The loop began again.
Or at least, it pretended to.
For the first time since the nightmare began, the pocket watch's fractured hands didn't move when the chime sounded. They trembled, like a dying insect trying to stand, their motion jerking rather than sweeping. I felt it in my teeth — the vibration was wrong.
The opera house was dimmer this time, as though someone had painted the air with a film of soot. The murals along the upper balconies were smeared, the figures in them blurred into faceless smudges.
Yet the sound… the sound was sharper than ever.
A single piano note, high and brittle, rang through the silence. Then another. Slow, deliberate, like someone pressing each key as if testing whether the instrument still breathed. The melody crawled into my skull, wrapping itself around my thoughts.
I turned toward the stage.
It was empty.
But the music persisted.
The thorned roses had grown in strange places now — spiraling up from the cracks in the wooden floorboards, their petals glistening with condensation that looked suspiciously like blood. They weren't static anymore. Their stems shifted faintly, as if turning toward me.
The moment I stepped forward, the ground groaned.
And then… it moved.
The floor beneath me pulsed, just once, like a heartbeat.
I froze.
I'd always thought the opera house was rotting, its planks brittle and hollow. But now, the boards swelled faintly under my weight, as though a muscle were tensing below. Something was breathing beneath the stage.
The piano keys stopped.
A hush fell, heavy enough to make my own pulse feel like a trespass.
Then a voice, impossibly close to my ear, whispered:
"You are not supposed to be here yet."
I spun, but no one was there. Just a darkened corridor leading to the side wings, its arches warped into a ribcage shape.
The pocket watch in my palm grew hot. A thin crack spidered across its face — another fracture — and a shard of glass fell to the floor, vanishing before it landed.
I could leave. I could walk toward the grand entrance and let the loop claim me again.
But I didn't.
The voice hadn't sounded like the Conductor. The Conductor's tone was velvet over steel; this voice had been raw silk dragged over a blade.
I stepped toward the side wings.
The corridor seemed to lengthen with every step, its walls narrowing until my shoulders brushed bone-like struts. Each breath I took echoed oddly, as though the air were being sucked away from me in slow pulls.
Halfway down, I heard it — a sound like paper tearing underwater.
A slit appeared in the wall. Not a door, not a crack — a wound. Through it, faint golden light spilled, flickering as if strained through leaves.
I pushed my hand through.
It was warm inside.
When I leaned through, I saw the underbelly of the opera house. Not foundations. Not earth. But a vast, churning network of gears and tendons, each moving in impossible harmony. The machinery wasn't cold steel — it was wet, sinewed, plated with ivory and brass. And woven between the teeth of the gears were strands of musical notation, written not in ink but in crystallized roses.
Every few seconds, one of the notes shattered, scattering petals into the void below.
And somewhere deep in that biomechanical labyrinth, I saw movement — a silhouette pacing on a thin bridge of bone. Tall. Lank. Dressed in what could have been a conductor's coat if it hadn't been stitched from skin.
I couldn't see the face.
But the figure stopped mid-step. Slowly, their head turned toward me.
My mouth dried instantly.
Even from here, I knew they were smiling.
The sound returned, not from any piano now, but from the machinery itself — each gear's grind forming a note, each tendon's snap a percussive beat. The opera house was singing from beneath its own floorboards, a heartbeat-melody that was building, building, building—
The pocket watch screamed.
Not literally — it vibrated with such force that the sound it made became a keening wail. Cracks webbed across its face until there was barely anything left to read the time from. The hands were spinning, blurring, then freezing, then spinning again in the wrong direction.
The figure beneath the stage stepped toward me.
The wound in the wall widened without my touch, and the golden light bled into crimson. The machinery's movement became frantic, each note growing sharper until it pierced thought itself.
"Come closer," the silhouette said. Their voice was both far and inside my chest. "You've been playing the wrong part."
I couldn't move. Every instinct screamed that stepping through meant not another loop, but something else entirely. Something permanent.
But then the roses in the wound began leaning toward me, their thorns dripping. Each petal they shed vanished before hitting the ground, dissolving into black dust.
And I realized: the loop wasn't broken.
It was fraying.
One more step, and the music would change.
One more step, and I might not wake up again.
The silhouette stopped just at the edge of the bridge, head tilted.
"I can fix your timing," they said.
The wound pulsed, waiting.
And for the first time, I wasn't sure whether dying again would be the safer choice.