Dark Fantasy & Magical Realism

In a village forgotten by most maps and remembered only in whispers, there was an orchard where time did not flow—it ripened.

They called it the Clockmaker’s Orchard.

Not because it was tended by a man with gears for fingers or springs for bones—though the villagers whispered he might’ve once been such a thing—but because the trees there bore not apples, nor pears, nor peaches.

They bore moments.

Golden fruits shaped like hourglasses. Plum-colored spheres that pulsed with laughter. Bitter black berries that hummed with sorrow. If you bit into one, you’d relive the moment stored inside—vividly, as if you’d stepped through the mouth of time itself.

The catch? Every bite cost you a year.

A year gone from your body. Taken clean.

Yet people came.

Eira came with the first frost.

A woman with eyes like overcast skies and a heart full of hollow spaces, trailing grief behind her like a fraying scarf.

She did not ask for directions. She did not knock on the Clockmaker’s door. She simply walked past the rusted gate, through rows of crooked trees, and waited until one of the fruits dropped to her feet like a sigh.

She picked it up. It glowed a soft amber in her hands, warm as breath. When she bit into it, the world spun—and her daughter’s laugh echoed through the cold air like birdsong.

A memory from six years ago: her daughter chasing dandelions, her hair wild in the wind, shouting “Catch me, Mama!”

Eira wept as the vision faded.

And when she opened her eyes again, her hands had aged. Just slightly. A wrinkle deeper. A bone more visible.

One year, gone.

The Clockmaker watched from the shadow of his workshop.

He rarely interfered. The orchard did what it wanted. It remembered what others forgot. It fed the desperate and hollow and grief-stricken.

But something about Eira—her silence, her determination—unsettled him.

She came again. And again.

A fruit filled with lullabies. Another with her husband’s proposal beneath that lantern-flickered bridge. The day her mother brushed her hair for the last time. Her childhood hiding spot in the wheat fields.

Each memory, ripe and warm.

Each bite, another year stolen.

By the end of the third week, she looked twenty years older. Her hair streaked with silver. Her joints slower. But her eyes—those stormy, empty eyes—had gained something like light.

“Why are you doing this?” the Clockmaker finally asked her one dusk, his voice stitched together like creaking floorboards.

Eira turned to him, hollow-cheeked, smiling faintly. “Because I’m rebuilding my heart, one memory at a time.”

He tilted his head. “Hearts rebuilt of memory are soft things. Easy to break again.”

“They’re better than empty ones,” she said.

He said nothing. But something shifted in the orchard that night. The trees grew quieter. Their shadows longer.

As if they, too, were listening.

On the seventh visit, she reached for a fruit shaped like a teardrop—dark blue, almost black, its glow thudding like a heartbeat.

The Clockmaker stepped forward.

“Not that one,” he warned. “That memory was never yours.”

Eira paused. “Whose is it?”

“Mine.”

Her fingers hovered. “Why is it here?”

“The orchard is not mine to command,” he said quietly. “It remembers what we bury. And sometimes, it grows what we most want to forget.”

She hesitated. But something in her—a compulsion, a pull—wouldn’t let her leave it untouched.

She bit into it.

A vision exploded behind her eyes.

A little boy, lost in a blizzard of gears and ticking things. Alone in a house that never slept. A father with iron hands and a locked heart. A mother made of wind, vanishing through a crack in time. The boy crying, and crying, until he learned to silence his soul.

She stumbled back.

“You… were human,” she said, breathless.

The Clockmaker nodded once, almost imperceptibly. “Long ago. Before I built the orchard. Before I let it grow from my forgetting.”

“Why didn’t you eat the fruit?”

“Because I didn’t want to remember.”

They stood in silence, among the trees that bent with time-heavy fruit, in a world that had no clocks—only memories and their prices.

“I came to remember,” she said softly. “But I think… I also came to forgive.”

He looked at her sharply.

“Forgive whom?”

“Myself,” she said. “For surviving. For not saving them. For letting the world go on.”

He said nothing.

The orchard rustled. Leaves turned like pages.

That night, she did not eat a memory. She simply walked among them.

Let them whisper.

The orchard, it seemed, had softened toward her. A tree bent low, offering her a silver fruit with a single memory she’d never lived—her daughter’s wedding day.

She didn’t bite it.

She kissed it and left it hanging.

A gift she could no longer afford, but could still believe in.

Eira left the orchard before the first thaw.

She looked older—yes. But she walked straighter. Smiled easier. Her heart no longer rattled with ghosts. Only echoes.

Behind her, the Clockmaker watched.

And for the first time in decades, he stepped into the orchard and picked a fruit for himself.

A plum-colored one. Laughing. Lively.

And with trembling hands, he let himself remember.