A dark, dimly lit room. The only light came from a flickering oil lamp resting on a rickety table, its flame barely holding on against the heavy stillness that filled the space. The air was thick with the scent of wax, dust, and something faintly metallic. A boy, no older than sixteen or seventeen, worked away with feverish focus. His hands moved quickly, almost desperately, shaping and twisting the object before him with precision born of obsession. The thing in his grasp was strange, unsettling even, a straw doll, its body crudely bound together by thin twine. Where its head should have been, there was instead a small piece of parchment, and upon it, drawn in uneven ink, was a crude depiction of a person.
This was Malakai's room. His long, unkempt black hair hung loosely around his face, reaching his shoulders in uneven clumps, the strands greasy from neglect. His green eyes, bright, sharp, and tired, remained fixed on the doll, refusing to look away for even a moment. After what seemed like hours, his frantic pace slowed. He leaned back slightly, studying the doll, and then reached for a battered wooden bucket beside him. Inside were brushes, old, bristled things, and the faint remnants of pigment dried along their edges. He picked one up, dipped it into the faint residue of color that clung to the bottom, and began to work again.
He twirled the brush in his fingers, coaxing out every drop of color he could. His movements were quick and improvised, painting with the efficiency of someone who could not afford to waste anything. The doll's straw body slowly gained uneven streaks of muted red, dull blue, and greyish white. He switched brushes, one after another, scraping and pressing the hardened bristles until the last trace of color was gone. By the time he was finished, the doll looked chaotic, its painted clothing barely distinct, its shape obscured by layers of hasty strokes. It was messy, imperfect, but complete.
With a low exhale, Malakai pushed himself back from the small stool and reached for the large table beside him. He dragged it closer with effort, the legs scraping across the stone floor. Upon it lay a massive, sprawling model of a town. The details were intricate despite the rough materials, tiny houses carved from wood, miniature roads marked in charcoal, patches of moss arranged to mimic forests. It was difficult to make out everything in the dim light, but the care and dedication behind it were undeniable. Each structure, every little pathway, carried traces of countless hours of labor.
And yet, what stood out most were the dolls. Every house, every corner of the model, bore one or more straw figures like the one he had just finished, some small, some larger, each adorned with the same crude drawn faces.
Malakai set the newest doll among them, adjusting its position carefully until it stood upright near the edge of the miniature town. He stared at it for a long moment, then let out a quiet sigh that seemed to drain the last bit of energy from him.
He leaned back, shoulders slumped, and allowed himself a small, crooked smile. "Lysander," he murmured into the empty air, his voice hoarse from disuse. "What do you think about this, huh?" A soft, humorless laugh followed. "Ha… bet you couldn't do something like this." His tone wavered somewhere between pride and bitterness.
There was no answer, of course. He was alone. The silence pressed back at him like a wall. The faint smile lingered on his lips, a complicated mix of satisfaction, sorrow, and something darker. He turned his eyes back to the dolls, to the elaborate townscape before him. This wasn't just a hobby, not anymore. It was a ritual, a real one, or at least one he believed could be.
He and Lysander had stumbled upon it by accident during one of their reckless adventures. The two of them had spent nearly every spare moment chasing stories of the supernatural, combing through forgotten paths and overgrown ruins that dotted the edges of the empire. They had been inseparable then, two dreamers chasing something that felt greater than the world they were born into.
That day, they had found an ancient ruin unlike the others. Its crumbling stone walls were etched with strange symbols, the remnants of a language neither of them could read. Within it, they discovered markings, directions pointing toward four other ruins scattered far apart. That discovery became their obsession.
They traveled for months, following those faint clues. But as they neared the end, reality caught up to them. Malakai, Kai as Lysander called him, was soon to be drafted into the Empire's military. He had no choice; service was mandatory. Lysander's health, always fragile, had worsened to the point that traveling became nearly impossible. He was soon to leave for the capital as well, to study and recover, to live a different kind of life.
They both knew it would end there. The ruins were a fleeting dream, something to distract them from the inevitability of their futures. But fate, or luck, had one last surprise for them. The final ruin contained five parchments, old and brittle, covered in symbols and fragmented words. Rituals, real ones, or at least they appeared to be. Each parchment described a different ceremony, complex, cryptic, almost impossible to interpret.
They spent days trying to understand them, arguing over the meanings, sketching and translating by lamplight. In the end, they couldn't agree. Each of them saw something different in the words. And so, with time running out, they made a promise. They would each take a parchment, study it, try to perform the ritual on their own, and one day, when they met again, they would share the results.
