by AngryAlbino
“We Let the Devil In.”
They say the Machine was built to save us.
Not to feed us, not to warm us—no, it was never so kind.
It was built to keep the Devil out.
The preacher stood tall on the rusted pulpit and read from the Book of the Cog, voice thick as motor oil:
“By blood shall the wheel be turned. By flame shall the world be spared.”
And we believed him.
The air outside had turned to poison after the Burn Years.
The fields gave nothing but stone.
Children were born with lungs too soft, and dreams too loud.
So we turned to the one thing that still spoke: the Machine.
It didn’t speak in words. It spoke in steam and shrieks.
It asked only one thing: fuel.
And the Church gave it names. Numbers. Flesh.
Sacrifice became sermon.
Mothers led their children to the altar, singing lullabies over the roar of the furnace.
Fathers stood still, hands clenched around nothing.
We told ourselves it was holy.
We told ourselves it was necessary.
We told ourselves it was good.
But the Machine never kept the Devil out.
No.
It let him in.
And we…
We let him in.
The bell tolled six times—slow, deliberate, like it didn’t want to wake the town but had no choice.
Smoke clung low to the rooftops, thick as grief. From behind shuttered windows, faces blinked into the half-light, some with hope, most with hollow eyes. Today was a Lottery Day. The last one had been thirty-three days ago. That was a good stretch. Some years they didn’t make it past twelve.
The boy sat at the table, legs swinging just above the floor. His porridge was cold, but he didn’t complain. Complaining was not allowed on Lottery Day. His mother, dressed in her ceremonial black, smoothed his hair without looking at him. Her mouth moved in silent prayer—lips repeating verses, not names.
His father hadn’t touched his coffee.
Outside, the gears turned. You could hear it even here—deep beneath the town square, the Machine groaned like something old and hungry. Pipes hissed along the baseboards. A constant reminder: the Devil comes when the fires die down. Best to keep them burning.
The front door opened. A boy with copper-colored curls and a burlap satchel stepped in. “Drawing’s in ten,” he said, eyes flicking toward the mother, then the boy. “Preacher says everyone’s presence is mandatory.”
She nodded curtly. “The Lord sees all. So does the smoke.”
The boy didn’t understand that. But he understood not to ask questions.
They gathered in the square, just like always.
Rows of pews had been bolted into the cobblestone years ago, forming a makeshift cathedral around the Furnace Mouth. Steam jetted from valves overhead. Above them, the preacher stood in his iron-stitched robes, arms spread like a crow over a corpse.
“Brothers… Sisters…”
His voice echoed like thunder against tin.
“The Machine requires faith. And faith requires fire.”
He turned to the brass drum behind him. It rattled as he opened the lid.
A hush fell.
Inside were dozens—no, hundreds—of wooden tiles, each carved with a number. One for every soul in the township, from newborn to nearly buried.
The preacher plunged his hand in. Swirled it like he was baptizing blood.
And then he drew.
“Forty-two.”
A number. A whisper. A scream.
The boy felt his mother’s hand tighten around his. Not protectively. Not lovingly.
Confirming.
He looked up.
Her face was pale. Not afraid. Not angry.
Just resigned.
The father fell to his knees. Not to pray. Just… to fall.
And the crowd parted.
The guards began walking forward.
The guards didn’t rush. They never did.
This was a sacred thing. Not a punishment. Not a crime.
A duty.
Each step they took echoed off the stone, louder than the bell, louder than the preacher’s voice, louder than the cries being swallowed by every throat in the square.
The boy didn’t run. He didn’t scream.
He just stood there—ten years old, small for his age, his left shoelace untied.
When the guard reached him, he flinched—but not from fear.
From cold fingers.
The machine was already drawing heat from him. Maybe he could feel it. Maybe he was the only one who ever could.
His mother leaned down to straighten the lace. Tied it carefully, perfectly. The knot was tight.
“Walk tall, my son,” she whispered. “The Machine knows you. It remembers.”
