Sharp transparent four-sided dice hurt to step on, and they are hard to notice hidden upon a plush carpet. I knew there were more, scattered from the table, but I had to walk across that floor to turn on the lights. I braced myself, knowing I would land my foot on another one with each step and then exhaling when I didn't.

I prayed to all the gods of dungeons that I didn't land on the metal D4 I'd bought at that haunted old mansion's estate sale. It should have stayed on my display shelves, where it belonged, but of course, we'd needed all the D4s for the last throw before nightfall.

Things like this always seemed to happen to me on nights preceding Halloween.

I had yelled in pain the first time I stepped on one. Then I had winced loudly on the second one. After that, I was moving with caution and trepidation across the floor. I felt very nervous walking through the game room in the dark, that night.

There is part of me that does not want to remember the events of that night. It is mostly too terrifying to recall, haunting my memories and giving me nightmares. Just thinking about what happened gives me the most awful feeling of dread, like I could encounter them again, somehow.

The last die that my foot came down on was the metal one, the one we thought was made of pewter. That one hurt a lot more, probably because it punctured the skin on the bottom of my foot. With the light on I saw why my foot had felt sticky when I moved across the last stretch of carpet.

There was a trail of blood from my hurt foot, just the one footprint leading back to the metal die I'd stepped on. Somehow, I hadn't seen it there in the dark, and I'd stepped on it, getting blood on it.

There seemed to be a darkness emanating from it, like smoky-looking shadows from its edges. I rolled it onto the table, and it depicted no numbers. Instead, the four sides parted and separated an equal distance, revealing a round crystal at the center, spinning and raveling up the blood in tiny streaks. When the white crystal was transparent reddish-brown, I noticed the darkness had crept and swirled all around the room.

I was alarmed that even when the lights were on, the room was bathed in shadows and darkness. Besides the immediate danger of the D4s, there was the supernatural horror of darkness pouring from the weird die. Just then a voice was speaking from a pale and half-dead face peering from the shadows.

"Thou hast sanguinated Tetrahedron, now four wishes to make, to undo your debt, or become as we."

I was startled and a little disturbed by the appearance of the creature. After a moment I did not believe it was a ghost, so I took a closer look at it. Then, after a while I talked back to it.

I stared at the creature, it wore some kind of black leather bondage suit with rings and hooks and straps and zippers all over it. The creature also had screws drilled into its bald head instead of hair, and a zipper sewn to its mouth and opened, so it could talk. For a long time, I stared at it, thinking I'd seen it somewhere before.

Then I realized with a cold shiver that I was surrounded. Obviously, they wanted to scare me, I felt a little scared. I didn't like it.

"Is this like some kind of Halloween prank?" I looked around at the other bondage demons, each of them with things stuck into them, chains, whips, duct tape over their mouths, straitjackets and all of them in the same kind of leather bondage uniforms. They even had one that was wearing a full suit covering its face and, on all fours, and being led around by a leash and collar. "You guys are doing that bondage creature from American Horror Story, right?"

The creature spoke in a raspy, tortured voice. "We are as Tormentals, sent to compel thee to thy four wishes, and we shall leave thou after a fourth wish, or become as we are, thou shalt."

I felt a chill. Whatever costumes and weird stuff these guys were into, they had the wrong person. I had no idea who any of them were, and I didn't know anyone into bondage and stuff. I kept thinking maybe I'd somehow met a bunch overly enthusiastic Halloween party people.

"I don't know what you people want, but you'd better get out of my house." I said.

"We will stay and compel thee to make thy first and subsequent wishes. If a fourth thou refrains, then as we are, thou shalt be." The creature told me. They all started chattering evilly or making muffled moans behind their gags or insane laughter.

I looked around at their bloodless wounds and red eyes and deformities and wrapped chains.

"You want me to make a wish? Fine, I wish you'd all just go away from here and take your stupid glowing Tetrahedron with you." I told them. I felt a nauseating sensation like rapidly slipping and falling and suddenly we were atop a tall building, under the full moon, the freezing wind whipping me. Tetrahedron still glowed before me, hovering in the exact position it was before and the creatures remained all around me, the moon lighting up the bloodstains on their black leather like a green glow in the moonlight.

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

"Thou see the gore of our transformation, as our painful visage erupted from within. We feel unending agony, we are the Tormentals, the very element of suffering embodied. That is our message." One of the insane Tormentals spoke to me, his head tilted unnaturally from the collar of his straitjacket.

"I made a wish for you and this thing to go away!" I complained, realizing they had somehow abducted me and taken me with them. I had no idea how they did it. I felt terrified and freezing cold and shocked, standing there trembling and shivering.

