The next morning, Elias's roommate found the room empty. The laptop was a melted husk of plastic and silicon on the desk. On the screen, etched permanently into the dead pixels, was a single, flickering image: a bonfire, finally lit, burning with a flame that looked suspiciously like a human soul.

On the screen, his character—the one with his face—finally reached a bonfire. It knelt and reached out a hand. As the character touched the sword in the embers, Elias felt a searing heat in his own palm.

When he launched the game, there was no intro cinematic. No talk of Ancient Dragons or the First Flame. He was simply there . He stood in the Undead Asylum, but it wasn't the game he had seen in trailers. The walls weren't stone; they were composed of flickering, distorted lines of code. The sky wasn't overcast; it was a void of static.