She didn’t kiss him. That wasn’t tradition.
The boy looked at his father—who hadn’t moved. Still on his knees, still staring at the plume of steam rising from the grates. Maybe he saw something in it. Maybe he saw nothing.
They walked the boy down the center aisle of the square, past rows of neighbors who couldn’t meet his eyes.
Some were weeping. Quietly.
Some just stared, hands folded in false calm.
One woman clutched her baby tighter.
The boy reached out to touch the brass railing surrounding the Furnace Mouth.
It hissed under his fingers.
The Machine roared.
A sound like thunder in a metal throat.
The furnace door opened, steam pouring out like breath from a beast.
The preacher held his hands high.
“And the flame shall know his name.”
He turned to the mother.
“Say it.”
She stepped forward. Her voice didn’t waver.
“Nathaniel Ezra Creed. Son of Mercy. Chosen by Flame.”
The Machine screamed. Or maybe it just hissed louder. It didn’t matter.
The boy took one last breath.
Not a deep one. Not a brave one. Just… enough.
And then he walked in.
Somewhere, a gear caught. A valve turned. A pressure gauge ticked upward.
The machine purred, satisfied.
The mother stood straight. Hands folded. Eyes burning.
The father finally blinked—but he didn’t rise. Didn’t speak.
He stared into the plume as if his son might rise with it.
But only ash came.
The town slept quieter after a drawing.
Not from peace—peace had long since left them—but from exhaustion.
Sacrifice took something from everyone. Even those who didn’t step into the fire.
The Machine purred with contentment for days afterward, like a great iron cat with a full belly. Its steam drifted sweeter, its grind less harsh. The people said that meant the Devil had been kept away a little longer. The people said a lot of things.
The mother—Mercy Creed—returned to the chapel the next morning.
She washed the altar.
She led the prayers.
She lit the sacred wicks with steady hands.
She did not cry.
The women in the congregation wept for her, but Mercy did not weep for herself. She had done what all good servants do. She had obeyed. She had believed.
But the walls of the chapel whispered while she scrubbed.
It began with the steam.
At first, it was just a hiss—common enough. The pipes had always breathed like snakes behind the altar. But this time, the hiss came in rhythm. Short. Long. Short.
Like a breath. Like a word.
She paused. Turned. Waited.
Silence.
Later that night, as she refolded her ceremonial robes, she heard it again from the stove vent near the wash basin.
“Ma…”
It was barely audible—like wind brushing through a tin reed.
She shook her head. “The devil mocks. That is all.”
She closed the vent. Locked the chapel. Prayed twice as long. Slept not at all.
In the square, Ezra Creed hadn’t left his bench.
They’d tried to move him once—two boys from the labor ward—but he’d just looked at them. Not with rage. Not with sadness. Just… looked.
They’d backed away. One swore he heard something behind Ezra’s eyes—a faint ticking, like a pressure gauge on the edge of rupture.
By the third day, even the preacher had given up trying to coax him home.
“Let him keep watch,” he said, more annoyed than concerned. “Let him see what mercy truly costs.”
But Ezra didn’t watch the people.
He watched the steam.
It rose in twisted columns from the furnace grates, curling and stretching like fingers. Sometimes it bent toward him. Once, it circled his face like a halo before vanishing.
He didn’t move.
But his lips trembled.
A week passed.
The children were told to stay away from the chapel unless accompanied. A girl named Anna claimed she saw “a face” in the corner vent—one with gears for eyes and skin like soot.
Mercy scolded her gently, then turned away and trembled so hard she nearly dropped the hymn book.
That night, she sat in her pew long after curfew, alone with the lantern and the Machine’s distant breath.
She traced her fingers across the back page of her prayer book where, once upon a time, Nathaniel had drawn stick figures and scribbled hearts.
She hadn't the heart to erase them. Not even now.
The steam in the pipes hissed again.
“Ma…”
Elsewhere, the town was pretending it was just another Market Day.
