Archive of Our Own

“Another challenger,” rustles a voice rough and rasping as wind in the pines. “It has been... ages.” It sounds hungry—hungry not like a wolf circling its prey, or a bear lazily enjoying a cornered creature. This is the hunger reserved for a deer so starved of flora it has, out of pure, concentrated desperation, placed its foreleg between its jaws and rubbed its dull, flat molars forward and back in hopes of drawing out some form of sustenance as from the green wood of a sapling. This is, perhaps, more terrifying than any carnivore. One can never tell what desperate prey will do next.

Your body aches as though you’ve been asleep for decades; your chin has fallen to your chest as you must have fallen asleep in this old wooden chair. The other person’s breathing is harsh, pounding in your ears with every pant. Your mouth tastes like graveyard dirt—something richer and more rotten than you’re familiar with.

Blearily, you open your eyes and find a man sitting across from you. That is—the word ‘man’ comes to mind at the outline of a cloaked mound with two eyes peering from a vaguely human figure, but he’s not so much a man as a lump of lichen and fungi with a pair of shoulders and a crooked neck. The only light is a kerosene lantern behind him, and something flickering in the corner of your eye; his face is shadowed, the details vague, but his eyes glow dully like moons. They’re oversized, swirling like a settling snowglobe instead of holding a proper pupil.

Your hands have been carefully positioned along the chair arms and your coat removed; now you’re just in your t-shirt and cargo shorts, wondering if maybe you shouldn’t have stayed out in the forest at night. You’re just an engineer, after all. What do you know about these woods?

Yes, Impulse—what do you know?

The man is watching you expectantly. “Didja forget how ta play?”

Frowning, you actually look at the table before you. It’s covered in scratches and dents, biting deep into the thick wood; scrawled across the table are mossy outlines. It seems someone carved into the table, etching large rectangles, and over time the lines filled with grime that moss could feed on. Flourish there it does, creating odd patterns within the grain. To your left is a bronze scale and a thick tome with mushrooms emerging between the pages. On your right are two piles of cards: a shorter pile and a slightly taller pile. They look otherwise identical.

The man across the table seems to drop his act of superiority, shoulders rounding out as he leans forward and heaves an annoyed sigh. “Here,” he says, roughly drawing three cards from your smaller deck and one from the larger deck, then jamming all four in your face. His fingers are short and caked with grime, lichen stuck to the folds of his knuckles and moss sprouting hairily from beneath his cracked nails. “Play yer squirrel.”

You swipe the cards and wrinkle your nose at him before actually looking at what he’s drawn for you. A squirrel, a stoat, and two wolves. You don’t like the way the stoat looks. It’s got some shape of arrogance to it, its snout haughtily lifted as it stares out at you through half-lidded, lazy eyes. Warily glancing between the man and your deck, you toss the squirrel into the center of the table.

The man looks at you like you’re crazy, and you feel the blood drain from your face.

With a finger of treebark, he points to the mossy outlines along the center of the table; slowly you reach out and obediently drag the squirrel into one of the outlines.

With a satisfied nod, he leans back in his chair—well, presumably he’s sitting down. No way he’s actually that short, right? “Now yer stoat.”

You reach to put it down, but as though it’s magnetically repelled, you can’t seem to place it on the table.

“No, no, you gotta pay to play that card. See the amount there in the upper right? That’s how much it costs.”

There’s a red icon painted on the top corner of the stoat card, like a drop of blood. “I have to bleed?” you ask, voice gruff with disuse.

“Bwha—no, no! You gotta kill somethin’! Gracious, no, not yer blood. Judas priest, get a load’a this guy. The cards, stupid, kill the squirrel to play the stoat.” He crosses his arms and hunches down, glaring and muttering something under his breath about 'last time.'

How do you kill the squirrel? You’re no hunter, you don’t have a gun. There’s nothing around that looks like a game piece except the scale, and that doesn’t really seem like it’d kill something. Then again, maybe this is just a normal card game. One that you’re going to play with no memory of how you arrived at this cabin in the woods or woke up perfectly situated in a chair you’ve never seen before, with a strange man who seems more forest than human and who seems to assume you’d know how to play his odd game.

Experimentally, you simply pick up the squirrel and start a discard pile for yourself, then set the stoat in its place.

Leaning forward suddenly to peer at the board, the strange man nods enthusiastically. “There ya go! Now those other cards in yer hand are too expensive. You don’t have two things to sacrifice. See that?” He taps the table in front of your stoat, which glares up at you as if full of judgment.

“My turn’s over?” you guess, to his delight.

“Ding this bell here to end your turn,” he says, reaching up to place something of tarnished brass on the table by the scale. It trembles and quivers with almost breath of its own, wracked with tremors as if it, like you, doesn’t know what this place is or why it’s here. The top is lightened, illuminated with evidence of repeated use.

Still trying to play along while you figure out what’s happening, you tap the bell, which peals out with a clear, satisfying tang.

Sweeping the backs of his knuckles across the rough wood grain, the man nods, conceding. “I haven’t placed any cards to oppose your stoat. It’s dealt me one damage, I’ll add it to the scale.” Upon the tray nearest him, the forest man drops a small item. At first it sounds like a pebble, a sharp corner rapping tinnily onto the bronze of the plate before it settles. But it’s a deliberate shape, like it was purposely crafted into something or like, perhaps, it’s always been a shape you should recognize. Even when you squint, you’re not quite sure. The shadows that swallow your opponent also lap hungrily at his side of the table, the lamp behind him maintaining a half-blinding light if you look for too long.

Then he presses his side of the scale to the surface of the table with a gnarled finger. “You win if you tip the scale all the way to my side, like this. But first,” he interrupts, face darkening, “my turn.” He places the card of a slavering coyote on the table to attack the scowling stoat. “Yer stoat’s in the way’a my coyote. Its health is now 2 less, ‘n when it reaches zero, it’ll be gone. Now it’s your turn again. Draw a card from one of the piles.” He leans back from the table, watching acutely as your hand hovers above the two stacks.

You already have two cards that require blood to play, and only one card on the table. It makes the most sense to draw from the taller pile, a squirrel. There are few options here, which is to say, of course, that there are only two, and the right choice seems obvious. You are, after all, a man who takes the safe route.

As you move to place the squirrel, you see your own hand reaching in duplicate, triplicate, ten and a hundred times over to place the squirrel. The sight gives you pause—an odd sense of deja vu brings you peace as you settle the squirrel back in your hand and wait out the turn. There is a second option, and if you’ve done this before in another lifetime, or another universe, or even in a dream, whatever deja vu is, you think just this once you’d like to deviate. Just... an experiment, you’ll call it, a test to see what happens.

The man across the table gives you an odd look. Until now, he’s considered you with a dead-eyed expression, his face only going through the motions; but his brow furrows and his eyes squint until they’re simply two shifting orange slits. He examines you before settling back in his chair, creaking as though he himself is made of wood while he releases a rush of breath. The air rushes harmlessly around the cabin as he withdraws the corpse of his coyote card and holds his hands up. “I’m not gonna play no more cards this game. This’s just to teach ya how the game goes. But don’t go thinking I’ll let ya win every time, y’got that?”

So his turn passes, and as you draw another squirrel, the sense of deja vu does not return. You are present, here and now, and you have not made this choice before. The other option would have taken only an extra turn, and you could have dealt more damage, but this—patience, for once—is most efficient when the cards are down. Not what you would normally do—no—but you’ve chosen this path and you won’t turn from it. You place both squirrels and play a wolf; your opponent places four more of the small objects on the scale.

“Weird,” he mutters, almost to himself. “You’re weird, y’know? Y’re not supposed to play it like that. Feels like the game’s over too soon or somefin’. Awright. Lemme...” He whips out a piece of... something, maybe fabric or pelt, and dramatically flicks it onto the table as you quickly drag your remaining cards from beneath. “Lemme tell you a story. You were a traveller trapped in a concrete jungle.” Placing a small, handcarved basswood figurine on the fabric, he taps its head where the tip has been sliced off and flattened—it appears unsanded and rough, certainly unfinished and unstained, yet its sides are worn from use. It rests on an icon, apparently to represent your progress in this strange game, and beyond that, a map continues, branching through what appears to be a sharp forest of tall, rectangular trees before concluding at a large, ominous symbol. The map itself flutters in the cabin’s living stillness, corners lifting with a breeze you can’t feel. “Two options before you led down two very different roads. Knowing you only had enough resources for one animal, you’d have to turn the other away.”

This must be some kind of test, you think. This must determine the rest of the game. One of five cards in your deck—it’ll impact 20% of your gameplay, going forward. Or maybe 10%, if the strange man’s play accounts for half, and your cards total to the other half. There has to be a clear choice that will give your deck the advantage; there has to be a way to determine which card you must choose.

The first card he flips over is an odd lizard, and at the bottom of the card, between its attack and damage, is a stamped symbol. The ink has bled, like the stamp was dipped in liquid ink and pressed with force enough to splatter it across the entire empty space of the card. A skink, the card reads; the symbol appears to be a severed, wriggling tail, writhing in a pool of its own blood. Even the skink appears to be watching its own severed tail with apprehension; can you curse a creature to lose its tail for you?

The next card is—honestly, it’s kind of cute. There has to be some kind of twist to it, because compared to everything else you’ve seen so far, this card appears wildly out of place. A small wolf cub grins up at you from the card, tongue lolled happily out the side of its mouth. A sundial is the symbol on this card, stamped with slightly more care, but the ink still must have run too thin. The lines are uneven and blotted. Where’s the grotesquery? Where’s the blood?

With a pitying look toward the skink, you draw the wolf cub toward yourself without looking at your opponent, and add it to your deck.

Returning the skink card to a large deck off to the side of the table, the man moves your figurine forward another space. “Yer pack felt real empty on your back, there. You stopped to refill it. Choose one.” Across the table, he lays out three items. The first two are glass bottles, necks too thin to properly accommodate the cards claustrophobically shoved within; the third is a rusty pair of pliers with handles that were once a vibrant yellow but have been used, or maybe out of use, long enough to wear grit and grime into every minor scratch and crevice until the yellow is almost gray. Faintly you recall that yellow is your favourite colour, and before you even know what you’re doing you’ve reached out your hand and wrapped your clumsy fingers around the grip.

The man smiles at you, and it seems almost affectionate between the lichen devouring his lips and the yellowed birch-grain of his teeth.

In your palm, the pliers are comfortable, familiar, like something you’ve spent more of your life with than without. Maybe they’re yours. Maybe he dragged them from your pockets with his stiff fingers and split nails while you were still asleep. You shudder to even think—

He fills the gap with a pair of scissors, which, you intuit, you could use to cut something. Likely a card, given that you’re playing a card game. It seems a useful tool, so with a nary glance at the bottled cards, you take the scissors. They’re quite strange—textured almost as though someone took a pair of metal scissors and ran them through a computer model and back: the handles are misshapen in patterns, much the same way bismuth forms with cubic layers. Still, they shine in the grungy overhead light, and you find them oddly beautiful after your time bathing in the beauty of chilled server rooms clunking away at complicated calculations.

The gamemaster replaces the slot finally with an hourglass. You have yet to express patience during this whole ordeal; you’d rather end the game sooner, play along with his foolish hobby only as long as you must before you can leave without causing a ruckus. Instead, you consider the trapped cards. One is a boulder, nestled in dirt and covered in thick, sticky lichen. What use could you possibly have for a boulder? The other is a lithe squirrel, which could be beneficial. More useful than a boulder, at least. You could play the stoat with this, you think as you wrap your fingers thick around the cold glass of the bottleneck.

“Tha’s all you can carry,” the man says. “Mebbe you should work out more, get a bigger pack. Weak.” He scoffs as he sets your figurine aside to roll up the map, revealing the card slots beneath. Reaching out a palm, he gestures for you to pass him your deck, knuckles dark like spruce wood as they beckon. He shuffles in silence, and you feel in the moment like a deer staring down an arrow. What does he intend to do with you? Is he going to kill you if you lose? Why can’t you bring yourself to look away from your inevitable demise?

He’s so strange. This must be a dream—for he cannot be reality—and yet you are endlessly intrigued by this place, this man, this game. It’s a puzzle, and you could never resist one of those, could you, Impulse? Not the crossword in the newspaper, not a calculation gone astray or machine malfunctioning, not a wire sparking out of its place in your creation. It is curiosity that pins you to your seat with such convincing gravitas. This game, it seems so simple... yet the imagery alone is enough to hold your attention. Why does each card evoke some emotion deep within you, like fear or perhaps—

What is that? What else do you feel?

“Who are you?” you ask in a rush. Anything to avoid that feeling.

The man across from you stutters, as though the question should be obvious. “I’m the gamemaster, duh! I master the game, you play it. Fool. Okay, you always start with three cards and a squirrel. Draw yer hand and pass me that stoat.” He sets your deck back in place, and, like he predicted, you draw the stoat as your second card, between the wolf cub and your river snapper. In exchange, he passes you another card—that is, another stoat.

The stoat is changed—different now from the last time you saw it. Its eyes aren’t so dead, and its muzzle is lined in a snarl on one side, almost like a sneer. Most shocking is a splash of colour on its forehead: a forelock of vibrant green, like a dollop of moss on the stoat’s forehead. You hold it in front of the other cards in your hand, peering at the changes.

“S’rude to stare,” a rich, accented voice asserts from... somewhere, startling you from your study.

When you look around, you don’t see anyone beside you and the gamemaster.

“What did you say?” you ask him, but he shrugs.

“I didn’ say nuffin’. Get yer ears checked or somethin’, Judas priest. Yer goin’ crazy and the game’s barely getting started.”

“Yeah, ‘cause it’s me, genius. Great, we got a stupid player this time, that’s blummin’ awesome.”

You stare at the stoat, incredulous. The card can’t possibly be talking to you. This isn’t a dream, and playing cards can’t talk. You even flip the card over and check the back for some kind of speaker.

“Hey, hey, hey, watch the merchandise! Easy there, Impulse, you’ll ruin the run if ya drop this card. Stupid game. Shoulda known you’d end the game already, stupid run. Let me know when you make an interesting play, wouldja?”

Its voice is big and round, odd for its tiny snout; such a large personality for something made of thin, soft paper. Then again, who are you to judge? Are you not an imposing figure to most, and does your voice not still tremble every time you place your regular order at the diner after work? Coward. Never could live up to the potential you were given, could you, Impulse?

“Geez,” the gamemaster sighs, “just play a card already! I’ve got my whole plan of attack lined up here, and you’re sittin’ there chattin’ to a card.” You can see his cards in the third row, ready to be played but not yet on the field. You must always start with the advantage of the first turn. He has a coyote and a kingfisher, whatever that is, with its pair of new symbols stamped into the once-empty space. The card seems almost water damaged, like someone dropped it into a pool of water once and didn’t bother to press it while it dried.

Staring at the frail squirrel in your hand, you consider both the stoat and the wolf cub. The sundial on the wolf cub draws your interest, but then again, the stoat just talked to you. Maybe you should hang onto it for a while, try to keep it alive.

Both the kingfisher and the wolf cub are unknown to you, mysterious as their sigils are. Hesitantly, you lay down a squirrel and kill it to place your wolf cub in the far right lane, across from where the kingfisher will move in. All you can do is hope that something weird happens with the markings on the cards, and you haven’t just placed down a card with no attack to be killed instantly. Of course, you’re leaving yourself open to the larger attack from the coyote... Is it worth it, sacrificing points to find out what it does?

The wolf cub, as expected, does no damage. It simply stares at you with bright eyes. You hope it doesn’t die. You hope this is worth it.

The coyote approaches first, dealing two damage and tipping the scale toward you; then your opponent slides the kingfisher across the table, and deals one more damage. The golden item tips the scale, but nothing kills the wolf cub. Shouldn’t it take damage? When you look closer at the kingfisher, though, it almost seems to float just a few millimeters off the table; one of the symbols is a wing, does it somehow fly over your card?

The point teeters on the edge of the scale, then drops to the table; you pick it up to place it back, but not before examining it. It’s a gold-plated nut—not an edible nut, not from a tree. No. Contrary to everything else around you, contrary to the man covered in moss, contrary to his wooden hands and decomposing table, the scale is tipped with nuts and bolts.

You should put the nut back.

Staring at it, lying motionless and fake in your palm, you are overcome with something strange. Why are your eyes watering? Why are you crying? No, stop that, that’s not how the gamemaster’s story went. Put the nut back on the scale and keep playing the game.

You need to put it back; you need to balance the scales.

Impulse, put the nut back.

But you can’t. You can’t, because—

From across the table, the gamemaster gently lifts the nut from your palm, his fingertips scraping like a living spruce sculpture across your hand, and sets the nut back on the scale. Through blurry eyes, you see a genuine look of concern wash like running water across the darkness of his face. With a sniff, you rub the short sleeve of your shirt across your cheeks and press it into the corners of your eyes. Why would he care that you’re upset over nothing? You stare at the man and his coat of oleander and amanitas, the man cloaked in death and smelling of rot and decay, of wet wood melting into mulch; you stare at him and you wonder why you care so much about a metal nut on a bronze scale. You wonder why you ache to hold it again. You’d give anything to hold it forever.

“Y’can call me Bdubs,” he says, voice quiet, like stone scraping gently over stone, as if knowing his name will bring you any peace. Absurdly, it almost does—like now that the faceless mound of moss and man has a name, he’s more human. “I’m... I’m sorry. But you hafta keep playing.”

