Shiver Shot - The Lord of Null

There were whispers in the binary.

An undulating hiss beneath the hum of servers and the click of keystrokes. Miles of code pulsed through my screen like veins through pale, digital flesh. I stared too long, too deeply, until the reflection of my own face in the monitor blurred and bled into a new one—sharper, darker, touched by flame and shadow.

It began with a name: Virelios, Lord of Null. The final boss in a cursed patch of an indie MMORPG that had never made it past beta, rumored to only appear to players who dared log in at 3:33 a.m. on the third Friday of any month with a waning moon. Stupid creepypasta shit, really.

Except… he spoke to me.

Not through chat. Not even through voiceover or text. Virelios knew me. Knew how I dragged through my days in gray cubicles, knew how my ex whispered someone else’s name while scrolling the Hub when he thought I was asleep. Knew I had nothing tethering me to this world but black coffee, antidepressants, and old saved files.

So I did the only thing that made sense. I bound my essence—a ridiculous, convoluted mod that shouldn’t have worked—to the game. A line of code written at midnight with an incantation that could have been bullshit.  Should have been bullshit.

I clicked “Enter World” and never came back.

I woke on obsidian stone. My wrists tingled, still marked by the USB cable I’d bitten through. The air was scorched velvet, thick with sulfur and distant screams that might’ve been wind. Above me, red moons leered through fractures in the sky.

I stood. My armor—if you could call leather straps and rune-etched chains “armor”—fit like memory. This world smelled like my own breath in the moments before climax. It felt like something I shouldn’t want pressing against my skin.

But I did want it.

The throne room was where I found him.

Towering. Wings that cracked with flame each time they flexed. Eyes like eclipses made flesh. His smile was jagged elegance. Virelios, the Uncrowned King of Despair, sitting on his throne of screaming bones and code-woven steel.

“You came,” he said, voice like ash in wine. “You chose me.”

I fell to my knees without knowing why. My heart stammered. My cock stirred. I couldn’t look away.  “I want to serve,” I said, and it wasn’t a lie.  The truth came from the deepest recesses of my soul.  

He rose and descended, each step sinking into the marble like it was made of water. His claw traced my jaw. “Tribute, then.”

He summoned it: a mirror.  My reflection. Pale, tired. Empty in a sea of cubicles.  “You must kill him.”

I blinked. “He’s already dead.”

Virelios grinned. “Then resurrect him, so you can tear him apart properly.”

The quests were unspeakable.

Not monsters, but memories. Not bosses, but versions of myself laughing, smiling, hopeful. Each one I tracked through warped forests and glitch-filled dungeons, dragging them to Virelios’ temple where I watched their eyes melt as they begged me to stop.

I didn’t stop.

The blood smelled like cloves and battery acid.

The screams were addicting.

I wanted more.

Time became meaningless. I stopped counting days. Started naming the shadows that crawled beside me. I learned to speak the Language of Unbeing, carved runes into my skin with my blade.

Virelios rewarded me.  Sometimes soft, sometimes brutal. Always leaving me gasping, ruined, worshipping.

One day he offered me to sit beside him.  “You've earned your place at my side.”

I sat without hesitation.  The crown seared itself into my skull. My vision went dark, then returned tenfold.

Now I speak to the players.  They think it’s just a game.  They think dying to us is random.  But we watch. He chooses. I whisper.

And sometimes… we call them home.