First, her fingers moved—just a twitch. Then her eyes tracked him across the room. One morning, Mateo found a single, real tear pooled at her stone feet. And he noticed something else: his own shadow was no longer his. It was taller, thinner, and its hands were always raised like hers.
He froze.
“I wish I had never found you.”
Mateo tried to destroy the sculpture. The chisel shattered. The hammer flew from his hand and struck his own reflection in a mirror, spiderwebbing the glass. He tried to flee Valverde, but the mountain roads twisted back to his studio door.
Mateo couldn’t answer. He couldn’t move. He could only watch, trapped in his own masterpiece, as the world outside forgot his name and remembered only the sculpture—and the warning carved into its frozen face.
Be careful what you wish for.
Elena was grinding herbs at her kitchen table, calm as the eye of a storm. She didn’t look up. “You wished for excitement, mijo. For your work to matter.”
Then he looked at his reflection in the window glass.
Mateo should have been terrified. Instead, he was ecstatic.
The world went white.
Mateo would roll his eyes and return to his sculptures—twisted figures of saints and monsters, dreams carved in stone that no one in Valverde wanted. The village preferred practical art: functional water fountains, plain crosses for the cemetery. Mateo’s feverish, emotional pieces gathered dust in his tiny studio.
That night, Mateo stood before the living statue. Her stone fingers had almost reached his throat now. The obsidian sphere pulsed like a black heart.
He called the town. Word spread. Art critics from the capital took the winding mountain road to Valverde. They called it “The Caged Scream.” They called it “a visceral masterpiece of existential dread.” They paid him sums he’d never dreamed of.
The town elder declared it a relic of the old gods. But to Mateo, it was a miracle.
