The Year One Hundred & One,
The magma bubbled like stew in a pot. A severed black hand with two claws scuttled like a crab out of the liquid fire onto the underground shore. It flexed back, cracking its joints—it had fed the sprawling inferno for a century, refilling the lake of molten lava with its own seeping, red-hot marrow. Finally, bleeding smoke and flame, the severed hand dragged itself into the dark cracks of the bedrock. It took more than a year for the hand to find its way though the roots of the mountain up to the light.
The black claws emerged in a vast chamber filled with sunlight. There was a well in the center of the space that radiated sheer power throughout the mountain like the beating of a drum. The severed hand crawled to the base of the well, basking in the overflowing energy, and grew like a weed.
The claws extended day by day, then split, forking branches. Each end divided again, forming crude hands and feet. Where the third claw had long ago been severed, a tail sprouted. The stump where the black hand had met its original arm grew into a hideous knot of bone, an elongated tumor, and finally a skull without eyes, ears, or a mouth.
The black skeleton crawled to its knees and pulled itself up to the cusp of the well. It had no heart, but not all wishes come from a pure light within: the unquenchable thirst for power, the burning for revenge, the lust for chaos—these are dreams conjured in dark places. The skeleton reached its clawed hands into the water, which immediately began to boil and steam. It withdrew from the well, one by one, three eggs, each bright as a ruby. One dark wish, three answers; three eggs, one keeper, waiting to be born again in the heart of unholy fire.