He drew things. Not for a living. For eyeballs. For views. For upvotes and karma.

For dopamine.

Sometimes for money, but only when asked.

He was bought from, he never sold to.

It started as a joke. A sketch for a friend. Then a forum. Then a following. Then money.

The comments told him who he was.

“More like this.”
“Hot.”
“Wrong, but right.”
“Your brain must be a terrifying place. I love it.”

Tentacles, mostly. Glossy, anatomically improbable things. Commissioned by lonely weirdos with PayPal accounts and a fixation on things that slither and penetrate.

He told himself it was fiction. Just pixels. Just fantasy. A safe kind of wrong. Nothing like the real kind.

He’d always said he didn’t believe in anything—not love, not fate, not the soul. Least of all beauty. Certainly not monsters.

The drawings changed. His drawing changed too, the pen on his tablet like a chant, the rhythm that of a prayer or a hymn.

He started adding expressions. Not ahegao, no, nothing like that. Real ones. Ones that people felt in their souls. They noticed. “That last piece hit different,” someone DMed. Another said, “I saw myself in her.”

He grew a following around his name. People started talking about him like he was famous. Still, he wanted more. Wanted reach and influence. He didn’t know what he was reaching for.

Something reached back.

Someone messaged him, not with a kink, not with a commission—but with a memory.

“You drew this. But I dreamed it. Before you posted, I dreamed her face. I remember the smell of brine, the burn of it in my nose, before the dark came. I thought I’d forgotten. But she remembers me too, doesn’t she?”

He slept less. Drew more. Built a website, and watched his hit-counter tick in the corner of his fourth screen—the more hits, the faster he drew, the less he slept.

He stopped replying to messages. He wanted to, but there were too many. Answering them meant getting more messages, and he wasn’t really a word sort of person anyway—time was better spent drawing.

The comments got strange. Not angry, never angry, just needy. Hungry.

“Do you take custom dreams now?”
“I didn’t ask for her to touch me. She did anyway.”

“Please draw the one with the mouth. The first mouth. The mouth like sin and loneliness. Please. I’m so alone.”

The website earned. More than enough. No use for so much money.

He stopped taking commissions. Turned off DMs.

They still found him. His snapchat, the one he kept for new girls and old friends. A gmail address he’d forgotten about. One started mailing hand-written letters—no return address, just tentacle sketches on the envelopes, all in the same pale purple ink he used in a throwaway piece months ago. Ink he’d mixed himself. Ink he’d bled for, once. He remembered tearing a hangnail, and the taste of ink mixed with his blood.

He thought nothing of it at the time.

He changed his email. They still found him.

One girl showed up at his door. She didn’t knock. Just stood there, rain-soaked, staring. She mouthed, “She’s real,” and pressed her forehead to the peephole. He never opened it, just listened to her humming, the same chant or prayer or hymn that his pen made against his tablet. Eventually, she left something at the threshold: a folded drawing. One of his own, altered, shaded in new ways, as if she’d seen it from another angle.

When he picked it up, it was still cold and it burned.

⸻

His audience started to lose themselves. Slowly at first—quieter profiles, vague accounts deleting themselves after strange, too-sincere comments like, “Thank you for showing me where I belong.”

Then faster.

They began drawing too. Poor imitations. Scribbles. Each post accompanied by strings of text he couldn’t read, but understood.
“Her memory grows in us. You are the herald.”
“Why have you forsaken us?”
“Come back to where you belong.”
“You are needed.”
“I thought… I thought I was a moth; she was my flame, my pyre.”

He wanted to quit.

He couldn’t.

He’d wake in the morning and new pieces would be posted under his name. Signed with his handle. In his style. Except… not quite. The lines were sharper. More sinuous.They had layers he couldn’t see, couldn’t move, couldn’t unlock. Still, the master files were in his folders. The exports: uploaded from his IP.

The worst part?

They were better than his work had ever been.

They made people worship.

They began to call themselves The Taken. A subreddit formed. A Discord, buzzing with manic devotion. Some tattooed his linework on their bodies. Some removed things from their lives, made space, prepared themselves with rituals.

A few streamed their preparations.

He didn’t watch.

He heard about it though.

Then it happened.

It happened, and he heard about it. We all did; it made the news, there were memes about it.

⸻

The last post he made was an apology.

“I didn’t mean for you to believe me. It was supposed to be fake. It’s not. I’m sorry. I didn’t know she was real. I didn’t know you’d all be so easy.”

The drawings, one by one, fell from the net. Replaced with some random grotesquerie or attempt at erotica.

All traces of his once famous username: long since purged.

He’s still alive. He walks by the sea now, somewhere unlisted. He doesn’t draw. Doesn’t even own a pen. Sometimes, he sketches, with his toe, in the sand, but only when there’s no-one near—only where the sea will take it before anyone can see.

He’s quiet now. Not broken—he was never broken—but hollowed. Like a shell that’s been carefully, reverently cleaned out by something with patience and too many limbs.

He doesn’t speak often. When he does, it’s always kind. Like someone who remembers what it felt like to be seen too much.

People who meet him—tourists, mostly—they say he seems nice. Gentle. A little sad. Older than he looks.

Those who ask for it don’t recognise his name.

Sometimes—rarely—someone says something. A phrase. A word that shouldn’t mean anything but does, to that part of him that he’ll never forget.

He smiles, small, and says, “Not anymore.”

He walks away.

The sea eats his footprints behind him.