"And your wish came true, without delay, yet you came away with us." I heard another Tormental speaking quietly, strangely and quickly. I looked and saw this one had a morgue sheet drawn over it, stained with the glowing gore in the moonlight. They held out a ghostly phone with an image of Tetrahedron.

"What is this?" I looked at Tetrahedron and I felt a kind of panic, realizing I was to be trapped by these creatures. "I wish to know what this thing is."

I suddenly understood its history. I knew its origins, and its many kills, for often it uses the wishes made by its victims to cause suffering and death. I learned its secrets, how it chose its Tormentals and kept them from making their fourth and final wish, enslaving them to an existence of unending suffering. My mind filled to the brink of madness, and I knew too much. I knew there was no escape, that becoming a Tormental was better than making wishes. I realized which building I was on, chosen by Tetrahedron.

I went to the edge and stood there for a long time. The full moon looked massive, and I looked across at it, watching as it grew larger and lower in the sky. I looked down and saw the rest of the building, as we hurtled skyward. I realized that when I was dead, or if I wished to stop it, the building would come back down, collapsing, killing everyone inside.

"No matter what I wish for, something horrible will happen when it comes true." I realized. I laughed and laughed, the mania of knowing what I knew was making me go crazy. I gibbered and got the Tormentals laughing like hyenas.

"What shall thou wish for next?"

"I'll wish I had never stepped on Tetrahedron, that I'd never made any wishes!" I grinned, thinking in my delusional state that I had defeated the cosmic dice. I was already driven into a delirium by knowing the full expositional backstory of Tetrahedron in all its unending horror.

I was again in the darkness, wandering across the floor. I had a terrible sense of Deja vu' and then vaguely recalled a legend about an evil D4 that grants wishes if it gets some blood. Just then I stepped on it, the same metal four-sided die from before. I knew it had already happened, but it was like memory of dream, hard to recall and fading from my mind.

"Thou cannot avoid the fate of thy path." The unzipped mouth of the leader of the Tormentals, Screwhead, was telling me.

"You Hellraiser rejects think you know what pain feels like?" I stammered from the fresh shock of stepping on the sharp plastic pyramids and the final stab by Tetrahedron.

"We relish the wishes you make. Say your last, or become one of us." The covered Tormental told me. I noted that in the dark the bloodstains had vanished. These creatures were not alive, they belonged to Tetrahedron. I knew all about them still, instinctively.

I considered the exponential butterfly effect of wishing away the world of Tetrahedron. It was so ancient that undoing its existence would also erase me from existence, long before it ceased to exist. I would only cause my own inexistence. Such were the results of its wish fulfillment, always disproportionate to the intention of the wish maker, the evil would spread.

I thought madly about the many clever wishes I could make, but always realized what would happen. I began to see how so many had become Tormentals, unable to make a final wish. I felt terrified at the thought of becoming one of them.

"Thou hast very little time before thy death." Screwhead told me in a creaky voice.

"I'm about to die?" I asked. My panic grew, but it occurred to me that if they were causing me to die soon, then all I had to do was make my wish. Tetrahedron couldn't kill me if it had no more power over me. I was sure of this, but I still had only a moment before it would stop my heart and make me into a Tormental. I quaked with fear, but still felt oddly humorous, my reaction to the overload of terror.

I thought quickly. If I wished not to die, something terrible would happen that would make me regret surviving. If I did not make a wish before my life was over, I would become a Tormental. Then I knew what to wish for:

"I wish not to have a fourth wish to make." I said without confidence. I was so scared my voice was squeaky, and I realized at some point I had wet my pants.

"Farewell. Tetrahedron will pass from your hands to another." The grisly Tormental told me.

"Thou hast made four wishes, until thy death." Screwhead told me, fading last from them.

I sighed with relief. I wasn't sure if I'd still die. I stared at the clock, and when it struck midnight I winced, but nothing happened. I knew I could die at any time, but as the hours ticked on and morning approached, I went and took a shower and got clean pajamas on.

When I went back down to the game room, I picked up all the scattered clear D4s out of the thick carpet. I couldn't find Tetrahedron. I walked with a limp, from bandaged the hole in my foot.

It was almost dawn when I decided I wasn't going to die.

I made some coffee, the thought of it being my last day weighing heavily on me. Each day afterward I dreaded the death they had promised was about to happen, but I soon realized my fate was no longer in the hands of dice.

Sighing happily, I took a breath of living air. I now live each day to the fullest, never knowing when it will be my last. Life and death are a dice roll, so watch your step.

And never leave spilled dice where someone might step on them.

Oh, and don't buy mysterious pewter dice at haunted house estate sales, like where I got mine.

Just be careful out there, and stay safe.