The clock tower's rust stung Ayla's nostrils as she counted dried blood in the 43rd step's crevice—matching Lucas' cerulean joint lubricant. Eric's white gloves glowed cadaverous in twilight as he offered the watch: "Best hear time's death rattle yourself, Miss."
The engraved case stung her palm. When Ayla thumbed open the lid, Lucas' spinal gears screeched. The photo showed twenty-year-old Odile in wedding-style lab robes, a sakura pendant on her ring finger glinting like a scalpel—her human lover's neck branded with Lucas' iris scar.
(Stained glass projections cleaved space as three-decade-old wedding marches surged through floor cracks)
"It stopped nineteen years ago." Eric coiled the chain around her wrist, the red marks overlapping the photo's chapel motifs. "Three months pre-your-birth."
Lucas seized the watch, his prosthetic heat cracking the glass. Gears spun counterclockwise, bleaching twilight into pallor—champagne-clinking guests materialized, their drinks mirroring Lucas' cerulean blood.
Ayla's temples throbbed. The stained glass pattern matched the cemetery curse array exactly. Odile kissed her lover's ring under the window—its inner code matching Lucas' heart serial number.
"Hold tight!" Lucas' arm cinched her waist as realities dissolved. Their interlaced fingers fused palm prints into his joints, his heartbeat syncing with ghostly toasts: "To Odile van Neumann—may her love outlast curses!"
(Watch gears accelerated, shaking loose Ayla's hairpin. Its blood trail crystallized into her mother's specimen code—No.21)
Eric's laughter slithered: "What a duet—reality versus memory, now versus then..." His chain snared Lucas' ankle. "...vessel versus original."
Glass shards hovered, each reflecting infant Ayla in an incubator—beside teenage Lucas' spinal prototype in '88.3.17-dated fluid. As bells pealed, their clasped hands bled cerulean, forming a modified curse array with inverted irises.
Lucas' mechanical eyes glazed. He tore his collar open: "Now see? I'm just a living curse vessel..."
Ayla bit her tongue, pressing bloody fingertips to his scar. The photo faded—Odile's wedding gown morphed into a straitjacket. Stained glass warped, revealing her mother holding baby Ayla at the lab door—fifteen-year-old Odile clutching the rusted pendant in the shadows.
The tower tilted. Eric's voice slithered through spacetime: "Relish this eternal dawn. Your time..." The chain snapped. "...was never yours."