“Why is this happening?” you ask. “I mean, what is happening? Why are we here? Why do I—“ your voice cracks, stealing the rest of your sentence.

He shakes his head gravely. “I can’t tell you that, Impulse. Ya gotta play the game.”

You have to play the game. Draw a card and continue your path through the concrete jungle.

Play the game, Impulse. Nothing has ever been as important to you as this.

Play the game.

“If I play the game,” you bargain, “can I have it? The nut?”

He considers you, a glint warming in his eye like a spark. “Oh, that’s new. That’s exciting! Yes, yes, you can. Oh, but I gotta make it harder. Gotta give you an incentive. Okay, well, you can have it if you win. Right? Win the game, and I’ll give it to you and you can keep it forever. Deal? Deal.”

You have your deal; now play the game.

It’s your turn; the scale is tipped three points against you; you have a snapping turtle in your hand and no way to play it, and the same can be said of the stoat. On the board, the gamemaster—Bdubs?—flips your wolf cub facedown and places a wolf atop it. At least you can kill the pesky kingfisher; but no matter what you do, you cannot play anything unless you draw a squirrel. So you do. You draw it, and immediately sacrifice it to play the stoat.

“Are you sure?” it sneers, and that is the last thing you need right now, a snarky stoat judging your only option. But unfortunately, you need it on the board, so you ignore the snide comment and ring the bell to end your turn.

The stoat immediately kills the coyote, and the now full-grown wolf leaps to attack the kingfisher. The other symbol on the kingfisher becomes clear, as does the source of its water stains, as Bdubs flips the card over, submerging it in a thin layer of water. Instead, the wolf attacks him directly, bringing the score back to the center.

It seems you’ve forgotten to account for the third row, however, where your opponent’s next moves were clearly broadcast. A skunk moves up to take a defensive and putrid stance across from your stoat. It does not attack, but your stoat is too revolted to do any more damage. The kingfisher attacks again, flying right over the head of your wolf for a measly one point. For your next turn, you’re feeling much more steady, now that you’ve learned what three symbols mean: winged, submerged, and... young? It doesn’t matter what you call them, only what they do. You draw another squirrel in hopes of someday playing something useful, and end your turn so the wolf can garner you three more points.

One more turn of the same: a kingfisher attack and a powerless skunk. This time, though, you draw from your main deck, where you know two ruthless wolves are waiting. With blood of both the squirrel in your hand and the stoat on the table, you play your wolf in a different lane from the pungent skunk, and attack with a total of six—two more than you need in order to tip the scales and win. Bdubs slowly trickles the first four onto the scale until its underside kisses the wood grain, then lets the final two echo as he drops them into a thick wooden bowl.

“Yours,” he says, “for your vicious overkill.”

You don’t want to be vicious. You just want to go home.

The stoat hisses as it is returned to your hand, but you shuffle it back into the deck without paying it much mind.

“Sounds like someone’s upset you nixed his favourite card,” Bdubs grins. “Joel likes the stoat. S’why it looks the way it does. He thinks that stupid green streak makes it look cool or somefin. Yeah, right! He wishes. Pfft. Awright, pick a card.” Moving your figurine another space along the path, to the only location connected to the fight, he lays out three cards for you.

The first is a raven, an expensive flying card with good attack; next is the sparrow, a cheaper version of the raven; and then the bullfrog, with a new symbol that appears to be some kind of defensive card. Satisfied with the defense of your river snapper, you opt for the cheap sparrow. You need more cards that cost fewer than two blood, you noticed during the game, and a flying card seems quite beneficial in certain cases—or so the cowardly kingfisher would indicate. You have to wonder, though, what the point of these selections is. Are they really just for you to build your deck? They seem like some kind of test, though you’re not sure what they could possibly be testing. Your understanding of the game? Your strategy? That should be easy enough to figure out via your gameplay alone.

Still, you remain wary.

The next stop on your map is, apparently, a strange altar. The skull of a ram is mounted above a flat stone with the outline of a card wearily worn into it as though by a miniature river. Within the outline is a crude sketch of a skull wearing goggles, outlined in a crusted maroon substance that seems eerily like blood. Small stones stand around the altar, stretching up from the table and encircling the flat stone as you lift your deck and spread it before you. The gamemaster also pulls on a slipshod wooden mask: a woman with long hair and goggles pulled up to her forehead. “Heya Impulse,” she greets from the darkness. “Sacrifice a card from your deck for me, and I’ll give you my blessing in return. How’s that sound?”

What card are you most okay with losing? You can’t sacrifice the stoat, not after learning it’s Joel’s favourite—whoever Joel is. And your new sparrow and wolf cub are both easy to play. You have two wolves, and especially with the wolf cub, you could get rid of one with little effect, but they’ve already been such help in getting the final few points in. On the other hand, you haven’t played the river snapper, and with such a high cost it’s really not worth it to try just for a few points of plain defense.

As you lift the card to place it onto the altar, you look into the eyes of the river snapper and see, as if looking through its eyes into another world, something else. You must sacrifice a card, Impulse. Do you understand the tactics? Do you have what it takes to kill this creature forever?

Why is it so lifelike, so familiar? Why do its eyes look almost human, why does it remind you of—

A gunshot, a shout ripped from a throat, a man with a bullet in his back. Blood seeps into the soft grass of the forest beneath him. Running. Panting. Someone you’ve left behind is running in another direction.

Then you’re caught, a hand on your shoulder pulling you back to the cabin with the strange man who leans across the table to anchor you, still masked as the long-haired woman.

You realize your hands are shaking; you’ve dropped the card halfway to the altar, so she picks it up and places it for you. “Sorry,” he mutters as the skull’s eyes flash red like a vortex of blood, and the card disappears.

You snap out of your stupor to wonder how the card could have disappeared so instantly. Maybe a spring-loaded mechanism beneath the card outline to transfer the card up into the skull, rotating it vertically? Part of you wants to reach for the stone and examine it—is it really a stone, or simply a well-designed gamepiece?

Bdubs places a bloodied card face-up on your side of the table, near the scale. “A minor boon of the bone lord,” the woman explains. “You’ll start games with 1 bone. Best of luck, mate.”

Slipping off the mask with a quick shake of the head and a bubbly noise, the gamemaster becomes himself again. “Ugh,” he mutters, “always with the tense neck and shoulders. Oh! You don’t know bones yet, do you? Humm... I’ll leave that there, and I’ll explain once you’ve got a card that costs bones. Until then, pretend it doesn’t exist, got it?”

“Yeah, sure,” you mumble, examining the card. It’s not playable, not meant to slip into your deck. It simply depicts the creature with the ram skull extending its ghostly hands to offer a single broken bone. Bones, huh? A new kind of cost for cards; but how do bones collect? If you start with one, are they like squirrels—free blood?

Don’t worry. You’ll see sometime, whenever you get another card.

But first, the gamemaster moves your figurine forward another space, the symbol something like a monster covered in vines. You almost smile to think Bdubs, floral and bumbling as he is, could be depicted so viciously.

Reaching off to the side, the gamemaster twists together two thick segments of carved wood; with a click, the eyes glow a dull red. Instantly, you’re tempted to recreate the two segments and the internal wiring that connects only when both pieces are fitted snugly into each other. It’s a simple mechanism, really, activated by a button or even just a metal plate—

It doesn’t matter. The red glow also peeks out from a sigil carved onto the base: an arc with spikes growing from it, almost like the abstract of a porcupine, or a drawing of a sunrise as scribbled by a child. Atop it is the head of some sort of bug, with two segmented antennae drooping above its multifaceted eyes and an alien shape to the curve of its jaws.

Face set in a rough frown, Bdubs slams the wooden totem onto the table. “On the path, you were stopped by a monster whose cards were powered by n’unnatural force; you noticed that when yer cards attacked those it set down against you, your creatures took a point of damage.”

On his side of the board, he prepares a mantis in the second column and a beehive in the fourth. You’ve never seen either of these creatures. The mantis’ sigil is a split arrow—will it attack the spaces there, rather than the space in front of it? That should make it an easy target, you think. The beehive... seems to produce bees? Maybe every turn, if there is an open space next to it, it will produce a bee. But if that’s the case, why place it away from the mantis, where it won’t be protected? You must be wrong about one of the sigils, else the gamemaster has made a bad play.

Into your hand you draw your starting squirrel, Joel’s stoat, the sparrow, and a wolf. Obviously, you place a squirrel; now your options are the stoat or the sparrow; do you want to kill a card, or work towards gaining nuts and bolts? The beehive seems intimidating: if it keeps churning out cards as long as it survives, that’s not good. You kill the squirrel and place the stoat in front of the beehive. Joel scoffs, “Bad play.” That’s all you can do for now, though, so you try to shake his words off and ring the bell.

Your stoat hits the open space in front of the beehive, and you gain one point. Then the mantis moves forward and strikes diagonally to its right and left for two points, and the beehive slides forward but deals no damage.

Considering your next step, you draw another squirrel. The wolf cub is likely your best bet, as it will take on the mantis easily; but you’ve already placed the stoat in front of the beehive to take it out, and there’s no point wasting a perfectly good card. Using the squirrel, you play the wolf cub in front of the mantis, noting again the glowing sigil added by Bdubs’ totem. Now, because the mantis strikes indirectly, it will have a chance to mature after the mantis is dead, so next turn you should earn an easy three points. The stoat will have a harder time, and if there really are bees produced by the hive, you’ll have another challenge, but the wolf at least will help hold the tide for a while. In the first column of the third row is an odd card: the ring worm, with no power and one health. How odd. It can’t possibly be a helpful card, but you recall a ring worm isn’t really a worm—it’s a disease. You resolve to keep your creatures away from it; if Bdubs continues filling his spaces with powerless creatures, you should have no problem winning, and you won’t risk a card falling ill in case that’s a mechanic of this game, because of course it would be. You’re certain there are mechanics yet to be uncovered, not least of all bones.

Once you ring the bell, your wolf cub attacks first. But as it bares its teeth and crushes the mantis’ head between its young jaws, it also takes damage.

“Jeez!” you proclaim with a shudder. You hadn’t recalled that the spiny sigil would attack your creatures in return. You shudder to see the betrayal in the pup’s eyes as it dies, so young, with green chitin stuck between its teeth and yellowish bile oozing out its maw from the mantis’ remains. You have turned this infantile thing into a killer, and you have not protected it from retaliation. You have killed it. It will never grow up. “Dude! That’s messed up!”

You understand why it is a card: not because it will grow up happily as your companion, but because you will be devastated when it dies as a pup.

This game is not fun, Impulse. It does not coddle you. It exists to disturb you.

The wolf cub will always grow up too fast, eerily and unhealthily fast, like nothing in the world could. But why? Why must you play this game? What freedom will you attain once you have beaten the gamemaster, and what does he get out of it? These questions you must find the answers to if you are to master the game.

“Tha’s the game,” Bdubs responds simply.

As your stoat’s claws draw across the beehive, a small yet vengeful bee, venom glistening on the tip of its stinger, emerges in the space next to it, and from the spines your stoat dies.

The ring worm advances but does nothing; the empty spot that held the mantis is wiped clean; the bee attacks for one, and the beehive does nothing.

Noting that the bee emerged when the hive was hit, not at the start of Bdubs’ turn, you squint at the board. You could draw either your sparrow, which won’t kill the bee but will balance out the bee’s attack until you can draw something more powerful, or the wolf, which will be entirely unhelpful since you already have one in hand and no way to play it, or you can draw a squirrel. Ah, but you also remember your pack! The three items there may be of some use. You want to keep the pliers for sentimentality’s sake, but the scissors or bottle could assist you.

You reach for the side deck, then uncork the bottle and pull out the squirrel, drawing a second from your side deck; using them both, you play the wolf opposite the bee. It kills the bee without pomp or circumstance and takes one damage itself; Bdubs’ turn passes uneventfully, though he lines up another ring worm across from your wolf in the third column.

With no other plays available to you, you draw a squirrel and wait with bated breath to see what happens to your wolf when it attacks.

The spines kill your wolf now, but the ring worm dies with it, and you draw from your main deck. It’s unclear whether the wolf died merely from the spines, or due to some other fast-acting disease; you hope it was just the spines.

Luckily, the sparrow awaits you with a determined chirp. You play it in the second lane, and slowly chip away at Bdubs’ health as he refuses to play any more cards.

After four turns of this, on the brink of victory, you draw the final card from your main deck and, using two of the three squirrels you’ve accumulated, play the wolf in the third lane that once held a ring worm. You win, and receive three extra nuts and bolts in your overkill bowl.

From somewhere beneath the table, Bdubs produces a moderately sized wooden chest. Unadorned, with a small golden lock on the front; its corners look sharp enough to cut paper, its sides and top rough with splinters lying in wait for an unsuspecting victim whose hands are soft and just asking to be punctured. You don’t touch the box, only watch as the gamemaster, with his hands of wood grain, pulls the lid back on its hinges.

“Yer ready for bones, now,” he says, gesturing to the cards within the chest.

In the top right corner, each has a bone symbol with a number. The first is a rattler, playable for six bones. The second is a coyote—you remember it from the first game—and the third is a cockroach, both of which cost four bones. If you’ve learned anything from blood costs so far, six is going to be a lot of whatever bones are. Between the coyote and the cockroach, the cockroach is ridiculously worthless aside from the sigil that intrigues you. It contains a skull within two arrows that reach around it, towards each other; clearly it’s something to do with death. As much as you’re repulsed by the idea, having a creature that has some power over death, or activated by it, would be interesting. Otherwise, the only difference between the cockroach and coyote is the coyote’s two power rather than one. They’re both weak and unremarkable, though the scowling face of the cockroach is nowhere near as unsettling as the beady eyes of the cockroach.

With great trepidation, hoping fervently you will not see any more grotesquery here, you pluck the cockroach from the box and shuffle it into your deck.

While you do, the gamemaster is focused on unrolling a new roll of animal skin, placing your figurine at the null location nearest you. Your path here splits. There are many places further ahead whose symbols you don’t recognize, and you see no benefits nor drawbacks ahead—only mystery. You must choose between the two directly ahead of you: you can warm a creature by a campfire, or you can sacrifice another creature. Remembering the river snapper’s grisly fate, and your emotional outbreak, you choose the route that leads you to the campfire.

You wish, as you move your figurine, that your river snapper were still around. You think maybe, some other time, you would’ve liked to sit by a bonfire with him—it. The thought registers then as insane. It’s not even a turtle, it’s just a card. A card that you held only briefly in a game that you need to focus on.

Bdubs narrates, “A group of starved survivors huddled around a campfire. ‘Warm a creature by the fire?’ they asked. ‘Enhance its health?’”

You eye the shrunken, drooling faces of the figurines and grow suspicious of whether your chosen creature will survive. Looking through your deck, you decide your stoat and wolves are off limits. That leaves the sparrow, cockroach, and wolf cub. For variety’s sake, you’d prefer not to rid yourself of any of these. The most similar is the wolf cub, and in its unevolved state it is rather weak... If the enhancement sticks, it might not be so easy to kill next time; maybe it will grow up into a real wolf if you give it this chance.

Amid the tight circle of figurines is a card with the image of a warm, glowing fire, the bottom of which indicates it will change your creature by +2 hearts. You lay your wolf cub atop the card.

Reaching over the figurines, Bdubs slams a stamp onto the card. When he pulls away, the wolf cub has 3 health rather than 1.

Hastily you retreat with it, careful not to smudge the fresh ink.

Your opponent clears the table for a fight, but does not present a totem. A normal fight, then. This should be easy. At least, you should be able to learn what your new cockroach does, or test your wolf cub, depending on the luck of the draw.

Bdubs drops a token on your side of the table, atop your boon card. It looks just like the coin on the card itself: inscribed with half a bone, with a ridged edge. “Yer bone for the boon. Y’earn one for each of your critters that dies from anythin’. Not a real bone, ‘course. Not the ones you’re thinking of, anyway; but they’re bones, of a sort.”

Do you know what he means, Impulse? Of course you don’t. You will.

You shake your head clear and draw: you begin with a squirrel, the stoat, the sparrow, and a wolf. In the third row, Bdubs has placed a bat in the first column and an opossum in the third. The bat is the more immediate threat: it’ll hit for two, and it’s got wings. Both are only one health, though, so that should be simple enough. You play the squirrel and subsequently the stoat, just across from where the bat will move to. For now you end your turn and watch Bdubs set a nut on his side of the scale. The bat and opossum both move up, dealing you four damage.

Bdubs prepares something called an alpha in the second lane and a coyote in the first.

With the stoat down, Joel seems to have thoughts on your tactics. “Play a card!” he hisses shortly.

“I’m going to,” you mutter under your breath. Of course you’re going to play a card, this is the game in which you must play cards so more creatures can die gruesomely, and you must use those deaths to play more cards again in a tiring cycle. You draw a squirrel and look at your options. You could play your sparrow, and it would counter the damage of the opossum. You grip your cards tighter, wishing you had anything but the sparrow right now—anything that could damage the cards themselves.

But you can’t play the wolf yet if you want to kill the bat, so you play the simple sparrow across from the opossum to tank the damage.

Joel’s stoat kills the bat, and the sparrow does one more damage to Bdubs, but your turn ends with you unsatisfied. There has to be more you can do, or more you could do, if you had the right cards in hand.