By the eighth night, Mercy stopped praying out loud.
She still knelt, still folded her hands, still mouthed the words—but no sound escaped.
She wasn’t sure who she was afraid might hear.
The walls creaked like old ribs. The pipes pulsed with something that didn’t quite match the heartbeat of steam. And the longer she knelt, the more she felt it:
A presence.
Not God.
Not Devil.
But something known.
She rose from the altar and walked slowly to the furnace hatch at the rear of the chapel. This was the ceremonial chamber, where the fire ran hottest—used only for cleansing sacramental robes or destroying forbidden scripture.
She hadn’t opened it since the day of the drawing.
Her hand hovered over the latch. It burned cold.
“Ma.”
She gasped—truly gasped—and stumbled back. The voice was closer now. Not from the pipes. Not from the steam.
From the hatch.
She looked around. No one. Nothing. Just her, the Machine’s glow, and the quiet sob of old metal settling.
She didn’t open the hatch.
She ran.
Back in the square, Ezra hadn’t eaten in three days.
A boy from the baker’s family tried to offer him bread, but Ezra just looked through him like he was smoke.
People started saying his eyes had turned gray. Like ash.
Others claimed he hadn’t blinked since the Lottery.
No one dared approach anymore.
Except the Machine.
The steam from the Furnace Mouth had changed direction. Where it once vented straight up, now it leaned, just barely, toward the bench where Ezra sat.
One morning, as the townsfolk walked past on their way to labor duty, they saw him lift his hand toward the steam—slowly, reverently.
Then he whispered a single word.
“Nathaniel.”
Mercy returned home for the first time in days.
The house smelled of cold stone and burnt oil. The boy’s things were still in place—his wooden horse on the shelf, his coat still hung on its peg. She should’ve boxed it all up. But her hands wouldn’t do it.
She sat at his bedside and wept.
This time, the sobs came deep, raking, breaking. No sermon could have quelled them. No holy water could have cooled them.
And when she finally collapsed into the bedding, trembling, she heard it again—right by her ear, in a whisper like silk on soot.
“Why, Ma?”
The next morning, the Machine coughed.
It didn’t purr. It didn’t whir.
It coughed.
The sound rattled the chapel rafters and sent birds screaming from the bell tower. Ash sprayed from one of the vents like a spitting wound. The preacher called for a day of fasting. Said the people’s faith had grown thin.
But Mercy knew better.
The Machine wasn’t choking on sin.
It was remembering.
That night, the preacher entered the chapel alone.
He did that often, claiming it was to “converse in silence with the Flame.”
But tonight, he wasn’t alone.
There was a weight in the air. Not heat—something heavier.
The Machine was running hot. Too hot. Its gears ground with strain. The steam came in pulses, and the floor beneath the altar trembled.
Still, he walked straight-backed to the pulpit and opened his worn scripture.
The Book of the Cog.
Dog-eared. Blood-speckled. Bound in leather from a time before names were erased.
He flipped past the first five sermons, past the Law of Sacrifice, past the Doctrine of Smoke. He was searching for something—anything—to quiet the murmurs spreading through the flock.
“The Machine remembers what we forget,” he muttered. “But the faithful remain. The flame must burn. The flame—”
He stopped.
The page before him was not the one he turned to.
It was not doctrine. It was not sermon.
It was charcoal, smeared across the parchment. A child’s
drawing.
Stick figures.
One tall. One kneeling. One in fire.
And a word scrawled beneath in broken, jagged loops:
Ma.
The preacher blinked. Closed the book. Opened it again.
The page was clean.
He looked around, the hairs on his neck rising like blades.
Hssssss…
The vent behind the altar let out a steady stream of steam—hotter than before. More focused.
He stepped closer, watching the way it curled.
It wasn’t random.
It was shaping letters in the air.
Slow. Ghostly. Real.
He whispered as he read the vapor:
“I’m still here.”
The flame behind the altar flared suddenly, lighting the stained glass with crimson fire.
