Black and white line drawing of a twenty-sided dice showing a 1 on its top face, with the word crap written beneath it and a dark smudge at its base.

D20 dice showing a one with the word crap

Black and grey · Flash

A black and white drawing of a twenty-sided dice, with the number 1 on the upper face and other numbers visible around its edges. A dark shaded smudge sits beneath the dice, and the word crap with a full stop appears below it in a serif typeface. The linework is bold and clean, with no colour and no body part shown.

Dice Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Ysolde, I want it on the record that the roll was a one. Before anyone at Tuesday's table tells you the dice were loaded, they were not. They were my grandfather's, cast in the foundry at Ferrin before the Long Dark, and they have never once lied to us. Pell swears they are cursed. Pell also swears the moon is a hatch, so I have stopped taking Pell's word on physics.

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The scene was the cargo spine of the Marrow Gull, forty metres of rusted ladder over a drop into the hydroponic decks, where the air smells of basil and diesel. Captain Oduya wanted to climb it in the dark with a lantern clamped in her teeth. I called for a straight climb test. The die tumbled off the table, rattled under the chart chest, and came up showing the single 1 on its upper face. Silence, then Ibeth said a word my mother would have washed out of her mouth with lye. Three rungs of rot gave way, and Oduya hung by one hand from a pipe that sang like a kettle.

Here is what I did not expect. The table went quiet in a good way. Nobody reached for their sheet to fudge the number. Pell asked what the crew would do next, and for the first time in a year the players were leaning in instead of checking the time. A one is a bad roll, but it is a door. The worst thing a die can do is give you nothing to push against, and this one gave us a crumbling ladder, a drowning lantern and a captain with blistered palms who could not stop laughing.

Bring your own dice when you come at midwinter. Grandfather's stays under the chart chest, where it fell, until somebody needs a reason to be brave.