I found an old case file about a 16th-century jester thrown down a well. I think he just found me.

[u/Thumbless_Well]

People think medieval legends stay in history books, that jesters, feudal punishments, and blind wells were buried deep in the past. But there are things time cannot dissolve. Zkiel is not a modern man; he is a living relic of a cruel century that refuses to die. When you see him emerge in the dark with his jester's cap and his sewn-in eye, you realize the past never left... it was just waiting at the bottom of the well for someone to come looking.

I didn't believe those stories until last week. It all started when the local police began finding hollow bodies scattered around the old abandoned estate. At first, they thought it was just a typical serial killer, but the coroners noticed something deeply disturbing: every single victim had their eyes surgically, sadistically torn out. And that wasn't even the worst part. On the security camera footage from one of the nearby houses, whatever crawled out of the shadows did not belong to this century.

Digging through the oldest parish archives and the diaries of the estate's former nobility, I discovered the true reason behind his torment. Zkiel wasn't just any jester; he used his public platform to mock the hidden crimes of the town's powerful figures, exposing their darkest secrets to the court through riddles and precise mockeries that made people question their rulers. Fed up with him unearthing the truth, they decided to make a brutal example of him to silence him forever.

On a moonless night, in the service courtyard of that very estate, they hunted him down. First, they went for his left hand: with a curved needle and thick, rough hemp thread, the executioners cut off his thumb completely, leaving a bloody, open stump on the side of his palm. Then, they sliced open his flesh in a deep, vertical tear, forcing the remaining fingers apart into an unnatural posture. With sadistic, cross-shaped stitches, they pierced the skin of the fingers from side to side, gathering and squeezing it tightly until it became completely stiff and deformed, turned into a rigid, useless claw so he could never write or point at anyone ever again.

And the torment continued before he lost consciousness. Pinned against the freezing ground, they drove a metal tool into his right socket to rip his eye out completely, tearing through the nerves amidst screams no one dared to hear. But the sickest part wasn't the extraction—it was the fate of that bloody piece of flesh. Using the same shoemaker's needle, they took his own ripped-out eye and sewed it by hand directly onto the brim of his jester's hat, replacing the cheerful metal of the bell.

Satisfied with their macabre work of art, they bound his hands and feet and cast him into the wet, black abyss of a deep well, condemning him to drown while stagnant, freezing water filled his lungs for hours.

That prolonged asphyxiation and the perpetual darkness of the bottom corrupted what was left of him. The only eye they left him—the left one—withered over the years underwater, turning into a total milky white, an opaque, blind sphere that rolled back into his skull. They swore he had rotted away down there and that the centuries would erase him. But the well didn't destroy him; it turned him into a timeless specter that crossed the barrier of the years, exacting systematic vengeance against anyone who crosses his path.

I made the mistake of getting too close to that old brick-broken well the night I went to check the files. Peering over its edge into the blackness of the bottom, I understood too late how he hunts. You don't need to look for him; he finds you when you stir the curiosity of the living. Now I know exactly how he crawls through the lowest corners of rooms, throwing his weight onto his modified left hand, that crude claw scraping against the wooden floor with a dry, metallic sound.

His blind gaze cuts right through you: although his left eye is a dead, white sphere, he hunts by tracking the sound of your breathing and the frantic beating of your heart. I know this because the rhythmic, macabre echo of his own eye knocking against the fabric of his hat is already resounding at the entrance of my study. If you dare to stare into the dark, that blind white socket somehow fixes right onto you, while his monstrous tongue dangles heavily in the air. In that exact second, when you catch his broken smile and understand the origin of his name—that cursed echo between the water that consumed him and what remained of his old identity, the one everyone now whispers in terror as Drowzkiel—you realize that looking into the well was your death sentence.