Before you all start flaming me for “posting under the wrong topic” or “making a bait post”, let me clarify that this isn’t some creepypasta or whatever. You probably won’t believe me, but at this point, I don’t really care. I don’t think it would matter even if I did, because I’m pretty sure I’m going to die. I don’t know when, but I know how, and I know it’s coming. I guess I just felt I should at least try to spread the word before it happens. If you want to test your luck, be my guest.

I’ve always spent a little too much of my time on the computer. I have more childhood memories of dicking around on sites like myspace or gaia.online than I do of family vacations or birthday parties. You know how every kid has that one accomplishment that they’re a little too proud of? Something they talk about so much that everyone around them gets sick of it? Like winning a big soccer game, or getting on the 6th grade honor roll. Well, mine was obtaining the Legendary Webkinz Crown of Wonder before any of my friends. I don’t think I could recreate the excitement I felt if I tried.

I used to be pretty bitter about how the internet changed. While everyone was moving to Facebook, I was still posting My Chemical Romance Blingees on my geocities site. I remember thinking I was hot shit for “going against the grain” back then. Real “not like other girls” energy. But, at some point after college, even I had to suck it up and hop on the bandwagon, whether I liked it or not. It sucked, but what choice did I have? Shit sucks everywhere these days.

I won’t say that I lost interest in the old web after that, but I didn’t have a lot of time to surf like I used to. You know how soul-sucking a 9-to-5 can be. My time was spent working, eating, and sleeping, just like everyone else. That is, until I got laid off about 6 months ago. Don’t bother offering me sympathy– I’m way past that shit now– and quite frankly, I’m sick of hearing it. My point is that I suddenly had a lot of free time, and a nice big hit of nostalgia-fueled dopamine was exactly what I needed.

I’m not here to give you some sob story about how depressed I was, but I was in a pretty dark place. I stopped going out, to the point where most of my friends stopped asking– or talking to me at all. There were days where I’d spend the daylight hours updating my LinkedIn profile and sending job applications to any shithole who was hiring, and my nights high off my ass, tossing and turning in a fitful sleeping-pill-induced mimicry of rest. At some point, I just gave up trying. Resigned myself to cycling through the same two or three apps day in and day out. Sometimes I’d turn on some streaming service, let a movie or something play in the background, but it never served as anything other than comforting noise.

It was a Twitter post that first pointed me towards neocities. I hadn’t even realized it was still around, or that people still used it. After the death of geocities, and the subsequent loss of my site, I was just too stubborn to remake it from scratch. At least, I had been back in 2013. But at that moment in late 2021, already 3 hours deep into a doomscrolling session on my couch, I figured, why not? It wasn’t like I was doing anything else with my time.

To say that I simply “found a new hobby” would be the understatement of the decade. Nostalgia hit me like a tonne of bricks, and just like that, I was hooked all over again. It was like being transported back into my Dad’s living room, and I was 9 years old, sitting in front of the chunky old desktop computer. I couldn’t believe that all this time, while I had pined for the way the internet had felt– the way I had felt– back in those days, this little piece of the past had sat, perfectly preserved like a fossil, just waiting for me to dig it up. Actually coding my site had been daunting at first, but it didn’t take long for muscle memory to kick in. I had actually managed to become pretty familiar with both HTML and CSS over the years, and the amount I still remembered kinda surprised me. Soon enough, I had crafted a webpage so niche and perfectly catered to my interests that my younger self would have been boiling with jealousy if she saw it.

Neocities was only the beginning when it came to my renewed interest in old web nostalgia, and I started spending what time I hadn’t allocated to updating my site on snooping around other areas of the internet for more relics to unearth. I especially enjoyed sifting through all the old sites preserved through the Wayback Machine– some of which I even remembered from my childhood. I found a lot of interesting things this way, for better or for worse. Probably for worse, looking back. But that’s one thing about the internet that hasn’t changed; if you dig deep enough, you’re going to see things you were never meant to see.

