The Hourglass Veil

Time smears across the walls, thick with rusted whispers. The clock coughs forward, one second, then another, stuttering against the weight of the wind. Her space narrows, an alley ribcaged in decay, every breath steeped in the scent of scorched fabric and forgotten ink.

Ray walks with the sun slashed across her lips, a shimmer of light fractured by the red lace binding her eyes. Hope is the name they gave her in the orphan tower, but she discarded it long ago, alongside the others who never learned to stop screaming.

She counts her steps. Twelve. Thirteen. Fourteen. She stops. The alley is empty except for the weight of something unsaid, a silence thick as iron. The graffiti slurs against the walls, dripping like old wounds, letters bent in agony. A language she once knew, now erased.

The wind coils around her, teasing the fabric that dances from her head like a spectral afterthought. She lifts her hands, bare fingertips brushing against the unseen. It hums beneath her skin. A memory stitched into the bones of the city.

Tick.

The clock lurches, the sound swallowing her pulse. She turns her head, though her eyes see nothing. But she knows.

Tick.

A shape moves, just beyond the periphery of sound. Heavy footsteps. Not human, not entirely. Metal grinding against the rot of the world.

Ray tilts her head, lips parting. “You found me.”

The thing does not answer. But she hears the static in its breath, the mechanical tremble of something built to endure, never to feel.

Hope.

The name rattles inside her skull, a cruel joke played by a universe that once spat her into this world without purpose.

She takes a step forward. The thing does not move.

Another step. Her hand lifts, fingers grazing metal so cold it burns. A seam in the air, a sliver of the impossible. A door where there is no wall.

Tick.

The clock twists inside her ribs, winding her lungs too tight. The graffiti moves. She can feel it, though she cannot see. The letters unravel, stretching, screaming—

Ray.

She inhales.

The world ends.

It peels backward, the alley dissolving into the bones of something older, something infinite. She is standing at the threshold of a machine dressed as a city, time a suggestion, space a wound.

She reaches up, fingers brushing against the lace over her eyes. It unravels at her touch, thread by thread, until she sees.

A city of gears, cogs turning in the sky, clouds parting to reveal an iron sun. Towering figures with faceless masks, their bodies humming with the weight of history, the architects of a time beyond time. And at their center, a throne of molten glass.

The thing speaks, finally, its voice a chorus of forgotten things. “You are late.”

Ray tilts her chin, smiling beneath the lace. “No,” she whispers, stepping into the unmade light. “I am right on time.”

The clock swallows the last second.

And the world begins again.

Tick.

Tick.