“The Steam Djinn”: Why the radiators no longer work

When the building had first been constructed, a man from the ironworks had come and carefully bound up a steam djinn in the basement to run the boilers and pipe hot steam through the wrought radiators. It had been a complex ritual, swallowing a whole week during the pouring of the concrete basement, and photographs from the archives caught snatches of the process as the man chalked elaborate runes of summoning and circles of binding to bring the djinn from its home plane and herd it into a steam boiler.

For the next 75 years, the djinn provided the building with heat, its exertions echoing through the decorative radiators, their scrollwork now blurry and muted under decades of paint. A little water every now and then was all that was required to keep the djinn productive and the building warm. It was not as efficient as later forms of heat, and the radiators were notorious for burning anyone who brushed up against them. The mighty whirlwind wraith in the central cooling plant was far better, but with no money for renovation or repair, the steam djinn continued its work.

It had begun to fade of late, though. No matter how much water it was fed, the heat was increasingly intermittent and feeble. Votive offerings and half-remembered rituals from old library books propped it up for a time, but it was soon apparent to everyone that the summoning had been for a 125-year contract, a standard span in the era before urban planning, and that as the time approached the steam djinn would increasingly fade out, returning to its home and leaving the building dark and cold.

None knew how to summon another. And there was no money for anything better. The plan, then, was to ride out the ebbing steam as long as possible, piling on layers and huddling ever closer to the dying heat, until the day it went out. Water would need to be turned off at some point in the near future, to keep pipes from freezing and bursting, and the building would continue its slow decay from magic to mundanity.

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