But that promise had been broken.
Lysander, that stubborn bastard, had gone too far. Word reached Kai weeks later: his friend had been caught after performing some forbidden rite. They said he escaped, but no one knew where to. Whether he was alive or dead, Malakai didn't know.
He sighed, the sound heavy in the dim room. His eyes drifted toward the newest doll, the one still faintly glistening with wet paint. For a moment, the flickering light caught on it, casting strange shadows over its drawn face.
"Idiot," he muttered softly, though there was no anger in his tone, only exhaustion.
The flame of the oil lamp trembled, and the shadows of the dolls seemed to shift ever so slightly across the tiny town.
He set the finished doll aside and moved with a kind of methodical calm that made the room feel colder. On the table beside him lay the few items the ritual required: a length of coarse string, five half-melted candles, and a small vial of thick, dark snake blood. He took a single gold coin from his pocket and placed it on the table as if anchoring the whole thing to something real.
The brush was still damp at the tip. He touched it to the vial and let the ink-dark blood cling to the bristles, careful not to waste a single drop. For the next hour he worked in near silence, making the same intricate mark on each doll: a triangular eye bisected by a tiny sword. The pattern demanded steady hands and patience; the thin strokes had to be deliberate. He had practiced the motion earlier, on scraps and on spare straw figures, until the movement felt less like drawing and more like a ritualized muscle memory. The limited amount of blood shaped how he worked, slow, sparing, measured. There were too many dolls and too little of the pigment he needed.
He thought through the ritual as he painted. In his understanding, the rite required two things before the final enactment: a grasp of a person's present course of fortune, and a representation of that person to be woven into the spell. You had to know where fate had been leaning for someone, what streaks of luck or misfortune trailed behind them, and only then could you let the ritual touch their thread. That was why he had chosen so many dolls. He did not want to draw too much from any one life; instead, he would gather small pieces from many. Being a junior officer helped. Office files, casual conversations, favors asked and granted, these things let him sketch a rough map of the town's people and where chance had favored them or not. He took what he considered small, careful measures, cataloguing faces and recent fortunes like a clerk listing inventory.
When the last doll bore its tiny triangular eye, he began to string them together. The process was mechanical and quick compared to the slow painting. He tied and looped, bringing each figure into the connected line that ran across the table. It took him about ten minutes; the line of dolls looked like a crooked train of paper people, the coin threaded into the center like a talisman pressed between two knots.
The symbolism felt right to him. Snakes stood for fate in the fragments of lore he had chased, coins for the flip of chance. He placed the coin back with the string, aligning it where the ritual said it should be. Then he turned his attention to the room itself.
He arranged the model of the town so it sat at the center of the space. With a practiced sweep he marked a large triangular sigil on the floor, broad, crude, the kind of gesture meant to contain something more than a drawing. The model sat on that mark like a brittle world set inside its frame. He placed the five candles around it at measured points and set the connected dolls in their places among the miniature streets and houses, each one corresponding to some face or fate he had watched and judged.
When everything was arranged to his satisfaction he poured flammable oil around the room's perimeter, leaving a narrow path clear for him to move. He had prepared an exit; he had thought through the aftermath. The small opening he had made led out to the city's underlayers, a route he could use if he needed to leave quickly. He did not imagine himself running forever; he imagined a single clean break, a final erasure of what he had done and the room he had used to shape it.
He lit the candles. The flames blew a soft, fickle light over the miniature houses and the dozens of painted faces. For a moment everything seemed balanced on the point of a blade: the coin at the center, the linked dolls, the sigil, the tiny town. He breathed in the oil and blood and stale lamp smoke and felt the shape of everything tighten into a single purpose.
If the ritual worked, he told himself, luck would not be a matter of chance anymore. Fate would incline toward him. He would be carried forward. The thought steadied him, and the room hummed with a quiet that was less silence than the held breath before something breaks.
Malakai reached into the pocket of his coat and pulled out a small matchbox. His fingers trembled slightly, not from fear but from exhaustion and anticipation. He slid a single match free, struck it against the side, and the head flared to life with a faint hiss. The small yellow flame flickered, reflecting off his wide green eyes. He stared at it for a second, the point where something ordinary was about to become something completely different, then threw it across the room toward the model on the table.
