26 Feb The One Wish of Dr. Westley

Part I

The alleys of Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar stretched in labyrinthine confusion, the passageways narrowing into forgotten corridors where only the most persistent seekers wandered. Dr. Graham Westley stepped carefully over the uneven stones, past shuttered stalls where dust settled thickly over abandoned wares. The deeper he ventured, the fewer signs of life remained. The usual clamor of merchants hawking trinkets and tourists haggling over prices had long since faded behind him. Here, in the city’s neglected arteries, only whispers remained—soft voices that murmured from the recesses of old shops, carried on the stagnant air like remnants of stories no one wished to tell.

Graham was no stranger to places like this. He had spent years sifting through the forgotten corners of the world, digging for artifacts that history had buried. Once, his name had meant something in academic circles. He had lectured on ancient civilizations and penned papers that scholars debated in dimly lit conference halls. That was before the disgrace, before the scandal that had reduced his reputation to whispers of fraud and speculation. Now, he scavenged for whatever scraps of forgotten history he could sell to collectors who cared more for novelty than authenticity.

A flickering glow from an unmarked doorway caught his attention. The shop appeared to be in worse condition than the others, its entrance framed by rotting wooden beams and draped in a faded cloth. A single oil lamp burned behind the counter, casting elongated shadows that flickered unnaturally against the walls. As he stepped inside, a voice greeted him—not in the eager tone of a merchant, but with something closer to resignation.

“You have been searching,” the voice rasped in Turkish.

The speaker emerged from the gloom, a man as weathered as the ruins Graham had spent his life studying. He was ancient in a way that went beyond age, his skin drawn taut over sharp bones, his milky eyes clouded with cataracts that should have rendered him blind. Yet, he turned his head to Graham with unsettling precision, as if he could see him more clearly than anyone ever had.

“You have been searching,” the man repeated, this time in English.

Graham hesitated before answering. “I’m looking for artifacts,” he said. “Something rare.”

The merchant scoffed in such a way that it could have been mistaken for amusement, though there was no trace of a smile on his withered lips. He reached beneath the counter, his gnarled fingers disappearing into the darkness before emerging with a small brass object. He placed it on the worn wood between them.

It was a lamp, unremarkable in design, its surface dull with age, the spout slightly warped. It did not gleam with the promise of hidden treasure, nor did it bear the elaborate engravings of some long-forgotten empire. It was the kind of object that any street vendor might pass off as a relic, hoping to deceive an unwitting tourist.

Graham expected something more sinister, which would warrant the strange atmosphere of this place. Despite his best efforts, he failed to conceal his disappointment.

“A little on the nose, isn’t it?” he said, half-laughing.

The merchant did not blink. “It is not a trinket,” he said, his voice as dry as parchment.

“Then what is it?”

The old man traced his fingertips over the base of the lamp. “A burden,” he said finally. “One that must be passed from hand to hand. And now, it is yours.”

Graham felt the first stirrings of unease. “I didn’t agree to take it.”

“You did, the moment you stepped inside.”

He should have left then. He should have turned and walked back the way he came, shaking off the encounter as the nonsense of an old man who had spent too many years surrounded by relics of the past. But something in the merchant’s voice, in the certainty of his tone, held him in place. Against his better judgment, he reached for the lamp.

The metal was cold beneath his fingers. The lamp was heavier than it should have been.

“The wish commands the wisher,” the merchant murmured. “You do not own it. It owns you.”

Graham’s grip tightened around the brass, and he shook his head.

“Right,” he said, more to himself than to the merchant. “And I suppose you want to tell me it comes with a genie, too?”

The old man did not answer. He merely folded his hands in his lap and watched as Graham turned and left, the weight of the lamp still cold in his grasp.

* * * * * *

The lamp sat on the small, rickety desk in Graham’s hotel room, its tarnished brass reflecting the weak glow of the flickering candle beside it. The room itself was barely fit for habitation—peeling wallpaper, a stained mattress, and the distant sound of rats scurrying within the walls. It was the kind of place where anonymity was guaranteed, where a man could disappear for days without question.

He ran a thumb over the surface of the lamp, feeling the uneven texture of its age. The absurdity of the situation struck him again. He had wasted his time on the ramblings of a senile merchant. He should have known better.

