Script Master:
A day came when the machine was to be employed in raising up a colossal stone. Under it, people whispered, would be the Giantess’ treasure. All the town turned out for the levitation, the crowd as jolly as on a feast day. Thus every soul in the community witnessed the successful hoisting of the great stone and the collapse when an axle broke.
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It was as if a piece of sky had fallen to crush the earth.
The monolith thumped down. The ground shuddered. The frightful stone toppled over and entombed one Learned Man. Nothing of him remained but that left hand he favored. Just as a severed salamander tail will twist and wind, so did his fingers writhe. Their squirming did not quit until Vespers prayers were heard at sunset.
“What do we need with another ghost?” said the Innkeeper’s Widow. “These stones are crowded with souls who died before their time — drowned maidens and unborn infants and boy soldiers conscripted in foreign lands.”
They say two Learned Men left town in a rush, but not before a noisy row with the Innkeeper’s Widow, whom the scholars accused of stealing their bottomless purse. She and her gossips, in high dudgeon, chased the strangers from her inn. The eviction was so forceful, it caused the men to abandon their iron box full of secrets.
The Nobleman confiscated it. A wise man, he locked it away in his vault where, it is said, the papers remain all these many lifetimes later. With each generation, locals fear the birth of an ambitious heir who might rebuild the cursed machine.