High above the clouds, a city floated suspended in the air: Aurelis, a place where time stood still.
Its towers were made of living crystal, and its streets were made of stone that shone like ice. There lived the Keepers of Time, ancient beings charged with ensuring that the hours of the world kept their course. At the center of Aurelis turned the Great Gear, an immense machine fueled by the stray thoughts of the human world: every doubt, every postponed decision, every "what if?"
One day, however, the Gear creaked.
It was only a sound, faint and dry, like the creaking of an old bone. But in Aurelis, that was enough to declare an emergency. The Keepers of the Second Hand lowered their golden masks. The Midnight Shades left their libraries. Even the Living Clocks—beings with dials instead of faces—stopped ticking.
Something had entered the city. Something that shouldn't have been there.
A girl.
Flesh and blood, with large eyes and dirty hands, escaped from real time. It was said that she had climbed a rope of dreams while she slept, slithering through the cracks of "perhaps" and "tomorrow."
No one knew how.
But what they did know was this: the girl was making the hours move. Aurelis, for the first time in a hundred thousand years, began to slowly slide into the future.
The leaves were falling. The shadows were shifting. And in a city where nothing ever changed, that was impossible.
The Keepers surrounded her. They wanted to lock her away. But it was too late.
The Gear began to turn faster.
Aurelis was descending.
For the first time in centuries, the floating city was falling toward the world... ...and with it, everything that time had forgotten.
