Looking back, we were never supposed to play the game that night.
It was just a standard school overnight event.
We had sleeping bags spread across the classroom floor, teachers poking their heads in once an hour to maintain the illusion of control, and a stubborn, low light that kept the shadows long and restless.
By midnight, the childish icebreakers were over.
The room felt suffocatingly warm, and despite the hour, sleep was the last thing on anyone’s mind.
Seeking an escape, a few of us drifted to the dark corner of the room: me, Jia Min, Wei Jun, and Daniel.
Of the five of us, Aaron was the only one who didn’t move. He stayed by the window, a quiet silhouette against the glass, just watching.
“This event is so boring,” Jia Min sighed, picking at the seam of her sleeping bag.
Wei Jun threw a pillow at her. “Then close your eyes and sleep.”
She didn’t. Smiling, she reached into her bag and pulled out a folded sheet of paper.
On it was a circle of letters, scrawled in messy, frantic ink.
“My cousin taught me something,” she said, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. “It can move a bowl. By itself. We can ask it anything.”
For a moment, nobody spoke. Even the noise from the other side of the classroom seemed strangely distant.
“Sounds interesting,” Daniel admitted.
“Yeah,” I said, “let’s play.”
One by one, we moved closer to the paper. Aaron remained beside the window, refusing to touch it, his eyes fixed on the circle of letters.
The Rules of the Game
We crouched in the shadows, waiting until the footsteps of the teacher on duty finally faded. The four of us gathered around the paper while Aaron remained several steps away beside the window.
Jia Min smoothed the paper onto the cold floor.
From her bag, she took out a small ceramic bowl and placed it over the word START written in the centre.
“One finger each,” she whispered, her eyes darting to each of us. “Keep it light. And whatever you do, don’t lift your finger. Not until we’re finished.”
We nodded, the casual excitement from moments ago beginning to freeze into something more serious.
“There are rules,” she continued. “Don’t ask how it died. Don’t ask it to prove itself. And if it suddenly stops… nobody lifts their finger first.”
“To end it, we have to say it three times: Spirits, spirits, please return to the starting position.”
We murmured the phrase back, our voices soft, sounding like a muffled prayer in the dark classroom.
“It’s not so simple.”
The voice came from the darkness by the window. We all jumped slightly, turning to look at Aaron.
“What do you mean?” I asked, my heart gave a nervous flutter.
Aaron didn’t answer. He stared at the paper, his face unreadable, even when we waited for him to explain.
Typical Aaron. He was always saying things just to get under our skin.
“Ignore him,” Wei Jun muttered. “Let’s just start.”
One by one, we placed a single index finger onto the bottom of the upside-down bowl.
Nothing happened. The silence stretched until I nearly laughed and called the whole thing a prank.
Then cold seeped through the ceramic, and the bowl twitched beneath our fingers.
The First Broken Rule
The movement was small at first, just a slight drag against the paper.
Wei Jun let out a nervous laugh. “Okay, who’s pushing?”
“I’m not!”
“Not me!”
The bowl shifted again. We stared at each other.
Daniel spoke first, his voice unsure. “Spirit, spirit. Will it rain tomorrow?”
The bowl slid beneath our fingers, stopping first at N, then O.
Wei Jun snorted. “Lucky guess.”
Jia Min nudged him. “Your turn.”
He leaned closer and nodded. “Will I pass my exam?”
YES.
“No way,” Wei Jun said, grinning.
I hesitated, then asked quietly, “Are you here with us in this room?”
YES.
Wei Jun shook his head. “Okay, okay. Are there any girls who like me in our class?”
The bowl hesitated, then slowly dragged itself to NO.
We burst into laughter. The sound broke the tension, making the fear fade. The rules Jia Min had warned us about suddenly felt less important.
“Is that it?” Jia Min asked. Her smile faded as she looked down at the bowl. “Anyone else before we end the game?”
No one answered.
For a moment, she simply stared at the bowl. Then she leaned closer.
“How did you die?”
The reaction was instant.
The bowl snapped sideways. A chair scraped across the floor behind us.
Before anyone could turn, the window slammed shut with a deafening bang.
The sudden noise made us flinch, and my finger slipped completely off the bowl. I panicked and pressed it back down almost immediately, hoping no one had noticed.
The silence that followed felt heavy. Crowded.
But Aaron didn’t even blink. He stared into the dark corner as though someone stood there, whispering words meant only for him.