With a sigh, he rubbed at the metal, more out of irritation than expectation.

The air shifted. At first, it was subtle—an almost imperceptible change in pressure, the faintest dimming of the candle’s flame. Then, the shadows around him deepened, stretching across the walls in unnatural angles. A thick, black smoke began to seep from the lamp’s spout. It did not rise in soft curls like incense, nor did it dissipate into the air. It poured forth in a dense, inky flood, spreading across the floor and climbing up the walls. The scent of burnt cinnamon filled the room, laced with something bitter and decayed beneath it.

Graham pushed himself away from the desk. He had no time to process what was happening before the smoke coalesced into a shape—a figure standing before him.

The genie did not resemble the fantasies of childhood tales. It was gaunt and trembling, its body impossibly thin, its hollow, ink-black eyes sunken into a face stretched too tight over its skull. Its limbs were elongated, tapering into fingers that did not seem entirely solid, their edges dissolving into the smoke that had birthed it.

“You may have one wish,” it rasped, the words strangled, as if each one pained it. “But I beg you—be careful.”

Graham stared at the thing. He had spent his life searching for knowledge, chasing after lost truths that eluded lesser men. Now, standing before a creature that should not exist, he was being offered the one thing he had always wanted.

His hesitation lasted only a moment.

“I wish to know everything,” he said. “Everything—past, present, and future.”

The genie’s body convulsed violently. Its face contorted in an expression of raw anguish as a scream tore from its throat—a sound like splintering bone and rent metal. Black smoke surged outward, filling the room in a violent storm, and the lamp shattered, sending fragments of obsidian dust scattering across the desk.

The genie’s form collapsed inward, folding into itself before disintegrating into nothingness.

And everything went still.

Part II

At first, nothing happened.

Graham remained in his chair, staring at the space where the genie had stood just moments before. The room was unchanged aside from the scattered fragments of the shattered lamp, which lay strewn across the desk, comingled with a fine layer of black dust. The walls, meanwhile, had returned to their ordinary state, no longer shifting with unnatural shadows.

He let out a laugh, abrupt and humorless, and ran a hand through his hair. The tension that had gripped his body unwound slightly as the rational part of his mind reasserted itself.

“Of course, nothing happened,” he scoffed.

He had allowed himself to be taken in by the theatrics of a delusion—an elaborate trick of exhaustion, stress, and expectation. The old merchant, the eerie warnings, the grotesque figure conjured from smoke—it had all been some fevered hallucination, the kind that came from spending too long chasing myths in forgotten corners of the world. He had fallen for it.

Still, his hands trembled as he reached for the bottle of whiskey on the nightstand. He poured a measure into the stained hotel glass, drinking deeply as he forced his mind back to logic. The explanation was simple. He had imagined it all, letting superstition and old stories burrow into his thoughts.

Then, the visions began.

It happened in an instant, so sudden and unbidden that it felt as though something had cracked open inside him. One moment, he was alone in his hotel room, and the next, he was somewhere else.

He saw through someone else’s eyes.

He stood in a cramped, dingy apartment. A woman—her hair tied in a loose knot, a mug of tea cradled between her hands—sat by a window, staring out into the night. Graham knew, with absolute certainty, that she was in Boston, that her name was Lena, and that she was thinking about calling her sister but wouldn’t. He knew the exact words she would whisper under her breath in the next moment before she even said them.

Then, just as abruptly, he was back in his own body. The whiskey glass slipped from his grip, tumbling onto the floor and shattering.

He had little time to react before another vision took hold.

This time, he was in the backseat of a taxi in Tokyo, his hands gripping the worn leather interior. The driver—a man named Hiroshi, forty-two years old and divorced, with a daughter he hadn’t seen in six months—was humming under his breath. Graham could feel the exhaustion in the man’s bones, the dull ache in his temples, and the weight of his regrets.

Another snap, another shift.

He was standing at a street corner in Buenos Aires, enveloped in humid night air. A man in a navy-blue suit brushed past him, and in that moment, Graham knew everything about him—his name, his childhood, the affair he was having, the lie he had just told his wife.

The visions slammed into him one after another, relentless and suffocating. He saw through the eyes of strangers across the world, felt their thoughts coil inside his own, and experienced their memories as if they had always belonged to him. He lurched forward, bracing himself against the desk, but the flood of information did not stop.

