going to come here looking for me,” he said to me as soon as he realized it was me. “There’s nothing I can do. They’re going to get stuck here too. What do we do?”

I didn’t know what to say.

Dina waded back in the direction she had come and retrieved Nicholas, who still repeated “Why won’t he look at me” over and over even for a few minutes after he had gotten to safety.

As Dina went back again for Corey, our long-hair hippie NPC companion, I started looking around the cavern.

It took real bravery to even be able to open my eyes. I know that makes no sense, but it felt like life or death.

I looked in the direction I had been crawling. There was darkness. Behind me, the terrifying force emanated toward us.

I heard splashing. Dina had found Corey the NPC. I heard him take a deep breath as she brought him above water. That was a close one.

“I was almost there,” he said in a strange, uneven voice.

Anna and I had barely made it on our own. Dina had managed to help the others. That was good news, though by helping us she lost some Outsider buffs for the finale. Oh well.

“How was this supposed to be a simple fun storyline?” I asked. Chris had described it that way. Fun. He used the word fun.

No one answered me.

There is no way that this was the same storyline he was talking about. Our group almost drowned in two feet of water because we lost the will to live. Something was different. Something was wrong.

Storylines could change from one iteration to the next. In the Delta Epsilon Delta storyline, the killer changed every time you played it. What had happened to make this storyline like this?

We were Off-Screen again.

Judging by the sounds of sloshing water in the distance, the cave system was huge. Hundreds and hundreds of feet in every direction.

“What is an Unknowable Host?” Anna asked.

I didn’t know what she was talking about at first, but then I realized that I had worked so hard not to look in the direction of the terrible force that I had not looked it up on the red wallpaper.

Unknowable Host (Deceased)

Plot Armor: 150

Tropes

Evil Never Dies

It only changes form.

Not Yours to Control

Characters who encounter this being’s power will misunderstand it in their attempts to harness it, to disastrous ends.

Minion Maker

This creature is able to summon or create low-level monsters to do its bidding.

Dark Aura

This being has an aura with wide-ranging affects, from fear to some combination of status ailments. Bypasses stats on first exposure.