The Game We Failed to End
“We have to end it now,” I whispered, my voice sounding thinner and weaker than I expected.
Jia Min nodded quickly, her face pale.
Together, we spoke the words three times.
“Spirits, spirits… please return to the starting position.”
The bowl moved, but not toward the center. Instead, it drifted sideways, then began to slide in a slow, continuous circle.
“That’s enough. We sent it back,” Wei Jun said, his voice tense.
“It’s not even at—”
“I said it’s enough!”
Wei Jun abruptly lifted his finger. Daniel followed immediately. Jia Min hesitated for a split second, then lifted hers too.
I waited a second longer, my heart hammering, before I finally pulled mine away.
The bowl stopped, and the room fell completely still. Yet the air around us remained strangely close, as though something had stayed inside the circle.
Aaron didn’t move.
Even after Jia Min folded the paper, grabbed the bowl, and shoved both into her bag, he remained beside the window, staring at the bare patch of floor where the circle had been.
They Came Back Different
It started the next morning. Jia Min, Wei Jun, and Daniel didn’t come to school.
“They’re all down with a fever,” the teacher said. “Probably some flu bug.”
Their parents took them to different clinics, but every doctor said it was nothing serious. When they came back, however, they weren’t the same.
Jia Min whispered to herself when she thought no one was near.
Wei Jun snapped at everyone, his words sharper and rougher.
Daniel spoke slowly, repeating the final words of every sentence under his breath.
The adults only saw separate problems, explaining it away as school stress or not fully recovering yet.
I knew it was because of the game we played, but I wondered why I was completely fine and why Aaron was, too.
The way Aaron watched them told me he already knew what was happening.
Aaron’s Agreement
I found Aaron beneath the stairwell after school.
“You knew what happened, didn’t you?” I asked.
He didn’t deny it.
“You didn’t summon her,” he said. “She was already in the classroom.”
“What do you mean?”
“When Jia Min asked the wrong question, she made her angry.”
My chest tightened. “She stayed, didn’t she?”
Aaron nodded.
“Because we didn’t finish the game?”
“The question made her angry,” he said. “Failing to end the game gave her a way to stay.”
I swallowed hard. “Why didn’t she touch you?”
He was silent for a moment.
“There are already five inside me,” he said. “They won’t let anything else in.”
I stared at him. “Five what?”
Aaron’s expression remained unreadable.
“They don’t like being discussed.”
A chill ran down my spine.
“Then why didn’t you stop us?”
“They won’t let me interfere,” he said. “I can watch, but I can’t take part. That was the agreement.”
“What agreement?”
He said nothing.
I knew he wasn’t going to explain.
“Then what about me?” I asked. “Why am I fine?”
His gaze dropped to the chain around my neck.
“Check your amulet.”
My fingers tightened around the amulet hidden beneath my shirt. I pulled it out and held it beneath the weak stairwell light.
My grandfather had given it to me when I was younger.
“Keep this close,” he had told me. “It will protect you.”
One corner of the amulet had turned black. Its edge was charred, as though something had been slowly eating its way through it.
My breath caught.
“Will the others recover?”
“They’ll recover,” Aaron said.
“When?”
He looked past me, toward the dark landing above us.
“When she decides they’ve suffered enough.”
They Recovered, Mostly
After several days of strange behaviour, they began to improve.
Jia Min stopped whispering during lessons. Wei Jun’s temper settled. Daniel gradually returned to speaking at his normal pace.
Still, certain things never completely disappeared.
I showed my grandfather the amulet once, pointing to its blackened edge.
He examined it silently before letting out a slow sigh.
“The spirit wasn’t trying to kill anyone,” he said. “It was angry. Once that anger fades, your friends should recover.”
“Should?”
He handed the amulet back to me.
“Some things leave more slowly than others.”
They did recover, eventually.
But every now and then, I would catch Jia Min whispering when she thought nobody was near. Sometimes Daniel repeated the final word of a sentence beneath his breath, so quietly that everyone else continued talking as though they had not heard.
We never discussed what happened that night, and we never played another summoning game.
Years later, I still kept the amulet my grandfather had given me.
The burnt edge never faded.
Related Stories
Aaron was not always like this.
Months earlier, his mother made a choice to let him walk again—and something else learned how to walk through him too.
Borrowed Steps and the Five Who Finished Through Him
But the mistake didn’t start with them—it began much earlier.
The ritual had already failed once—when it was counted wrong.
