We were on the edge of death with not even a trace of hope. The moment we failed to end the chase scene that had started right after Second Blood, we had essentially failed the storyline.

These were the thoughts moving through my mind as the cosmic entity scripted to kill me snatched me from the embrace of my friends and began impaling me with his fifth-dimensional tentacles of light once more.

The reason we had lost, as best I could tell, was that Carousel wanted a scene to show exactly how powerful these creatures were. And the game of it was, we had to find a way to end that scene without dying before we moved on to the rest of the finale.

We had failed to do that. I didn't have any sort of narrative support to help. Nothing to offer Carousel that was better than what it had in mind. We had followed the path laid for us for so long that we never quite managed to build an ending of our own.

The moment it became clear that we couldn't end that chase scene, the shapeless ones started attacking us. It would have been out of character for them to kill all of us. It violated all of the established lore and their personality, but that was what happened when you lost a story. The enemies stopped performing and started doing cleanup.

Once they became these cosmic horrors, our options were supremely limited.

This was what it was like to lose. How demoralizing. A quick and sloppy ending would be tacked on to the storyline we had worked so hard to beat. The bad guys just killed the good guys. That's the end.

What a lame final story.

Even as my mind was being blown, I could see the countdown.

Three seconds left until we were On-Screen, and the pain became absolute.

Two seconds left.

And then I heard something that seemed far away. It was a question.

"Is now the time?" someone asked me.

I forced myself to look. I only had a fraction of a moment to live.

"Is now the time for me to find out what happened to Janet?" Bobby asked. "It seems like now it's the time, right? I pulled my thread to its end. Would it help to do it now?" he asked more urgently.

Was he asking me what I thought he was asking me?

The timer on the red wallpaper was frozen with one second left. I could still feel the cosmic essence overloading my mind with knowledge beyond my understanding, but at that moment, I had bigger things to think about.

Was he asking me what I thought he was asking me?

Was he about to quit the game? How could he be asking me that? I didn't know, but Carousel sure thought it was an important question, seeing as it was delaying my death.

I heard footsteps in the distance. I heard breathing, and even with the pain and distraction caused by the Shapeless One, the fear overcame me. The Axe Murderer was on his way.

"Do I need to do it now?" Bobby asked.

How could he possibly know what would happen if he quit the game? How could that be what he was asking of me, to tell him it was okay? He must not know what happened. He must not. Or else, how could he ever ask that of me?

I turned my head toward him, and we locked eyes.

Fear overcame me. I was incapacitated. Completely unable to speak. Barely able to think. Afraid of everlasting death.

In that moment, a part of my brain that often guided my decisions kicked in. It was that pragmatic survival instinct, the one that had gotten me so far. It had saved me when I was a child, telling me not to go upstairs, when I had no way of knowing my parents were being killed up there at that moment.

It only took a second.

I nodded my head.

How could I ever forgive myself? I nodded my head. I told him yes. Immediately, regret coursed through me, but the nod was all he needed.

He wiped tears from his eyes and then looked up at the beings that were tearing the rest of us apart, and he didn't flinch.

"I quit the game at Carousel," he said.

And it was like the air was sucked out of the room. The Shapeless One who had once been Vogler dropped me to the ground. I didn't even notice that I was hovering ten feet in the air at the time. Luckily, I had enough Grit not to feel the fall.

The others had similar fates, dropping one at a time.

Then the shrieking came. It emanated all over the cradle, loud, but not just in the form of sound. It was a shriek that hit me in my chest, that I was feeling in my mind. It was deep and fearful.

I was certain of one thing.

These Shapeless Ones were terrified.

The giant behemoths that had been so threatening before, with their menagerie of kaiju body parts and horrific visages, began unfolding immediately. Those body parts disintegrated as fast as the Shapeless Ones could make them. They went from visible fifth-dimensional nonsense creatures to something bigger that my mind couldn't understand, so it forced my eyes away.

They were leaving the material plane altogether.

Stolen story; please report.

On the red wallpaper, the plot cycle started to go backward, moving from The End all the way to right after the beginning of the Finale. When Janet had quit the game, it rewound so that we could reshoot the scenes she had been in. But now it was rewinding for reasons I didn't understand at first.

"What is happening?" Anna screamed, covering her ears.

Oh, right. They didn't know about that yet.

"We need to run," I said. "We need to get out of here right now. Get up off the ground. We have to go."

The others were more than happy to follow my commands.

I could even feel the mixture of Ramona and Alasdair wrapped around my arm like some sort of death metal gauntlet, wriggling with fear. I didn't know who was afraid there, and I didn't want to think about it. Whoever it was was trying to speak through what was left of Alasdair's mouth.

"This way," I said, leading them the best I could. We were in a dead end, and I heard footsteps coming from the distance. We still had time, but I didn’t know how long.

"What is happening?" Antoine asked.

I looked him square in the face, and then the others, and I said, "The axe murderer is coming to kill Bobby because he just quit the game."

"The axe murderer?" Kimberly asked.

"Yeah," I said. "The one on all our posters. Now let's get a move on."

It felt great to finally be able to say it. In fact, I didn't get stressed out at all from it. It was natural, like it always should have been. It was always so confusing that I could never speak about it before, but now that they heard his breath, it was like I had permission.

We ran, and as we started to go, I noticed that Bobby wasn't following along. But of course he couldn't. He was the target. 𝙛𝓻𝒆𝓮𝒘𝙚𝙗𝒏𝙤𝙫𝓮𝒍.𝓬𝒐𝙢

"Come with us," I said. "Maybe if we put you inside that dimensional compactor, that will be enough."

