The Red Thread of Hiis

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No one entered the palace through the front gate.

That was only for cameras.

The true entrance lay beneath the fountain, where the water never reflected the sky. Every president eventually found the hidden stairway—not because someone showed it to them, but because one night they simply remembered where it was.

The first panel belonged to daylight.

The second belonged to rumor.

By the third, truth had already become an inconvenience.

Two strangers met every election season in a café overlooking the old towers of Tallinn. One drew impossible maps in a notebook. The other never asked questions. They watched candidates smile for photographers while ravens circled the palace without landing.

Neither man voted.

They knew votes were merely footprints covering older tracks.

Deep below the palace stood the faceless doll.

A fresh red thread waited beside its neck.

Invisible hands moved carved figures across a circle of ash. Every speech above echoed below as another knot tightened. The politicians believed they were choosing words. The doll believed it was choosing voices.

One candidate dreamed of a corridor lined with hundreds of identical wooden dolls. Every doll wore his face.

He awoke screaming.

Another began speaking in perfect sentences that no one had taught him. The language carried no nation, no alphabet, only obedience. Poll numbers rose overnight.

Television called it momentum.

The old women in forgotten villages crossed themselves and whispered that the palace had eaten again.

Election Day arrived beneath a sky that looked like an enormous wooden iris staring down from somewhere beyond weather. Limousines rolled through the gates. Reporters celebrated democracy while photographers captured history from every angle except the one that mattered.

Below them, the faceless doll slowly turned.

The red thread tightened by itself.

Far beneath the foundations, another passage opened into darkness, lined with dolls whose necks were wrapped in centuries of fading crimson.

At the end of the corridor stood a single empty chair.

It was not waiting for a president.

It was waiting for whoever believed the palace belonged to them.