Across the table, the alpha and coyote move forward. The alpha has a strange symbol, two arrows pointing towards the creatures beside it; it only does one damage, but the opossum and coyote’s attacks have been increased by one. The coyote kills your stoat in one blow, and the opossum takes out your sparrow as expected while the alpha does a mere one damage.

You’re left with a wolf in hand and nothing on the table. All you can do is draw a squirrel and hope. Except—your pack! You can use the scissors, you can rid Bdubs of the alpha!

With a vengeance, you rip the scissors from your pack and stab them down into the alpha with a satisfied grimace.

Bdubs looks at you with a strange look—mostly enraged, but his expression soon flickers from stern to almost fond. “Yer s’posed to cut it in half. But I guess, I guess yeah, that... works. I’ll retract my alpha.” He extricates his card from the scissors, returning the coyote and opossum to their regular strengths.

Finally, you place down your squirrel in front of the coyote, which immediately leaps upon it and rips the poor creature to shreds. The opossum does only one damage, and you draw another squirrel. Is there any way to win this?

In the fourth lane, a vulture appears to circle your demise. You cannot win. You’re down by three; you can use each squirrel to block one attack, but once the vulture moves up you’re screwed. Still. You’ll be damned if you don’t keep trying.

With a deep breath and heavy sigh, you place your squirrel in front of the coyote again and ring the bell. The opossum hits you for one point after the squirrel is dead, but the vulture is the nail in your coffin with three damage.

Across the table, Bdubs sighs, face fallen and dark as the summer night sky. “We can use this as a learning opportunity, or I think I’d fall ashreep. You’re s’posed to be better at this game by now, y’know that? Yer s’posed to win sometime. Awright, get up. Grab that candlestick from over there,” he says without pointing.

It hadn’t occurred to you that you could move around the cabin, or even stand, really. You’ve been engrossed in the game—much as you hate playing it. You stand, take a few stiff steps as the springy floorboards beneath you lack even the strength to groan at your weight. This whole place seems ready to collapse at any moment, like the blood shed on the table within has been corroding the very foundations of the place. The floor is damp, not just musty, and you don’t think it’s water but above all you don’t want to look down at the sticky liquid crawling along the rubber soles of your canvas hiking boots. The sound alone is disgusting; you don’t want to see the blood in a pool large enough to lightly coat the cabin floor, so you don’t look.

You don’t look.

“I got no secrets to keep from you, Impulse,” Bdubs lisps with a lopsided grin. The way he says you, he makes it sound like you’re old pals, but you’re certain you’ve never known this man in your life.

You live in a nice neighbourhood with clean-cut grass and a white picket fence; you have a respectable job working with newfangled computers, monitoring them and the punch cards they devour as well as the machinery that keeps them running; you have no reason to have ever known this man of the forest, cloaked as he is in blood and death. Yet he treats you like an old friend—not just as a challenger or someone to play the game with him, but as though you once knew each other well enough there was no need for secrets. He treats you like you’ve got history, but you’d never go for someone like him. That is, well, of course, if he were a woman, which he isn’t, and you’re not, and...

Now, Impulse.

What a mess you are.

“You gotta have me mistaken for someone else,” you mumble, staring at a painting on the wall. It’s filled with splotches of colour, an abstraction of something that murmurs of familiarity. You can’t place how, but you know the painting represents a group of people—the artist’s friends? There’s not a dull colour in sight. The whole canvas is textured, too, layered with paint of different consistencies that rise and fall from the surface of the canvas like the choppy waves that follow the disturbance of a peaceful pond. You’re no art critic, but it feels full of life. You could reach out and almost touch the people the artist loved.

Bdubs is silent for a moment, absorbing your reaction. “Yeah,” he whispers at last. “I must.”

To the right of the painting is a cuckoo clock, all three hands unmoving. Are you, too, frozen in time? Or has the world frozen around this cabin, leaving you at the mercy of the gamemaster?

You turn from the wall and notice a large safe on a table; more pressingly, there is a gnarled hand with dirt caked under the fingernails and along the quick that reaches around the edge of the safe, resting on one of the hinges. You frown and take a step closer, but it jolts as if noticing it’s been seen and retreats into the shadows. Closing the distance between yourself and the table, you peer into the darkness beside the safe.

It stares back.

Through a crack in the logs of the cabin, you see an eye. It blinks at your notice, but does not look away or hide. The eye is... well, it’s just a normal eye, really. What were you expecting?

Once you tear yourself away, you fetch the candlestick from beside the door; oddly, it holds only two candles at different heights, asymmetric and offputting. You wouldn’t want this as your table’s centerpiece—you’d be the laughingstock of the HOA if you did. You can’t afford to lose your spot—you’re on thin ice as it is, childless and unmarried. You’re not even courting any women. But you keep your house, yard, and garden pristine, and you know the HOA rules by heart, even if your heart’s not actually in it. You’re the image of a perfect man with his business attire, his neat brown hair combed to the side, and his briefcase; if you haven’t got a family, you must restore your normalcy points by joining the HOA. It doesn’t matter what you want. It’s what you need if you want to keep the things you have.

It never matters what you want.

You’re so used to being observed like a rat in a maze that you’re hardly fazed by the revelation that there are people watching. First Joel, of course, watching you misplay his stoat, and now a shadowed hand and disembodied eye. You grab the unlit candlestick and lazily stretch your back and shoulders before returning to your seat.

Lighting one of the candles, Bdubs explains absentmindedly how the candlestick works. Words fall from his mouth like water from a waterfall, rapid and flowing into and over one another. Somehow you follow him seamlessly. His voice and the race of his explanation fit easily in your mind as something you yearn to listen to. Seeing your blank stare, he finishes: “Basically, you got two lives here, awright? You just lost one. Don’t lose the other.”

There’s something deeper in his voice. Concern, maybe? He’s looking at you with an urgency you don’t feel. If you lose, you lose, that’s it. Then you walk out of here as a loser, yes, but you still walk away. That’s all you want.

That and the gold-plated nut.

Bdubs pulls out a candlestick of his own, something two-pronged and covered by a skull; the candles stick out from its eyes, both lit and flickering challengingly. Then he ducks out of view. When he resurfaces, his face is covered by an elaborately carved wooden mask with a beard reaching almost to the table’s surface.

“Oh, he’s just doing the blummin’ prospector again. Don’t worry, the mule’s key. Easy boss,” commentates Joel.

“That’s very helpful, thanks,” you mutter.

Across the table, Bdubs places two cards in the first two lanes. The first is thick—wood, not paper, and unfamiliar. The pack mule will move, you notice from its sigil. But the other card Bdubs has placed, a meager coyote, blocks the second lane and will prevent the mule from moving unless you kill it. The mule’s key, Joel said. Maybe you should consider why it’s got 5 health and no attack—maybe it’s meant to be killed. That, or you’re supposed to keep it alive, but if that’s the case shouldn’t it be more counterintuitive? Harder to let something live with high attack and low health—anyone would struggle to tank those hits—but no attack and high health? That seems like something to kill. You could be wrong, you could be dooming this whole thing, but as the scent of oil and gasoline fills your nostrils it gets a little hard to think as the pungent byproducts of innovation slip into the folds of your brain.

Your first hand is a squirrel, a wolf, a cockroach, and the wolf cub. The obvious first play is to place the wolf cub—but where? The coyote needs to stay in place for your plan, so if anything you should only play squirrels in front of it, lest you spend the rest of the game chasing the mule across the playing field and back. Grimacing, you kill the squirrel to place your wolf cub in front of the pack mule. Bdubs passes you a bone token, and you recall with your minor boon that you have begun collecting bones to play your cockroach soon.

Your wolf cub deals one point of damage. Then the coyote and mule step forward with two points of damage from the coyote.

You draw a squirrel and eye the board. There’s nothing in the top row yet, so you simply place the squirrel in front of the coyote to mitigate the damage after your wolf attacks the pack mule. Blocked by the feral coyote, the mule does not move and remains in range of your strong wolf.

Drawing another squirrel, you again bait the coyote so your grown wolf can finish off the mule.

Disappointed, Bdubs withdraws his mule and instead hands you a packet of cards, tied with plant fiber. You quickly remove the wrappings and admire the four cards within: another squirrel, a river otter, an opossum, and something called the field mice with a strange symbol on the card. You can already play the opossum, and with the pack mule now gone, you can kill the coyote without fear. On the other side of the board, however, a twisting, scaled adder slithers into the fourth lane. You draw another squirrel and consider your wolf, which will deal Bdubs 3 damage directly. But you also haven’t seen the cockroach in action yet, and you only need one more bone to play it.

In a flash of understanding, you kill a squirrel to place a river otter across from the adder in hopes it will combat the adder’s strange sigil, then use your four bones to play the cockroach across from the coyote. Your wolf deals three damage; the cockroach blessedly kills the coyote; and finally the river otter deals one damage to the space between itself and the adder.

Once the river otter has struck its paw at the empty space, Bdubs reaches across to flip the card over. “Yer cowardly river otter has submerged itself for my attack,” he grins, golden tooth flashing in the candlelight. It seems so out of place amid the ivy and wooden texture of his tree-bark lips, you’re taken aback. But the moment passes once he leans back and his adder hits your side of the board.

Even so, you win this turn. You love your wolf, no matter how much you hate what you’ve done to the poor wolf cub. It’s just a card, you tell yourself. Just a card. It doesn’t matter. This is a game and you should by no means be this invested in the cards.

It would be folly to care for them as creatures, and certainly not as friends. Let them go, Impulse.

Once you’ve drawn another squirrel, the loyal wolf deals three damage, the cockroach deals one, and your otter kills the adder.

Reaching up with a gnarled hand, the prospector pinches out one of his candles with his stony thumb and forefinger.

Then he leans forward, half-standing, and peers over your side of the table. You remember wondering if Bdubs was just short, and scratch that thought. Not a leprechaun, then.

The prospector leers through the mask and runs his fingers along the carved curls of his wild beard. “There’s gold in yer cards,” he says, voice gruff as he strikes with his pickaxe into each card. In their stead, he lays a gold nugget each with no attack and two health.

Despite the puncture wound through its body from the pickaxe, your cockroach begins to twitch and its spilled organs gather themselves up from the table and are drawn back into its body as the card is returned to your hand. Power over death, you’d thought when you picked it up, what a powerful sigil. What a courageous little cockroach.

You now have one open space in the third lane; in the fourth, the prospector lines up field mice with two attack. Maybe you can understand their power by observing, rather than playing.

Another squirrel can’t hurt, you think. Your options are only limited now by the playable space on your board. You still have... some cards you could draw in your deck. The light sparrow, maybe, or the other wolf. You almost hope you don’t draw the stoat—for all Joel’s apparent attachment to it, it’s not a great card. Really only good for tanking hits, yet you always feel bad allowing it to fall to an opponent. Hinging your strategy on pleasing one onlooker can’t be a good plan—and still, here you are.

You grab your wolf and attempt to play it, sacrificing two gold nuggets, but the prospector stops you. “You can’t draw blood from no gold ore, friend.”

At the moment, then, you can play only the opossum, despite your two squirrels. Sacrificing the two bones, you place it in the only open space between the gold nuggets, and it strikes once.

Pushing the field mice up, the prospector pauses, two fingers planted firmly on the face of the card. “Field mice,” he says, face turning up into a smile, but his heart isn’t in it. “When they’re played, a copy is created in yer hand. Yunno, they just spread unstoppably. Mice, always so persistent. We were like that, once; but that was a long time ago, before we were here. You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you, Impulse?”

He fixes you with a look: an old, aged look that makes you think maybe you should know something about it, but you don’t. You don’t know anything about this place. “Sounds useful,” you say instead, unsure what he’s digging for.

Returning to his seat, he removes his hand from the card and his field mice remove the gold nugget for you—convenient, you’ll have another space to work with. In the top row, he places another new card—the daus with two attack, two health, and a the icon of a pair of chimes held between the phalanxes of a bristled brute. What in the world is a “the daus”? It seems you’ll find out soon enough. Behind the field mice, he also plays another copy. At least you can use overkill on it.

You draw from your main deck: the stoat. Not what you were hoping for, but you’ll make it work. Killing a squirrel and the opossum, you play the wolf in front of the field mice, then kill your other squirrel to play the stoat beside the wolf.

It’s not ideal, but it’ll get another point of damage on the scale in case of a rainy day. Your stoat strikes directly, and your wolf kills the first field mice, then stratches at the second field mice behind it. The daus moves up in the second lane, and on either side, small chimes appear with no power and one health. What are they for? Do they simply occupy the space? You can’t be sure.

Again, the prospector pauses as he slips the chimes onto the board. “The noble daus,” he muses, “protects its own. You, of all people, should understand the value there.”

While you try to parse what he could possibly mean with his pointed statement, the daus strikes the gold nugget in front of it and kills it, freeing up another space for you to play whatever you like. The second field mice kill your wolf, but as the bone drops onto your pile, you recall that the gold nuggets have also been giving bones—meaning you have plenty with which to play the cockroach. It doesn’t seem to matter where you play it—both the daus and the field mice will do two damage.

First, you draw a squirrel. Then, playing it and the cockroach, you use their blood to set the field mice across from their kin. With the extra bones, you place your cockroach again, playing it before the daus. It strikes the daus, weakening it; but when the stoat kills the chime, the daus bares its teeth and attacks, leaving the stoat gasping on the brink of death while your field mice kill the others.

The prospector takes his turn, the daus killing your cockroach and returning it to your hand.

But you look at the scale, still tipped two notches towards the prospector, with no nuts or bolts on your plate. You take a bit of a risk and draw from your deck. As if by fate, you draw the second wolf—exactly what you wanted to see. With a wince, you kill Joel’s stoat and the field mice to play it, then use those final bones to play the cockroach again. You’ll get one bolt of overkill by not striking the daus.

As the scale tips one tick at a time, the prospector simply watches you. You look from him to the daus. Protecting one’s own, he said. What could you possibly know about that? You’re just the IT guy for some normal company, you’re an unenthusiastic member of the HOA, you’re a single middle aged man. You have no one to protect—just yourself and your fragile reputation, hovering on the cusp of revelation, poised to shatter into a thousand rough-hewn pieces sharper than razors and fracturing your whole life beyond repair.

The hair rises on the back of your neck as your mind brings up flashes of imagery you don’t recall ever seeing to begin with—a gunshot, aimed at you; blood on the fallen leaves; the crash of a wolfpack hot on your heels, the rumble of their feet and the screams of the birds; you remember leaving someone behind. It tugs at you even now to have left him there, but you’re so certain you’ll see him again.

Who?

Where are you getting these images? They’re realistic, as though you once saw them played back on someone’s camcorder and called them to hand when relevant. But how could they be relevant? You’ve never seen someone get shot. You’ve never even been near a gun when it was fired!

Bdubs has peeled off the mask, removed the prospector’s outer layer and mannerisms, and relit your second candle.

From beneath the table, he hoists a large, ornate chest. Metal vines crawl up its sides, reaching for the lid as though they hope to devour what’s inside. “Mebbe one of these will keep you goin’,” he slurs as he opens the lid dramatically onto its creaking hinges.

Within are three cards, weathered and water-damaged. He narrates as you flip over each card.

“The long elk... I got no words for that freak o’ nature.” It appears to be a spine, covered in viscera both dripping and encrusted, reaching outside the leafy border of the filthy card. You almost don’t want to touch it, for fear of contamination.

“The eternal serpent; death strengthens it f’rever.” The ouroboros continues in an ever-turning circle, the snake always eating its own tail. You’ve always considered it to be a strange concept. Would the snake not simply eat itself until it could not turn any further, becoming a small ring of impossibility until it chokes? The ouroboros has never sparked more than disgust or discomfort in you.

“The stalwart mole man. The ultimate defense.” Simple. You like simple things. It has zero attack, six health, and the bulk of a wrestler. Despite the face only a mother could love, you think it the best fit for your deck. After all, you’ve been struggling with playing cards because they’ve all been dying. It could be nice to have a card to rely on to tank a few hits while you stockpile squirrels for a larger attack. You’re beginning to wish, again, that you’d never sacrificed the poor river snapper.

Bdubs watches you fondly as you select the mole man and shuffle him into your deck. “Thought so,” he murmurs.

“What?” you snap, fed up with his odd, unexplained looks. “C’mon, dude, stop being weird. Just play the game so I can beat you and leave.”

He casts his eyes toward the table suddenly, face withdrawn into the shadows of his hood. “Sowry,” he mutters. “Right, let’s play the stupid game.”

“Aw, look what you’ve done, ya fool!” Joel interjects from somewhere behind you. When you stand to face him, there’s no one there. “You’ve gone and bloody upset him!”

You reach for the packet that held the mule’s cards to crumple it into a ball and throw it at the darkness from which Joel’s voice emanates, but as you glance down you instead notice something written in red on the back of the packet. 1-11-15 with a drawing of a dial. Oh!

You turn from the darkness behind your chair to the safe along the far right wall, and quickly set the first dial to 1, the second to 11, and the third to 15. The safe unlocks, and you swing it open to reveal a card and a key within.

