Snow fell like ash over Cogspire City.
It was not the clean, crystalline lace found in the storybooks of the Upper Crust; it was a heavy, oil-saturated sludge, thick with the grit of pulverized coal and the chemical tang of the Great Smog. It clung to the verdigris brass of the rooftops and gummed the intricate gears of clock-towers that ticked with a relentless, mechanical heartbeat. Steam hissed from the iron maws of street-level vents, rising in pale, wavering plumes—ghosts of the boiler rooms that had forgotten the peace of the grave.
Christmas Eve had arrived. In Cogspire, however, "festive" was a synonym for "fatal." It was not a season of warmth, but a deadline of debt. It was the night when the ledgers were balanced, and the Ministry of Gears ensured that every citizen had paid their "Ounce of Progress."
High above the smog, the Cathedral of Saint Nikolaus the Mechanized began its hourly toll. Each chime was a physical blow, a low-frequency vibration that rattled the iron bones of the skyscrapers and sent ripples through the glass veins of the elevated skywalks. The bells were ancient, forged in the age of the Great Ignitron, before men learned the mercy of silence. Tonight, the sequence broke. They rang twelve times—then, after a chilling pause of silence, a thirteenth chime groaned out, heavy with the sound of grinding stone.
The final toll hung in the air like a funeral shroud. It was a forbidden number. A mechanical heresy.
Eliah Crowe stood beneath a flickering copper streetlamp, his breath blooming in a fog of metallic-tasting air. He pulled his duster tighter—a heavy piece of craftsmanship featuring leather reinforced with thin steel ribs and hemmed with glowing blue runes that pulsed with a faint, comforting heat. Snow gathered on the brass rims of his goggles, and behind the tinted glass, his eyes reflected the city's sickly, eternal amber glow.
Eliah was a Clockwright. In a city built on tension and springs, he was the man who fixed things that should have stayed broken. He lived in the spaces between the gears, listening to the city's metal heartbeat for the stutter that preceded a catastrophe.
A mechanical carol drifted down the avenue: a dissonant medley of tinny bells and warped violins, the choir rendered through the vibrating diaphragms of steam-whistles. The Automatons were marching. They were tall, skeletal constructs draped in moth-eaten red velvet, their brass faces hammered into fixed, porcelain-white smiles. Each carried a burlap sack that dripped a dark, viscous fluid onto the slush-covered cobblestones.
The city called them Yuletide Bearers. To the wealthy, they brought gold-plated trinkets and refined coal. To the poor of the Lower Districts, they brought notices of eviction or the "Recycling Clause."
Eliah watched as one stopped before a crumbling townhouse. The construct's chest cavity opened with a pressurized hiss, gears clicking like gnashing teeth. It reached into its sack and produced a small box bound in jagged copper wire. The door creaked open to reveal a family—hollow-eyed and trembling. The father reached out, his hands shaking as he took the "gift."
A child's scream tore through the mechanical music, sharp and sudden, before being muffled by the closing of the heavy oak door. Eliah didn't need to see what was inside the box to know it was likely a "Legacy Debt"—a mechanical component harvested from a relative who had failed to pay their life-taxes.
He turned away, his jaw tight. Curiosity in Cogspire was a debt paid in scars, and he had already paid enough for one lifetime.
A sharp, rhythmic clink sounded from his wrist. A small brass device began to vibrate, its etched runes flaring a violent, warning red. It was a summons, delivered via the city's sub-dermal vibration network.
[SUMMONS DETECTED: CLOCKWRIGHT CROWE ]
[LOCATION: LOWER FURNACE DISTRICT - SECTOR 9]
[INCIDENT CLASSIFICATION: ANOMALOUS]
[PRIORITY: BLACK SNOW]
Eliah's stomach did a slow roll. Black Snow. That was the classification for horrors the Ministry of Gears officially denied, even as they buried the remains in the deep-sea vents. It meant the laws of physics were currently optional at the crime scene.
He checked the cylinder of his heavy-caliber revolver. He kept it loaded with a "Clergyman's Mix"—three silver-jacketed rounds for the things that bled, and three sanctified cogs for the things that only leaked oil. He began his descent.
The Lower Furnace District was the city's gut. Massive pipes, thick as redwood trees, pulsed with a rhythmic, thumping heat that made the very air shimmer with distortion. Down here, the snow didn't settle; it turned into a scalding mist that could peel the lacquer off a man's boots in seconds. The walls were stained with centuries of soot, and the only light came from the orange glow of the furnace grates.
