The road isn't a road.
It's a spine.
The marble and cobblestone I expected underfoot are replaced with bone-white ridges, each vertebra groaning when I step on it, flexing ever so slightly — like the thing it belonged to is still alive somewhere far below the surface. I try not to look down into the seams between each piece, because they're not cracks. They're mouths.
The ticking hasn't stopped. If anything, it's become louder, syncopated, like a clock trying to imitate a heartbeat. But it's wrong — too slow to be alive, too uneven to be mechanical. It makes my own pulse feel out of rhythm, my body unconsciously trying to match it.
That's when I notice something even stranger.
Every time I blink, the tower in the distance changes height.It's subtle at first — one moment it's thin, piercing the clouds, the next it's short and squat, surrounded by a halo of frozen gears suspended in the air. The change happens only when my eyes close for a fraction of a second.
I force myself to keep them open. My vision blurs. My eyes sting.I make it twenty-seven steps before instinct wins and I blink.
The tower is closer.
Not by much, but enough that I know it wasn't my imagination.
I pick up the pace. The bone-road curves sharply, taking me between buildings that aren't really buildings anymore. They lean too far inward, almost touching above me, forming a canopy of blackened rafters and warped glass. The windows watch me pass — not with eyes, but with that same faint shimmer of movement I saw in the opera house darkness.
Then, for the first time, something moves outside of my peripheral vision.
A man stands at the next curve.At least, I think he's a man. He's tall — far too tall — and his limbs hang at wrong angles, as though his bones are jointed in more places than they should be. His head tilts slightly when he notices me, and I hear the ticking falter for the first time.
We stare at each other. The red sky seems to hold its breath.
Then he lifts a hand. It's thin, fingers ending in needle points, and in the center of his palm is… a clock face. No glass, just exposed hands, twitching back and forth like a nervous animal. The numbers run backwards.
The instant I realize this, the ticking roars in my skull.
I stagger. My vision doubles.
When I look again, the man is gone.
The tower is closer still.
And now I'm running, because I can't shake the thought that if I stop, if I let that ticking line up perfectly with my own heartbeat, I'll end up with a clock in my chest too.