He knew where his ex-wife was at that exact moment.

She was in Philadelphia, in a dimly lit bar on Chestnut Street, tapping a spoon against the edge of a half-empty cocktail glass. She was waiting for someone Graham had never met, but he knew exactly what she would say when they arrived. He could hear the conversation forming in her mind before she spoke it. The knowledge burrowed into him, unwanted and unbidden, consuming him piece by piece.

It did not stop at thoughts and locations. It expanded, deeper, beyond the surface of mundane secrets.

He knew how everyone he passed would die.

The hotel concierge downstairs would suffer a fatal stroke three years from now, collapsing behind the front desk while a guest waited impatiently for their receipt. The cab driver who had taken him to the bazaar would be hit by a truck before the month was over. The woman in the Boston apartment would die in her sleep at sixty-eight, her body undiscovered for two days.

Some deaths were simple and quiet—a fading heartbeat, a moment of stillness. Others were horrific.

Graham tried to shake the thoughts away, but they clung to him, insidious and absolute.

The world around him began to glitch.

The mirror above the dresser caught his attention. His reflection did not move with him. He turned his head slightly, and in the glass, his reflection was already facing forward, staring at him. His stomach clenched. He took a cautious step forward, watching as the figure in the mirror hesitated before following. It was out of sync, lagging behind his movements by a fraction of a second. Then, it moved before he did.

Shadows in the room shifted unnaturally, pooling into corners where they did not belong. Words in the open book on the nightstand rearranged themselves before his eyes, the letters writhing across the page, forming a language he did not recognize.

He stumbled back, his mind reeling, panic surging through his veins. He needed to leave.

He grabbed his suitcase with trembling hands, carelessly stuffing his belongings into it. The need to escape overwhelmed all rational thought.

By the time he reached the front desk, his skin was clammy with cold sweat. The concierge—a man Graham already knew would die in three years—glanced up with a polite but distant expression.

“I need to check out,” Graham said, forcing the words through clenched teeth.

The concierge frowned. “Sir, you already checked out yesterday.”

Graham recoiled in confusion, and a cold dread settled into his spine. “No, I didn’t,” he said. His voice sounded weak and distant.

The concierge’s brows furrowed. He turned to the computer screen, tapping a few keys. “According to our records, you left the hotel yesterday afternoon,” he said slowly. “You checked out at 3:15 PM.”

Graham could see it happening—the memory that wasn’t his, the moment that never existed. A version of himself, walking to the desk, signing his name, and handing over the key.

But he had not been there. How could he have been?

“That’s impossible,” Graham said.

The concierge gave him a wary look. “We have footage, if you’d like to see it.”

Graham didn’t want to see it. Every instinct screamed for him to turn and run, to put as much distance as possible between himself and whatever truth awaited him on that screen. He ignored them all and followed the man into the small security office.

The screen flickered to life, displaying grainy footage of the front desk from the previous afternoon. Graham watched as he approached the counter, dressed in the same clothes. The footage showed him exchanging brief words with the concierge, signing the ledger, and walking away.

Then, the screen glitched, and for a fraction of a second, there were two of him standing there.

“That’s strange,” the concierge beside him murmured in confusion, leaning in. “It must be a—”

Graham didn’t hear the rest. He backed away from the screen, the floor tilting beneath him, and ran.

Part III

Graham did not remember how he got to the airport. He had a vague recollection of stuffing his passport into his jacket, forcing himself to walk out of the hotel without betraying the panic clawing at the edges of his mind. He had paid in cash, barely registering the transaction as he boarded the earliest available flight out of Istanbul. The city had already begun to feel like a dream, an event that had happened to someone else, in some other lifetime.

The flight itself was a haze of half-formed thoughts and drifting consciousness. He didn’t remember sleeping, yet hours passed in what felt like moments. The rhythmic hum of the engines blended with the murmur of distant conversations, neither of which seemed entirely real. He must have dozed off at some point, because when he opened his eyes, the plane had already begun its descent into New York.

He stepped off the jet bridge, feeling an inexplicable weight settle over him. Unfathomable knowledge remained inside him, an unwelcome presence that he could neither control nor silence. People passed by him in hurried strides, their lives unfolding in intricate detail before he could shut it out. He knew what they were thinking, what they had done that morning, what they feared most in the world.