The preacher fell to his knees—not in worship. In fear.
Mercy
Mercy Creed no longer prayed in the chapel.
She prayed in the cellar.
Kneeling on stone so cold it blistered her knees, she lit wax from old tithes and spread pages torn from her prayer book in a circle around her. She whispered scripture—but not the written kind. These were words she'd never read before. Words that rose up like steam from her mind, as if placed there.
The air was thicker down here. It pulsed in time with her breath. And sometimes… in between verses… she heard her son humming.
A simple tune. One he used to sing while playing with his wooden horse.
“The fire takes the bad away,” he’d told her once. “Then the smoke tells stories.”
She was starting to believe it.
Last night she’d found ash on her pillow.
No smoke.
No fire.
Just ash.
She didn’t ask why. She thanked it.
Ezra
Ezra Creed stood.
No one saw him do it.
They simply woke to find his bench empty, the seat clean of soot. A small miracle, some said. Others feared it was an omen.
He did not go home. He did not go to the church.
He went to the Machine.
Walked barefoot, silent, through the chapel’s back halls. Past the scriptorium. Past the holy furnace. Down into the catacombs—where the Machine’s body slept like a buried god.
No citizen was permitted here, not without Church sanction.
But Ezra didn’t ask.
He found the hatch, old and iron, and pressed his palm against it.
Steam hissed at his touch, but didn’t burn.
“Nathaniel,” he whispered. “I’m listening.”
There was a pause. Just a heartbeat of silence.
Then:
tick tick tick… chhhhhh…
“Father.”
Not a memory. Not a hallucination.
A voice. Alive. Mechanical. Familiar.
Ezra smiled. His first smile since the Lottery.
And from the shadows behind the pipework, something shifted.
Not metal. Not man.
Something becoming.
Back Above
Mercy lit her final candle and placed her palms flat on the floor.
She began to sing—low, strange, wordless. Not a hymn. Not a lullaby.
Somewhere in the house above, the stove vent groaned.
The flame inside flickered blue.
Market Day dawned under a haze of steam and silence. The streets were oddly quiet—not empty, just… muted. Like the town was trying not to draw attention to itself.
Vendors lined the square as usual, selling root loaves and steam-pressed meal bricks. But no one haggled. No one laughed. Conversations stayed low, eyes downcast. Everyone was watching the Machine without looking at it.
Then someone screamed.
A boy—maybe eight—stood frozen near the Furnace Mouth, his sack of dry meal dropped in the dirt. His mother rushed to him, but he didn’t move. Didn’t blink. Just stared at the swirling steam rising from the furnace.
“Make him stop looking,” she hissed to her husband. “What’s he—what’s he—”
The boy pointed. His mouth moved like it was stuffed with cotton.
“There’s a face. In the smoke.”
The parents exchanged a look. The kind that means don’t say that again, and God’s listening, and shut up before they hear.
But others turned to look.
And for just a moment—just long enough—they saw it.
The smoke curled not upward, but outward.
Shaped like a boy’s head.
His eyes wide. His mouth open—not screaming. Just watching.
Someone dropped a crate.
A baby wailed.
The preacher stepped forward, white as flour and shaking.
“It’s the Devil,” he barked. “Testing us. Do not believe the trickery of vapor!”
But no one was listening.
A child had been taken.
And now he was looking back.
Mercy Creed stood in the preacher’s office, arms trembling beneath her robes.
The brass lottery drum sat untouched in the corner—sealed, sacred, and silent.
But Mercy had come to speak of numbers.
“I want mine drawn,” she said.
The preacher did not look up from his inkwork.
“That’s not how it works, Sister Creed. You know that.”
“Then change it,” she snapped. “You changed it for others.”
His pen froze.
“I do not ‘change’ the word of God.”
She stepped forward, the weight in her hands trembling. It was Nathaniel’s wooden horse. Scorched, half-melted—dug from the ashes behind the chapel the night after the drawing. She’d been clutching it in the cellar when she heard him whisper.