“Oh,” says a new voice, higher than Bdubs or Joel but still rough around the edges. Its card pictures a stinkbug—weak, with two health and only one attack, and emitting a mild yet disgusting green odor from its sigil. Is that a pile of poop with stink lines? Real mature. “Hello! It’s been a while, man, I thought I was never gonna see this card again. Why don’t you try that key in the cabinet over there?”

“Hey, stop givin’ him hints!” Joel huffs.

“They said we’re allowed to give hints—“

“Not because they’re not allowed, Cleo, because it’s my job!”

“Geez, okay guys, stop fighting,” you chitter, butterflies gnawing at your gut, as you cross to the beautiful cabinet and fit the key into the lock. It turns smoothly, and the gilded flowers disappear as the frontplate slides down, revealing two odd puzzles. You wiggle the brass pieces around for a moment, but nothing reveals itself to you, so you walk back to your side of the table and sit down.

Bdubs has unfurled a new map. The paths are much straighter, less meandering, with right angles and long straightaways. At uniform intervals you note small structures; along each side of the paths is a familiar fence. “Skyscrapers gave way to shorter buildings and stretches of eye-searingly green grass. The artificial fencing guided your path as you entered... the White Picket Prairie.”

Is this supposed to be some kind of commentary on the American Dream, or is he trying to mimic your exact neighbourhood? Sure, everything’s kind of the same everywhere, but that’s out of your control. What are you, a city planner? You just live there, and drag yourself to the boring, bitchy HOA meetings on occasion. You’re hardly living the American Dream these days with your empty bed and pristine, unused living room.

There is only one path forward. “Next you gotta pick a card based on the cost. Two blood, three blood, or bones.” He lays out three cards in front of you, gesturing to which is which. You have too many high cost cards already, you may as well use the bones it takes to survive along the way.

When you flip it over, a coyote’s lopsided grin greets you, toothy and saturated with saliva. Great, a card you already passed over. And it’s four bones—not even cheap! You would’ve preferred another opossum. Maybe you’re just biased against the card that’s been played against you so often, but you also think that’s a perfectly good reason to dislike it. Still, it seems... eager to please, even as it begins to chew happily on its own paw. Maybe it’s missing a few wires here and there, not the brightest bulb on the tree, but as long as it does its job, at least it doesn’t cost more blood.

Next, you’ll have to pick between two paths that branch apart for multiple events. On one path is a regular fight; on the other is a totem fight, which you’d love to avoid. It seems to add needless complications.

Your figurine seems to scuff against the map as though walking along the white concrete walkways that wind through each neighbourhood near yours. You’re almost nostalgic for a moment before you remember that the moment you return, they’ll be on your back about finding a girl and keeping up with your lawn and making sure the rust doesn’t eat too much of your truck. You just want to play this game and pretend you’ll never have to go back there.

Before the fight, you encounter a trial. Pulling his hood far over his face, Bdubs leans down to peer through a small stone arch; his eyes seem to glow brighter, the way the candles illuminate them orange and yellow from this angle. You look into his swirling eyes as he offers three cards. “Pass one of my challenges and gain a card. The trial of wisdom: the three drawn cards must have at least three sigils combined to pass. The trial of health: the three drawn cards must have at least six health combined to pass. The trial of kin: two of the three cards must be kin to pass.”

What constitutes cards being kin? That seems like too much of a risk for you, if you’re not sure exactly what the requirements entail. Health or sigils, then, which will it be? You’ve been searching for more defensive cards like the mole man, but a good number of your cards do have more than one health. The question is then whether you will draw any cards with more than two health, or whether your luck will run out and instead draw cards with one health. But three sigils across three cards? That seems like quite the challenge. You tap the challenge of health, and hold your deck out for the gamemaster.

He draws from the top of your deck: first the stinkbug, which is promising; then he draws the cockroach, and your hopes sink; but finally he draws your wolf cub, the one you warmed by the fire, and together they give six health for the trial.

Like some kind of drug dealer or spy, Bdubs passes you a card slyly across the table, face down, before leaning back in his seat and removing the stone arch.

A porcupine with the spines. Pretty cheap, and a good defense, not bad! The design is on the cute side, though you wonder if it’s simply a matter of perception—are the other cards simply so disturbing that this card seems relatively tame? Its legs are splayed in a defensive stance, its spines raised, but at least it appears to have its mind intact.

Bdubs sets up a regular fight with nothing special; in the first lane on your side of the table is a fir tree with snow gathered upon its boughs, which seems like a decent defensive card. You peer at the sigil: a winged shield, like one of the sigils on your new mole man. Does it shield from winged attacks? Even if it doesn’t, four health is nothing to scoff at. Across the table, aligned with the second lane, is a delicate sparrow.

You draw your starting deck: a squirrel, of course, and the stoat, the stinkbug, and your mole man.

“Nice topdeck,” sneers Joel.

Cleo scoffs. “It could work, if Impulse knew how to play the damn game.”

“Woah, what’s with the hostility? I know how to play,” you defend as you kill the squirrel to place the stoat across from the sparrow. It deals one damage, unopposed, until the sparrow flies over its head to hit you and even out the score.

“Really?” sniffs Cleo. “’Cause that was a pretty bad play. Seems like you don’t know the strategy.”

You draw a squirrel and suggest, “You could tell me the strategy.”

“Nah,” Joel says. “Can’t tell you anyfin’ that’ll help you too much. Just the basics, like how you should go solve the cabinet puzzles, or that—“

“Enuff chatter!” Bdubs pouts. “We’re tryna play the game, here. Important stuff, remember? Yer not s’posed to say too much, we don’t know what your stupid chatter could do! Ruin a perfectly good run, that’s what I think.”

Examining the board, you note that the stoat will kill the sparrow, but in the first lane a raven is perched and ready to swoop towards your snowy fir, and another sparrow is readied in the third lane. The fir can hold out against the raven for two rounds, which bodes well; but you’ll lose a point for now, since you can’t play anything without killing the stoat. Oh, but you have the stinkbug!

First, you kill your squirrel and the stoat to place the moleman in the second lane; then, using your bones, you play the stinkbug in the third lane, where it deals one damage. During Bdubs’ turn, the snowy fir and mole man both block their opponents, and the stinkbug renders the second sparrow powerless.

You draw a regular card, since a squirrel will hardly help you right now, and find yourself with a wolf.

Only the stinkbug can attack, and it takes its time to kill the helpless sparrow directly in front of it. You can’t say you enjoy the gruesome end, especially the way the stinkbug takes special care to ensure the poor songbird’s life has bled out entirely, but you can appreciate the meticulousness in its twisted form.

You missed a raven swooping into the fourth lane, and you resist the urge to give up. It’s honestly nothing to be dramatic over; you’ll make it just fine. Except you can’t play anything. Still hoping to play the wolf, you draw a squirrel and hold it in your hand as the stinkbug attacks with its meager one damage. The first raven fells the snowy fir; the mole man blocks a hit from the sparrow, then burrows into the table and emerges to take the hit from the second raven as well. You hadn’t know it could do that.

You draw another squirrel and finally can play your wolf. You place it in the first lane to take out the raven, then ring the bell to end your turn. The wolf draws the raven into its jaws in a flurry of black feathers and dark down; the stinkbug deals its routine one damage. Then the mole man blocks the hit from the sparrow, losing its life to defend you from the raven. You draw a squirrel just to move on so your wolf and stinkbug can attack, leaving you the victor with two points of overkill.

With a smile, Bdubs clears his side of the board and lays out three cards for you to choose from while he holds the map, ready to unleash it for you. The skunk, lightweight and stinky, though luckily it’s not a scented card. Beside it is the black goat, a worthy sacrifice that appears to be worth three blood rather than one. Finally, the rat king: a rush of rats with their tails tied in the center—a disturbing scene as they rip and claw mindlessly, screaming, trying to escape their bound tails. You quickly snag the black goat so you don’t have to watch the senseless violence of the rat king; perhaps the skunk would have been smarter upon second thought, but you can’t be sure and the moment has passed.

Next, you can choose to continue on this path to an altar of some sort; but remembering the snapping turtle, you instead choose to hop the fence and refill your pack since you can’t bring yourself to part with the pliers, whatever they may do.

First, he lays out a boulder in a jar, a fan—“to lift your cards in the air for a turn”—, and an hourglass. Since you passed it up so eagerly last time, you reach for the hourglass and drag it into your pack. He replaces it with a frozen opossum in a bottle. Whatever could that do? You’re not sure you want to thaw the opossum, much less discover what its crumpled, refracted corpse looks like when thawed. Instead, recalling the usefulness of the snowy fir, you pick the boulder in a bottle.

Next along this path is a toothed icon, like a bear trap. You immediately push away the terror that comes with the idea of such a trap. It’s not real, not something you’re going to step in. Why can’t you shake the feeling of being hunted?

You may feel hunted, but you’re not really trapped—are you, Impulse? Who’s stopping you? You could leave this cabin whenever you want.

You won’t.

The image of a man you know intimately but can’t remember flashes through your mind, too quick to capture his face.

So it is that you remain in your seat as Bdubs pulls on a mask. It’s much more intricate than the last, and he pulls a black neck gaiter over the wooden nose and mouth. A large gash runs through one eye. It almost seems burned in, seared by some heated element. This mask seems to be held on by a black headband, which he ties into a long, loopy bow behind his head. All in all, it seems much sillier than the other masks he’s used, and you can’t quite take him seriously. Just when you’d been suspecting you’d been playing some kind of forest spirit or eldritch entity, he pulls this out of the woodwork. The voice is even sillier: some kind of flat affect, lilting yet stiff, incredibly unlike the voice he’s been using otherwise. Sure, he’d tried to deepen his voice when playing the mysterious entity within the stone arch, but this is an honest-to-goodness voice. Sultry and smooth, with no trace of his typical singsongy nonsense or wide lisp.

“Take a look at these,” he’s saying. “Real clean pelts, yep, great quality for ya. Costs two per rabbit pelt, five per wolf, and if ya got ten, I can getcha a real special pelt.” He tips out your bowl of nuts and bolts, which you quickly map into two groups of four in your mind.

“Here,” he says, placing one rabbit pelt in front of you, “free o’ charge. You can find the trader just up the road; he’ll pay real nicely for these.”

You carefully portion off five of your points, then another two, leaving you only one nut and the promise that you will retain it once you’ve won.

“I’ll take one wolf and one rabbit pelt, thanks.”

They shuffle into your main deck just fine, like any other cards, but you already regret losing your winnings. As they’d amassed, you’d hardly felt it, but their loss is like a hole in your pack. You feel like something’s leaking out, dripping in a trail behind you. Not like blood, but like oil. Slick, easy to lose, eager to escape its container. Like memory.

There must be something you’re forgetting. But you can’t—you can’t quite wrap your head around what could be missing. You had a normal childhood, did you not? Sure, you went to some boarding school with the bright lights and white hallways, but it was a school. They taught you things about computers and other brand new technologies. Your parents passed young—a train accident on their way to your graduation. You remember combing the woods in search of anything you could recover from the crash, and finding absolutely nothing—almost like they had never been there, like there had been no wreckage or bodies in the forest no more than a few days earlier. Then you got your job, and you grew up, and you became a man that anyone would want to be. Good job, good house, good salary. What more could there be?

There was... You remember someone, actually. You remember someone who used to cover his face because the skin on his jaw had been badly injured. The entire left side of his face had been damaged as a teenager, and when he grew up he’d still been rather insecure about it. You remember he was distant, or you were, and though you grew up together, the two of you could hardly be called friends. What had happened to draw you apart? You don’t remember the last time you saw him—could it simply have been graduation?

How strange, to have known someone for so long and yet to recall so little of his manner. What had his name been?

Across the table, Bdubs has twisted two bits of carved wood together to bless all his canine cards with... a temporary stamp of the water sigil, so each dives underwater after attacking. That sounds like it could actually benefit you, since it will allow you to attack directly. It’ll also fill up his spaces in the lanes. Yeah, you can work with this.

First, he opens with a coyote in the second lane. He really seems to like that opener. Too bad it’s worthless.

You’ve drawn a squirrel, the stoat, and two rabbit pelts. Well, not exactly what you were hoping for. You kill the squirrel and play the stoat in front of the coyote, dealing one point of damage. The coyote moves up and swipes two health off your stoat, then submerges itself. You wonder if it’s all right, or if it can feel the water entering its lungs while it’s underwater. Do the cards really feel anything? Surely not. This is a game, a means to an end, not some kind of purgatorial torment.

Next, Bdubs prepares a bloodhound in the fourth lane. You draw from your main deck: the wolf cub. That’s perfect, exactly what you need. First, though, you choose to eke as much use out of your stoat as possible. Instead, you fill the space in front of the bloodhound with a simple rabbit pelt and attempt to sacrifice it to play the wolf cub. It seems, however, that pelts have no blood. Maybe you should have assumed that, but better to try and fail than never try at all. You always thought that saying was right, even if your classmates seemed to think it was just rhetorical crap. Well, look at you now: winning a weird card game in a cabin in the woods with no clue where you really are. Maybe they were right, actually.

The stoat deals a point of damage, then the bloodhound rips the rabbit pelt to shreds. It’s quite thorough—maybe it smelled rabbit and saw red.

You draw a squirrel for your wolf cub, playing it in front of the bloodhound. It’ll take some damage before it matures, sure, but it’ll be worth it. A powerful adult, when grown, merely some growing pains along the way. You tell yourself this and push it to the back of your mind. Both your stoat and wolf cub add one damage each to the scale. You’re merely one point from winning, and yet so far.

The coyote kills the stoat, and the bloodhound scars the wolf cub; both then return to the water as Bdubs prepares an alpha in the third lane. It doesn’t matter, though, as your grown wolf cub gnashes its teeth and viciously digs its claws into the submerged bloodhound’s card, dealing its full three damage directly to Bdubs’ scale. Vicory.

What a simple game! If only they could all be like this. Just a couple turns, nothing complicated. Yet still you crave some kind of challenge.

The urge reminds you—there are more puzzles to be solved. Hadn’t Cleo and Joel mentioned something you could pause now to work on... something to put your mind through its paces... Right!

Standing, you navigate the horribly sticky, dark floor to the newly unlocked cabinet. The puzzles both have four lanes and four rows, much like the table you’ve been playing on, save that the bottom row has an icon indicating it represents your hand; each lane has a brass rectangle that can be slid and clicked into one of the three rows in its column, but not moved from side to side. Just like the game you’ve been playing, then.

On the left side is a button with a bell icon and an odd cutout with two numbers hanging in the center from horizontal pegs and a slash between them, currently reading ‘0/5’. So... you should just try to beat your opponent in a normal game, with these unlabelled cards. The first is a 2/1 card, then three 1/3 cards. You align them all in the third row and press the button. The number ticks up to 5/5 and the puzzle pops forward—it’s the front face of a drawer. The puzzle was almost too simple for you to understand how it worked, but all that really matters is you’ve gotten it open.

Inside is a sheet of paper folded into three sections. It appears to be some sort of official correspondence within a company called SystemTech Inc. regarding... Regarding the loss of two high quality humanoid computational system prototypes and one older generation humanoid computational system. So... androids? That sounds like androids. But they’re the stuff of science fiction, like Asimov writes. They’re not real.

Apparently back in the early 50s, these androids had been released as a round of experiments concluded. But this correspondence, dated in ‘58, seems like they wanted their property back. But that means the androids were, what, sentient enough to exist in society? Despite your work with computers, you find it difficult to believe that kind of tech could ever even fit inside something so comparatively miniscule as a human body; you know how enormous computers are—they take up entire floors of your workplace. All that, packed into a human-sized supercomputer smart enough to mimic sentience? No way.

The letter also mentions some kind of artist collective, which a couple experimental subjects had developed ties to and which, apparently, the company suspected was hosting their ‘lost property.’ The terminology makes you shudder—too similar to what you’ve read in history books. The Hermit Collective, it’s called, and that sparks somewhat of a memory. Have you heard of them somewhere, or seem their work, maybe? You’ve never really had much experience with art, and certainly not an artist collective. Still. You file the information away for later and move on to the second puzzle.

This one has an interesting trick: a skink card seems to be trapped by the brass retainer in the second row of the second lane. There are other skinks in the other lanes to the right, but they aren’t fixed in place. You first try the simplest arrangement, hoping for the best without really trying to puzzle out a solution; the flying card forces up the card above it, which can block your flying card—no points there. The counter reads a measly one point, even though the space in front of the three-power card is open. The skink, you recall, has a tail. The sigil shows the tail broken. Perhaps when struck, the skink creates a tail in the slot next to it. You try a new alignment of the small brass panels, leaving the skink alone, and tally four points. Only missing one, huh. But if you move the flying card down, and the flying defense card, you’ll hit that extra point. Bingo!

The second drawer opens, and you pull out several stacks of stapled pages; they seem to be electrical diagrams, but the markings are more complicated and compact than you’ve ever seen. The capacitors and resistors, for one, are estimated to withstand ridiculously high power flow. These designs are simply too good to be true; nothing on earth could...

Then you flip to a list of supplies; it continues for several pages, listing all variety of nonmagnetic metal components, tubing of various sizes, enough oil to fill a human circulatory system, and dyed silicone. The page after that is covered in sketches of the androids, detailing where each larger component lies: here for the engine that will be its heart, there for the tubing that will replaces its respiratory system, here is the complicated system that breaks down food like the digestive system and processes it into something like waste. Behind that is a report, mostly redacted, that seems to detail the android’s creation.