He saw the threads. It wasn’t just information anymore, but something deeper. When he looked at people now, he could see the invisible forces shaping their actions—subtle shifts in probability, choices being nudged along unseen paths. It was as though reality had been laid bare before him, revealing the mechanisms working beneath the surface. When a woman near the baggage claim hesitated before stepping forward, Graham knew, with absolute certainty, that if she had moved just a second earlier, she would have tripped, spilling her coffee onto the businessman walking past her.

But she hadn’t. Something had adjusted the outcome before it happened, and Graham could see it happening.

He shut his eyes for a moment, gripping the strap of his carry-on as he forced himself toward the exit. His vision swam. He could feel the world recalibrating, but he had no control over it. The knowledge was too vast, too chaotic.

* * * * * *

The moment he stepped outside, the world skipped forward.

The sun had moved in the sky. The streets had changed. The traffic pattern was different, as if time had lurched ahead without him. Graham blinked rapidly and pulled out his phone, checking the time.

It was 7:42 PM.

The last time he had checked, it had been 4:10 PM.

Had he blacked out? Had he walked here without realizing it?

No. No, he hadn’t.

He had somehow lost three and a half hours in the time it had taken him to cross the street.

His hands clenched around the phone. He needed to test this, to prove to himself that he wasn’t imagining things.

He returned to his apartment, locking the door behind him with unsteady fingers. The city noise faded into the background as he steadied himself at his desk, his mind racing.

If his perception of time was breaking—then he needed to leave himself proof.

As a test, he grabbed a sheet of paper and a pen and wrote a message in bold, deliberate strokes:

“Graham, if you’re reading this, you wrote it last night. Do not open the envelope until morning.”

He signed it, folded it neatly, and placed it inside a plain white envelope. He sealed it with a piece of tape, ensuring there was no way to open it without tearing it, and hid it, tucking it deep inside a stack of books, far enough back that he wouldn’t accidentally come across it.

Then he sat on the edge of his bed, waiting for sleep to take him.

* * * * * *

Morning arrived, but it didn’t feel like morning.

Graham’s eyes snapped open. His body was already sitting upright, though he had no memory of rising. A sense of wrongness settled over him as he moved toward the bookshelf, his fingers fumbling through the pile of books.

He found the envelope exactly where he had left it.

The seal was already broken.

He stared at it, perplexed. He had hidden it himself, and he hadn’t opened it.

His fingers trembled as he unfolded the paper. At the bottom of the page, beneath his signature, a second line of handwriting had appeared, the ink long dried:

“You already know.”

* * * * * *

Graham did not leave the apartment for the rest of the day. The experiment had confirmed what he feared, that he was no longer in control of his own timeline.

The world around him continued to shift, moments slipping through his grasp. He caught glimpses of himself in places he had never been: a reflection in the window of a passing bus, a figure turning the corner just as he stepped outside. They all shared the same posture, all of them wearing the same clothes.

Then, the subway incident happened.

He had boarded the train without thinking, letting the motion of the city carry him somewhere—anywhere—that wasn’t his apartment. The knowledge in his mind had dulled slightly, receding just enough that he could pretend, for a few moments, that things were normal.

Then, he saw himself sitting across the car.

At first, he thought it was a trick of the glass, a reflection catching him at an odd angle. But the man across from him was as real and as solid as the seat he occupied, sitting there with his hands folded neatly in his lap. And he was smiling—not a natural expression, but something practiced, something almost—but not quite—human.

The train rumbled forward, its fluorescent lights casting flickering shadows along the walls. Graham felt his mouth go dry. The man did not blink or shift in his seat.

The train didn’t stop. Graham glanced toward the route map above the door, searching for some indication of where they were. He had taken this line before. He knew the stops, the rhythm of the journey—but the stops were wrong. The map showed names he didn’t recognize, symbols that shifted each time he looked at them.

Panic crept up his spine as he turned back toward the man sitting across from him. He was closer now, but Graham had not seen him move.

The train continued to rumble forward, the lights stuttering in and out of sync with reality. The other passengers seemed unaware, their faces blurring at the edges of his vision.

He had to get off.

