Tick.Tick.Tick.
The sound no longer came from the fractured pocket watch in my hand, but from somewhere deeper — as if it had lodged itself inside my skull. Each beat pressed against my thoughts, reshaping them, erasing the edges between memory and dream.
I blinked, and the opera house around me was gone.
In its place, I stood on a bridge made of black iron ribs, arching over an ocean that breathed. Each exhale brought the tide closer, the foam glistening with fragments of broken mirrors. My reflection stared up at me from every shard, and each version's eyes ticked like the face of a clock.
I couldn't tell if I was awake. I couldn't tell if I had ever been.
A voice threaded itself through the ticking.Low, unhurried. Familiar.You are late.
I turned.
Behind me stood the conductor — or at least, the thing that had once been him. His uniform had melted into the shape of an ossified exoskeleton, polished black like a beetle's shell. His baton dripped molten silver, and his smile was lined with teeth that looked like they belonged in a music box.
The thirteenth chime waits for no one, he said, stepping closer.
I wanted to back away, but the bridge beneath me groaned, as though it resented the thought. My feet refused to move. Every tick in my skull was now a nail, hammering into the inside of my mind.
"What happens at the thirteenth chime?" I asked, my voice thin.
He didn't answer. Instead, he lifted the baton and pointed to the horizon.
There, suspended in the red-lit sky, hung the moon — split open like a rotten fruit. From within spilled black roses, their petals twisting into thorns mid-air. Each rose fell into the ocean, and the water hissed, rejecting them. Steam rose in shapes I almost recognized — silhouettes of people I once knew, faces I didn't want to remember.
The ticking grew louder.
The conductor tapped his baton against the air. A single musical note formed, glowing, trembling. It spun toward me. I flinched, but it passed through my chest.
Suddenly, my heartbeat fell in sync with the ticking. Tick. Pulse. Tick. Pulse.
You've carried it long enough, the conductor said. Now, it will carry you.
"What—?"
The bridge beneath me cracked. Through the gaps, I saw gears grinding, colossal and wet with some dark lubricant that might have been blood. The iron ribs buckled, and I fell forward—
—only to land back in the opera house.
Except the seats were gone. The stage was a vast, circular pit, and in its center floated the fractured pocket watch. Each shard hovered in perfect orbit, spinning around an invisible axis. Between them, I saw moments — not images, not memories, but moments. A hand closing a door. A drop of ink blooming in water. A mouth about to speak but never doing so.
The ticking was everywhere.
I stepped forward. Every movement I made echoed, as if the world itself was hollow.
Something else moved, just beyond my vision. Not a shadow, but a gap — a hole in reality shaped like a person. It stepped in rhythm with me, matching my pace.
I realized, too late, that it was my own outline. Empty. Waiting.
The thirteenth chime struck.
It wasn't a sound. It was a silence so dense that my breath froze mid-inhale. My shadow-outline lunged forward and merged with me.
The fractured pocket watch stopped ticking. Its shards collapsed inward, reforming — not into a watch, but into an eye. An unblinking, metallic iris, with hands like clock needles spinning in both directions at once.
It looked at me. No — it looked through me.
And I understood.
The ticking had never been a warning. It had been a countdown.
The conductor's voice returned, but it came from inside my head now. The first act ends. The next begins.
The eye blinked.
The world ended.