Page 851 of End Game

Cami doesn’t hesitate.

“Absolutely.”

Griffin nods.

Dex is already moving.

Ronan looks at me.

I look back.

Then we step in.

Nobody hides.

Nobody stands three feet away pretending we’re friends.

Cami is in the middle with Griffin beside her, and the rest of us fit where we fit. Dex’s hand lands on my waist. Ronan’s shoulder presses mine. Cami reaches back and catches my fingers.

The photographer lifts the camera.

“Okay. Everybody look here.”

I do.

The shutter clicks.

And there is nothing outside the frame.

Chapter fifty-nine

End Game

Ronan

Everyone knows tonight is the end, although that has not stopped Dex from asking four separate times whether I have planned some kind of post-credit scene.

“I’m just saying,” he argues as he opens a bag of pretzels. “Marvel established expectations.”

“This campaign predates most of the Marvel movies you care about.”

“That doesn’t answer my question.”

“It should.”

He squints at me like there might be a different answer written somewhere on my face if he studies it hard enough.

There isn’t.

The table looks exactly the same as it always does, and I think that is part of what makes tonight difficult. There’s still the small scar along one edge from the time Dex dropped a candle. The same dice trays are lined up in front of the same chairs, my screen is where it always sits, and the shelves behind me hold years of sourcebooks and handwritten notes.

All four of us still have healing tattoos, physical evidence from earlier this week that this ending has been arriving in more than one form.

More importantly, there are four people in front of me settling around a table they have occupied for hundreds of hours in a world that exists only because we kept agreeing to return to it.

I told them two sessions ago that tonight would close the campaign if they survived the final confrontation. There is no secret quest waiting afterward, no second villain hidden behind the first, and no late revelation that everything they accomplished was only part of some larger plan.

I dislike endings that invalidate everything before them.