There’s only one page behind this one, and you’re not sure you want to see it, so instead, you flip through the other packets. They’re both nearly identical to each other, but different from the first. The schematics are even more complicated than the first, though you can hardly believe your eyes.

You pick a packet and flip to the final page.

There, staring up at you with closed, lifeless eyes that had yet to be animated, is your odd acquaintance who would, in the future, cover his face with a mask. His face is pristine here: perfect silicone freshly laid over the metal contraptions of his face and tacked into place, not yet melted or burned or whatever happened to him. His hair is vibrant white, though his eyebrows are still a deep brown. He looks... unsettling. It sends a shiver down your spine as if you’ve seen a dead body. Quickly you shove the packets back into the drawer and hastily push it shut, though you can feel some of the pages stuck between the drawer and the sides of the opening.

Bdubs has unrolled the map for you, akin to your very own neighbourhood, and suddenly everything seems far too similar for your liking. “What was that?” You point to the cabinet accusingly.

Across the table, he shrugs, raising his eyebrows surprisingly high. “I dunno, I’m not the one who put the stuff in there. You’d hafta ask Joe. They’re kinda... They oversee the cabin, most times, not me. I just play the game the way I was taught to.”

You’re sick of the deflecting, sick of the lies. Sick of not knowing where you are or what’s going on. “Who the hell is Joe?”

“I toldja!” Bdubs cries.

“He told you,” Cleo repeats, voice even and much less animated than Bdubs. “Joe oversees this cabin, not the game. And no, you can’t speak to them. You have to play the game, Impulse.”

“Just play the bloody game, man!” Joel shouts, inspiring a rather strong ringing in your left ear.

Gritting your teeth, you lean back in your chair and fist your hands into the legs of your pants. “Fine,” you grit, “I’ll keep playing the game. But I’d better get an explanation later.”

You move your figurine to the next spot with a vengeance, neither looking at nor caring about the icon you’ll land on. Maybe you should’ve.

You’re not prepared for Bdubs to once again don the mask of the man you once knew—

“Etho!” you cry at last, pointing with all your might to the mask. “How the hell do you know Etho? Was he an android? Why does he—Why is he a character in your game?”

“I’m jest the trader,” he says in that casual, silken accent, as he slips on a pair of plastic glasses—the ones with the fake nose and mustache attached. But as you peer into the depths of the gaiter, you don’t see it moving. “Show me your pelts, Impulse, I’ll see what I can offer in return.”

Listening with your eyes closed, his voice seems to originate from far behind the gamemaster. Is he another eye, someone watching you play? Just how many people around here are interested in watching you grow horrified and enraged in turn at this game?

“Etho, do you know me? We—Didn’t we go to school together? Do we know each other?”

Again, he shakes his head and repeats, “I’m jest the trader.”

Frustrated, you try to swallow your nostalgia, your memories, and the sheer feeling of wrongness. You’re missing something, and you can’t reach it yet. You don’t understand what’s missing in this equation: you knew Etho, once, even if you hadn’t quite been friends—Etho was one of the advanced androids that was released by SystemTech Inc.—Etho may in fact be here, watching you play this game. What’s the final piece of the puzzle? It’s on the tip of your tongue, something you should know, something you should be able to figure out with ease, and yet your own mind feels like it’s limiting you.

You stare at the two rabbit pelts and one wolf pelt on the table, and the cards the trader has laid out for you. For the rabbit pelts, you choose two cards which you think could be very powerful: the secretive kingfisher, a manic look in its visible eye, and the fervent mantis—both with sigils to help them within your deck. For the wolf pelt, you see multiple options that entice you, including a deadly adder with an arrow-shaped sigil that appears to mean it will move after its turn, but none so much as the raven egg with the same sigil as the field mice. It only costs one blood, and creates a duplicate of itself in your hand when played? And it’s a fledgling, as well, which you assume will become a raven. Very powerful indeed. You’re satisfied with your selections.

Something twists in your gut when Bdubs removes the trader’s mask. You almost had a chance to understand something around here, if only he hadn’t been so secretive. He’d seemed... was it sorrowful? There’d been something in his voice, perhaps, for you to cling to.

Next along the path is the last stop before the paths narrow and something large and ominous blocks your path. Its stench permeates even here: rotten fish and stagnant water, like a diseased pond left to rot in the backyards of a circle of houses. You pause briefly at the campfire, where Bdubs and his group of skeletal survivors drool at your creatures, offering to strengthen its power if you simply let it join them in the warm red glow. Looking over your deck, you realize there are some cards you don’t want to lose, and you can’t trust these survivors not to eat whatever you put in front of them. You could buff something cheap, something you could lose. The raven egg? But it’s too powerful, and so is the mantis. The coyote is too brittle and the cost too high. Slowly, you select the river otter: a card you’ve never played, whose use you understand but which hasn’t helped your hand as of yet. Would you miss it?

But it’s no matter; Bdubs simply amends the card’s power and allows you to draw it back into the safety of your deck.

No sooner has your figurine touched the icon of the next encounter than Bdubs is rolling up the map and pulling on his next mask. Eyes filtered blue through the lens of the mask, he appears to be some kind of fish man. Thin, delicate frills of wood extend to either side, and two strands of mustache seem to droop like a catfish’s feelers from either side of his mouth. Even his lips stick out like a fish’s—not puckered, but prominent and wide.

“Hey Impulse,” he greets, leisurely yet threatening. He raises his fist, a large fishhook clenched between his fingers. “I’m the angler. Got any fresh fish for me?”

It’s almost absurd, but so absurd it circles right back around to frightening. This must be someone else speaking for Bdubs, because it’s certainly not his voice. On his side of the board, he prepares only a lone beaver in the second lane, lit coldly by the dual candles ignited within the skull. A second life; a second stage.

“Oh, almost forgot,” he chuckles. Pinching out one of your candles, he hands you a card: the smoke, with no power and one health, will give four bones upon its demise and costs nothing to play. That could come in useful, in a pinch. You decide to save it for the second wave, whatever that may be, if you don’t near the brink of loss in this first stage.

You begin with a squirrel, of course; the stoat, the cockroach, and the kingfisher are at your disposal as well. You sacrifice the squirrel to play the kingfisher, and pass the remainder of your turn, satisfied with one damage. It can’t protect you, but it will reliably get more points on the board, regardless of what goes up against it.

“The industrious beaver,” the angler muses as he slides the card up and places a pair of two-health dams beside it, “knows a thing or two about... going underground, ya might say. Shows the benefit of building up your fortifications, and goes to show that sometimes ya just gotta hunker down with yer community. Isn’t that right, Impulse?”

These people keep trying to tell you something, acting like you know more than you do, and you’re beginning to think they actually do believe you know as much as them.

But what could you know about... hunkering down with a community? You’d never presume anyone from your neighbourhood or even the HOA would allow you to stay for dinner, much less stay for a while. You’ve never had what you would consider a strong community, or really any friends. No one from school sticks out—except Etho, but he interests you because he remained in your periphery for quite some time, and now he’s returned, and apparently he’s an android. Whatever they think you know, you don’t.

You’re a coward, Impulse, through and through. You know it; that’s all you will know.

The beaver hits you with one point of damage. Nothing to be concerned about, so you draw a second squirrel and play the stoat in the fourth lane—you only have two free lanes left and you’d like to get some damage in more than you want to kill the beaver. You’ll get something out next turn.

But before your creatures attack, the angler leans forward with a cruel grin and softly places the tip of his hook on your stoat with a light thud. “Fresher fish,” he rumbles, “easy pickins.” And he drags it roughly across the table to his side.

Joel growls. “Oh, no, not the stoat. Impulse, you bloody fool, you lost the stoat!”

That seems unfair, that he can simply do that without first explaining what the hook was! It could’ve just been a prop! But it wasn’t and Joel’s stoat works for the angler now, at least until the battle ends.

Still, your kingfisher deals its damage directly to the angler before the beaver scratches your side once more and the stoat hits you for another point.

You have a cockroach and the smoke in hand. If the smoke gives bones, you should be able to sacrifice it, right? Crossing your fingers, you draw from your main deck: a porcupine. Perfect! New plan in mind, you kill the smoke, gaining its odd, transparent bones, to play the porcupine across from the beaver. Maybe killing it will also kill the dams, you think vaguely. Then, using the bones, you play your undying cockroach before the stoat.

But you’ve forgotten again about the angler’s hook. He slides the cockroach to his side before your creatures attack. The porcupine hits the beaver and the kingfisher gains you a point, but the cockroach has betrayed you. Next, his beaver hurts your porcupine—but finds itself with a snoutful of quills—and the cockroach hits you directly. To keep your progress, you uncork the jar and pull out the boulder, playing it in the fourth lane where all the action seems to be. Then you ring the bell, so the angler should steal your boulder.

Once the angler has indeed hooked the powerless stone, your porcupine finally impales the beaver on its many quills—though the dams remain in its lieu—and the kingfisher, as always, contributes what it can. You resolve to fill your hand with cards for the next stage while you wait for your loyal pair of creatures to kill what they can. It takes two more turns, during which the angler aligns a second beaver in the third lane, but it’s blocked by the dam left by the first beaver and you are spared.

With a wink, the angler extinguishes one of his candles and swipes his remaining cards from the board, replacing them with bait buckets before only your porcupine and kingfisher; they appear to have no power and one health. Unlike the mule, you get the uneasy feeling you shouldn’t hit these—that, or you should, lest they turn into something much worse next turn. But they don’t have the fledgling sigil—can they transform without it? The angler is, beneath the mask, a gamemaster; maybe he can do strange things that break the rules of the game. That’s how he’s been playing all these cards so far, hasn’t he? He definitely hasn’t had the proper blood or bones to play all these. Heck, his cards don’t even have costs in the upper right corners. What a cheat!

In the interim, you’ve drawn both the otter and the raven egg to attack while your mole man defends. You draw a squirrel. For now, you hold onto it; the porcupine will allow you to see what happens with the bait, and if need be, you can play your mole man next round.

Your porcupine loyally strikes the bait bucket. It tips over, and in its place, the angler reels in a great white shark with four attack. The humble kingfisher continues its path to enlightenment, or whatever else it may be doing while it steadily wins you the battle. The great white causes a problem, now, as it submerges until a thin layer of water covers it and the angler turns the card over.

There’s nothing you can change now, as the great white wraps its toothy maw around the porcupine and chews it into several pieces; the quills still stick themselves in the shark’s snout, however, and it resubmerges to deal with this new injury. The bait remains still, and the angler lines up two otters in the first and fourth lanes.

You draw a second squirrel and play your mole man in a desperate attempt to survive the great white’s powerful jaws. The kingfisher dives as always.

The otters swim forward to deal one damage each, but the hulking mole man tanks their hits, as well as that of the great white; it dies after valiantly defending you from the second otter. “The simple otter knows when it’s time to show its face, and when it’s time to dive into the deep and nurse its hunger.” A dark look crosses the mask of the angler, a look of vengeance. This guy seems like he’s spent too long nursing his hunger and not enough time above water, by his own analogy.

You’re practically forced to draw a squirrel. Your kingfisher is too good, and at least an otter could even the score. As it stands, you’re up by two, and he’ll deal six damage to combat your one; that’ll leave you down by three. You’ll survive, you think, staring at the raven egg. Down by two, if you play it in front of an otter. The kingfisher would have been better played elsewhere. It’s not worth it to hope for a card that costs bones. You draw the squirrel and kill it to play the raven egg in the first lane; a copy is created in your hand, though you likely won’t be able to use it. Then, in a move you will almost certainly regret, you kill the faithful kingfisher and instead play your otter across from the other. The otter attacks for two, and your turn is ended.

The first of the angler’s otters gnaws weakly on the raven egg, but cannot kill it. The shark hits hard, though, and the angler’s second otter scratches at you as well.

You simply draw a squirrel and place it as a decoy for the shark, then ring the bell. Your raven and otter both attack for two, and you’re almost there as the only creature from the angler who can hurt you is the otter in the fourth lane. You draw from your deck just in case you may find a creature that requires bones, but it’s just your black goat. Useless, now. You ring the bell, and win with a single point of overkill.

The moment the bolt hits your bowl, you lean back in your chair and stretch with an almighty groan. You feel like crap, your brain is fried, and you don’t think you can possibly go on playing. But you do.

The angler’s mask is removed and Bdubs becomes... just Bdubs. The way you like him. At least, you think you like him as Bdubs. You can’t be sure. He seems treacherous, to say the least, like he’d betray you at the drop of a hat. But this is just a game, and he’s simply the gamemaster. For reasons beyond your understanding, he is running this game for you and you can’t say you don’t appreciate the effort he’s putting in.

“That last boss,” you find yourself saying, “that was a nice amount of challenging. Thanks for that.”

You mean it genuinely, but Bdubs rolls his eyes. “Yeah, yeah. I thoughtcha were gonna die through and through. You wisened up, though, did you ever. And just in time, too! Geez. It hurt to watch!”

Yikes—not worth complimenting him; he’ll just bite right back with an insult. You’ll probably forget that soon enough, but for now you simply flip over the stained, worn cards in his thick wooden chest and consider them.

“The... uninspiring geck. Mebbe you can find a use for it?” It’s a rather plain card, containing a vaguely reptilian creature with one power, one health, and no cost. But is it worth it to go searching through your deck for it whenever you need to play something free?

“The holy mantis god. A perfect incarnation ‘f terror.” Its many legs are bound in prayerful subservience to its acolytes, it appears to strike in three directions, not just two as your other mantis does. And for only one blood, that could be incredibly powerful.

“The daus. Ick, that filthy, feral hog. It becomes incensed when its chimes are struck.” You recall this one from the first boss fight, against the prospector. What had he said? That it protected its own. When its chimes are struck, it attacks the creature that harmed them, yeah, that’s it. But strange protectiveness aside, the thought of the prospector’s expression alone is enough to make up your mind. Whatever the daus has to do with you, you’re going to find out. You shuffle it into your deck and advance to the next map.

“You grew tired,” Bdubs drawls, “of the same thing day in and day out. Your feet took you far beyond the picket fences and whitewashed houses, venturing from the paved streets of the prairie. In your travels, you reached The Escape.”

This map seems to have only one branch, just after the beginning, after which it remains in two steady roads on either side of a great divide. It reminds you of a divided highway, with thick forest around and between the two lanes.

Odd, don’t you think, for a forest to be called The Escape?

But that’s what you came here to do, isn’t it? Every weekend, isn’t that what you do? You get in your truck, you drive until you can’t see the city and then you keep going for a couple more hours, and you escape. Because out here there’s no HOA, no expectations for you to fit in. This forest is your escape.

This game is your salvation.

Your first stop along the path is to a pair of mushrooms: once the map has been removed, they sprout up from the table itself. They seem to lean in close, to reach toward you with thin tendrils spreading across the table from their stems. The fine white hairs creep slowly across the table as Bdubs dons a very strange mask.

“Hallo,” greets a deep, accented voice through one side of the mask; its left eye glows a vibrant red, staring at you incessantly. The wood has been carved into small strips that peel away from the mask, like the petals of a pinecone—or like fur.

The mask flips to the second face, connected to the first, and a lighter, more whimsical voice greets you. “Hello, hello! Have you brought us two of the same creature from your deck today?” You see the hint of pine curling up and around the far side of the second face. Perhaps a ram horn?

“We are the mycologists.”

“The mycologists, yes!”

“And we would like to assist you. Can you provide two of de same creature?”

It’s offputting, the way the mask flips between the two so rapidly as they finish each other’s sentences and speak over one another in their opposite tones and registers. Still, you flip through your deck. Right, the only doubles you have are your wolves; the mycologists seem... unstable. Will you trust them with your wolves?

Slowly, you pass them the cards.

The hand that reaches out to grab them is covered in a plush green substance—moss? no, an odd fur—and the wrist beyond sprouts mushrooms and fungi of all assortments that defy gravity and space to grow as they will. You’re not entirely certain it’s Bdubs’ hand, not when you’re watching the two mycologists, fused at the sides of their faces, stare intently at your wolves.

“This won’ be pleasant,” the mycologist with the red eye says. His accent softens the consonants, blurring them together as the vowels deepen.

The other nods, in turn nodding both their faces at once. “Which... yeah, you may wanna look away for this.”

You look for a moment longer, then cover your eyes. It’s worse this way. A rough rasping echoes throughout the cabin, which quickly bites into what sounds like flesh; you hear liquid run to the edge of the mushrooms and drip to the table. You don’t want to know.

“Now that’s pretty darn impressive!” brags the lighter voice.

“Take back your creature.”

But you gave them...

The scene before you is gruesome. Bits of fur and chunks of flesh remain scattered upon the mushrooms, and the fungal tendrils creeping across the table have run red with blood. A single card rests within the muck and viscera. Its two halves are sewn together with crude sinew and a few bloody fingerprints almost blot the shocking truth: you may only have one wolf, but it now has six power and four health.

Awed, you draw it into your hand; the back of the card still appears perfectly normal—indistinguishable from any other. Before you can mention it further, the mycologists slice the mushrooms off the table with one fell sweep and begin to retreat.

“We hope to see you again soon, Impulse,” rumbles the first.

“A-good luck!”

Then Bdubs removes the mask and all trace of the mycologists disappears.

