❖ The Gears of Humanity IV ❖
The fog rolled thicker than usual that morning, like time itself had decided to smother the city's breath. Garnelion's vertical layers swam behind gauze—bridges fading into mist, tram rails suspended in silence, all sound dampened by a slow, encroaching stillness. Somewhere, a distant bell rang thirteen times, then stopped.
Rowan, Noelle, and Emeric stood before a shuttered storefront in the quartier d'Horlogerie—the district of clockmakers.
The sign above the door, finely wrought in bronze, read:
"Maison Verdette – Horloger depuis 1073."
The shop had been here for over three centuries. A legend among the city's horological circles. Some said Verdette clocks never ticked out of rhythm, even during storms. Others whispered that his personal pocket watch contained gears forged from fallen stars.
But now?
The windows were dark. Dusty. Locked from the inside. No one had seen Auguste Verdette in seven days.
Noelle scanned the street, eyes narrowed beneath her wide-brimmed cap. "Neighbors say they heard ticking. All night. Nonstop. As if every clock in the house had begun to race."
Rowan stepped closer to the door, glancing through the pane. "And no one ever saw him leave?"
Emeric shook his head. "Not a soul. His apprentice came by yesterday and found the locks sealed. Even the basement vault was bolted shut. No signs of struggle. No damage. Just… missing."
"What about his personal life?" Rowan asked. "Family?"
"None. Lived alone. Obsessed with time."
"Sounds healthy," Noelle muttered.
Emeric knocked sharply on the door, then looked up at the small brass eye above the arch. It was a security device, but the lens was cracked, as if something had struck it from the inside.
With a metallic groan, the door creaked open.
Unlatched.
Rowan raised an eyebrow.
"I thought it was locked," he said.
"It was," Emeric replied, voice cold. "Yesterday."
They stepped inside.
The air was stale—thick with old oil, dust, and something faintly… metallic. Ticking echoed throughout the chamber in layers, dozens of clocks moving at slightly different rhythms, never in unison. The walls were lined with towering timepieces, each one crafted with obsessive precision. Gilded hands spun with urgency. Some faster than normal, some slower. All wrong.
"Something's off," Rowan muttered.
"You mean besides the whole haunted-clock-shop vibe?" Noelle said dryly.
Emeric crouched near the main counter, examining scratch marks in the wood. "These weren't made by tools."
Rowan leaned over.
They weren't scratches. They were numbers. Scratched in sequence.
42:51:03
42:51:04
42:51:05
"It's a countdown," Noelle whispered. "Or… a timecode."
"But to what?" Rowan asked.
Emeric rose and turned toward the back room. "Let's find out."
The door leading to Verdette's workshop was ajar, barely. A shaft of golden light spilled through, steady and unnatural. Rowan reached for the knob—and froze.
A ticking sound was coming from the door itself.
He pressed his ear to it.
It was hollow.
Emeric nodded. "Go."
Rowan pushed the door open—
—and was swallowed in light.
The room inside was unlike anything they'd seen in Garnelion. A chamber of clocks, yes, but beyond mere function. This was madness made mechanical.
Clocks were stacked on top of each other in impossible shapes—twisting spirals of gears and cogs, pendulums beating like hearts, rotating at different speeds. Some clocks had no hands. Others had too many. There were inverted hourglasses leaking black sand upward. A grandfather clock in the corner had no face—just a mirror.
In the center of the room stood a workbench.
And on the workbench was a pocket watch.
It was ticking backwards.
"That's Verdette's," Emeric said. "His signature design. Starsteel casing, lunar etching on the dial. Worth more than this district."
"But where is he?" Rowan asked. "No blood. No signs of force."
Noelle leaned in to examine the watch, but something about the ticking made her falter.
"It's… pulling at me," she whispered.
Emeric looked at her sharply.
"You feel that too?" Rowan asked.
She nodded. "Like the air bends every time it ticks. Like it's not just measuring time—it's controlling it."