He surged toward the doors, gripping the metal pole as the train plunged into darkness. The lights flickered off completely for a single, endless moment.

Then, they returned. And when they did, the man was now sitting right beside him.

The train slammed to a stop, so forcefully that Graham nearly collapsed. The doors hissed open, revealing a station Graham did not recognize. The walls were lined with symbols that shifted like ink spreading through water.

He bolted.

The moment his feet hit the platform, the air shifted. He turned, looking back toward the train—

It was gone.

The station was empty.

He stumbled forward, his hands bracing against the tiled wall. He pulled out his phone, checking the time, and his stomach turned.

A full week had passed.

Part IV

Graham woke with the unsettling awareness that he was already standing.

The cold floor pressed against the soles of his feet, the dim glow of a hallway light casting faint shadows along the walls. He found himself standing outside his apartment, his hands hanging loosely at his sides as though he had been there for some time. His body felt strangely distant, as if his mind had been disconnected from it and was only now returning.

The door in front of him was his own, but something was amiss. The wood seemed too smooth, the handle too polished, as if it had been replaced by something else that only looked like a door. A soft, rhythmic tapping sound came from the other side.

His stomach turned. He had locked the door before he went to bed. He was certain of it.

But now he was out here—and something else was inside.

A slow, sinking dread spread through his chest. His hand lifted, almost against his will, and he reached for the knob.

For a moment, the tapping stopped.

Then—something tapped back. The knock came from his side of the door.

Graham yanked his hand away as if burned and took a step back, but his gaze remained fixed on the door.

Then, he saw movement. A shadow slid across the narrow gap beneath the frame, pooling unnaturally before it receded, and the handle twisted slowly, almost curiously.

A familiar voice followed.

“Let me in,” it insisted. Graham swallowed hard and staggered back. It was his voice.

The handle jerked violently, rattling against the frame. Graham took another step back. The sound of static filled the hallway, vibrating deep in his skull, and the door bulged outward. The wood warped and stretched as if something was pressing against it from the inside, forcing its way through. A single, gnarled hand emerged from amidst the distortion—its fingers too long, too thin, the skin haphazardly folded over the joints.

Then, the face appeared.

It was him. Not just a reflection, nor a distorted imitation—this was him, but malformed and putrefying, a thing that wore his skin like a mask but couldn’t quite configure itself correctly. Its features sagged, reforming in slow, unsettling movements, like wax melting and re-solidifying with every breath.

Its mouth opened, and when it spoke, the sound was filled with the crackle of feedback, the breaking of bones, and the whisper of pages turning.

“You wished for knowledge,” it said.

Graham couldn’t move.

The thing lurched forward, but instead of stepping through the door, it folded outward, its body twisting as though it were pouring itself into the space rather than moving through it.

“Now,” it rasped, “you must become it.”

* * * * * *

The walls shattered around him.

The hallway was gone. His apartment was gone. He stood in a thousand places at once, all of them real, all of them his.

He was in Istanbul, standing in the market stall.

He was in the hotel, staring at the broken lamp.

He was on the train, watching himself smile back.

He was everywhere.

And then, he was nowhere.

Time folded inward, and he watched himself make the wish—again, and again, and again.

He was the wisher.

He was the merchant.

He was the genie.

He was everyone.

And now, he was nothing.

The cycle had been ever-present, looping endlessly. He’d simply failed to recognize it.

The thing that had worn his face watched him with hollow, shifting eyes. Graham felt his own body dissolving, his skin unraveling into strands of ink and whispered words.

The knowledge had always been available, waiting for the moment he would once again possess it.

Now, all semblance of his personality was being stripped from him, making room for something new.

Graham’s involvement in the process, he realizes, was not a mistake.  It was inevitable.

And Graham knew that once the process was complete, he would cease to exist.

* * * * * *

Graham did not remember running, nor did he recall escaping. But somehow, impossibly, he found himself in a book-lined study—the air rife with the scent of parchment—gripping the armrests of a high-backed chair.

A man sat across from him, a glass of wine in his hand, his sharp eyes studying him with a knowing patience. So far as he knew, Graham had never seen the man in his life, and yet, he knew him intimately and recognized him immediately.

“Dr. Koenig?” Graham rasped, barely recognizing his own voice.

