Edwin Cogsworth had spent his entire life building toward a single moment: success that could outlast mortality itself. His failures were numerous, an automaton that couldn’t walk, a flying machine that barely hovered, and a financial empire crumbling into bankruptcy.
Each failure chipped away at his legacy, and the whispers of his irrelevance haunted him. But when he discovered the blueprints for the Fate Engine hidden within an ancient manuscript, everything changed. It was a machine like no other, one capable of bending the flow of fate itself. With it, Edwin could control his destiny and rise above the ashes of his past mistakes.
There was only one problem. The machine required a sacrifice.
At first, Cogsworth thought he could find a workaround. Weeks of experimentation turned into months, but the results were always the same: without a life to fuel the machine, the process wouldn’t work. Reluctantly, he accepted the truth and chose his sacrifice: James Everett, soon to be known as AGONY. Kind, hardworking, and drowning in debt, Agony had trusted Cogsworth to deliver them all to success. But trust, Cogsworth decided, was the most valuable currency to exploit.
The night of the betrayal, the workshop hummed with the machine’s rhythmic energy, the glyphs along its surface glowing faintly. Cogsworth paced, nerves simmering beneath his calculated exterior. His team was gathered, Jacob, his loyal mechanic; Seer, his prophetic scholar; and Dave, the moralist who had already tried and failed to stop the project. They were waiting on one more person: Jeff Wright, the handyman Cogsworth had called earlier to fix a small electrical issue. He thought little of Jeff’s presence. The man was ordinary, just another worker passing through.
When the machine activated and James screamed, Cogsworth’s confidence faltered. The machine wasn’t pulling energy as cleanly as he expected. Its vibrations grew erratic, the glowing glyphs flashing wildly. “Shut it down!” Dave shouted, but Cogsworth was paralyzed. Suddenly, the air tore apart with a deafening crack. One of the machine’s massive cogs spun loose, and Cogsworth barely registered Jeff’s presence as the handyman tried to run. The machine sucked Jeff into its vortex like he was fuel it had been waiting for, and Cogsworth watched in horror as Jeff’s body disintegrated into the glowing rift.
The last thing Cogsworth saw before the cog impaled him against the wall was Jeff’s red eyes glowing through the chaos, a warning that fate could never truly be controlled.
As a ghost, Cogsworth is bound to the machine, the massive cog still embedded in his chest like a grim monument to his failure. His spectral form flickers with an electric hum, his eyes glowing faintly with the same energy that consumed Jeff. He paces the workshop endlessly, muttering calculations to himself, believing that if he can fix the machine, he can undo the curse. But Jeff is always there, lurking just beyond the shadows, his glowing eyes a silent reminder that Cogsworth’s time has long since run out.