A couple of months ago, my daily explorations led me to an archived forum dedicated solely to old text-based RPGs. You know how they looked back then; simple web pages, mostly just a basic list of categories with no extravagances. Really basic stuff. Any images that were once hosted there were broken, but all of the threads were still intact– and there were a lot of them. There were hundreds under each category, and they often garnered enough replies to fill multiple pages. It seemed to have been a fairly active hub in its day. I even started to recognize the usernames of the more active members when they inevitably popped up again. Honestly, even though their topic of choice didn’t exactly fit my niche, I found myself growing fond of them. Like I was getting to know them, somehow. I don’t know if it was the result of some kind of parasocial relationship, or if I was looking at these people like characters in a book, but I was enthralled. I just couldn’t stop reading through these years-old conversations– learning way too much about teleprinters and MUDs in the process– and becoming more and more familiar with the members of this once-active community.

It was far into the forum’s life that the first mention of The Darkest Path appeared. By this time a lot of casual users were posting far less often, or had seemingly moved on entirely, leaving only those most dedicated behind to keep the discussions going. Despite the dwindling numbers, however, those that remained continued to post religiously. I’d say there were roughly 15 or so regulars still hanging around when user xyzzy made a post about the game. I recognized xyzzy immediately, as he was one of the forum’s most prolific posters. One of those guys who always had an opinion about something, and an overwhelming desire for everyone to hear about it. He explained– while making certain to point out that there was no way anyone else on the forums could have possibly found this niche new game before he had– that the premise of the game was simple; you are a vampire, and you must drink as much blood as possible.

Unexpectedly, not everyone was sold right away. The pitch was vague, and some people were skeptical based solely on xyzzy’s reputation. But, nevertheless, there were others who were intrigued by the game, and ultimately decided to give it a try. A scattered posts referencing The Darkest Path popped up here and there over the following days, mostly consisting of general questions or requests for help, as there didn’t seem to be any sort of wiki or walkthrough anywhere online. As time went on, though, mentions of the game began to appear more and more frequently, until almost all unrelated discussions were buried. It seemed like, in the span of a couple of weeks, the forum’s entire community had not only joined The Darkest Path, but had become obsessed with it. The flood of posts got so obtrusive that an entirely new topic dedicated solely to the game was created in an effort to regain some semblance of order. While this did technically work, not many new threads were created under the original topics thereafter, and it remained that way until the forum’s eventual end.

That didn’t really matter to me, though. I mean, why would it? Clearly a community, already shrunken by the passage of time, filled with people who were now older than they had been upon first joining, had discovered a new niche interest to share with one another. That seemed pretty par for the course when it came to insulated online communities like this one, and I even found myself feeling hopeful that, maybe, this shift would bring new life to the site. Timestamps at this time told me that they had been nearing the tail end of the glory days of online forums, and I knew that this one, too, would eventually become defunct– I was viewing an archived version, after all– though I dreaded seeing it happen with my own eyes. I was just happy that I could click over to The Darkest Path topic, and continue reading.

Things didn’t get weird right away. At first, all I saw was the same dedicated community, only now they were putting that energy into a new shared passion. The users had even begun creating their own wiki of sorts. They had comprehensive lists of obtainable items, random encounters and how to trigger them, basic mechanics for beginners, that sort of thing. Another recognizable user– FLATHEAD4PREZ– even created an entire spreadsheet that would act as a map of the game’s fictional city, separated into four quadrants, and labeled with street names and points of interest. Sure, some of the information was pretty dry– especially when the more technically savvy users wrote up long wordy explanations of how the game’s inner workings functioned or something equally mind-numbing– but I had a genuine interest in watching these people build something from the ground up. I kinda felt like I was watching an ant farm, observing the work of the builders as they dug their winding tunnels. Close enough to reach out and touch the colony, and yet so separated I may as well have not existed at all. As I write this, I can’t help but wonder where these people would have ended up, if they had known. Or if someday, someone might read an archived version of this post, and look at me in that very same way.

