Pick Up The Pieces

The campaign binders fill the top shelf of my study. Vol. 1: The Ashen Prophecy. Vol. 4: The Sundered Throne. Seven volumes in total, the last one still half-empty. I run my fingers along their worn spines, Eldyrane’s complete history recorded in careful script. My hands shake more now, and my wedding ring jostles around when I reach up to straighten them. A task that once took a few minutes now demands the better part of the morning. The cancer has taken my strength, my weight, and my future. But these stories remain unaffected.The doctor says I’ve got weeks, maybe a month. Time to organize my affairs, but not to finish what matters. I pull my cardigan up around my shoulders. To think, this sweater used to feel tight on me, now I could probably wear it like a straitjacket.

My office is filled with the scents of the medicinal teas Ellen insists will help and the musty perfume of books I’ve collected over decades. The morning light refracts through the stained glass, illuminating the room with colors that dance like the ethereal sprites I once described to the guys.

I pull open the drawer where I keep my dice. They rattle against each other, that familiar, hollow sound that once signaled possibility. Now they sound like bones.

“And so the Silver Conclave falls,” I say to myself. “Its towers crumbling into the Endless Sea as Lord Vathek’s laughter echoes across the waves…”
No one’s listening. I haven’t spoken to the guys in months. When Ellen posted about my diagnosis, they sent messages, awkward, well-meaning things about thoughts and prayers. Then silence. I don’t blame them. What do you say to a dying dungeon master? You can’t cast Regenerate on a pancreas in real life.
The simple act of standing has drained what little energy I had for the hour, so I sink into the recliner. The pill bottles on my side table are stacked in rows. I’ve started naming them after minor villains from our campaign.

The final binder sits on the desk, notes half-finished. In our last session, they’d discovered the ancient mechanism beneath the City of Brass. Seraphiel’s redemption arc sketched out but unearned. Brian might have even tried to pickpocket another fire elemental, a glorious disaster I’d never get to preside over. Ten years, and I’d left them stranded in the middle of the last act.

I open it, thumbing through my notes. The final confrontation, the revelation about Seraphiel’s true lineage, the choice that would determine the fate of Eldyrane, all outlined in my scrawling hand, never to be voiced. I’d even sat in the living room and dictated them to Ellen a few months ago when I had some fool thought about continuing one day.

“Some storyteller,” I chide. “Couldn’t even finish the damn thing.”

Outside, Ellen’s car pulls into the driveway. She’s been running mysterious errands for the last few days. Probably more appointments to schedule, more papers to sign.

Forty-three years of marriage, and she still surprises me. When I first mentioned this online role playing thing years ago, I braced for the eye-roll, the gentle suggestion that perhaps a man my age should find more… appropriate hobbies. Instead, she’d simply asked, “Does it make you happy?” When I nodded, she’d said, “Then I hope they appreciate what they’re getting.”

She never joined us—she respected that this was my space—but she became part of our world anyway. Bringing me tea during late sessions when my voice grew hoarse. Listening to my excited recaps over breakfast, asking thoughtful questions about character motivations and plot developments. She understood what my colleagues never did, that this was about connection, not escapism.

When the diagnosis came, I watched her backbone straighten in ways mine couldn’t. While I retreated, she advanced. While I pushed people away, she held our world together. She fielded the worried calls I couldn’t take, managed the appointments that overwhelmed me, even kept the guys updated when I was too proud to admit how bad things had gotten.

I’ve spent decades analyzing literature, dissecting the great love stories of fiction. But none of them prepared me for the quiet heroism of a woman who holds your hand through chemo and still asks about your imaginary worlds. Who sees the man you are behind the illness and the man you are behind the screen, and loves both versions equally.

I place the binder back on the desk. The characters we all created together deserved better than to be abandoned in narrative limbo. But then, stories rarely end when and how we want them to.

I’ve been chronicling imaginary worlds for decades, but I never scripted my own departure. That’s an irony I wasn’t expecting: the dungeon master, done in by poor planning.

The doorbell chimes.

I tilt my head, listening for Ellen’s footsteps in the hallway. Nothing. Probably in the garden, lost in her pruning meditation.

“Coming,” I call out, my voice a thin thread of what it once was.

Could be that pharmacy delivery Ellen mentioned. I shuffle to the door wearing my faded slippers, one hand braced against the wall for balance. The effort feels monumental, but I’ve grown tired of being waited on.

I turn the knob, swing open the door, and the world gets woozy like when the chemo first kicks in.

Three men stand on my porch. Unknown to my eyes perhaps, but not to my heart. I recognize them straight away.

The stocky one can’t keep still, a restless energy in how he shifts from foot to foot. He runs a hand through thinning hair, a gesture I’ve heard a hundred times in my headphones as a nervous tic before a risky dice roll.

Brian. Has to be.

The tall, composed Korean man with impeccable posture and a neutral expression, holding a leather messenger bag. His eyes assess me with clinical precision.

Kevin. Without question.

And off to the side, a pale, rail-thin figure with hunched shoulders and a gaze fixed firmly on my welcome mat, fingers twitching at his sides.
Nate. Definitely.

“Hey, Walt,” Brian says, his voice the same boisterous tone that’s announced countless critical hits and catastrophic failures. The same voice that once declared, “I seduce the Gelatinous Cube,” and tried to perform a Waltz of Seduction that left us all in stitches for ten minutes straight.

Kevin gives a single, precise nod. Economical in movement as he is in words.

Nate remains silent, a slight tremor visible in his hands.

My mouth opens, but no sound comes out, only a dry click of the tongue. My breath catches. They’ve traveled across states, left their lives behind, crossed the divide between digital and physical, for what? For a dying old man who couldn’t finish his story?

“You came,” the words catch in my throat.

My vision swims, blurring at the edges. Fingers clutch the doorframe, anchoring me to the real. After a decade of voices through headphones, the very adventurers I’d challenged with impossible odds, showered with legendary rewards, and secretly cherished stand before me flesh and blood on my worn welcome mat.

I flick from Brian’s nervous energy to Kevin’s stillness to Nate’s downcast gaze. Sir Gallant. Brother Iriel. Seraphiel. The knights of fallen empires and saviors of forgotten kings, here to continue the story.

“We couldn’t miss the finale,” Brian says, attempting lightness but betrayed by the thickness in his voice.

Behind them, Ellen stands on the porch, the smile I love transforming her face. Not errands. Arrangements. For them. For me.

A knot in my chest loosens, a pressure I didn’t know was there until it was gone. It’s a feeling so unfamiliar, so sharp after months of dull ache, that for a moment I mistake it for pain rather than hope. They didn’t come for Eldyrane. They came for me.

I wasn’t just their dungeon master. I was part of their fellowship.

Gesturing inside, I move backward, my hand remaining on the wall.

“I’ll set everything up in Walt’s office,” Ellen says, slipping inside as if this extraordinary collision of worlds is the most natural thing imaginable.