Rowan frowned. "But there's no aether here. Nothing magical. This is pure mechanism."
"Exactly," Emeric said grimly. "And that's what makes it terrifying."
They spread out, each exploring a section of the room. Noelle examined the walls, tapping hollow spots. Emeric rifled through loose blueprints, his brows furrowed. Rowan approached the mirror-faced grandfather clock.
His own reflection looked back—only, the eyes were wrong.
Too calm. Too certain.
He reached forward and touched the glass.
It was warm.
Behind him, Noelle found something in the floorboards—a hatch, locked tight with six different mechanisms. She called them over.
"Basement?" Rowan asked.
"Vault," Emeric confirmed. "Where Verdette kept his rarities."
They worked in silence, bypassing the gears and triggers one by one. When the last mechanism clicked free, Emeric slowly opened the hatch.
A shaft of frozen air hit them.
"Smells like old time," Noelle muttered.
Rowan descended first, oil lantern in hand.
The vault was circular and lined with copper shelves, all covered in velvet cloth. But many had been disturbed. Items gone. A few scattered remains lingered—broken watch faces, melted sand, a child's drawing of a clock with legs.
At the center stood a pedestal.
On it rested another device—a large, ornate clock with thirteen hands.
"An unfinished prototype," Emeric said, stepping beside him. "Verdette was working on something called 'the forgotten hour.' No one knew what it meant. Just a theory among clockmakers. A thirteenth hour hidden between seconds."
"But it's impossible," Rowan said. "There are only twenty-four."
"Not if time is broken," Emeric replied.
There was a note beside the device, handwritten and smudged in haste:
"It is not that we lose time. It is that time loses us."
"I have seen it. I was there. I stood inside the hour no one speaks of."
"And something stood with me."
A chill passed through the room.
Noelle turned away from the pedestal, suddenly pale. "We're not alone."
The ticking began again.
Louder.
Deeper.
Not from the clocks.
From the walls.
Rowan raised his lantern.
In the shadows, something shifted.
A figure—not quite human—emerged from the far end of the vault. Tall. Wrapped in brass and black robes of folded leather. No face, only a mask carved like an hourglass. Its limbs were segmented like clock arms, and behind its shoulders, a rotating disc of metal spun in silence.
It did not walk.
It glided.
"Who are you?" Emeric demanded.
The figure tilted its head.
Then it spoke.
Its voice was like gears shifting under stone.
"We are the Custodians."
"We guard the forgotten hour."
"You are not meant to be here."
Rowan stepped forward. "Where is Verdette?"
"He broke the pact."
"What pact?"
But the figure did not answer. Instead, it raised one long finger and pointed directly at Rowan.
"You carry broken time. You are bleeding moments."
Noelle stepped between them. "What does that mean? What did Verdette do?"
Silence.
Then, slowly, the figure turned its back and vanished—folding through the vault wall like paper slipping between pages.
Emeric cursed and ran to the wall, but it was solid copper.
"He's gone."
Rowan stared at the note again.
"He didn't just disappear. He entered the thirteenth hour."
"You think that thing… took him?"
"Or he made it."
Noelle crouched by the device, studying the placement of the thirteen hands. "This clock isn't set to any known time. Not solar, lunar, not local."
Emeric picked up the note.
"There's a pattern here. But not a temporal one. It's psychological."
"You mean symbolic?"
Rowan's voice was distant. "What if the thirteenth hour isn't just time? What if it's a place? A state of being? The moment between breaths, decisions, deaths…"
"Or regret," Noelle murmured. "A place you enter when you can't move forward… but can't go back."
A silence fell.
The ticking had stopped.
They looked at each other.
Then Emeric spoke: "We're going to need more than clocks to solve this."
Rowan nodded. "We need to know what Verdette saw. What he built. And why it's changing time itself."
Noelle glanced at the mirror-clock upstairs. "And if that thirteenth hour exists…"
She didn't finish the thought.
Because the lights flickered.
And one by one, the clocks began to tick backward.