The tower had fallen silent.
Not the silence of peace, but of something vast holding its breath. The clash outside—the fire, the shadows, the shrieks of broken steel—had dwindled into whispers, as if the world itself feared to interrupt what had just been born within the throne chamber.
Kairen stood amid the whirlwind's fading glow, the taste of iron and smoke thick on his tongue. His blade, still in hand, hung uselessly at his side. Before him, the gears of the throne slowly ground to a halt, the storm of light and shadow collapsing into a single figure.
Safaa.
Or rather—what remained of her.
Her outline shimmered, her body caught between flesh and metal, between memory and mechanism. Golden script still circled her like fireflies, but the warmth they once carried had turned alien, pulsing in mechanical rhythm. She raised her head, and her eyes—those eyes that had once carried defiance and belief—now gleamed with the hollow, cold glow of a clock's face.
"Kairen…" Her voice was hers, but layered with a deeper resonance, as if another mouth spoke through hers. A father's voice. A dead man's voice.
"…the Watchmaker has returned."
The words cut deeper than any blade. Kairen felt his chest tighten, not with fear, but with something crueler—betrayal and inevitability bound together. Safaa hadn't chosen this. She had been made for it.
The gears behind the throne shifted again, and the first toll of a great unseen bell reverberated through the chamber. One. Low and final, the sound made the air vibrate, made dust rain from the rafters, made Kairen's teeth ache. Outside, the cults that had been locked in combat froze, all heads turning to the tower. Even the shadows of the Veiled Ones recoiled.
The Watchmaker's timepiece had begun.
Safaa—or the vessel she had become—rose from the throne. Every movement was precise, mechanical, as if her joints obeyed some clockwork rhythm. She stepped toward Kairen, her silver pendant burning brighter with each motion.
"You cannot fight time," the layered voice intoned. "You can only obey it."
Kairen's grip on his sword tightened until his knuckles cracked. His instincts screamed to strike, to sever this abomination before it grew stronger. But his heart faltered. Somewhere inside, Safaa was still there. He saw it, a flicker in her trembling hand, a faint hesitation in her stride.
"No…" he whispered, lowering his blade just enough. "I won't kill you. I'll drag you back from this abyss—even if I have to tear time itself apart."
The second toll rang.
Two. The floor trembled beneath his boots.
The throne chamber's gears began to turn again, faster, pulling reality into alignment with something ancient and wrong. Kairen staggered as the walls warped, as if the tower itself was bending into a spiral, its axis fixed on Safaa.
And then, the third toll.
Three. The sound shook the world.
The manuscript fragments still swirling around Safaa suddenly snapped together, pages fusing into a single book of golden light. She clutched it to her chest, her lips moving in silent, feverish prayer.
Kairen's blood ran cold. That was no prayer—it was an invocation.
The voice within her grew louder, drowning hers out:
"The clock has no mercy. The pendulum falls for all. When the twelfth toll comes, the world will be mine."
Kairen took one step forward, his jaw clenched, eyes burning with defiance.
"Then I'll stop the clock before it strikes twelve."
The chamber's light fractured, the bell tolled a fourth time, and the volume ended in a roar of grinding gears and the sound of a world about to collapse.