Dungeoncrawlmaster was the first to disappear. He wasn’t what I’d call a significant contributor to the forum by any means, but you could bet money on his appearance under the newest post from xyzzy. The subsequent pissing contest that followed was always the highlight of my day, and often had me laughing out loud at just how ridiculous it was. I remember first noticing his absence after eagerly clicking through to a xyzzy thread titled “New Vampire Power at lvl 15”, only to find that the discussion that followed was boringly civil. Though I was disappointed, I figured the instigator had just gotten tired of the game, and had moved on. In fact, I had expected that very thing to happen to all of the forum’s users eventually, and wasn’t exactly surprised when more usernames began to become dormant.

Half of the point of an RPG is in its name– they’re roleplaying games. Meaning, it wasn’t odd to see some posts wherein users would write as their in-game avatars, trading pieces of prose back and forth until some conclusion was reached. I hadn’t thought about roleplay since my tweenaged obsession with Warrior Cats, and so wasn’t really alarmed when new threads containing pleas or threats of violence began appearing sprinkled in along with the usual discussion. It wasn’t exactly the asterisk-action-asterisk formula I had been taught, but it’s not like I had been keeping up with the hip new vampire roleplay meta, either, so who was I to judge? I generally avoided roleplay posts anyways, as they could get long and wordy in a way I wasn’t keen to trudge through.

I wish now that I had paid closer attention to exactly which users were vanishing and when. I wish I had stopped to think about just how weird it was that, even as the number of active forum users plummeted, the volume of new threads only seemed to rise. Organization and information-gathering had all been forgotten by the time the group had slimmed to 5 active members. New posts became short, and were often worded in such a way that I assumed they were being written entirely in character. Checking the timestamps revealed that whether there had been hours or minutes between each new thread, they never truly stopped. It was as if these 5 people had all suddenly given up on their lives, and were now fully dedicated to the forum, and The Darkest Path.

The final post was made by xyzzy, in response to a plea from FLATHEAD4PREZ. It simply read; “Sorry, man. It’s either you, or me.”

So I had reached the end. What a freaking rollercoaster. It had taken me roughly a month to read through the forum from start to finish, save for a few skimmed walkthroughs or roleplay threads, and in the immediate aftermath, I couldn’t bring myself to close the page. I just kinda… sat there, cursor hovering over purple links, mulling everything over in my head. I’d love to say that I was weirded out, or that I had some kind of premonitory gut feeling that something was wrong, but that would make me a liar. It was more akin to that strange sort of emptiness you feel after closing a really good book, like you’ve been abruptly thrust back into the real world and you’ve yet to get your bearings. In the end, while the question of “where are they now” did cross my mind, my thoughts were mostly of The Darkest Path, and what had become of it after all this time. Surely a small, text-based, in-browser game hosted by a single amateur web developer from the early aughts wouldn’t still be around, right?

Well, wasn’t I surprised when the link in xyzzy’s original post presented me with a few short lines of white text, stark against a full-black background;

“You have been lured into the dark by the vampire Lord Alasdair Crimsonwraith. With barely a moment to panic, you feel the icy cold pain of fangs pierce your neck. Your lifeblood now drained from your body, you may walk The Darkest Path.”

Aside from the name of my apparent new sire– delightfully cliche and most likely chosen by xyzzy– being written in bold red text, the only deviation from the white Arial font was the solid underlining of the words “walk The Darkest Path”, indicating the presence of a clickable link. Sure enough, upon following the embed, I was presented with a sign-in screen, and was given an opportunity to create an account. Now, those that know me are well aware that I’ve always been a vampire kid– and I’m not talking about the bullshit sparkly kind, either. I was that girl curled up with a copy of “Dracula” or “Carmilla” in the back of the classroom during silent reading time. Honestly, one look at my username should be a dead giveaway. It’s the same one I’ve used since I was old enough to have one, and the name of my old geocities site– minus the underscores. There was no chance in hell I wasn’t going to sign up to play this game, especially after I had just spent an entire month of my life reading about it like I was perusing the morning paper. I typed in my faithful old username, chose my password, and, channeling my weird little goth kid self, named my avatar Countess Stella Vileblood.

