When people hear of djinns, they think of genies. They don’t think of the demons of fire and smoke that were born out of time. The origins of the Djinn are tied to the Middle East and North Africa.

Djinn are crafty creatures- possessing control over fire and the most powerful of them, the ability to distort reality with their wish granting. At a price (and peril of the wish maker).

But this is not a story of Djinn. This is a story of Ghouls. The carrion creatures that many have forgotten are tied to the legend of Djinn and Genie. Ghouls with their insatiable appetite for dead flesh. Ghouls with their deep burrows and graveyard raids.

Ghouls— too magically inert to make the transformation back to their Djinn state.

Not all Ghouls are mindless, dirt dwelling monsters. Some are still wrapped in their cloak of dwindling humanity. They try to hide their teeth. And their appetite. Eventually both are revealed.

You cannot avoid the hunger. Not when destiny calls you through it.

Family matters. Even for orphans. Especially so. Secrets that live within your bloodline can’t be hidden by a new name.

Isaiah Fallow learned this the hard way.

Isaiah didn’t look like the rest of his family, his skin a touch too tan and hair a whirling curl of black. In all the pictures he looked like a distant cousin from far away. But he was loved and that’s all that mattered.

Until his sixteenth birthday.

Secrets of the blood can hide a long time, but not forever.

Isaiah was sixteen when the hunger woke up. When a burning in his stomach felt like the screech of a dying star. He didn’t remember the day or weeks that followed. Outside of the spill of blood and bone. Horrible crunching echoed through half dreams. Wicked lights danced at the edge of his sight— a beacon of fire calling from the Southwest— calling to him in a language that sounded like a song of mourning.

When he awoke he was changed. No longer a boy and very far from a man. Isaiah Fallow’s hunger had turned him into something not seen for centuries— a ghoul. The change requires magic— the blood demands it. It wants to be transformed from the dormant state. But in an age of technology, it rarely finds it.

Still, a large enough amount of magic will trigger the transformation. Be it through ritual or consumption. Or both.

The Fallow’s loved Isaiah. If they hadn’t, he would have never turned. His birthday party saw the whole community celebrate a bright, kind, young man. The type of boy who smiled like careless ease. The kind that even strangers feel protective of— knowing that joyful innocence is a rarity.

So, an entire community turned out to share their appreciation of him. Secretly they placed their own hopes and dreams across his narrow shoulders— believing he could become the best of them. Many wishes were muttered as he went to blow out his birthday candles— whatever was wished, it wasn’t what was deliver.
No one expected a pale, primal creature to rip through his skin and then the crowd. There’s an old word for what happened- carnage.

With razor claws and a gaping maw— the creature tore through the gathering like wet paper.

The age of monsters had returned to the world— and the only one who lived to tell the tale had to bear the burden of bringing it back.