The city never slept. It only ticked.
Beneath the crimson fog, gears the size of cathedrals turned endlessly, grinding against each other like the bones of a dying god. The streets of Verradine pulsed with mechanical heartbeats — engines, pistons, and the rasp of steam through the narrow arteries of the city. Every building seemed to breathe, every lamplight hummed with whispers of old machinery.
And through it all walked Eiden Varos, the man who could no longer dream.
His coat was tattered, blackened by soot and rain. His eyes — pale gray, like steel cooled too soon — reflected nothing but the flicker of the gas lamps. Yet behind that emptiness burned something feral, a hunger that refused to die.
They called him The Butcher of Greystone, though he had never killed without reason. The Church said he was cursed, that the clockwork gods had marked him for defiance. He called it clarity — the kind that only came after you lost everything worth praying for.
Tonight, he was chasing ghosts again.
The case had begun with a rumor: a clockmaker's apprentice who vanished after crafting a timepiece that could count down to a person's death. The city's authorities dismissed it as superstition. Eiden knew better. Verradine was built on superstition — every whisper, every shadow, every ticking second carried its own intent.
He reached the shop at the edge of the Dockward, its windows fogged, its sign half-eaten by rust:
"Tolliver's Precision & Repair."
Inside, the air smelled of oil and blood.
He froze.
The walls were covered in clocks — hundreds of them, all ticking at once, yet not one kept the same time. Their hands spun forward and backward, stuttering as if trapped between seconds. On the counter sat a single clock, shaped like a human heart, its hands motionless.
Eiden approached it slowly. His hand trembled, not from fear, but recognition.
The gears inside that heart were etched with symbols — the same symbols burned into his chest years ago, the night his comrades died in the war of cogs.
Then, a voice whispered from behind him.
"You're late, Eiden."
He turned sharply, drawing his blade from beneath his coat — a blackened saber etched with his own blood, an artifact that hummed when near lies.
But no one stood there. Only the faint shimmer of air, like heat over desert sand.
The clocks began to tick in unison.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
Eiden's head throbbed. His vision blurred, as if the world itself was slipping backward in time. For a heartbeat, he saw the shop as it once was — filled with life, laughter, the clockmaker and his apprentice working side by side. Then came the explosion, the fire, the screams.
He gasped and dropped to his knees.
When he looked up again, he wasn't in the shop anymore.
He was standing in a vast ocean of clocks, each one floating in the air, stretching endlessly into the void. Every clock face bore a reflection — his reflection — but each one was different. In some, he was smiling. In others, he was bleeding. In all, he was still searching.
A shadow loomed behind him, tall and faceless.
"Do you remember," it asked, "the moment you chose to live instead of die?"
The voice was his own.
Eiden gritted his teeth, raising his saber. "I don't remember dying."
The shadow smiled without a mouth.
"Then perhaps you never stopped."
The clocks began to shatter, one by one, their glass faces falling like rain.
And as Eiden fell with them, he heard the ticking stop — for the first time in years