Wishful - Dark Fantasy

*It's not a secret that humans feed from greed. *

In the ages before cities and towns, before concrete roads and the voting of presidents, there was a creature that listened to prayers. Not the kind whispered to gods, but the trembling kind whispered by desperate hands clutching gold coins, trinket, and blood and grief.

They called it the Wish Dragon (very original, thank me later) — a thing that spoke in riddles and dealt in balance. It was not born of this world. The old scroll texts describe it as a shape made of stormlight and silver scales, its breath carrying the smell of salt and ruin. The brave—or the stupid—could summon it if they dared to risk everything.

It offered three wishes to those who solved its riddle. Simple, almost merciful. But every granted wish came with its shattered mirror: joy twisted into tragedy, love turned to an unhealthy obsession, wealth into theft and decay. No one ever outsmarted it. Every wish it granted fed something unseen inside it—a hunger that grew vast and slow, like ice creeping across a windowpane after a snow storm.

For years, even centuries, kingdoms and empires rose and fell around it. Each thought they could master it, tame it, chain its power, rewrite the rules. One king ordered his castle be built around the dragon’s resting place, believing himself immortal. By the end of the year, the castle was a mausoleum of gold touched statues — each one a subject turned to gold from just one touch. (You get the reference 👀)

The priests began to call it a demon. The peasants called it a god of consequence. Kings called It a treasure room. But It didn’t matter. Death followed all names.

So it was up to that of a high priest and a wizard—their names now lost to dust and maggots. They forged a seal not meant to kill, but to bind. To hide away from the eyes and greed of mankind. They carved their blood into the dragon’s riddle-script, using words older thought to be older than the sun. The dragon fought them for three nights and a day, its roars shaking the bones of the earth. But in the end, it was not strength that defeated it. It was understanding.

They trapped its essence in a vessel — an object both precious and terrible. Some say it was a mirror of obsidian framed in bone. Others claim it was a stone heart, still warm and faintly beating. Whatever its form, the curse worked. The dragon’s body turned to ash, its voice sealed within the relic.

For centuries, that artifact was hidden. Priests guarded it beneath cathedrals, behind doors of ancient oak wood. Kingdoms forgot. Languages changed. The dragon’s name faded from speech, but the tale stayed. Parents used it to teach their children about lessons of greed. Where do you think the saying: 'Be careful what you wish for' came from?

The relic was left to rot under layers of dust and incense.

But the land itself remembers what mankind forget.

War and famine swept through the countryside like plague. The old abbey that once guarded the relic fell to ruin—its walls split by roots and rain. Bandits stripped the tombs, the priests were burned as heretics, and the once-sacred vault became nothing more than a story.

Story start:

Cities began to build themselves. Brick, by brick. Cathedrals became tourist attractions. Old abbeys turned into sanitariums, museums, and eventually—ruins again. Faith had been replaced by flashbulbs and factory whistles.

But stories have long memories, even if men don’t.

It was 1904 when Edgar Wren, a junior journalist for the New London Courier, set out to prove himself. He was twenty-three, painfully underpaid, (honestly? Who wasn't here?) and entirely too sure that logic could explain anything. His editor called the assignment “Old saying origins: Folklore of the old.”

But for Edgar? That ment: go dig through crumbling churches, make up a few ghost stories, and make the paper look worn.

Edgar arrived in the countryside after three days of rain. The carriage left him miles from the village, and he begrudgingly walked the rest of the way with his boots sucking through mud. The ruins he sought were little more than a silhouette on the hill—stone teeth against the gray sky.

Inside, the air smelled of mold and forgotten sermons. His lantern’s light bounced off broken pews and the bent ribs of what once had been an organ.

“Jesus,” he muttered, his voice echoing up the nave. “Could’ve told me it was half-collapsed, Mr. Turner.”

He stopped to jot a note in his damp leather book: Abbey Saint-Orren. Local tales: demon sealed under altar. Superstitious nonsense

Something glittered in the corner.

He frowned, crouched, brushed away centuries of dust. Beneath the altar stones was a faint seam, a sliver of something dark.

“Hidden compartment?” he said to himself, more to fill the silence than anything. His words came out hollow, nervous. He pressed his fingers into the crack, pried—stone groaned.

A hinge gave way with a sigh of stale air. Inside, resting on a bed of bones and dried wax, was an object. A broken mirror.

Edgar blinked. “A...mirror?”

The lantern flickered. The wind outside howled louder.

Edgar froze.

He swallowed hard, tried to laugh. “Right. Very funny. Locals setting up a trick mirror for tourists?”

He stepped forward, lantern swinging wildly, scattering light across carvings he hadn’t noticed before—riddles etched into the walls, curling around the mirror in a language that shifted if he stared too long.

He turned to leave. The doorway behind him was gone.

Edgar’s breath hitched. He spun back toward the mirror, telling himself the angle of his lantern was to blame, that the rain or the rot had shifted a beam and closed the way. But the reflection disagreed.

In the mirror, he still stood before the altar, but his face was smiling. Not nervous or tired — grinning, wide and wrong, eyes too black.

He stepped back, heartbeat quick and stupid in his chest.

The smile in the glass widened.

“Trick mirror,” he muttered, voice tight. “That’s all. Some kind of optical—”

The reflection tilted its head.

Edgar didn’t.