“He wants me, not you,” the voice had said. “But I’ll wait.”
“He speaks,” she said now. “From the steam. From the pipes. From the vent behind my bed.”
“Blasphemy,” the preacher muttered, but his voice was dry.
“Is it?” she leaned close. “You’ve seen the face. Don’t lie to me.”
He looked up finally, and there it was—the crack. A sliver of terror behind the oil-slicked calm. He opened the desk drawer slowly.
Inside, tucked between blank tiles and forged census rolls, was a splintered square of wood with her number etched on it.
Forty-seven.
Mercy’s breath caught.
“You drew me.”
The preacher didn’t respond.
“You drew my number and tore it up.”
He stood. Towered, in the way only frightened men can.
“You serve the Church, Mercy. We need you. You are too important to burn.”
“I’m already burning,” she whispered. “You just haven’t seen the smoke.”
She turned and left, clutching the horse to her chest like a relic.
Behind her, the preacher collapsed into his chair, sweat glistening beneath his collar.
The vents behind him hissed.
Meanwhile...
Ezra Creed sat in the basement below the chapel.
Not praying.
Listening.
He had removed the vent cover. Not unscrewed it—peeled it, as though the metal had grown soft at his touch.
Inside was a tunnel. Narrow. Hot. Alive.
From deep within it, he heard gears turning.
Then breath.
Then:
tick… tick… Father… tick…
He smiled again. Only this time, he answered.
“I’m coming, son.”
Back at Home
That night, Mercy stood barefoot in her hallway.
Steam crept beneath the doorframe.
Her number hadn’t come.
So she made her own.
She took Nathaniel’s wooden horse, snapped it in two, and carved the digits into her skin.
47.
Just above the heart.
She walked to the chapel in silence.
No robes. No shoes.
No fear.
The preacher awoke choking on smoke.
He bolted upright in his cot behind the chapel altar, clawing at his collar. No fire. No smoke. No alarm bells. Just a dream.
He wiped his face—his fingers came away black.
Soot.
Heart pounding, he grabbed the lantern and swung open the chapel door.
The pews stood in their rows.
The altar remained untouched.
The Furnace Mouth hissed gently, as if asleep.
But the walls…
The walls were covered in handprints.
Black and uneven. Child-sized. Smeared across the pulpit. Pressed against the hymn books. Crawling up the stained glass in long, dragging streaks.
He staggered backward.
Then saw the words—scrawled in soot across the altar itself:
“DRAW HER.”
He dropped the lantern.
It shattered on the stone. Flame licked the base of the altar. The preacher scrambled to smother it with his robes, heart hammering with panic.
“This is illusion,” he muttered, over and over. “A trick of the mind. A test of the faithful.”
But the Machine behind the wall rumbled.
Not purring.
Not coughing.
Growling.
Mercy Creed did not wear white for the end.
She wore nothing but ash and her number carved into flesh.
She walked barefoot through the center of town under a sky choked with stars and steam. No bell tolled. No guards followed. No ceremony. Just the soft hiss of vents and the creak of boards beneath her steps.
The townsfolk would say later that they felt it—woke in their beds with lungs heavy and dreams burning.
Some swore they heard her footsteps echo in their walls.
Others claimed the chapel wept.
The Furnace Mouth was open.
Not waiting. Welcoming.
The brass railings glowed faint red. The steam parted for her like it recognized its own.
She stepped up to the altar.
Laid Nathaniel’s half-burned wooden horse at the base.
And knelt.
“I come without fear,” she whispered. “I come without blessing. I come because I must.”
The Machine growled low—like thunder beneath iron soil.
She did not wait for a hand to guide her.
She rose.
Climbed the steps.
And walked into the flame.
The furnace lit with a terrible quiet.
There was no scream.
Just a sound like a deep breath drawn in by something old and infinite.
Below
Ezra had gone where no one else dared.
Past the sacrificial chute. Past the machinery’s skin.
