⟁ The Clockmaker's War

In the middle of the endless wastes of the Gray Zone, there stood a tower that did not cast a shadow. Its bricks were made of ticking gears. Its windows spun like eyes, blinking once every hour. And inside, behind an enormous wall of pocket watches and broken timepieces, the last clockmaker in the known world continued his work.

They called him Aven Hale, though names didn’t mean much anymore. Not after the Collapse.

The world had ended not in flame or ice, but in delay. Time itself had begun to fracture, stutter, reverse. People aged backward in seconds, or blinked out of existence altogether. Whole cities woke up on Tuesdays and died on Mondays. Clocks became sacred objects. Worshipped. Feared. Destroyed. And only the clockmakers – once irrelevant craftsmen – had any chance of holding the timeline together.

Aven had survived. Not because he was smarter or stronger, but because he had built something forbidden: a warclock.

It ticked with a sound like a heart cracking. Its hands moved against each other in chaotic rhythm. Instead of numbers, it had twelve cryptic runes, each etched in mercury and bloodsteel.

He wasn’t alone in the tower.

Across the room, suspended by wires and gears, was the prisoner: a young woman frozen mid-breath, eyes open, mouth half-formed around a scream. She was called Kyra, and she was caught in a time-loop trap, her last second repeating over and over again for eternity.

Aven hadn’t meant to trap her. She’d come to kill him, an agent of the Temporal Faith. But her watch had been a fake. She had stepped across the warclock’s pulse line and got caught in the paradox.

For years, Aven spoke to her, despite her frozen state. Told her stories. Read her forgotten books. Sometimes, he thought he saw her pupils move.

But now, things were different.

The outer wall of the tower had begun to melt. Time was bleeding through. An army was coming — not of flesh, but of fractured reflections: mirror-soldiers from alternate realities where the Faith had already won.

Aven stood before Kyra. For the first time in fifty years, his hands trembled.

“I’m going to free you,” he whispered. “But if I do, your knife will still be mid-swing. I may die.”

Her eye twitched. Just once.

He turned to the warclock. Inserted a golden key into its side.

“You deserve a choice,” he said. “And the world deserves one last paradox.”

The warclock groaned. Time inside the tower snapped. Gears burst like bone. Kyra gasped — fully — and screamed as her blade slashed toward him.

But he wasn’t there anymore.

He was everywhen.

The tower exploded in reverse.

From the ashes, twelve timelines unfurled like ribbons in the wind. In one, Kyra stood alone, holding the key. In another, Aven became a god of hours. In the worst one, time stopped altogether, and the sky became a mirror.

But in the one that mattered, they stood side by side — no longer hunter and prey, but two broken pieces of a shattered clock, trying to put the world back in rhythm.

Together.