Let me get the boring shit out of the way now and paint you the quickest picture I can, so you know what I mean when I say that this game is… simplistic. Along the top of the page is a list of three options; “My Vampire”, “Enter the City”, and “How to Play”, in that same white text. Immediately beneath sits the game’s title, centered and written in bold red letters slightly larger than those of the main body. These two things act as the entire site’s header, and remain constant from page to page. Choosing “How to Play” was ultimately unhelpful to me, as it contains a near identical amount of information to xyzzy’s initial forum post– which is to say, it explains very little. “My Vampire” is your classic summary-plus-inventory combo. There, you can find information like your character’s name, the items in your pockets, the amount of money and blood you’ve collected, and the number of humans you’ve drained since your account’s creation date. Finally, “Enter the City” is where you actually play the game. It’s a three-by-three grid of squares that represent the city’s streets, each with a clickable “move here” option present in the middle. Doing so will move your vampire– or, more accurately, the name of your vampire– into the chosen square. Vertically, every second row of squares is given a street name, and are then numbered horizontally. Sometimes, as you move about the map, you can come across a human– aptly labeled as such– who you can approach and drain of their blood. The catch is that in order to move, you’re required to expend one “action point”. Action points are accumulated over time, one being renewed every 30 real-time minutes up to a maximum of 50, meaning once you’ve spent all 50, you have to wait for a bit until you can move again. While technically there is more to the game than what I’ve described, like random NPC encounters, points of interest to visit, and skills your vampire can learn, none of that is really important, so I’ll spare you the details.

With that whole spiel over and done with, there’s something I’ve neglected to mention thus far, as it wasn’t really relevant until now. Though I never reconnected with my old friends– good riddance, honestly– I actually did manage to make some new ones online. As I said, I was spending a lot of time on neocities, and that included browsing the hand-coded webpages of other losers like me. It’s pretty common for webmasters to add real-time chat boxes or guestbook links somewhere on their sites, and I found the act of leaving little comments for one another charming enough that it became a part of my routine. A few of these breadcrumbs led to the exchange of information, and eventually, the creation of a small Discord server for six freaks with a love of old shit– and who I knew would go wild for this game.

I posted a link unceremoniously, and sat back to watch as each of my friends encountered Countess Vileblood. They reacted exactly as I imagined they would– which was positively, if that wasn’t obvious– and all five of them were signed up by the end of that day. We spent that evening in our server’s voice chat, laughing at the ridiculous vampire names we had chosen and getting a feel for the game. Of course, I had the upper hand when it came to gameplay and what to expect, so there wasn’t nearly as much of a learning curve for me. I’m not above admitting that I kinda reveled in the feeling of superiority, and kept most of the information I had learned to myself for the first while. Eventually, though, the question of where exactly I had found the game came up, and my throne wasn’t important enough to make up some cheesy lie. In fact, once the cat was out of the bag, I couldn’t stop myself from talking in-depth about the old forum, and the journey it had taken me on. Thankfully, seeing as we all shared similar interests, everyone seemed tuned in to what I was saying, and we eventually veered off into talking about the inevitable downfall of the internet as we know it today, and what might become “old web” in the future. Basically, it was a pretty typical night for us.

Playing The Darkest Path with my friends was fun. It brought me back to the good old days of getting together with my grade-school pals on Club Penguin or ToonTown, just to run around and do a whole lot of nothing in particular. We’d shoot each other a few messages throughout the day about an item we had found, or post a screenshot of our vampire’s newest gained level, then hop into the voice chat in the evenings to go searching for points of interest to explore, or attempt to find one of the secret guilds hidden around the map. We’d talk, and we’d play, and we’d end the day with laughter and a round of “good-night”s. I honestly hadn’t been quite so happy in such a long time. Maybe that’s why I neglected to put the pieces together.

