In the clockwork city of Chronstadt, where time was currency and every citizen's wrist bore a ticking brass ledger, Alistair Vex was the only watchmaker who could repair broken lives.
His shop—The Sundial’s Shadow—stood at the crooked intersection of Now Street and Then Avenue, its walls lined with clocks that didn’t tell time so much as negotiate with it.
Need an extra hour to undo a mistake? Alistair could loan you one—for a price.
A mother might trade the memory of her child’s first steps to stretch a dying breath into a final conversation. A gambler could pawn the sensation of sunlight on his skin for five more minutes at the roulette table.
But debts always came due.
And Alistair’s vault held every forfeited moment in glass vials, swirling like liquid mercury.
Then Lena Dusk arrived with a watch that wasn’t broken.
Its face showed no numbers—just a single, unmoving hand pointing at XIII.
“It was my grandfather’s,” she said. “He told me never to wind it.”
Alistair knew that watch.
He’d made it.
Fifty years ago, for a man who traded his entire past to freeze himself at the brink of death. The watch wasn’t a timepiece—it was a cork in the bottle of mortality.
And Lena had just pulled it.
The moment Alistair touched the winding stem, every clock in Chronstadt struck thirteen.
The city shuddered.
Brickwork aged centuries in seconds. Children withered into elders mid-step. And from the vault, the stolen hours screamed in their glass prisons, battering to escape.
Alistair watched in horror as Lena’s grandfather’s corpse twitched in the alley outside—not resurrected, but un-finished, his decades of decay reversing as the stolen time rushed back into him.
The old man sat up.
His pocket watch ticked.
And from the shadows between buildings, other figures began stirring—
—those who’d bargained with Alistair.
Those who’d left debts unpaid.
Now, Chronstadt’s citizens keep their watches buried in lead boxes. They whisper that if you stand too long at the corner of Now and Then, you’ll hear the faint click-click of a winding stem turning.
And if you see a clock with thirteen numbers?
Run.
Time remembers who stole from it.
And it always collects.