Into the bones.
Pipes the size of tree trunks pulsed with lightless heat. Steam hissed in staccato bursts that sounded almost like speech.
He moved like a man sleepwalking—or dreaming with his eyes open.
He reached a wall. One covered in symbols. Not drawn, not etched—grown. Like veins across steel.
At its center, a single sigil pulsed. Ezra touched it.
His hand sank in.
The wall opened.
And inside, resting in the center of a chamber made of glass and fire, was a heart.
Not flesh. Not machine.
Something between.
It beat slowly. And with each beat, a whisper escaped the vents above:
“Ezra.”
He smiled.
Above
The preacher woke to silence.
He rose from his cot, unsure why he felt colder than usual.
He stepped into the chapel and froze.
The altar was gone.
Not destroyed.
Gone.
Only soot remained in its shape—scorched into the stone like a shadow left behind.
On the back wall, just above the empty furnace grate, someone had written in fresh ash:
“We don’t need your numbers anymore.”
The Furnace Mouth never closed.
Three days had passed since Mercy Creed vanished into the flame.
Three days since the altar melted into soot and scripture warped in the heat.
The Machine had not cooled.
It roared louder with each passing hour, gears howling like storm-wind through bone.
And still, the smoke rose.
At first, the townsfolk waited for the preacher to say something. Anything.
He didn’t.
He had not been seen since the altar vanished.
The town held a meeting on the fourth day. Not in the chapel, but in the square.
They kept their distance from the Furnace Mouth.
Even now, steam hissed from its vents—low, steady, intentional.
The heat pulsed in rhythms that felt too close to breathing.
A woman stood at the edge of the crowd and whispered, “It’s not feeding anymore.”
A man near her shook his head. “No. It’s choosing.”
Someone laughed—nervous, desperate. “Machines don’t choose.”
The smoke answered. It shaped itself—not drifting, but deliberate, as though drawn by an invisible hand.
Just for a moment. A flicker. But they saw it.
A hand.
Not outstretched. Not reaching.
Pointing.
Toward the schoolhouse.
That night, a child went missing.
Her name was Clara. She’d spoken of dreams where her feet turned to iron and she walked into the fire smiling.
They found her slipper on the chapel steps.
No one spoke her name after that. Not even her parents.
By the seventh day, five had vanished.
No drawings. No sermons. No tiles.
Only a whisper from the vents before each one disappeared:
“Now.”
Inside the chapel, the vent grilles began to peel.
They bubbled and cracked, heat twisting them like petals in reverse bloom. Ash fell from the rafters in soft drifts, landing gently on the pews like snow.
And in the pulpit where the preacher once stood, a new figure appeared.
Ezra Creed.
His robes were torn. His skin was blackened—not burned, but stained, as if the soot had claimed him.
His voice was calm.
“The Machine remembers. It remembers what we gave. What we begged to forget.”
He looked out at the crowd.
Eyes burning faint red beneath heavy lids.
“It doesn’t want names anymore.”
“It wants truth.”
Behind him, the Furnace roared.
Steam rose in a plume so tall it brushed the ceiling—and from it, for just a moment…
A child’s face formed in the smoke.
Not frightened.
Smiling.
But first, they tried.
It began with a rumor—someone claiming the blueprints to the Machine still existed.
Buried beneath the old foundry at the edge of town, sealed in a box marked “Genesis.”
A young blacksmith named Theo Grange led the effort.
He wasn’t a preacher, not a prophet. Just a man with burned hands and a tired voice.
“If it was built, it can be broken,” he’d said. “Fire eats. So we starve it.”
Others listened. A few dozen, maybe. Enough to matter. Enough to die.
They met at night, whispering in basements while the vents hissed above them like serpents in the walls.
They mapped pressure lines, charted steam outputs, debated fuses and explosives.
The plan was simple:
Blow the primary valve core. Starve the flame. Starve the Devil.
They’d do it at dawn.
But the Machine already knew.