Our group had been playing The Darkest Path for roughly two weeks when we logged on to find James’ character dead. More accurately, one of the other server members– a graphic design student named Gabbi– posted a screenshot of James’ character in the middle of the afternoon, alongside an expression of confusion. The word “DECEASED”, bracketed and written in red capital letters, now succeeded the name “Lord Nikolas Tenebris”. The vampire still stood where James had left him upon logging out the night before. I had no choice then, but to confess that I had still been keeping one piece of information to myself. I told them that, as the members of the forum had discovered, when your avatar reaches level 15, they gain a skill that allows you to attack and drain the blood of other vampires. While The Darkest Path had been mostly abandoned by its playerbase, we had run into the odd wandering user now and again, one of which I assumed was responsible for the murder. This reveal was met with devious excitement, and we all lightheartedly warned one another to “watch their backs”, else we may just sneak up on them. We left messages teasing James for being the first to die, and awaited his response when he inevitably logged back in. When he didn’t show up by the time everyone else had gathered in the voice chat that evening, we just laughed and traded jokes about how he “must have been butthurt” over his character dying.

Despite the mounting worry that gripped us over the days that followed, finding our friend’s obituary still came as a shock to us all.

Things were different after that. How could they not be? One of our friends had literally died, and none of us knew how to broach the subject. The Facebook link that Raphael– the only one in our group with a stable job– sent to the server was like a nuclear bomb, and all we could do was sit among the fallout. I don’t think I’ll ever forget how it felt to read a heartfelt goodbye from the mother of a friend I had never gotten the chance to meet in person. I didn’t even really know how I was supposed to feel. Of course I was sad, don’t get it twisted, but it was a weird, disconnected kind of grief. I knew him, but did I really know him, y’know? I talked with this guy every night, but if I showed up at his funeral, no one would know my name. I never had the chance to ask the others if they felt the same way.

I might not have noticed the warning signs, but I’m not an idiot, and neither are the others. None of us were particularly spiritual, nor did we have any strong opinions on the paranormal, but we couldn’t deny the correlation when the next in-game death preceded the real-life disappearance of the youngest member of our group, Dakota. We had eventually decided to continue playing The Darkest Path some time after James’ death, and things had just begun to return to some semblance of normalcy when Raphael broke level 15. This wasn’t the first game we had all played together, and we were no strangers to friendly fire. Are you even really friends if you aren’t trying to get each other killed in a video game? There had been real intent, lighthearted or not, behind those threats we had made, and there was no realistic reason to think that acting on them would get Dakota killed, yet I don’t think Raph ever forgave himself for it. I honestly believe that’s why he was the next to go. Laney had been really close with Dakota, having known them for years offline. It didn’t come as a surprise to any of us that she lashed out when she finally got the chance. Whether it had been in anger, grief, or maybe a mixture of both, I don’t know. I just wish she hadn’t done it during our nightly voice chat. I’ll never forget the sound of those screams, or the wet tearing of flesh. I wish, too, that I could ask Laney if she ever felt regret, though I think I already know the answer.

Raphael’s murder set a precedent for the days to come. Not only were we being given the opportunity to kill one another, at least one of us was willing to act on it. Was Laney trustworthy? Were her actions fueled only by a need for revenge, or would she do it again for less? What if she decided she wanted me dead for getting them into this mess? What about Gabbi? She’d always been the voice of reason within our group, meek and kind in a way that I honestly kind of despised, though I never said so out loud. Could I count on that agreeableness now, or would she use it to lull me into a false sense of security? Surely she, too, could feel the same dread as I could. After all, even the most docile animals bite when they’re backed into a corner.

