The Reliquary

There is a niche kept open for you, a feretory laid ready under the gold, and your name already written in the calendar against tonight’s first feast. The Reliquary opens in the cold at the street-door of a great shrine-house in a dead City lane on the last night, when the cause is sealed and the acts are made up and the relics are translated and the name is raised to the altars, a warm glow far up the stair where the custody waits by the candles, where every soul who could not bear to be the one no one would ever hold sacred, the bones no one would ever set in gold, the name they would not enter in the calendar, is venerated at last, brought up into the warm upper shrine, and held sacred over everything. You came back through that door because something in here, finally, will keep your name holy. All you have to do is be laid in the feretory, take the veneration, and let the shrine take the weight of being forgotten off your own going-out.

The Reliquary is Book Eighteen 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 gold leaf and incense and sealing-wax and quietly glad of 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, The Light, The Colours, The Séance, and The Surety, and the house remembers what you carried, who you are, and what you have already proven you will and will not do.

You read by deciding. Be laid in the feretory and take the veneration, or keep to the cold floor of the lower church, a pilgrim passing through and not a saint. Let one relic of yours be raised and held sacred, or keep your relics your own. Your choices decide which of the book’s endings the house gives you, and the way out, the true one, asks whether you can let your name be struck from the calendar, let your relics be deposed and given back to the ground, walk out into the cold lane held sacred by no one, an ending that is wholly your own, the genuine unvenerated one, mortal and your own.

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. 132 numbered sections, 38 endings. The interactive audiobook follows.