The pocket watch hung in the air like a dissected heart.It spun slowly, shedding fragments of glass that dissolved into dust before touching the ground. Where its face should have been was nothing—an absence so complete it seemed to drink the light.
Below, the opera house was dying.
Its roof sagged inward as though crushed by invisible hands, marble pillars had veins of rust running through them, and the once-proud balconies were peeling away like wet paper. In the stalls, the seats sat empty, each draped in a thin layer of ash.
A sound began—a single note, impossibly pure, cutting through the stale air. It emerged from nowhere and everywhere at once, resonating in the bones. I could feel it in my teeth. Then another note. And another.
They took shape before my eyes, translucent at first, then hardening into crystalline vines. Thorned roses unfurled at their tips, petals wet with something darker than dew.
The air was colder now. My breath misted in front of me, and when it cleared, I was no longer standing in the aisle.
I was on stage.
The curtains behind me were a rotting red, their threads twitching as though infested with unseen worms. The spotlight above flickered—but there was no light source. Only the blood-red moon outside the opera house, its surface veined with dark cracks, hanging too close, too heavy.
I felt something watching.
Not from the audience—they were shadows, dozens of them, still as statues, their faces obscured under porcelain masks with no eye holes.
The gaze came from above.
The storm clouds outside had pressed against the shattered ceiling, their shapes shifting into the curling staves of sheet music. The wind sang through them, and the song was wrong—notes bent and tangled, phrases repeating backward.
The pocket watch descended.
It stopped in front of my chest, ticking without hands, each sound burrowing into my skull. My knees buckled. The masks in the audience tilted their heads in perfect unison, as if a silent conductor had raised a baton.
Then, from somewhere deep within the opera house, came a scream.
Not human. Not entirely.