In the city of Eclipsa, time was not just a measure—it was a living force. The great Clocktower of Eclipsa stood at its heart, its gears woven into the fabric of reality. For centuries, it ticked without fail, ensuring that days turned to nights, seasons changed, and lives moved forward.
But then, one day… it stopped.
And so did everything else.
1: The Girl Who Wound the World
Liora Vey was not an ordinary clockmaker’s daughter. She had a peculiar gift: she could hear time. The whispers of slowing pendulums, the groans of overworked gears—they spoke to her. Her father, Master Vey, was the Keeper of the Clocktower, the only one allowed to adjust its sacred mechanisms.
But when Liora was twelve, her father vanished inside the tower. The moment he disappeared, the clocks in Eclipsa froze. The city fell into a silent paralysis—birds hung motionless in the sky, rivers halted mid-flow, and people stood like statues, their breath trapped between heartbeats.
Only Liora remained untouched.
2: The Thief of Seconds
For years, Liora lived alone in the frozen city, surviving on preserved food and stolen moments of hope. Then, one evening, she found a boy moving freely through the streets—Kael, a thief with a pocket watch that still ticked.
"You’re like me," he said, grinning. "Unaffected by the Stop."
Kael claimed he knew why time had frozen: Someone had stolen the Heart-Gear of the Clocktower. Without it, Eclipsa would remain suspended forever. Worse, if the gear wasn’t returned before the last residual time bled away, the city would unravel into nothingness.
Liora had a choice—leave Eclipsa frozen, or venture into the Veil, the hidden realm where lost time collected like sand in an hourglass.
3: The Veil and the Time-Eaters
The Veil was a labyrinth of fractured moments—floating memories, ghostly echoes of events that never were, and creatures called Chronovores, beasts that fed on forgotten time.
There, Liora and Kael discovered the truth:
Her father hadn’t vanished.
He had shattered.
Master Vey had tried to repair the Clocktower by merging himself with its gears, but a piece of him—his memory, his love for Liora—had been stolen by the Shadow-Winder, a rogue clockmage who sought to control time itself.
Now, the Shadow-Winder was using that stolen love to power a new, terrible machine—one that would let him rewrite history.
4: The Price of Moving Forward
To restart time, Liora had to make an impossible choice:
In the end, Liora chose the third path.
As she slotted the last gear into place, the Clocktower groaned back to life. Time rushed forward in a thunderous wave—birds took flight, rivers surged, and Eclipsa’s people gasped as if waking from a dream.
But Liora?
She became something more.
Her body turned to golden clockwork, her heartbeat the pendulum of the world. She could still see Kael, now older, still visiting the tower with a sad smile.
And sometimes, when the wind carried the sound of ticking, she swore she heard her father’s voice whispering back.