Intrigued by their odd personas, you push your chair back and return to the puzzle cabinet. At the least, you’ve had time to process what you found in the first two drawers, and you think you might be ready to see what’s next.

The puzzle on the bottom left has skinks, ants, and a couple miscellaneous cards. A skink is held in place by the brass casing in the first lane, on Bdubs’ side. Well, the easy first move is to line up the flying creature and move the creature with flying defense out of its way for an easy two points. You remember struggling with the skinks last time; this time, you remove the creature opposing it. The other lanes just take a bit of tinkering until you think you’ve solved it.

When you push the bell button, the score flips to 4/5. Right, there’s only one ant. Shifting around the ants and flying card, you finally bring it up to 5/5.

It doesn’t seem quite so hard now that you understand the skink.

The drawer pops open; inside are a variety of items: a manila folder, a card, and a carved squirrel head. The card is strange: it’s a wolf, but its fur is vibrant ginger against the plain card, and its attack is lower. A scar crosses one of its eyes.

Someone makes a sound of surprise—a soft, smooth gasp. “Took you long enough,” a high-pitched voice demands.

You find yourself apologizing to the card, or whoever’s speaking now that you’ve found it. “Do I know you?”

A pause. “Maybe soon, Impulse. For now, just keep playing the game. Keep playing the game. I think you can do it this time, honestly.”

“This time?” you mutter.

“Found Gem’s card, didja?” Bdubs shouts. He gets less intimidating by the minute; forest spirit—yeah, right. The man’s loud as a misaligned lawnmower. “Give it here, I’ll add it to yer deck.”

You hand it over, along with the carved squirrel head, and hold the manila folder in your flat palm. Whatever it is, you’re definitely not ready for it.

You open it anyways.

On the left, a tiny paperclip clings to a polaroid image of a man you shouldn’t recognize. By all means, you should have no idea who he is. He’s sitting stiffly at a fancy table at what looks like an art exhibit, enduring the ribbing of his friends with a shy smile. His eyes are closed, but he was clearly looking toward the camera. Across his face, between his eyes and over the bridge of his nose, is an X-shaped scar. To his right is a short man with a large grin and a thick braid peeking out from beneath a baseball cap; one arm is around the other man’s neck, while his hand closer to the camera ruffles the man’s hair and blocks most of his face from view. On the other side is a man in a red shirt and suspenders, wearing sunglasses indoors and making a peace sign towards the camera. A hawaiian shirt is slung over one of his shoulders, like he only took it off to look fancy for the exhibit.

The man in the center calls to you. You shouldn’t know him, in his gray suit and purple tie; yet you do.

The pages opposite the polaroid are clamped in with long brass fasteners. Xisuma was his name, and he died in the woods in the fall of 1959. He’s the snapping turtle—that is, he’s the one you saw—remembered—when you sacrificed the snapping turtle.

The top page is a communique regarding the Hermit Collective, dated in July 1959. It mentions Xisuma as the leader of the Hermits, an organization mingling with artists of all affiliations and spreading news to assist terrorism. It mentions ties to communism and homosexuals. People within whatever group or organization this was sent to were encouraged to fight communism and degeneracy by reporting sightings of the Hermits.

You don’t believe a word of it. Xisuma may have been the leader of this group, sure, but terrorism? Ties to political powers? That seems like a lot. You look once again at the polaroid; the people in it don’t look like terrorists, but again, you’re no expert. They just seem... friendly.

The next document is a newspaper page, continued from the front page, which is also stapled in. Xisuma was killed in a government hunt of the Hermit Collective, shot in the back in these very woods by an FBI agent in hot pursuit of the Hermits, who were in possession of stolen items worth over $1B. The number sends a shudder down your spine. What could have been worth that much? What could’ve been worth Xisuma’s life? In the faint memory you have, you remember him as a quiet soul with a smile like a milkshake. Remembering him is warm like summer rain. In the end, though, you can’t escape the blood. It had splattered on your shoe—you... tripped, or fell, and when you looked at your feet you saw his blood still on your shoes as you kicked wildly. But he’d succeeded. At the very least, he’d succeeded.

Wait. He’d succeeded at... Ugh. It’s just out of reach, buried under such a thin layer of dirt but so thoroughly it may as well be concrete. You should be able to remember what he’d been doing when he’d died.

And why had you been there?

That’s the money question: What were you doing in the middle of this forest three years ago with Xisuma and the Hermits?

Below the article are several more, which you flip through, and the final few pages are a coroner’s report with diagrams and images. He’d been in very good condition when he died; he’d been shot in the back. The bullet tore his heart apart. It was a special bullet designed to shatter on impact, sending shrapnel deep into any tissue surrounding the wound. It would have been just as bad had the bullet entered his lung; he never stood a chance. He would have died on impact.

But that’s not what you remember. Not that you really believe your memory’s all that reliable at the moment, but you remember catching him in your arms, and more importantly, you remember him peeling your arms away and telling you to run. You remember someone else tugging you away. You remember, as you ran in a different direction, glancing back to see Xisuma still watching you, and someone else, someone in a long, hooded black coat, running the other direction. Someone escaping, you recall with a small bloom of pride, though you can’t remember why.

Reverently, you close the manila folder and move to slide it back into the draw much more carefully than you did last time—at the last second, a photograph slips out, and as you catch it you see the glimpse of a name written on the back, amid several others. Your name.

A pair of rounded fingers plucks the image from your fingers. You’ve never seen Bdubs standing, but he is a little shorter than you. Still, he’s not afraid to stare up at you warningly. “Not yet, Impy. Not sure how that—who put that in there, that’s... That’s fer later. Trust me. It’s a later thing. Don’t go to fast, he told us, so let’s just, let’s go sit back down and play the game. You’re pretty far! So don’t stop now, let’s keep going and... and we’ll see what happens.”

He’s so clearly hiding something. Literally, he’s hiding the picture behind his back. And you could take him in a fight. Right?

You let something like resignation settle on your face, turning to walk back to the table, then quickly spin and reach behind Bdubs. He’s not that dumb, though, except maybe he is, because to keep it from you he just sticks his arm straight up, holding the photo like a child with a trophy. Well, luckily, you’re just a couple inches taller, and even when you’re both on tiptoe, you can just barely reach the paper. Once you’ve got a grip, though, you’re set—creeping from the edge to the corner to the heart of the picture until you rip it from his hand triumphantly.

If he doesn’t want you to see it, it must be important, so you retreat to your side of the table and hold it under the light. It’s an old picture: grainy, brown, yellowed at the edges. When you flip it over, there’s a list of names: Jessassin, Hypno, Tango, Impulse, & Etho. On the front, below the image on the border of the paper, the image has been titled, “The Rescues.”

The person on the left is wearing jeans, a black sweatshirt, and a mask; his hands are tucked into the pocket, and the guy next to him is leaning on him with an arm around his shoulder. These must be Jessassin and Hypno, then. Hypno is wearing some kind of tactical gear. It’s hard to tell from the grainy photo, but he seems to wear a holster hooked around his shoulders and buckled across his chest. He’s got a bit of blond fluff on his chin—maybe the start of a beard—and a black bandana wrapped over his hair. His pants are tight leather, and he wears a long black overcoat trimmed with gold. He’s got a troublemaker’s grin, especially as he leans his head against Jessassin’s.

On the right of the image is the man you once knew, the one who was apparently some kind of advanced android. Etho stands straight and secluded, though clearly welcome in the photo and among those being photographed. His memorable mask covers his face, though the mop of thick white hair flops free in whatever direction the wind last decided it should go. You can’t tell if he’s smiling, but he doesn’t seem unhappy.

The center takes you by surprise. It’s you, of course, but you’d known you would be there. The surprise is that you’re holding the other man’s hand—Tango—and he’s watching you adoringly as you give the camera your most awkward smile.

You... You’re not sure you remember him. But how can that be? You remember Etho and Xisuma; why, if this man seemed to mean so much to you, don’t you remember him?

You don’t remember this picture being taken. You don’t remember being with these people, being with the Hermits. There’s still more you’re missing. There has to be more. There has to be some way this is, like, your twin who has the same name as you, or some alter ego sullying your name. In 1959, and even in 1954, as the picture is dated, you weren’t hanging out with an artist collective. You were... In 1954 you would’ve still been in your last year of postgrad, in more of those white tiled halls. In 1954, you should’ve looked eight years younger. If you’d gone to school with these guys, how come you all look so grown up?

Do you remember ever seeing yourself in the mirror and looking any different than you do right now?

There are so many questions, swimming over and under and through one another like ghostly fish leftover from the angler’s buckets. You take them all and stuff them in a jar and set it on the table in your mind. Once you’ve won, you can let them all free, but you have a hunch that if you keep trying to win, then along the way, you’ll have the time to remember whatever it is you’ve forgotten. And at the end, if you really want to, you can ask.

So you lean the picture against the base of the scale and move your figurine along the map.

Bdubs pulls out the stone arch and tugs his mossy hood up to shadow his face entirely. “Three trials, you know the deal. Here’s yer options: the trial of wisdom, trial of power, or trial of kin. Make your choice.”

“Give me the trial of wisdom, and I’ll give you one of my own: was I one of them?”

First, you draw the kingfisher with two sigils.

“One of the creatures in the cards? Don’t be silly, Impulse.”

The cockroach, with a sigil. You’ve beaten the trial, yet it continues.

You roll your eyes. “A Hermit.”

The black goat.

He looks up at you as he withdraws from the arch and pulls his hood back, handing you a card. It’s a mole with a beehive stamped on it: good for defense.

Nodding slowly, as if coming to a decision in his mind, Bdubs works his jaw and hems and haws. “You were,” he affirms at last.

You leap on the shred of information like a starved cougar happening upon a fattened rabbit. “What happened?”

“Ah-ah!” He waggles his finger at you. “A trial for a trial. You’ve used up your question, wait’cher turn.”

Fighting the sudden urge to throttle him, you take a deep breath and glance back to the photo, an unknown fondness washing over you. Whoever they were, they must have meant a lot to you.

When you move your figurine to the totem fight icon, the gamemaster watches you for a moment before he rolls up the map and connects his totem.

Inexplicably, you burst out in giggles. “Stinky deer? You’re making the deer stinky? You gotta be kidding. Dude, that’s—how can this be a dramatic fight when the deer are just stinky?”

Bdubs crosses his arms, apparently pouting as he sinks into the shadows. “We’ll see who’s laughin’ when my smelly deer defeat your stupid deck!”

“Be nice!” demands Cleo, who hasn’t spoken in a while.

“Yeah, Bdubs,” Gem agrees, “go easy on the guy. Look at him, he’s got anxiety!”

You’re not anxious, what’s she talking about? If anything, you’ve “got” anger. Why do they all seem so intent that you find information, but the moment you try to ask about it, they get all skittish?

In the second lane, Bdubs has aligned a pronghorn that will attack on each diagonal, and beside it he’s prepared an elk fawn. Into your hand you’ve drawn a squirrel, the stunted wolf, the coyote, and the wolf recently changed by the mycologists. As soon as you can get that wolf out, you can win. It’s just a matter of holding out until then. First, obviously, you want to play the stunted wolf: it’s cheap points. Killing the squirrel, you place it in the fourth lane, where it will stop the elk fawn’s attack and kill it during the next round.

“Canine deck much?” Gem mutters to herself from somewhere within the shadows to your left. You have to admit, it’s fun to have drawn three canine cards as your topdeck, but it’s not like anyone controls what you get. Random luck seems to favor you, though. You get the feeling you’ve failed this fight before, a sinking feeling like you’ve jumped into a lake and realized at the peak of your cannonball that it’s shallower than you thought. You want to win. You want to prove yourself, you want to win. You don’t want to let them down—whoever “them” is to you.

Ignoring the roiling in your gut, you ring the bell. Once the stunted wolf has gained two points in your favour, the pronghorn quickly negates it, rubbing its pointed antlers into your side of the table as if marking its territory. The elk fawn does one damage of its own. Then they move: the pronghorn into the first lane, and the elk fawn into the fourth.

You draw a squirrel. You can just play it here and now, and you’ll win; but on the other hand, you can wait and try to get overkill damage.

Is there a point? Recalling the map, there’s a trapper ahead. But was there a trader? You don’t want to be stuck with more pelts than you need when you reach the boss. Beyond that, though, the trader did offer some pretty good cards. They could come in handy in the future. Is it worth it to risk the game on that chance?

In the first lane you watch Bdubs prepare a moose buck. With its four power and seven health, it might be one of the most intimidating cards you’ve ever seen.

You don’t risk it. The squirrel and the stunted wolf allow the chimaera wolf to tip the gamemaster’s side of the scale to the table, but just barely.

Your next stop is, as you predicted, the trapper.

His mask almost seems a mockery now that you remember him, or maybe the outline of him, like a bloody footstep in the snow. You remember that you used to know him, and now it taunts you. Is it really him out of sight, or is this all some messed up game designed to screw with your head?

Or, if he’s an android, did they just take his voicebox and make it speak things with his voice?

“Etho,” you choke at last, looking beyond the gamemaster’s tilted gaze to the space over his shoulder where the trapper had spoken from last time. You bite back the obvious question, because you know the answer—you know who he is. There are a hundred things you want to ask. You settle for: “What were we?”

The darkness stares back. Emotionless. Faceless, wordless, stoic. “Property,” says Etho finally.

“Etho!” scolds Cleo, but the darkness moves vaguely, waving them off.

“Take a pelt for free, Impulse, and consider my wares. I hear the trader down the road pays good cards for ‘em.”

“But aren’t you the trader?” you ask, trading your four nuts and bolts for two more rabbit pelts. Fodder, if nothing else.

“Nah,” he grins slyly. “That’s my friend Shade-e-e—three e’s on that. He’s a totally different guy, super honest.”

You linger in silence, the darkness seemingly lighter than before as you consider the man you barely remember. “I... I don’t have any more nuts and bolts. I’ll have to be going.”

The darkness seems to lean in, to ghost across your face like a breath or a caress. “Take a wolf pelt, on me. It’ll be useful down the road.”

With a hesitant glance to the gamemaster wearing Etho’s carved face, you add a wolf pelt to your deck as well.

“I’ll be seeing you soon, Impulse. Hopin’ you make it there safe and sound.”

Bdubs takes off the mask with a glare behind him, hissing, “Yer not supposed to do any’a that, yer goin’ off script!” But, recovering himself, he soothes the upset oleander blossoms on his cloak and lays out a vanilla fight.

In the second and third lanes he places ants whose power is obscured by the symbol of an ant. Do ants have some kind of special attack undisclosed by sigil?

Considering your hand, you first sacrifice the squirrel to play your buff otter in the second lane, then use the bones to place the chittering opossum in the first lane; you’re left holding only the field mice as you ring the bell.

A neat three damage to begin isn’t bad at all!

Then the ants draw near, and their power resolves into two each. Maybe they have a maximum damage, like four, and the maximum damage is divided across all ants on the board. That could be an interesting power! Play one ant to attack a space for four, or play a pair to attack two lanes for two each. You want to see what happens when you narrow it down to one, once your otter resurfaces. For now, the ants do four damage total. In the third lane, behind one of the worker ants, Bdubs adds a mantis to strike diagonally.

You draw a squirrel and sacrifice it and the opossum to play the field mice in lane three. If the ant power works as you believe, you don’t want to let it go unchecked. Better to prevent it from happening at all. A copy of the field mice is created in your hand and you end your turn like this. The otter and field mice each take out the creature opposite them, tipping not the scale but the tide of the battle. The other side is empty but for a moment. You have a chance to breathe, to draw a squirrel. Or you can attack. It all depends on the next card in your deck—why wait to find out? Why draw a squirrel if it won’t be necessary?

First, though, the mantis moves up and deals two damage. In the first lane, a worker ant readies itself for the battle.

You draw from your main deck: the stinkbug. You already have two bones to spend, why not use them? The stinkbug is best used as fodder for the worker ant, which you assume will have four power. At least you can do something to stymy its onslaught. You deal three points of damage, and the field mice kill the devoted mantis. The battle is at an even draw, now.

But when the worker ant joins the fray, it doesn’t have four power. It only has a meager one—ahh, the number of ants on the board. Counting up, so more ants is exponentially worse, rather than counting down from a fixed amount spread across the cards. It’s rendered powerless, then, by the stinkbug, and you draw another card while Bdubs places another worker ant in the rear of the third lane. A black goat isn’t really useful at the moment, but that’s all right. You have plenty of damage lined up: four directly to Bdubs, and one to the worker ant.

The next moves up, and their power increases. The first worker ant, weakened by the stinkbug’s stench, nips aimlessly at your creature; the second kills your field mice—lucky that you have a copy in your hand, then, isn’t it?

With another squirrel from your side deck, you play the black goat, which you can then use as a worthy sacrifice to play the field mice, which are again copied into your hand. These worker ants don’t stand a chance. Especially not as Bdubs lines up the useless ring worm in the fourth lane; what does it do besides take up space? You’ll never attack it to find out if you can help it.

In lane one, the stinkbug kills its opponent; in lane two, the otter strikes for two; and in lane three, the field mice kill the second worker ant. With one point of overkill, you’ve won.

Bdubs unfurls the map once more. Next stop: something to do with a totem. Are you finally going to get one of your own?