The man folded his hands. “You sought me out, Dr. Westley,” he said calmly. “Though I’m not surprised you’re having trouble recalling why. You’ve really done it now, my friend.”

“I don’t know what’s happening to me,” Graham said. He swallowed, his throat dry. “How did I get here? What’s happening to me? Why do I feel as if I’ve met you before, when I’m sure I haven’t—and how do we know each other’s names?”

Koenig studied him for a long moment before speaking. “No doubt, you recall making the wish,” he said, to which Graham nodded. “Well, Dr. Westley, the wish itself is conscious,” Koenig continued, “and now it is reshaping you.”

“Reshaping me?” Graham choked out the words. “Into what?”

“Why, into its vessel, of course,” Koenig replied, so matter-of-factly a casual observer may have suspected they were discussing the weather. Seeing the tension on Graham’s face, he gave an exasperated sigh and continued. “I’m afraid it seems you’ve stumbled upon that forbidden knowledge you dedicated your life to unveiling, and that upon achieving that goal, you’ve unwittingly doomed us all. Honestly, I can’t say I’m surprised. Somehow, I always suspected it would come to this.”

Graham’s mouth hung agape, dismayed, as a terrible certainty settled in his chest. Dr. Koenig took a sip of wine and reclined gently in his chair.

“Tell me how to stop it!” Graham cried.

“Every wish granted feeds the cycle,” Koenig replied without the slightest hint of urgency. His voice was steady and clinical, as if reciting something that had been said many times before. “You are not the first—but you may be the last. It’s difficult to say.”

The room shuddered, the walls flickering like an image on the verge of collapsing. Graham gripped the armrests tighter, his fingers digging into the worn fabric. “Dr. Koenig, please!” he cried. “You must have some idea how to help me! How do I stop it?”

Koenig sighed. “That,” he said, “is the wrong question.”

Part V

Graham came to several days later, perhaps longer, with no recollection of his conversation with Dr. Koenig, or of how he’d ended up back in his apartment. The passage of time had lost its meaning, shifting in ways that made no sense. Morning and night had ceased to hold distinction, blending into a seamless stretch of moments that rearranged themselves with every blink. He could no longer track when he had last slept, or when he had last truly been himself.

Perhaps the most alarming development, however, was that his body was… unraveling.

It had started with his fingertips.

The skin had peeled away, not in the way flesh wounds did, but as if it had been rewritten, transformed into something else. The tips of his fingers had become text, black ink bleeding into his skin, forming and reforming in shifting lines of letters. It was not a language he recognized, yet one he understood, and it moved beneath his skin, writhing in delicate, ceaseless motion, as though his body was no longer flesh, but parchment rewriting itself over and over.

He had tried to bandage his hands, to stop himself from seeing it, but the words bled through the fabric, spelling themselves against the material as if desperate to be read.

He tore the wrappings off.

It had made no difference.

* * * * * *

The changes did not stop with his hands.

His shadow no longer obeyed him.

It had first happened in small ways—a hesitation in its movement, a fraction of a second too slow. Then, it had grown worse.

It watched him.

It shifted when he wasn’t looking, moving even when he stood still. The angles stretched unnaturally, splitting apart from him in ways that made no sense. He would turn, expecting it to follow, only to see it still lingering in its previous position, as if reluctant to obey.

Once, in the dim reflection of his apartment window, he saw it reach for him.

Beginning the next morning, he avoided windows entirely.

The whispers began after that. At first, they were faint—just beyond the threshold of hearing, curling into the spaces between sounds. He mistook them for distant murmurs, the rustling of fabric, the hush of passing footsteps. But they grew louder.

They were speaking to him—no, not speaking to him. Not directly, at least. Rather, they had always been speaking, waiting for him to hear.

The source of the whispers loomed beyond sight, their presence pressing against the edges of his vision, vast and impossible. He did not see them fully—his mind would not allow it—but he felt their gaze, and he heard their voices.

They were nebulous, unbound by form, often little more than eyes folding into themselves—figures that dissolved and reappeared between moments. And, like Koenig, he felt as if he had known them forever—since the very beginning—and, simultaneously, that he had never seen them before. And now, for reasons beyond his comprehension, they had chosen to reveal themselves to him, and they were whispering his name.

