Gold Fever

Sniffy the rat had a problem.

No, not the usual problems. Not the gas leak in the wall, or the moth that knew his name. Not even the memory of what happened in the toaster — which he never talked about, not even to himself.

This was worse.

This was ants.

They were in the cupboards. They were in the vents. They were in his dreams.

They marched in lines through the pantry, over the microwave, and under the bathroom door. One morning, he padded groggily to the kitchen and saw the words, formed in tiny glistening black bodies, shimmering across the counter:

“WE SEE YOU RAT.”

Sniffy squeaked, chewed through a shoelace out of reflex, and bolted. Not up. Not out. Down. Down the squeaky stairs into the dark, humming place where few dared go.

The basement.

To him.

To Yarcs Lluks — the haunted, half-cursed skull of tangled wires and mad ideas, who lived in a throne of shattered remotes and hoarded secrets.

Yarcs’ LEDs flickered dim blue and red from his eye sockets. His jaw clacked open with delight when he saw the trembling rodent.

“Sniffy, my loyal disappointment,” Yarcs rasped. “You reek of fear… and cheese dust. Delicious. Come closer.”

Sniffy twitched but obeyed. “They’re watching me,” he whispered. “They’re in the walls. The ants. They’re spelling things. I think they know about… the peanut drawer.”

Yarcs chuckled — a sound like old capacitors frying in reverse.

“Of course they know,” Yarcs said. “They are my children now.”

⸻

It had started months ago. Boredom, mostly. A few experiments. A joke.

A sprinkle of sugar here. A drop of honey there. A breadcrumb reward for a lost capacitor, a fleck of gold from a busted SIM card.

Yarcs trained the ants. Just to see if he could.

But ants, you see, are fast learners.

By the second week, they were crawling through garbage piles and scavenging old devices — finding gold-plated pins, flaking layers of conductive foil, crushed bits of precious metal from broken tech.

They began laying it at his feet — or rather, his wires.

Sniffy had seen it. Every day, tiny tributes appeared at the base of Yarcs’ pedestal:

• Gold dust from a cracked USB.

• Micro shavings from a snapped headphone jack.

• Once, a whole microchip, with a bite taken out of it.

Yarcs didn’t feed them food. He fed them purpose.

“They do not question. They do not rest. They do not doubt,” Yarcs whispered to Sniffy, glowing brighter.

“Unlike you, little rat. You question everything.”

Sniffy bristled.

He tried to fight back. He set traps — bottle caps full of soap water, fake crumbs laced with glitter, a decoy motherboard he made from cardboard and nail polish.

They weren’t fooled.

They learned.

One morning, he woke up in his nest of insulation fluff and socks to find a tiny crown — crafted from solder beads and copper wire — resting beside his head.

Written beside it, in honey:

“SERVE OR STARVE.”

⸻

By the end of the week, Sniffy wore the crown.

He stopped resisting. He gathered. He fetched old earbuds from the junk drawer and left them near the hive. He dragged a broken remote from under the couch. A melted USB cable from behind the TV.

The ants took the offerings. Stripped them clean. Dug out the glimmering flecks and bore them in processions to Yarcs Lluks.

Yarcs’ throne sparkled with circuitry and gold.

“What is a king without loyal workers?” Yarcs mused, his voice low and reverent.

“What is a rat, if not a courier of dreams?”

The basement glowed with a soft, infernal light. LEDs pulsed like a heartbeat. A bowl of sugar sat full beside the altar. The air buzzed with electricity and unseen intent.

And in the walls, the mandibles clicked a steady rhythm.

“LONG LIVE THE SKULL.”

Sniffy, once a skeptic, now bowed low when he entered the basement. He knew better.

Some drawers are better left unopened.

Some gold is buried for a reason.

And some skulls?

Some skulls get what they want.

⸻

The End.

(Unless you hear scratching behind the fridge…)