Beneath Leadmere Manor

You live a safe but dreary life as a servant of Leadmere Manor, the seat of an old and powerful family. One day you stumble upon the chance at an impossible adventure, but you must choose your path carefully or calamity awaits.

Picture by Reinhold Silbermann.

This is my somewhat non-standard entry into @calluna’s 9th Tell a Story to Me Contest. The prompt for this one is the irresistible “Deep below ground, a portal opens…” One of the many—infinitely many, like the dimensions in a portal—things it brought to mind was Cave of Time, the first Choose Your Own Adventure book. That got me to this article, which confirmed what I remembered, that those books were rife with both portals and messed up endings.

^{Graphical proof of my point swiped from the article linked above, (c) Bantam Books.}

If you didn’t read them as a kid, the basic premise is that you make a choice at the end of each segment and the book tells you which page to turn to next. There are multiple possible stories with most of them ending in your gruesome death. And now you can experience it for yourself, in a small way, with Beneath Leadmere Manor! Start at Page 1 and choose wisely.

Beneath Leadmere Manor

Table of Contents

Page 1: Tears
Page 2: Light
Page 3: The City
Page 4: Thirst
Page 5: Bulb
Page 6: Mask
Page 7: At Sea
Page 8: Harbor