Graham had tried to fight it. He had tried to hold onto himself, grounding his thoughts in the fragments of his past that still felt real. He repeated his name under his breath, forcing himself to recall his childhood home, the scent of old books, and the sound of his mother’s voice, while he still could. The words, however, twisted as they left his lips.

His name was no longer his. He could feel it shifting, morphing into something indecipherable, something that had always belonged to them.

The knowledge inside him had now taken root, rewriting him from the inside out.

In spite of it all, Graham clung to one last hope. Namely, that if his wish had started all of this, then perhaps he could undo it.

He had to try. And so, he sat at his desk, pen in hand, forcing his mind into focus, and wrote carefully:

I wish to undo my wish.

The ink bled across the page, shifting before his eyes, the words rearranging themselves into a sentence he could not understand. He tried again, gripping the pen tighter, his hands shaking—and the same thing happened. Every time he formed the sentence, it changed, warping into something unrecognizable.

His mind refused to hold the thought. It was not his wish to undo. Defeated, Graham hung his head in his hands, rubbing his temples.

“It was never your wish,” a distant whisper brushed against his ear.

Graham’s fingers trembled as the ink spread across his hands, consuming his skin and dissolving him into written words.

At the height of his agony, the whisper returned.

“It was always ours.”

* * * * * *

Graham ran until there was nowhere left to run.

The city was virtually unidentifiable; its streets were no longer where they should have been, and its buildings were contorting when he wasn’t looking. He had fled his apartment, leaving behind the echoes of whispered voices and the weight of knowledge that had already displaced too much of him.

He did not remember how he had reached the desert.

One moment, he had been somewhere else—an alleyway, a hotel, a nameless street filled with the movement of people he no longer recognized. Then, he had stepped forward, and suddenly, it was only sand beneath his feet.

Graham stared, bleary-eyed, at the alien sun hanging low in the sky, bleeding orange light across an endless expanse of windswept dunes. That’s when it occurred to him that time had slowed, and that the knowledge inside him was no longer pouring in at an uncontrollable rate. He could still feel its presence—woven into him, written across his skin—but the rush had ceased, and for once, he felt as if he could finally breathe.

He ascended a dune, his legs heavy, his body weak from exhaustion that went beyond the physical. His fingers still bore the imprint of shifting words, the ink embedded deep into his flesh, but they no longer burned.

At the crest, he stopped. There, something was waiting for him. From his newfound vantage point, he saw a figure standing motionless below, where the sand flattened into a vast, featureless plain.

Graham knew what it was before he even saw its face.

It was him.

Epilogue

The Overseer watched what remained of Dr. Graham Westley with a patient stillness.

The being wore the disgraced archaeologist’s face, but the features were not entirely right. The angles were sharper, the shadows beneath its eyes deeper, as though it had been stretched into something beyond human. Its clothing was colorless, its form blending into the horizon like a thing that had always existed there, waiting for the doctor’s arrival.

“I was you once,” it said. The voice was Graham’s, but it carried a depth that did not belong to anything mortal. It echoed in the space between sounds, slipping into his mind without effort. “And, soon enough, you will be me.”

Graham staggered back, the sand shifting beneath his unsteady gait.

The Overseer did not move from its position—it didn’t need to. He could feel it inside him already. The transformation had begun long before this moment. The wish had not granted knowledge as Graham had once imagined. Rather, it had dismantled him, piece by piece, stripping away his identity and replacing it with something foreign and inconceivable.

The genie had never been a giver of wisdom. It had been just another vessel, waiting to be replaced—and Graham had asked for it. The realization settled into him with the finality of a closing book. He had never been the first, and he would not be the last.

The last thing he felt was his body breaking apart—the sensation of being undone, his skin dissolving into ink, and his thoughts unraveling into fragments of letters and whispered prophecy.  He saw the words scatter across the dunes, shifting in the sand.

The Overseer stepped forward, extending a hand as if beckoning.

And with a final, blood-chilling shriek, Graham disappeared.

* * * * * *

Far away, in a forgotten corner of the world, positioned alongside other antiquities on an otherwise unremarkable, dust-covered shelf—another lamp waited.

Before long, another fool reached out his hand and took possession of it.

They whispered a wish.

They got what they deserved.

And the cycle began again.