There was no sound when the world ended.No roar, no scream — only the soft, deliberate tick… tick… tick of the fractured pocket watch, suspended in the air like a cruel joke.
The opera house was gone. So was the street outside, the city, the sky.All that remained was a vast black plain stretching infinitely in every direction, broken only by the watch and the crimson moon that now hung impossibly close, its surface trembling like an eyelid about to open.
I was on my knees. My breath steamed in the air, though there was no wind. The ground beneath my palms felt wrong — not stone, not soil, but something faintly warm, like skin stretched over bone.
I forced myself to look up.
The moon's glow had teeth. It wasn't light spilling across the land — it was something alive, gnawing at the edges of reality, biting away the horizon piece by piece. Each bite made the black plain shiver, like a drumskin struck from below.
And the watch…
It pulsed.Not like a machine, but like a heart.With every beat, the cracks in its face shifted, rearranging themselves into jagged musical notes that bled silver ink, the droplets falling in slow motion before vanishing into the nothing beneath us.
A voice spoke.Not from above, not from behind — but from inside my skull.
"You are out of time."
My head snapped toward the sound, but there was no one there. Just a ripple in the air, like heat above asphalt. Slowly, it coalesced into a humanoid figure — not flesh, not shadow, but a thing of rotating gears and hollow ribs, its spine a string of watch hands clicking in unison.
Its face was a clock.No eyes, no mouth, only two black hands circling wildly, faster and faster until they blurred.
I swallowed. "What are you?"
The figure tilted its head. Its voice was the grinding of rusted cogs.
"The measure of what you have left."
"Left for what?"
It didn't answer. Instead, it reached into its own chest, pulling free a sliver of the crimson moonlight, shaping it into something solid. When its hands parted, a thorned rose lay there — crystalline, translucent, but inside its petals, faint silhouettes of screaming mouths twisted and folded.
It held the rose out toward me.
The moment my fingers brushed the stem, I was no longer kneeling on the black plain.
I was standing in the opera house again — but everything was reversed. The chandeliers hung from the floor, the aisles spiraled toward the ceiling, and the audience was suspended upside-down like flies caught in invisible threads. Their faces were porcelain masks, mouths open in eternal applause.
On the stage, the grand piano had grown legs — insect legs — each joint plated in brass. The keys moved on their own, hammering out a melody I recognized but couldn't name. It was beautiful, but every note stabbed at my ribs from the inside, like it was rearranging me in time with the music.
In the front row sat the clock-faced figure, watching me.
"You will play," it said. "Or you will be played."
My throat tightened. "I don't know the song."
"You will."
I looked down. The thorned rose had melted in my hands, its petals flowing like ink over my skin, seeping into the creases of my palms. My veins glowed faint red for a heartbeat — and then the piano stopped playing by itself.
Silence.
All eyes — hundreds of hollow porcelain eyes — turned toward me.
My hands moved without my consent. Fingers struck the keys. The melody returned, and I did know it. I had always known it. I just didn't remember until now.
Each chord I played made the world flicker — sometimes the reversed opera house, sometimes the black plain, sometimes a memory I didn't recognize: a young woman with ash-white hair standing beneath the same crimson moon, holding the same watch, her shadow stretching too far across the ground.
The clock-faced figure leaned forward, its voice suddenly closer, almost behind my ear.
"Every note is a second. Every mistake is a death."
My hands faltered for a fraction of a beat. The air screamed — the masks in the audience cracked, black fluid spilling from the breaks, pooling around my shoes.
The crimson moon shuddered above us.
I played faster.
And then, without warning, the watch in the sky stopped. No more ticking. The world froze mid-breath.
I realized, with a cold weight in my stomach, that I wasn't playing the song anymore. The song was playing me.
The last note struck like a gunshot.
The audience burst into shards of glass.The opera house collapsed upward into the moon.And I fell, backward, into the endless black.
Somewhere far below, the watch began ticking again.