“Grrrreetings, Impulse!” the woodcarver rumbles with a silver tongue as Bdubs dons his latest mask. The face is triangular and sharp, with two pointed ears on the top like a wolf. “Good to see ya finally made it, my dude! You ready to level up that deck of yours, like, just, totally to a different league? Aw yeah, I got some cool stuff for you. First, here we go, dealer’s fav’rite, of course.” He sets a carved wolf head in front of you, but you already have the squirrel head. It would benefit more cards to put a sigil on your squirrels. But you’ll see, maybe something more interesting will come up. “Then we got somethin’ Bdubs hates dealin’ with, ya know what I’m sayin’? Phee-yew, that’s all it is, makes your cards all stin-kay. Or, have I got the offer for you, make a tribe unkillable like that foul cockroach creature you’ve got in your deck.” He places the two bases on either side of the wolf head. “Which one will ya want?”

On the one hand, you could take the stinky totem and effectively freeze some attacks until you’re more prepared to deal with them. On the other hand, there’s a clear winner here. You take the unkillable base and screw the carved squirrel head atop it.

The woodcarver smiles. “Yeah, baby, that’s what I’m talkin’ about. Good pick, man. Now, go—uh, go knock ‘em dead, or whatever they say about that. We’re rootin’ for ya, Impulse.”

And that’s all. He’s gone quicker than he appeared; Bdubs removes the mask and lays the campfire before you without even unrolling the map.

He grins, birchwood-yellow teeth shining dully in the light. “Would you like to warm a creature by the fire? Mebbe the unambitious ringworm—oh, wait, you can’t. You don’t have a ringworm. How silly of you!”

Rolling your eyes, you thumb through your deck. The sparrow could be good, since it’s a guaranteed direct hit, or the kingfisher. But then again, the mantis hits twice. Or you could buff the stinkbug or opossum, since they can be played almost immediately if you draw them. You can only increase the power by one, though, so would it be worth it?

Drawing out the mantis, you place it over the fire amid the circle of survivors. Two power, and it strikes once on each diagonal. It’s a powerful card for only one blood, especially now that your squirrels return to your hand once they die.

“You can take a risk, if ya want. Try warming it one more time?”

Ohhh, you don’t want to. You want to snatch it up and hide it firmly within the depth of your deck, where the fire’s flames will never again leap. You want to leave satisfied, with your creature in tow; you hate taking foolish risks.

Would you be here, though, if it weren’t for just that sort of foolish risk? You think back to your second play. The first choice you made in this cabin was to abandon whatever deja vu you’d felt. Is this not the same thing? If you hadn’t taken risks and gambles, you wouldn’t have found the documents behind the puzzles. You wouldn’t have confronted Bdubs or Etho. You wouldn’t be stuck dead-center in the quicksand of remembering.

Again you wonder: Why won’t any of them throw you a rope? Why do they force you to remember everything on your own?

You give the gamemaster a small nod. No sooner has he flipped over your card than you pluck it from the fire and slip it back into your deck. Between the mantis and the wolf, you have two cards that could win you a game the moment you draw them.

If you’d lost it to the starving survivors, you couldn’t have forgiven yourself.

Isn’t it interesting how you can’t think of anything else in your life that you couldn’t forgive yourself for losing? The HOA? You hate them all. Your job? There’s always another. Your house? It’s never felt like home, anyways. Your parents? You don’t remember what they were like—you were always off at boarding school. So how has this game got you so riled up? Maybe it’s the blood on the floor or the eyes all around; maybe it’s the gore and the hypnotic stare of the gamemaster; or maybe you’ve got skin in the game. Maybe, once upon a time—like they start every good story—you lost something you could never forgive yourself for losing.

You stare into the image, at the man gazing at you so caringly, and grip the edge of the table until your knuckles turn white. Your fingers drag over a rough patch, almost catching on a splinter—you glance over and notice a carving, thin and rough, scratched in with a dull knife over what must have been hours.

The clock. You stand, leaving the table behind even as Bdubs unrolls the map and lays out three cards atop it. The clock hands move easily past the numbers until it’s set to 10:59; then the hour turns over, the hatch at the top pops open, and a ring emerges on a spring. As if in a dream, you pull it from the spring and slip it onto your left hand, where it fits like it’s always been there. You hardly even notice the weight or bulk. It’s golden and shaped like a nut—a metal nut.

Tears gather in your eyes, but you hastily wipe them away. Now is no time to back down from the challenge. If anything, it’s even more reason to push through and win the game. Once you do, they’ll have to answer your questions and tell you what’s going on. They’ll have to tell you who—what—you are.

When you sit down again, you’re careful to keep your hand below the table, ring finger out of sight. It’s not a point of pride and certainly nothing to brag about. But it... it must have been real. The way he looks at you, the way your whole body is a series of lines pointing to the joint of your hands. You don’t remember ever loving anyone, but you think if you did, that’s what it would look like. That’s what it was.

It would... it would explain why you’ve always been averse to marriage or even finding a girl to date. It would explain a lot. But if you don’t remember it, is it still true? Is it still real if you don’t even know whether to trust he was real? Isn’t it a lot to assume you should keep digging into something that seems like it holds a lot of, just, pain and suffering all around? All for the sake of a guy you don’t remember—don’t be stupid, Impulse. Maybe you should walk out of the cabin right now. Take off the ring, throw it as far as you can into the woods, and find your way back to the truck. Drive home with the radio on. Listen to a game. Microwave a TV dinner and eat it in your pristine recliner and read the Sunday strip that’s probably been sitting on your driveway all day now.

But you can’t do that, can you?

You know why: you protected them once. You need to know whether you would do it again. These people, the Hermits... You once ran off alone to distract whoever was chasing them—whoever was shooting at them. Now, you need to know why you did it then, or if it was even real. If it did happen the way you remember it, you need to know why you left and whether you should stay away.

Bdubs points to each card deliberately, enunciating like you didn’t hear him the first time. Well enough. You didn’t. “Bones,” he says, “one blood, two blood. Pick yer cost.”

You’ll always go for the cheaper card. You choose one blood, and flip it over to reveal... a mysterious card. From a thick, dark sea emerge several tentacles, the largest of which grips a cracked mirror which, thankfully, doesn’t point toward you. You don’t think you could stand to see yourself right now. Disturbed, you slip it into your deck.

You’re excited for the upcoming fight: maybe you’ll fight the man from the photo. Maybe you’ll get to talk to him, give him a chance to... prove he’s real? Something like that.

But as Bdubs neatly rolls up the map, he pulls out a familiar mask: the Trapper. You reach to look through your deck for the pelts you recently bought from him, but he holds out a hand to stop you. “M’not here for your pelts, Impulse.”

Oh. So you’re going to fight him. You must’ve jinxed yourself—technically he is in the picture, after all, but he’s not the one you want to meet.

“Yeah, okay,” you sigh. “Just... Does it even matter if I win? Does it matter if I make it all the way to the end and beat the final boss fight?”

The Trapper shrugs. “I think that’s up to you, t’be honest. It’s not all about winning, but winning gets ya further. You know what’s missing, right? Just gotta find it, and... All we’re tryin’ to do is help. Now let’s get to this boss fight, okay?”

In the first lane, he prepares a bloodhound. On the board is a strange frog in the second and fourth lanes and a leaping trap in the third. You’ve never encountered a bloodhound before, nor its sigil: that of a dog with an arrow. It must move under some condition, but you can’t possibly know what condition that might be.

In addition to your starting squirrel—now gifted with immortality—you draw the cockroach, a kingfisher, and the wolf cub. Oh, this should be easy. Sure, his side of the board is mostly full, but you can take it. First, you kill the squirrel and return it to your hand, playing the wolf cub in the first lane to combat the bloodhound. Whatever its motion is, it won’t be able to move if it’s trapped. Then, using the same squirrel, you play the kingfisher in the fourth lane. Next turn, you’ll be able to play the cockroach, but for now you ring the bell smugly.

Etho eyes the board like he’s not so sure you’re as victorious as you think.

All you know is, the leaping trap, with no power and one health, can’t be anything but a trap. You’re not killing it with a ten foot pole so long as you have a say in the matter.

Your wolf cub hits for one, and the kingfisher tries valiantly to hit Etho directly; the strange frog leaps up and blocks it. That’s well enough, you suppose. Can’t win them all. You should’ve noticed its sigil.

The bloodhound attacks your wolf cub for two; then both strange frogs attack you with a direct two points. Simple enough.

Next up in your deck is Gem’s stunted wolf. You play it easily in the second lane; now, you can play the cockroach if you want, but the only place to play it is across from the trap, which you would really rather not deal with. You can play it when one of these creatures dies. Your newly grown wolf kills the bloodhound. The stunted wolf kills the strange frog before it, but in its place a leaping trap is played. You’ll need to kill the stunted wolf, then, before it activates the trap next turn. Your kingfisher does the same. That’s not good, not if you only draw a card that costs one blood. For the first time, you find yourself hoping you’ll draw an expensive card. Something with heft, with beef, with lots of viscous liquid running through its veins.

Since Etho’s cards don’t attack, it’s your turn again. He aligns another bloodhound in the first lane. You draw... the mantis. That’s something to work with, at least! It won’t be in front of the cards it attacks. But which creature to remove from the board... You kill the stunted wolf and play the mantis in the third lane. The wolf gains you a simple three points. Then it’s the mantis’ turn.

It hits the first leaping trap, the jaws of which snap closed with a sharp metal scream, but they close on empty air. Then the mantis strikes again toward the third leaping trap. This time, the jaws snap shut—but they close around your submerged kingfisher. In recompense, the Trapper hands you a wolf pelt. It’s little comfort.

The bloodhound bays as it rushes forward to rip the throat out of your young wolf. It’s a horrible sight, enough for you to look away, and yet the image sticks in your mind as it always does. You will have to move on.

With a fresh stoat in hand, you ring the bell. The fourth lane will produce a strange frog for Etho’s next turn, but now you know what happens with those, and you want nothing to do with them. Besides, you’re about to win. The mantis deals six full damage. If this were the end of a regular battle, you’d be cheering at the overkill. Now, you’re just wondering what the next stage is.

First, the Trapper reaches behind himself into the darkness, rifling through some collection of items. He pulls out a pair of sunglasses with a fake mustache attached, like the Trader had worn.

Goodnaturedly, you gasp, pretending you hadn’t known they were the same person all along. “Shade-e-e! What are you doing here?”

“It was me all along!” the Trader warbles as he lays out eight cards, filling his side of the table. Passing you a wolf pelt, he gestures to the cards. “Take what you can, but anything you can’t pay for in wolf pelts will stay with me.”

You look at the board. You have two wolf pelts now: one from the kingfisher, which doesn’t make sense, and one that he’s gifted you. With your mantis still on the board, you could just... win this.

Your remaining options are an alpha with sprinter or a fledgling bullfrog in the first lane, neither of which interests you, but the bullfrog would be cheap to play; a rat king with loose tail or corpse maggots with a magnifying glass sigil in the second lane, intriguing you into considering the latter; in the third lane are an elk that creates a copy of itself in your hand or a mantis that can swim; and in the fourth lane are a bloodhound that builds dams like a beaver or a moose buck with quills like a porcupine.

You take the moose buck without hesitation. If you don’t, it’s too dangerous to leave by itself. After that, it seems like common sense to trade for the corpse maggots, clearing a path for your mantis to devastate. You can also play the corpse maggots immediately—though it’s that or the cockroach. The corpse maggots are... interesting. A decayed skull, browned with lack of age, upon which several small, meaty white maggots squirm and gnaw. You hardly want to touch the card. Why not, you think, playing it in the second lane though its price is high for what it offers. You hope its odd sigil activates.

The unnatural sigil glows brighter, and the Trader passes you your deck face-up, splaying it in front of you. “So, you can pick any card you like from your deck, but only one.”

Well that changes things! You carefully select the black goat, play it using your unkillable squirrel, and then play the moose buck in the fourth lane.

You ring the bell.

It’s clear and bright as you rack up ten direct hits: one from the corpse maggots, three from the mantis on each open space, and three more from the moose buck. A beautiful display.

Inclining his head respectfully, the Trader removes first his disguise, then the Trapper removes his mask, and you remember these are all simply people speaking for the gamemaster. But they want you to win, don’t they? That’s what you’ve done once again. With a grin, you flip over the three rare cards in the gamemaster’s box as Bdubs holds it out for you.

The mantis god you’ve already seen, you know the selling points; child 13, which you could never work up the heartlessness to sacrifice; and the strange larva. Its fledgling sigil catches your eye more than anything else, and you decide you’d rather watch a bug develop into something worth of playing than kill an innocent young creature. The mantis god... well, you’ve already got a powered-up mantis. Strange larva it is.

The next map isn’t so much a map as Bdubs clears some moss off his side of the table. “After braving so much, cultivating your following of creatures and killing all that stood in your way, you found the center of The Escape. Finally, you found yourself at the Cabin.”

Three options lay before you, and whichever you choose will be your last stop before what you imagine will be the end. You could meet the trader and exchange your four rabbit pelts for four regular cards; you could refill your pack with one more item; or you could imbue one creature with the abilities of another.

You already have two items in your pack, so wasting this time for a third seems pointless. If you don’t visit the trader, you’ll be stuck with four rabbit pelts that you’ll be unable to sacrifice, but they could be easy free defensive cards if you’re really in a tight spot. So you choose to sacrifice one card to better another.

When you’re looking at the altar, you consider...

There are a lot of cards here, but only a few have voices attached to them. You’ve only ever heard Joel speak for the stoat, Gem speak for the stunted wolf, and Cleo insult you from the stinkbug. Did there used to be more? What is the point of this game? If they want you to remember, why make you play the game?

It’s all about memory, isn’t it?

They... wanted something. Not the Hermits; they were a home. But the others, they were after the Hermits because they wanted something. You were determined not to let them have it.

You think... It’s so blurry, like fog that obscures even your hand in front of your face, but this comes back in a flash of clarity like the glint of sun off the muzzle of a gun: you failed.

You recall the feeling of hands on your shoulders, wrists, ankles. They didn’t let you get away, back to—no, away—away from the Hermits. Because you were distracting them. The Hermits went one way, you split off, they caught you. When they caught you, a lead anchor sank in your gut. That was the failure.

But if the failure came from your capture... The rescues. Etho is an android. Is everyone in the photo like him?

Are you like him?

Just how much do you remember about your parents? What did they teach you in boarding school? When did you start working at your job?

Your deck. You need to play the game. If you play the game, it will be okay. If you play the game, you will win. If you play the game, you have to remember.

It would be smart to use this opportunity to get rid of a card you hate playing, something that costs a lot for its power. Your priciest creatures are the powered-up wolf with no sigils, the eternal cockroach, the duplicating field mice, and the coyote. Between the cockroach and the field mice, at least you’ve intentionally played the cockroach for its sigil. You choose to sacrifice the cockroach.

As for which card should receive it, you’d like something powerful. The raven egg has proven quite useful so far. You could put it on the mantis perhaps, strong as it is. Or maybe you shouldn’t put all your eggs in one basket, should focus on something cheap that could be powerful with a little help. With something like the opossum, you could continue playing them as long as you amass bones with no regard for squirrels. You consider the porcupine, the sparrow, and the stunted wolf. The stinkbug also costs bones, but it already has a sigil. Best to give the opossum a use; and is it not fitting that the soul of the indefatigable cockroach should live on in the tricksy opossum?

Though you know what you’ve done, you half expect the cockroach to pop right back up, shake its legs out, and crawl straight back into your hand. Its lifeless body seems no different than usual. It’s come back from worse. But Bdubs plucks it off the altar and casts it aside, handing you your freshly impossible opossum.

The moment you move your figurine to the final icon, vertigo overcomes you and the cabin seems to spin around you, shrinking and growing whimsically. A light above Bdubs turns on, and you see him in full for the first time.

He has a toothy smile, large and angular, stretching further across his face than you would expect. If his skin is the colour of spruce wood, his teeth are the colour of its rich inner meat. His eyes are large, wide; one is half bruised, unseen blood pooling above his cheekbone. A gold tooth sticks uncomfortably out, gouging at his lower lip. He’s stocky, with short, rectangular fingers splayed on the table. His hair is dark and unkempt, cropped shorter than an inch. From it you see small mushrooms growing and even a few green tendrils. One snakes down and curls in front of his ear, under his jaw. It’s thin as a hair and yet you feel unsettled. Is he being consumed by the plants? Do they feed as from a corpse? Or are they fake, just placed there to offput you?

Then, just as soon as the light had been lit, it is extinguished. The cabin walls fall away, and suddenly you’re wandering the woods in the middle of the night, moon glowing far too large to be true. Once, you recall, someone made a series of art pieces: landscapes, but in each, the moon grew progressively larger, until its gravity began ripping up chunks of earth and stone. The final piece in the series had been a rocket flying toward the moon, inspired by George Melies’ most well-known film. You remember it fondly.

Hesitantly, you begin to walk. In the distance you see the cabin, a warm glow emanating from the window and beneath the door as smoke curls up the chimney. A table pauses your progress. On it lie three cards: a trial of pelts, a trial of the finned, and a trial of the winged. Well, if you have four pelts in your deck, you may as well see if you can count on them. It’s probably more than you have winged or finned cards, anyways.

The first draw is the mole man; then the kingfisher, which would have won you either of the other challenges. But finally you draw a rabbit pelt.