There was no part of me that believed that, but I had to try something.

"Riley," he said, staring at me, surprisingly calm given his inevitable fate, "it has to be like this. Whatever happens to me, it had to happen. You have to understand," he said. "I had to find out what happened to my wife."

I was tempted to just run off, chalk him up as a lost cause, but I didn't.

"Your wife was cut in two," I said. "It happened a hundred yards away from me. I wish I could have told you, but..."

"But you couldn't," Bobby said. "Yeah. I don't blame you. I figured it had to be something like that, but no risk, no reward."

Reward. Did Bobby really think that there was going to be a reward at the end of all this?

At that moment, I looked at him, and I realized something had changed on the red wallpaper. His “Saving Janet: The Darkest Secret” throughline had ten pips. He had completed it.

That was the risk of pulling a thread. It didn't get you what you wanted. It just made that plot thread more important to the larger narrative. Bobby should have known that wasn't a good idea.

"I had to know," he said. "No matter how it ends, don't waste it."

"Don't waste it?" I said, suddenly outraged. "Are you pretending that you did this for us?"

"No," Bobby said. "I did it for me. For my wife. But that doesn't mean it did nothing for you."

The axe murderer was getting closer. He was still far away, but I couldn't let this conversation end like that.

"What have you done for us? You dragged us into this storyline, and now what? You found a creative way to end that chase scene? Well, you're right. I won't waste it. I'm going to make it look like we got away into the darkness, and Carousel will edit it together. Congratulations. You solved a problem that you caused. What a saint. What a hero."

Bobby began to laugh, which enraged me even more.

"You think this is funny? We could have been safe. We could have survived on the river together, but thanks to you, now we go home without a Wallflower, and all you get to learn is that your wife was dead, which is what you probably should have known already.”

What could he have thought was a benefit to us?

“Oh, and of course, if we survive, we'll probably get good levels. Thanks for that," I added.

At that moment, something occurred to me. The storyline we were in was far more powerful than my scouting trope had led me to believe. I thought maybe the Shapeless Ones had somehow tricked me with a trope of theirs, but that was something that even Carousel wouldn't do, telling us that this was a beatable storyline while making it unbeatable.

Unless, of course, Carousel knew what Bobby was up to.

"You did this," I said. "You pulled that thread until Carousel made it so this storyline could only be beaten if you were willing to sacrifice yourself like this. A big moment."

"Something like that, yeah. I pushed the story forward," Bobby said. "I did, when you weren't willing to. I did what was needed."

"Thank you for that," I said.

Then I turned to leave.

Bobby stayed still, apparently at peace. That made me even angrier.

I ran over and grabbed his arm.

"Why aren't you trying to survive?" I asked. "Is this a sacrifice for us to push some story forward, or are you just giving up?"

I looked him in the eye and saw almost no fear.

"It's like you said," he said. "It's my time to meet the axe murderer. Maybe I'll ask him about Janet."

I became enraged all over again because it felt like he wasn't taking this seriously.

"You are going to die," I said. "Don't you get that?"

He nodded.

"Death isn't the end here, or at least it never has been before," he said. "Aren't you the guy who dies and then wakes up in a theater forty miles away? I don't know if Janet is alive somewhere or if death really is final, but I do know that in stories, there is only one way to revive the dead. You have to go to the underworld yourself and bring them back. I'm not giving up. I’m not. Don't you understand that?"

Bobby thought of himself as a Greek hero.

"Well, as long as you thought it through," I said with as much venom as possible.

I couldn't stand the idea that he could look death in the face so peacefully without knowing what was going to happen. I had died more than my fair share, but I always knew there was a way back.

Something about the calmness on his face overwhelmed me.

As I stared at him, I saw him on the red wallpaper and was reminded that he had enemy tropes. And in fact, he had been cast as an enemy.

The axe murderer was getting closer. I could hear him. Luckily, he never hurried himself, although he seemed to be going extra slow just then.

I reached down to the loops on my belt where I kept the knives I had collected on this storyline and grabbed the long silver one.

If he was dead already, there would be nothing left to kill. He was just another enemy, right? It was the only way I could save him. We could deal with his betrayal later.

"I wouldn't do that if I were you," a voice called from down the way, near where I had left the other players when I had come back to confront Bobby.

I looked and saw Roxy standing there, a silhouette against a bright light that didn't seem to have a source.

"If you kill him, the axe murderer will kill all the other players," she said. "The only way to save everyone is for everyone to get postered, and even then, I'm not sure it will work. I've only seen it happen once, and that was outside of a storyline."

I put my knife back in my belt.

Roxy walked over to us, eyeing me intensely.

"I will say, I am impressed at how quickly you were willing to kill him to save his life. Unfortunately, I can't let you do that."

A glance at Roxy showed me something strange. Her last name was gone. It had been Hughes before because she was cast as Andrew Hughes's wife. It almost looked like she wasn't even a character anymore.

"Don't tell me," I said. "Are you helping him? Are you on his throughline?"

Paragons, after all, were one of the primary tools that Narrators could use to help control and manipulate their throughlines. If Narrators could, why not a player?

"As of ten minutes ago, when he recruited and told me to keep you all safe," she said. "Now it’s time to hurry. I might suggest you bring him along. If we run into the rule keeper and Bobby isn’t with us, he might just kill us all and then find Bobby after."

She turned back to the way she had come, and I ran to follow. Bobby, now with the knowledge that he couldn’t just wait for death without endangering us, came right behind.