Ten Cuidado Con Lo Que Deseas -

In the center of his studio stood a sculpture he had never made. It was a woman, life-sized, carved from a single piece of jet-black stone that hadn’t been there before. Her face was beautiful beyond reason, but her expression… her expression was wrong. Her lips were parted in a silent scream, and her hands were raised as if pushing against an invisible wall.

He carried the sphere to his studio, feeling a thrum of power up his arms. That night, half-asleep and drunk on cheap wine, he held the obsidian and whispered to the empty room: “I wish for a masterpiece. Something that will make the whole world remember my name.”

Be careful what you wish for.

He was made of black stone. His mouth was open in a silent scream. And in the corner of his studio, a new obsidian sphere sat waiting for the next restless soul. Ten cuidado con lo que deseas

Mateo woke in his studio. Morning light streamed through the dusty window. The obsidian sphere was gone. So was the sculpture. His hands were clean, his chisels untouched. For a moment, he dared to hope.

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.

He froze.

“You wished for a masterpiece,” a voice whispered. It came from everywhere and nowhere, from the obsidian sphere still pulsing on his shelf. “But a masterpiece requires a soul. Hers is the first. Yours will be the last if you do not understand.”

He woke to the smell of wet clay and something else—sulfur, or maybe ozone.

“I wish I had never found you.”

But each night, the sculpture changed.

That ancient warning has echoed through folktales and whispered warnings for centuries. But for Mateo, a young, restless sculptor in the rain-soaked mountain town of Valverde, it was just a phrase his abuela muttered when he complained about the village’s slow, quiet life.

One stormy October night, lightning split the ancient oak at the edge of town. The next morning, the villagers found something strange embedded in the splintered roots: a flawless sphere of obsidian, cool to the touch despite the lingering heat of the strike. Inside it swirled faint lights, like trapped fireflies. In the center of his studio stood a

“I wish something exciting would happen,” he’d sigh, chipping away at a block of local limestone. “I wish my work mattered.”

The town elder declared it a relic of the old gods. But to Mateo, it was a miracle.