In the heart of the Petrified Forest, where trees stood frozen in mid-scream and the wind sounded like grinding gears, there lived a woodpecker that didn’t hunt for insects—it hunted for time .
Its name was Tock , and its beak was made of blackened brass, striking the stone-hard trees with metronomic precision. Each tap echoed like a hammer on an anvil, and with every impact, the forest shuddered:
— A fossilized squirrel twitched its tail after 200 years
— Sap oozed from petrified bark for the first time in millennia
— Shadows moved in reverse for exactly thirteen seconds
The villagers of nearby Chronos Hollow kept their pocket watches buried in lead boxes. They knew better than to listen when Tock’s drilling reached a crescendo at noon.
Old Man Harker, the blind horologist, claimed the bird wasn’t pecking wood at all. "It’s winding the world," he’d whisper, his glass eyes clicking like second hands. "And one day, it’ll peck through to the other side."
Then came the day the banker’s daughter vanished.
Little Lissa had followed the sound into the forest, clutching her prized possession—a silver music box that played a lullaby slower each year . Search parties found the box embedded in a petrified oak, its mechanism exposed like a ribcage, the tune now speeding up unnaturally.
And high above, perched on a branch that hadn’t swayed since the Ice Age, Tock cocked its head—revealing the girl’s face reflected in its obsidian eye , mouth open in a silent scream that matched the woodpecker’s rhythm exactly.
Now the villagers nail their clocks to the trees at the forest’s edge. The frozen timber absorbs the ticking, buying them a few more hours of normalcy each day. But sometimes at high noon, if you stand very still, you can feel the vibrations in your teeth
