Real artifacts aren’t sold in esoteric shops. They find us themselves, and we take them into our hands, sometimes without even realizing what kind of mechanism we are setting in motion.
Once, I came into possession of a bracelet brought from Bali. It wasn’t that light, porous lava they sell to tourists. This was a heavy, monolithic chunk of compressed volcanic ash and magma. I chose it intuitively, without even knowing its true nature.
For a long time, I simply wore it, until it began to slip off my wrist. That’s when I decided to find a place for it. In my home stood an antique candlestick, 250 years old. I placed a fresh red candle in it and slid the volcanic bracelet over the top.
I didn’t realize that in that moment, I had created a detonator. I had combined centuries of history, fire, and the primordial power of the earth.
A Radar for Foulness and the Sentient Fungus
For a long time, the composition just sat there. But one day, I lit that candle. It burned for only ten minutes.
The next day, I discovered a wood fungus in the house. It had devoured 40 square meters of hidden structures. This wasn’t just mold—it emitted a heavy, low-frequency pulsation. This foulness had a consciousness; it was a curse that had taken physical form. For a month, I clawed out this rot, I threw out my back, I sustained injuries, but I destroyed it.
Six months later, I lit the candle again. Suddenly, I began to suffocate; my oxygen was cut off. I extinguished the flame. The next day, my cat found a hotspot under the stairs—the fungus was trying to return. I tore down the stairs.
A few weeks later, I lit the candle a third time—and found another wall that the fungus had just begun to consume. I tore that down, too.
And then I understood the algorithm. This artifact had become an absolute scanner. It instantly illuminated everything that was slowly and secretly killing us in this house. But I didn’t immediately grasp its primary nature: this combination does not cleanse. It destroys.
A volcano does not know how to transform gently. A volcano incinerates the old, leaving behind only dead earth for a new beginning. When I lit the candle for the fourth time, the energy of destruction transferred to me: instead of ritually burning my old paintings as I always did, I cold-bloodedly threw them into a landfill to rot. I began to dispose of the past without mercy.
The Interrupted Line and the Hand from Beyond
The most terrifying and powerful lesson the artifact taught me was through death.
I had a cat—the last representative of a continuous feline dynasty that had lived in our family for 65 years. A bloodline as long as a human life. His kidneys failed. Terminal cancer.
Desperate to save him, hoping for a miracle, I lit the candle. We sat together and watched the flame for over half an hour. I prayed for healing.
The next day, I made the decision to put him to sleep. His suffering was mounting, and I had to stop it.
But at the moment of his death, I saw the true picture of the subtle plane. I physically felt a colossal, alien hand pierce through matter, stop time, snatch his soul in a millisecond, and slam the portal shut with a thud. I felt the consciousness of that being.
The candle worked. But according to the Law of the Volcano. It didn’t give him a gentle healing—it radically, with merciless mercy, severed his connection to his diseased body.
The Overflowing Vessel
Without the cat, who had previously acted as an energetic filter, the house began to fill with my father’s heavy melancholy. This stagnation, like that wood fungus, began to crawl across the walls. I looked at the candle and wanted to light it. But I knew: if I did, the volcano wouldn’t “cleanse” my father—the volcano would eject him from this house through conflict.
During that same period, I was working on a painting that had become possessed by a demonic entity (which I’ve mentioned before). I wanted to sear the canvas with the artifact’s energy, but intuition struck my hands: the fire would have activated the creature sleeping in the ash of the bracelet.
Return to the Earth
I realized that the bracelet had absorbed a critical mass of curses, illness, death, and foulness. It had become radioactive.
How do you cleanse compressed volcano? Water? Salt? It’s pointless. Fire would only awaken everything locked inside. A child of the earth can only be taken back by the earth itself.
I put the bracelet in a box and drove into the forest. I searched intuitively until I saw a triangular island between trails, with a massive tree rising in the center. The impulse was instant—here. I grounded the artifact, hiding it beneath the roots. Perhaps in a few years, I will return to see if the planet has purified it. Or perhaps, I will forget about it forever.
As soon as I left it there, the thick fog that had occupied my mind for the last few months vanished. It became easy to breathe again.
I know how to create portals, but I also know how to recognize when a tool has become too dangerous to keep in the house. The art of control lies not only in knowing how to summon power, but in knowing when to return it to the darkness.