The Tithe of Triumph Psychological Horror Preview
When millions wish for a miracle, something answers.
Kaelen Rourke’s game-winning touchdown is a dream come true, but victory comes at a terrifying price.
Piece by piece, his very being—scars, memories, even his touch—begins to vanish.
Discover the chilling truth of a debt collected in silence.
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The Price of a Miracle
We plead with the universe in moments of desperation.
We pray.
We wish.
We scream our desires into the uncaring static, hoping something, anything, is listening.
But the void is a vast and patient predator, and it has many ears.
When the collective will of a million souls begs for a miracle, it is a prayer of immense power.
A power that can be answered.
But no transaction in this dark world is without its price.
And the cost of a miracle is always, always paid by the one who stands in the light.
The world had compressed itself into a tunnel of screaming noise and blinding light.
For Kaelen Rourke, the final ten yards to the end zone weren’t just turf; they were the physical manifestation of a lifetime of prayer.
The roar of the crowd was a tangible force, a wave of pure want that seemed to lift him, to make him lighter.
He saw the defender, a human mountain, closing the angle.
There was no way through.
Kaelen’s body knew it.
His muscles screamed it.
Then, the impossible.
The defender, perfectly positioned, slipped on dry turf.
Kaelen felt a surge of energy not his own, a cold, electric burst that propelled him forward with unnatural speed.
For a disorienting second, the deafening roar of the stadium vanished, replaced by a sound like a billion grains of sand falling in a vast, empty cavern.
Then the roar crashed back in as he tumbled over the goal line, the ball held aloft, a game-winning touchdown that defied physics.
He was a hero.
A god.
He hadn’t just won; he had been granted victory.
The Unwriting Begins
The celebration was a blur of champagne and shouting, but a strange, hollow feeling began to settle in Kaelen’s gut.
The triumph didn’t feel entirely his.
At home, he held the game ball, but it felt like a prop.
The real event, the real miracle, was a moment of impossible physics he couldn’t explain.
He told his wife, Elara, it was adrenaline.
He told himself it was a fluke.
But he couldn’t shake the chilling sense that he hadn’t earned it alone.
A few days later, standing in the steam of a hot shower, he saw it.
On his right shoulder blade was a thick, jagged scar, a childhood relic from a fall off a rusty bicycle.
He’d had it for twenty years.
He turned to scrub his back, and when he looked again, it was gone.
Not faded.
Not diminished.
Vanished.
The skin was smooth, pink, and unbroken, as if the fall had never happened.
A cold knot tightened in his stomach.
He scrubbed at the spot, his fingers trembling, but there was nothing there.
He tried to rationalize it.
A trick of the light, the steam.
Maybe it had been fading for years and he’d just… stopped noticing.
But he knew it was a lie.
He could remember the exact texture of that scar.
It was a part of him.
And now it wasn’t.
That was the beginning of the subtractions.
A week later, a small, dark mole on his forearm that Elara sometimes teased him about was simply absent.
The skin was blank.
He started taking pictures of himself, frantic, secret photos on his phone, documenting his own body like an endangered species.
He felt a creeping, unnamable dread, a sense of being slowly, meticulously edited.
The horror then moved from his skin to his soul.
He was telling Elara a story about his late father, trying to imitate his dad’s booming laugh, and he stopped mid-sentence.
He could remember the joke.
He could remember the situation.
But the sound, the actual timbre and tone of his father’s laughter, was gone.
It was a hole in his memory, a silent, empty space where a beloved sound used to be.
The information was there, but the humanity of it had been carved out.
He was being unwritten.
The Shadow’s Deal
He descended into a quiet paranoia.
He avoided mirrors.
He stopped telling old stories for fear he’d discover another piece of his past had been scooped out.
The victory, once a source of pride, now felt like a curse.
A debt.
He started watching the replay of the touchdown obsessively, not with joy, but with the terrified focus of a detective examining a crime scene.
He needed to understand.
He sat there in the dark, the TV screen washing his face in a flickering blue light, the game on a continuous loop.
He slowed it down, frame by agonizing frame.
The roar of the crowd on the recording was a hollow mockery of the silence in his house.
He watched himself run.
He watched the defender close in.
And then he saw it.
For a single, horrifying frame—one-thirtieth of a second—Kaelen’s shadow on the bright green turf did something impossible.
It detached from his feet.
It stretched, thinned, and warped into a long, sharp, needle-like shape that shot across the grass and slid under the defender’s cleat.
The defender slipped.
The shadow snapped back to Kaelen’s feet just as he crossed the goal line.
His breath caught in his throat.
It wasn’t his strength.
It wasn’t a miracle.
It was a transaction.
The desperate, collective will of a million fans screaming for a win had been heard.
And something had answered.
Something that had bent the rules of reality for them, and for him.
The touchdown was the service rendered.
And he, the vessel of that victory, was the payment.
It was collecting its tithe.
A scar.
A mole.
A memory.
Piece by agonizing piece.
The Final Collection
A sudden, sharp coldness bloomed in his left hand.
It was a spreading numbness, a deadness invading from the tips of his fingers inward.
He looked down.
He saw the thick, hard-earned calluses on his palm, the product of a thousand hours of gripping a football, and watched in abject horror as they began to soften.
The rough, grooved skin smoothed over, becoming as soft and unfamiliar as a stranger’s, the evidence of his life’s work dissolving before his eyes.
He didn’t scream.
The sound was trapped behind the ice in his lungs.
He just sat there in the flickering light of his own stolen glory, a man being methodically erased.
This was the consequence.
Not a ghost or a monster that could be fought, but a silent, cosmic collection agency that could not be bargained with.
The debt of a miracle was being paid.
He looked toward the bedroom where Elara was sleeping and a new, more terrifying thought pierced his dread.
What would be the next piece taken?
The color of his eyes?
His memory of her face?
The sound of his own name?
He was a story being redacted, one perfect, unnoticeable deletion at a time, until all that was left would be a hollow, generic shape.
He took a breath, and for the first time, was struck by the terrifyingly novel idea that soon, even that might not belong to him.
So be careful what you wish for, when you stand with the screaming masses.
Be careful what prayers you add to the roar.
The universe has a terrible sense of balance.
And when a miracle is requested so loudly, something will always answer.
It will grant the victory.
And then, in the silence that follows, it will come to collect, with the quiet, inescapable patience of a creditor calling on a debt that can only be paid in full.