Bdubs lays out for you three boon cards: the boon of the bone lord, which will give you eight bones at the start of the battle; the boon of the magpie’s eye, which allows you to choose any card in your deck when drawing; or the boon of goat’s blood, which starts the fight with a black goat on your side of the board. Obviously you want to be able to sculpt your hand at will each time you draw. You take the magpie’s boon.

Then you are free to continue—until again a table offers three trials: the trial of the swift, the trial of rarity, or the trial of the ring.

Without thinking, your right hand drops to twist the ring on your left below the table. You have it, yes, but do you want to admit it? Are you willing to say it aloud, to put that on the line? If you were both Hermits, and if the picture was taken willingly with other Hermits and they kept it safe all this time, you might be safe with them. But how sure are you that Bdubs, or any of the many watching eyes, are the Hermit Collective, or whatever’s left of it these days? Could they be imposters, trying to use you for some unholy scheme?

They want you to remember. What if your memory is some kind of... black box, holding the information of how the Hermit Collective was felled, and you just don’t remember? Tricky thing, memory—you won’t know whether you should remember something until after you’ve already gone and done it, and by then it’s too late.

The truth is... you want to remember. No matter what it is. You want to take risks like you once did. With that at the forefront of your mind, you place both hands above the table.

“Hey, I hadn’t noticed the ring. You’ll pass, a’course.” He reveals your options. And that’s all it is. He must be a Hermit, then, if he’s just going to drop it. You remember whose ring this is, who gave it to you. If only you could remember his name!

You look over the options. The bone lord again, which could be useful with your unkillable opossum, but you want to consider everything first. You could also choose the boon of the ambidextrous and draw twice at the beginning of your turn, or you could gain a boon from the forest itself and begin with grand firs on all your spaces. You’ve never seen a grand fir, only a snowy fir, but that could give you more time to think and plan your moves. Drawing twice per turn could have been more useful before you inscribed your squirrels, but now you just don’t need as many. You choose the forest, bringing it with you as you continue to the cabin.

Once you step inside, everything shifts again and you’re sitting in place as though you never left. The gamemaster sits across from you, shadowed once more, with three candles lit beside him while yours is only one; this seems unfair. You begin with your topdeck: an unkillable squirrel, of course, with your stoat, stinkbug, and stunted wolf all here to cheer you on.

“You deserve a little revenge,” Joel says cryptically.

“You got this far,” Cleo offers.

“C’mon, Impulse, you can beat him!” says Gem.

Revenge for what, you don’t know, but you’re not going to think about it for now. Instead you’ll let them say what they will, but you’ll play your own way. It’s your game, and it’s going to be your victory.

In the first and third lanes he plays skinks, and in the fourth he plays the field mice. You’ll be limited in where you can play things, but it’s worth it to be deliberate and gather your cards for whatever comes next. You pass, of course, and his creatures only harm your firs. Across the table, he pulls on the mask of the prospector.

On the next turn, you pick over your deck and select the wolf cub, which can weather an attack from the field mice before it ages and kills them in one hit. Still you pass your turn. You’re not sure what the gamemaster plans to do as the prospector, since before his creatures is only landscape, and you killed his only mule.

“Like I said, yer cards are gold!” With the pickaxe, he strikes each of your grand firs and replaces them with gold nuggets again. Nothing really changes, honestly, except you’re now vulnerable to airborne attacks, which aren’t on the board yet. His skinks strike but only strike gold, and the field mice kill the gold nugget.

You draw, seeking your raven egg so it will finally be in your hand forever. Then, sacrificing the squirrel, you play the wolf cub, which attacks the field mice the moment you ring the bell.

On his turn, Bdubs’ skinks kill the gold across from them, and the field mice nip at your wolf cub’s heels aggressively. Still, it doesn’t back down. He also swaps out his mask for that of the angler.

Next, you’ll play the raven egg. You hope to save the stoat, stinkbug, and stunted wolf for the final blow, so you pull the mantis out of your deck. Using the squirrel, you play the raven egg in lane one and the mantis in lane three. This should win you the first round, and place the first nuts and bolts on the scale in your favour. The raven egg, of course, simply incubates as the mantis strikes first to deal three damage, then to kill the field mice. The young wolf then attacks with an additional three.

Bdubs inclines his head and wipes his cards clear from the board, pinching off the first candle. He places two stumps in front of your raven egg and wolf, but oddly ignores the mantis. Then, in the center two lanes, he plays an amalgam—an unholy combination of creatures sewn together into a horrid shape with the jaws of an insect and the horns and legs of a jackalope—and a patched-together pair of bloodhounds. Together, as one card sewn together by the mycologists, they deal four damage.

Simply to have him around in case of emergency, you choose the mole man from your deck. It may not come to this, but with the bloodhound on the board, it very well may. You can weather this turn, you decide, and leave the board as it is for now. Let it happen. You ring the bell. The angler’s hook chooses your mantis, but it won’t pull the card over until your turn is over. First, your young raven flies over the stump to deal two damage directly. Then the mantis kills both the amalgam and the second stump, so the wolf can deal another five damage. Oh, you hadn’t even any cause for concern.

Bdubs takes off the mask, sets aside the hook, and pinches the second candle out.

He cranes his neck, turning in his chair to grab something from the table behind him. It’s a small box with an infinity symbol inlaid in silver on the top. He flips the lid open and pops the infinity symbol out. “This’ll let me draw my cards from yer hand this turn,” he says, and promptly reaches over to snatch Joel’s stoat, Cleo’s stinkbug, and Gem’s stunted wolf from your hand. He also takes your raven egg, which doesn’t duplicate as he pulls it into his array. Then, in that order, he lays them out on his side of the board. After a moment of thought, he pulls out a plain marker and scribbles upgrades: the stoat will have two attack and four health, the stinkbug will have two attack and three health, the stunted health will have three each, and the raven egg becomes an adult raven already. That’s definitely cheating.

Behind them, he plays a card you recall seeing near the beginning of the game: the ouroboros. But now there are four of them, with one power and attack each; they’ve also been given the sigil of the winged shield to protect against airborne attackers such as your raven. They don’t seem too concerning yet, but if this is Bdubs’ final play, there must be more to it.

First, though, you’ll just draw a card—you choose the wolf—and end your turn.

The raven flies over the stoat to deal two damage, and the mantis kills the stinkbug and raven. As soon as they die, something rushes in to fill their place: maggots. The wolf, instead of striking directly, reins itself in to leap for the corpse maggots instead.

Then it’s the gamemaster’s turn. He gleefully pushes up the fourth ouroboros. “Y’know what I really like about these guys? They just keep comin’ back. No matter how down ya get ‘em, they just, y’know what I mean? They’ll stick it out to the end, no matter how many tries it takes.” He gives you a conspiratorial look, like you should know what he’s talking about—and you have to admit, you just might.

You have a feeling the deja vu from so long ago was real. You think just maybe you’ve been here before, played the same card the same way a hundred times at the beginning. And you think each time, you must fail, and you forget on the drive home. You’re not going to forget this time. You’re not going to drive home. You’re going to remember, damnit!

“But I’ve modified this one, just a lil. Nuffin’ too important just yet... Well, you’ll see.”

You must’ve been right, there’s gotta be more to the ouroboros than meets the eye. But what?

His creatures begin to attack: first the stoat against your raven, then the corpse maggots against the loathed gold nugget, then the stunted wolf, which kills your mantis, and the ouroboros, which hardly harms your grown wolf.

It’s time for the lowly opossum.

You use two of your eight bones to play it across from the stunted wolf; it will die immediately, but first it will harm the stunted wolf, and that’s what’s important.

The raven takes flight one final time above the stoat and deals two more damage; you’re so close, but you feel the battle is far from over. The opossum dutifully bites the stunted wolf, and your grown wolf easily destroys the ouroboros.

But Bdubs simply slides another up from behind—this one has two power and two health. How can that be? The others still say one each, how does this work? The stoat kills the raven, of course, as the maggots finish off the gold nugget. The stunted wolf kills the opossum, as planned. Then the ouroboros hits your wolf and brings it near death. Into your hand you draw the wolf, whose health may be of more use here than its power. First, you play the opossum again, but then you reconsider. The stunted wolf has two health left, which requires the opossum to be played now and once again. But if you sacrifice the opossum and squirrel to play the stoat, you can simply lay it back down with two more bones. So you do: you play the wolf in the first lane to oppose the stoat, and the opossum again to oppose the stunted wolf.

The wolf kills the stoat instantly, paws smothering it and crushing its skull; you hear an angry noise from Joel. But in the stoat’s place arise more maggots. The opossum clambers onto the stunted wolf’s back and scratches at its eyes until its health drops by one; then the wolf, again, kills the ouroboros.

Into its place slithers yet another, this time with three power and health. How high can it go, how long will this continue? The corpse maggots deal one damage to your wolf, the next damage you directly; the stunted wolf deals three damage; and the ouroboros kills your wolf.

Next from your deck you select the sparrow to play in front of the corpse maggots, and finally you release your mole man in front of the ouroboros while you collect yourself. The wolf takes out the corpse maggots, thankfully. The sparrow flies over its opponent to deal one damage, evening the score. The opossum finally kills the stunted wolf, earning its keep, and the mole man stays silent and steady as ever.

Two additional ouroboroses both move up, and they grow into three power and three health, like the one already on the board. However, they... divide? They spread? They appear to be part of some larger card, combining so the first card reads ‘Ou’, the second reads ‘bo’, and the third reads ‘ros’. This must be some kind of boss, and you’re meant to destroy the corpse maggots so it can form properly. Well, your sparrow will die soon enough.

So the first ouroboros deals one damage to your wolf; the corpse maggots interrupt your confusion to gnaw on the sparrow’s pinfeathers; the second ouroboros kills your opossum; and the final ouroboros only deals one damage to your emergency mole man.

Next, you draw the river otter in hopes it may be of some assistance with... something. You’re not hurting for points, but you could be in danger soon. Playing the otter in the third lane, you ring the bell. Your wolf hits the first ouroboros and somehow kills all three at once; you know there are more behind them, though, waiting. The sparrow deals one neat damage, and the otter deals two more before your turn ends.

When the ouroboroses move up—three in a circle, eating each other now—they read four attack and four health total. But oddly, it takes one health off your wolf, deals one directly to you, and deals only one to the mole man as the sparrow dies.

Hoping to take out the corpse maggots and get it over with, you call upon the coyote and play your bones to place it in the second lane. The wolf takes out the ouroboros, of course, and the coyote takes out the maggots at last. The river otter deals two more damage.

The ouroboros returns, then, and with a vengeance now that it’s whole. Four snakes twist in a circle, entwined and eternally ravenous. They have five power and health, now, though the power seems to be split. It kills the wolf and coyote, and deals you and the mole man one damage each.

What’s the best play here? You draw the strange larva, completely unsure what it does but hoping for something good once it grows up. It will spend its entire life, most likely, in the second lane of this board; and this is the only life it will ever get. If you had the energy, you would feel sad. You have so few cards, and you just want to end this.

The otter deals it two damage, but for the rest, you must wait. The ouroboros deals one steady damage to each creature, and one to you.

You’re running out of cards.

Remembering the daus, the card you’ve never drawn before, you also recall that it creates decoys. You take it into your hand. But you’ll hang onto it for now, instead playing the opossum in the first lane. That’s three damage, enough to bring a new ouroboros in with six attack and health on Bdubs’ next turn. Your strange larva has also flipped over, becoming a strange pupa with three health again. The ouroboros kills the opossum, of course, and the mole man; it also injures the strange pupa and deals two damage to you directly, evening out the score again.

But as you reach for your deck, the strange pupa turns over and becomes mothman: a beast with three health and an incredible seven attack. With this in mind, you draw the mole next to take the place of its predecessor in the fourth lane. The mothman kills the ouroboros instantly; the otter then deals two damage before resubmerging itself.

The next ouroboros, with seven power and health, deals two damage to your creatures, and four total to you. A stupid mistake, leaving your first lane open like that.

From your pack you pull the hourglass, hoping for more time to... do something.

“Awright,” Bdubs yawns, “I’ll pass my next turn. I wanted ta shreep anyways.”

First things first, you draw the porcupine. Using the squirrel, you also kill the mole to play the daus in the fourth lane. You won’t benefit from its chimes, but you just need its attack. Then you kill the squirrel again to play the porcupine in the first lane. The porcupine and mothman kill the ouroboros; then the otter and daus deal four damage, so you’re ahead by two. You don’t even get to use the bee. With nine points of overkill, you win. That’s it, you’ve won, you’ve beat Bdubs. He extinguishes his third and final candle.

You lay your deck facedown on the table and lean your head back. Closing your eyes, you remember Tango. You remember Etho. You remember Bdubs, the way he used to be: jovial, excitable, hot-tempered. You remember Xisuma most of all—who, of you, wouldn’t?

But you don’t remember yourself. Who were you before you were a Hermit? Are you an android?

The shuffle of card against table draws your attention like the whisper of leaves in the forest at night, or the snap of an unseen twig during the day. Bdubs has laid his one remaining card on the table. He’s not playing it. But it shows he could have won if he’d wanted: the unassuming geck, inscribed with the immortality sigil like your opossum, warmed at a fire to give it four power and seven health.

You don’t know what to make of it, and you really, really don’t care. You’re free. You just want to take your winnings and go home.

“I won,” you say. “Can I take my winnings?”

Bdubs squints at you as he gestures for something to be brought over. “Take yer pliers,” he says to you as someone you can’t see approaches in shadow, “and take a nut—or a bolt, none’a my business which.”

It’s... Some kind of mangled torso, you think: solid encasement on one side, slimming down to thinner, more flexible fittings—

No.

You won’t do this.

The pliers are already in your hand, Impulse. Just choose a nut, unscrew it, and take it with you wherever you go.

You won’t do it, you can’t do this. It’s—it’s not right. It’s not right. I remember now, isn’t that enough? you scream in your head, but no one can hear that, silly. It’s just a thought.

Miserably, daintily, avoiding as much contact as you can, you slowly clamp the pliers around a nut and twist. It’s really caked on with gunk: part oil, part blood. You know whose body this was. You don’t want to remember right now, you couldn’t have waited until later to remember this part? This is the old chassis, the first full size android created: Tango, your boyfriend.

Sure, the filaments of his hair had been a bit too stiff, and sometimes his face and voice box worked funny, but he was beautiful, and you loved him.

You pry the nut from his rusted corpse and shudder at your winnings. The stranger sinks away.

You’ve won. It hasn’t really sunk in yet, but you’ve won. You beat Bdubs the gamemaster, the forest man, not only the man you knew.

“We’re havin’ supper soon, if you... if ya wanna join us?” Bdubs seems almost hopeful that you will, but you decline.

You should really be getting home. That’s all you’ve wanted this whole time. You should get home because you need to be at work on Sunday morning. Taking the nut you earned with your pliers, you stand and stretch.

After a pause, Bdubs stands as well. “Awright.” He lifts the deadbolt and slowly drags the door open, pulling in with it a flood of cold air. Freezing, really. You shiver.

You want to stay, suddenly. You don’t want to wander out into the dark chill of evening and find your way back to your truck; you don’t even want to step foot outside. You don’t want to go back. Nothing waits for you there. Here, there are people you might remember; there is... there is memory here. Maybe you’ve kind of wanted to stay here for a while, playing this game forever. There’s so much more to learn and remember.

Like a robot, though, automatically, you find yourself walking to the door, stepping foot outside.

Every instinct tells you that you should go home. It's safer that way. It's what you're meant to do. You return home, forget all about this, and forget you were ever involved in anything dangerous. Every morning you wake up and function as a productive member of society, living the dream with your white picket fence and your perfect lawn. You have an incredible opportunity, Impulse, to turn your back on chaos and sorrow. You don't have to remember the pain of losing everything you ever knew. Isn't it easier to go back to being the average man, surrounded by a cut-and-paste neighbourhood of happy families?

Bdubs reaches out and catches your wrist gently. His ring finger presses against the vein beneath your thumb, the vein you never feel pulsing with life like they all say you should. “Thank you, Impulse, for what you did. If you wanna remember... well, you’ll know where to find us. Ya always do.”

Blinking back whatever it is you’re feeling, you turn from his grasp and begin walking away—back to the safety of your truck, your house, your life.

As the door shuts behind you, you’ve never wanted anything more than to rush back and bang on the thick wood, to shout their names until they all let you in again.

You don’t turn to look back.

One step after another. you carve a path through crunching leaves and chill air. You hardly know where you’re going, and even without the tears in your eyes, you’re probably lost.

But your feet have walked this path a hundred times. Once more is no problem.

The forest is vast, the story closing. You begin to hear the occasional car roaring down the interstate, and the sound reaffirms which direction you should head in, guiding you forward like a lighthouse toward a rocky shore.

When you step onto the gravel shoulder, you hear a rushing river—and then a truck careens past, and you feel like you’ve been jolted back to reality.

Your thoughts clear with the cool air filling your lungs, seeping in through your jeans.

You remain still for a few more minutes, mere feet from your truck, frozen.

Caught.

Between remembering and forgetting.

Which is worse?

There’s something you’ve remembered; there’s something you’ve forgotten.

You turn and walk back into the trees.

In the woods is a cabin. A warm glow seeps out through the window and beneath the door. In the woods is a cabin that holds everything you once knew, everyone you loved.

Through the forest, under the thick canopic night, you return home.