The match spun in the air, a brief arc of light. It had not even touched the ground when the color of the flames around the candles changed instantly. What had been warm, ordinary fire deepened into something unnatural, a dense, opaque black that absorbed the light instead of giving it. The room darkened as if the air itself had thickened. Malakai stumbled back, his legs bumping against the wall behind him, his breath catching in his throat. For a second he could only stare, his mind struggling to keep up with what his eyes were seeing.
It was working. The ritual was real.
The flames did not spread. They stayed where they were, controlled, contained, as if held in place by some invisible barrier. They should have burned through the wooden table and the straw dolls immediately, but instead they flickered in slow, deliberate movement, reacting like something alive. Malakai's expression changed from disbelief to exhilaration. His chest rose and fell with uneven breaths, and a small laugh escaped his lips, sharp and breathless.
Then the color began to shift again. The deep black of the fire lightened only slightly, changing to an almost imperceptible dark red. The difference was barely visible unless you stared, but it was there, a deep crimson hue at the very edges of the flame, pulsing like veins. The light did not brighten; if anything, the darkness grew heavier, more focused. The flames rose higher, forming pillars that licked at the ceiling without smoke.
Malakai pressed his back harder against the wall, torn between fear and fascination. He could not look away.
The flames began to twist and converge, spiraling upward until they merged into a single enormous shape, a dense, burning sphere that floated just above the model of the town. It pulsed once, twice, as though it had a heartbeat, then burst outward again. The fire spread across the floor, but not randomly. It moved with deliberate structure, tracing lines, edges, and intersections with precise geometry. Within seconds, the flames had redrawn themselves into a vast symbol covering the entire floor.
Malakai froze, eyes fixed on it. It was not the same symbol he had drawn earlier. It had changed. Now, clearly visible in the lines of flame, was the shape of what looked like a large palace or fortress engulfed in fire, with a single sword thrust into the ground before it. Above the palace, suspended in the air like an emblem, a massive crown took form, jagged and burning, hovering without support.
For a long moment, Malakai did not move. The entire room was silent except for the faint sound of the flames crackling against nothing. His chest rose sharply as he inhaled, his mind racing to process what he was seeing. This was not just a sign; it was something new, something he had not read about or imagined. He was staring at proof that the ritual had taken shape on its own. The pattern, the meaning, the crown, all of it had changed beyond his understanding.
A sudden wave of cold passed through the room. It was not gradual; it hit all at once, sharp and immediate, like the air had turned to ice. Malakai's first instinct was to wrap his arms around himself, but his body would not respond. The shock of it froze him where he stood. His limbs refused to move. He tried again, first his fingers, then his legs, but nothing happened. His body was completely rigid, locked in place by something unseen.
His mind filled with confusion and growing panic. The fire on the floor began to break apart, the detailed image of the burning palace fading as the flames split and spread outward again. They flowed back into the same circular formation as before, covering the floor in uneven streaks of red and black light. But even as the fire returned to its earlier state, the temperature did not rise. It stayed unbearably cold, the kind of cold that did not feel natural, the kind that bit into nerves and hollowed out the air itself.
Malakai's breath came out in short, visible bursts. Tears began to form at the corners of his eyes, freezing almost instantly against his skin. He tried to scream or call out, but his throat barely made a sound. The air in his lungs felt too heavy to move.
The cold fire crept closer. It did not move like normal flame; it rolled and folded over itself, slow and deliberate, as if it were thinking. It reached the edge of the table, then the legs, and finally touched the model. The miniature houses and streets disappeared instantly into the black-red glow. Then it spread further, reaching the walls, the floor beneath his boots, and then his legs.
When the flames touched him, the sensation was beyond anything he could comprehend. It was not heat; it was freezing to the point of pain. His skin went numb and burned at the same time, every nerve overwhelmed by the impossible temperature. His muscles tensed and locked harder. His body tried to convulse, but the paralysis kept him upright. His thoughts slowed, fragmenting into disjointed flashes of panic and disbelief. He felt his tears freeze, then burn away.
The cold fire rose up around him, engulfing him completely. His body felt weightless for a moment before the pain returned, sharper and deeper. It felt like the flames were reaching through him, not just burning flesh but cutting through thought itself. His last effort to scream came out as a broken gasp that did not even echo in the room.
Then, through the deafening silence, something vast spoke.
The voice did not come from the room; it came from above, from everywhere at once, so immense that the sound made the walls tremble.
"SO THIS IS MY FORTUNE."
The voice reverberated, impossibly loud, shaking through his skull and chest.
"HAHAHAHA."
The laughter was deep, echoing endlessly, stretching until the sound itself seemed to fade into the black flame.
And then, there was nothing.