The Colours

There is a place kept for you at the head of the column, a colour furled and ready with your name already at the head of the order-book, and a whole dark regiment formed up below the wall waiting on your word. The Colours opens in the cold at the gate of a lone border fort on the last night, when the order comes down to hold and the standard goes up, the colours cracking gold far above on the staff, where every soul who could not bear to be the man no column ever followed, the voice no order ever took up, the name no line ever rallied to, is followed at last, brought up onto the wall, and given the head of the command. You came back through the gate because something in here, finally, would fall in behind you and go where you go. All you have to do is sign the order-book, take the colours, and let the fort take the weight of being followed off your own going-out.

The Colours is Book Fifteen of ENCORE, a choose-your-path horror. The same Curator keeps the house; the same company of the dead is recast into a new production, this one stone and powder and pipe-clay and patient with you. Bring the character you built in The Haunt, The Vigil, The Understudy, The Crossing, The Gallery, The Betrothed, The Confessor, The Mourners, The Assize, The Terminus, The Exchange, The Ward, The Line, and The Light, and the fort remembers what you carried, who you are, and what you have already proven you will and will not do.

You read by deciding. Sign the order-book and take the colours, or keep to the cold gate, a visitor passing through and not one of the regiment. Bear the colour and take the head, or keep to the ranks. Your choices decide which of the book’s endings the fort gives you, and the way out, the true one, asks whether you can walk off the wall followed by no one, no column at your back and no man rallying to you, and ground the colours one last time with no one behind them, an ending that is wholly your own, the genuine other-rank, and alive.

If you like Fighting Fantasy or Choose Your Own Adventure, if you like interactive horror, if you like the cold anthology dread of American Horror Story, this is built for you.

▶ Play it free in your browser, then keep the ebook or paperback. 134 numbered sections, 36 endings. The interactive audiobook follows.