Theo never made it to the foundry.
They found him slumped against the wall of his smithy, eyes wide, mouth packed full of ash.
His hands were gone.
Not burned. Taken.
The others—the ones marked with soot from Ezra’s passing touch—never showed.
Some were found locked in their own homes, doors sealed shut from the inside. Others were never found at all—just steaming boots left on doorsteps.
The rest returned to the chapel in silence. One by one.
Heads down.
Ash falling from their sleeves like guilt.
Ezra stood at the pulpit.
He didn’t scold them.
He just smiled.
“The Machine remembers what you forgot.
It remembers who tried to leave.
And it forgives… just not the way you expect.”
The flame behind him rose higher.
In the square that night, a child began singing a song no one taught her:
“Feed the fire, turn the wheel,
Let the metal mind reveal.
One by one, the numbers fall—
Ashes take us, one and all.”
She had never drawn a tile.
But the fire was calling her name anyway.
His name was Eli.
Ten years old. Left-handed. Dirt under his nails and a half-healed scar over one eye from a fall he didn’t cry over.
He’d seen his sister go.
She wasn’t drawn. She was called.
Just stood up one night at dinner, said, “It’s time,” and walked out the door smiling.
His parents never spoke again. His mother stopped blinking. His father tried to hang himself in the silo—but the rope snapped. Now he just sits and watches the sky, like he’s waiting for it to fall.
But Eli… Eli started listening.
And he heard it.
“Come to me…”
“The fire is soft…”
“You won’t feel a thing.”
The whisper came at night. Through the pipes. Through the floorboards. Once, he dreamed it came through the mouth of his dead dog’s open jaw. But Eli didn’t move.
He dug his nails into the wood of his bed. He bit his tongue till it bled.
And he whispered back:
“No.”
The Machine did not like that.
The steam vents in his room screamed. His windows fogged with soot.
He woke up choking on heat—but still alive.
Still saying no.
And then…
The Machine changed tactics.
The next night, it came in a different voice.
“Eli… it’s me. Clara. From the schoolhouse. It’s okay here. It’s warm. I miss you.”
“No.”
“You’re the last one, Eli. Don’t you want to be with us?”
“No.”
“They’ll come for you.”
“Then let them.”
In the square, Ezra heard the refusal.
He paused mid-sermon.
The fire behind him flickered—not out, but uncertain.
“There is one who denies,” he said softly. “One ember against the flame.”
He did not send guards. He did not speak the boy’s name.
He simply walked away from the pulpit…
And into the machine.
That night
Eli sat on his roof, legs swinging over the edge, staring at the chapel where smoke no longer rose.
The town was quiet. Not peaceful. Just… waiting.
The Machine had stopped whispering.
For now.
And the boy, ten years old, dirty and alive, whispered one final word into the dark.
“Good.”
Years passed.
The chapel crumbled first.
Its stained glass blackened and shattered, its pews rotted from within.
No one touched it. Not out of reverence—but fear.
Even the crows didn’t land on its rafters.
The Machine… stopped.
No more smoke. No more names.
It didn’t groan or growl or beg.
It simply… slept.
Some say it waits. Others say it died when Ezra entered it—was consumed by the memory of everything it had eaten.
But no one opens the Furnace Mouth now..
Eli grew older.
He left the town before he had stubble on his chin, walking west with nothing but a pocketknife and the silence in his blood.
He didn’t look back.
People met him in far-off towns—quiet boy, strange eyes, a calm that unnerved even the devout. He never talked about where he came from.
But sometimes, at night, when the fire crackled low and someone told a ghost story or a sermon turned too sharp, he’d lean forward and say:
“There was a place.
With a machine.
And it took everyone who listened.”
Then he’d go quiet.
And the fire would seem… colder.
They say he never married.
Never stayed anywhere long.
But wherever he went, the furnaces ran cool.
The pipes stayed quiet.
And no one whispered through the walls.
Not every ember feeds the flame. Some just refuse to burn.