Continue Without Saving?
Player optional.
Lena loved broken things. Old tech, especially. CRT monitors with burn-in ghosts, Dreamcast discs that whined like dying birds. She called it “digital necromancy”—bringing dead code back to life.
So when a stranger on an abandoned forum linked a game called Sanctum.exe, she didn’t hesitate. The post was dated thirty-two years ago. The comments section was just two replies:
Don’t play past the mirror.
You can’t quit once you see yourself.
The download was barely 3MB.
It installed without permission.
At first glance, it was beautiful in that lo-fi, uncanny way—pixelated cathedral halls rendered in eternal twilight. Lena’s character—a pale figure in a black dress—moved soundlessly across cracked marble. There was no music, just the faint loop of static like someone whispering behind a wall.
When she tried to save, the game glitched. The words “Continue Without Saving?” appeared and hovered, pulsing red.
She laughed.
Some ironic developer joke, maybe.
She pressed Yes.
Hours passed. The church changed. Doors she’d opened were gone. Hallways she didn’t remember now led to locked gates. In one corridor, she found a mirror made of shifting pixels. When her sprite looked into it, the reflection didn’t move right.
It stared back.
And smiled.
Then her webcam light turned on.
Lena froze. She hadn’t enabled her camera. When she minimized the game, it stayed on—green and watching. She ripped a sticker off a notebook and slapped it over the lens. The light went out.
When she reopened Sanctum, her creepy in-game reflection was thankfully gone. But on the wall behind where she left her digital avatar standing, something new had appeared: a framed photograph.
Of her.
At her desk.
She deleted the game. Emptied the Recycle Bin. Ran antivirus. Reformatted the drive. She even unplugged every camera in the house and turned off her phone.
Two days later, she woke to find a new folder on her desktop: C:\Sanctum\Continue
Inside, a single image.
Her apartment.
Taken from behind her, timestamped 2:47 a.m.
Her monitor flickered.
Sanctum.exe had reappeared and started on its own.
On-screen, her character stood before the mirror again. Lena noticed that the reflection wasn’t “right”. Its head was tilted just slightly off-angle. The reflection waved, slowly, and smiled.
Then it stepped forward—out of the glass, out of the screen—just before everything went black.
The only sound left in her apartment was the faint hiss of static.