He found the scene cordoned off by the Iron Guard, their boiler-plate armor glowing with low-light blue visors. They looked tired, their heavy steam-rifles held with trembling hands. One guard, his pauldron dented from some recent impact, waved Eliah toward a shattered storefront.
"Careful, Wright," the guard grunted, his voice distorted by his respirator. "The air inside smells... wrong."
The sign above the door hung by a single rusted chain: MERRIWICK & SONS – JOY FOR ALL AGES.
The windows had been blown outward by a pressure surge, glass shards littering the street like diamonds in the soot. Thick, oily steam billowed from the shop, carrying the copper tang of blood and the scorched-hair scent of short-circuited wiring. Eliah stepped inside, his goggles instantly compensating for the low light.
The floor was a graveyard of whimsey. Clockwork dolls with porcelain faces lay shattered, their glass eyes staring at the ceiling; wind-up soldiers had been snapped like dry twigs, their bayonets twisted into iron knots; mechanical reindeer were gutted, their springs spilling out like metal entrails.
Then, he saw Merriwick.
The toymaker was nailed to the far wall with six-inch steel spikes driven through his palms and feet. His chest had been pried open with surgical elegance, his ribs splayed like the wings of a morbid bird. Where his heart should have been, a crude, emerald-green engine hummed, pumping glowing alchemical fluid through his graying veins. The man's eyes were still moving—darting, panicked, trapped in a cage of his own biology. He was a living clock, his every breath punctuated by the whirring of the engine in his chest.
"Gods below," Eliah whispered, his hand hovering over his revolver. This wasn't just murder; it was an upgrade.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
The sound didn't come from Merriwick. It came from the shadows behind the workbench.
Eliah leveled his revolver, the blue runes on the barrel glowing in anticipation. "Come out. Slowly. Hands where the light can see them."
Out of the steam stepped a small figure, no taller than a ten-year-old boy. It wore a festive red coat, though the fabric was sodden with oil and something darker. Its beard was a terrifying masterpiece of spun silver wire, and its eyes were two glowing emerald lenses that whirred as they focused, the shutters clicking like a camera.
When it spoke, its jaw unhinged far beyond the human limit, revealing a throat of brass pipes and vibrating reeds.
"Merry Christmas," the creature said. Its voice was a horrifying chorus—a layered recording of a hundred children's voices, spliced together to form words. "Clockwright. Have you come to... calibrate?"
Eliah's wrist-device screamed a warning. The runes flared so bright they cracked the glass casing, then went pitch black. The atmospheric pressure in the room spiked, making Eliah's ears pop.
"What did you do to him?" Eliah demanded, gesturing to the man on the wall.
The creature tilted its head, a series of clicks echoing from its neck. "Optimization. Merriwick was... inefficient. He made toys that broke. I make toys that hunger. I have seen the Great Gear, Clockwright. It does not turn for the weak."
Behind the small creature, the "dead" toys began to twitch. The wind-up soldiers stood on broken legs, their tiny gears screaming in protest; the dolls turned their shattered heads toward Eliah, their porcelain lips curling into impossible smiles.
The mechanical reindeer in the corner began to stitch its own entrails back into its belly, its brass antlers sparking with green electricity.
"Black Snow indeed," Eliah muttered. He didn't wait for the thing to finish its sermon. He squeezed the trigger.
The silver-jacketed round caught the "Santa" construct in the shoulder, tearing through the velvet coat. Instead of blood, a spray of neon-green fluid hissed against the floorboards. The creature didn't flinch. It merely reached up, plucked the flattened bullet from its shoulder, and let it drop.
"The Ministry sent a repairman to a revolution," the creature mocked, the children's voices in its throat rising in a haunting crescendo.
The workshop door slammed shut, the iron bolts sliding into place with a definitive thud. The steam in the room grew thicker, turning the world into a blur of shadows and glowing green eyes.
Eliah backed toward the center of the room, his boots crunching on the remains of a clockwork ballerina. He could hear them now—dozens of tiny, ticking footsteps. The toys were closing in, their springs wound to the snapping point.
"I'm not the repairman," Eliah said, thumbing the hammer back on his revolver to cycle to the sanctified cogs. "I'm the guy who scraps the junk."
The green-eyed construct raised a hand, and the room erupted into a symphony of violence. The toys lunged. Christmas had arrived in Cogspire, and it was looking for spare parts—starting with Eliah's heart.