Surprisingly– or maybe unsurprisingly– Gabbi was the one that suggested a truce. She said that if we all just decided right then and there to log off, and never log back in again, that all of this would be over. We could forget about The Darkest Path, “like it never even existed”. Of course we agreed, Laney and I. None of us had signed up for this mess, and we were more than willing to put this chapter of our lives behind us. Of course, the fact that I’m writing this now should be enough to tell you exactly how well that turned out. I’m not sure exactly what I was expecting to happen after the three of us signed off that night, but despite the unease that lingered in the silence of my bedroom as I tried to fall asleep, it was not being woken up in the early morning by a direct video call from Laney. I was barely coherent when she began to scream at me, hurling accusations and cursing me out. She was crying. She wanted to know why I had broken the truce, why I had killed Gabbi. I told her that I had gone to bed immediately after logging off, and I had been sleeping. Laney didn’t believe me. She knew that out of the three of us, Gabbi was the only one who hadn’t yet reached level 15.

If I hadn’t bookmarked The Darkest Path upon first signing up, I don’t think I’d still be alive to type this. Though, honestly, I’m not so sure if I view that fact as a blessing or a curse. When Laney openly threatened me, I was already entering my login information. Her character had advanced into my occupied square, and had locked us into a game of chance. A test of who could pull the trigger first. Whether she had run out of action points, had hesitated, or had simply been too slow on the draw, Laney hadn’t been fast enough to save herself. Not from me, and not from what I saw on that grainy webcam feed. I can still perfectly picture the way the light of the monitor had reflected in the eyes that streaked across the screen, bright and wild like a cat on the hunt. Laney’s screams had drowned out the sound of her chair clattering to and breaking against the floor, but failed to overpower the inhuman bellows that blew out the speakers of my headset, and made me scramble to tear it away from my ears. I watched as a twisted form stood, in a way that I can only describe as akin to that of stop-motion, once its prey had grown still and quiet. My friend’s body lay mercifully out of view, but I knew it was standing over her. It was dark in Laney’s studio, but I could just make out the silhouette of the figure; wrong in the way that its limbs seemed too long– or maybe too sharp– and its body shuddered with each ragged breath. I couldn’t tell if the liquid that dripped, dark against the soft moonlight that filtered through the open window, was saliva, blood, or some putrid mix of both. I didn’t wait for the Countess to make her exit before forcing a hard shutdown, and closing my laptop. I still wonder how it could be possible for one single creature to have so very many teeth.

I spent a lot of time re-reading those old forum threads after that. About a week, maybe two. I don’t remember. I can’t really put into words how it felt combing back through that dedicated topic with everything recontextualized. There had always been something sinister, something fearful, in those later posts, and I just hadn’t been able to see it. Maybe I didn’t want to see it. But I understand now, why it seemed like no one ever truly logged off near the end. It’s because they didn’t. They couldn’t. Not once they finally understood where one moment of distraction could lead. I haven’t dared to step away from my laptop since I saw… It, standing across the street last night, wide eyes reflecting the pale beam of a lone street lamp as they stared up into my 4th floor apartment window. It didn’t even surprise me when I opened the game to find Lord Alasdair Crimsonwraith waiting two squares away from where my character stood. I used up all 50 of my action points running as far away as I possibly could, but I know he’ll catch up. Eventually, I’ll fall asleep, and he’ll close the distance before I can react. He’s managed to survive this long, after all, and I’ve only just managed to reach level 17.

Writing this warning was a nice way to distract myself from what’s to come, but I think I’ve said everything I can. I’ve decided I’m going to wait for him. I’ve accumulated a nice handful of action points now, and when he gets here, I’ll test my trigger finger a second time. No matter what happens, it’s going to be him, or me.

This is a cool story and all, but this isn’t r/nosleep. Maybe try posting there, instead.

TLDR

If you wanted this story to be believable, you shouldn’t have linked the game in your forum signature lol. Clearly a shitty attempt at advertising. Nice try.

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