Silence.
Not the comforting kind — not the hush of sleep or solitude — but the kind that presses down like water, crushing every thought that dares to rise.
Eiden's eyes opened to white.
The ceiling above him pulsed faintly, like living flesh. Tubes and glass veins crisscrossed its surface, glowing with a pale luminescence that made the air shimmer. He was lying on a cot — thin, metallic, bolted to the floor. A faint heartbeat echoed through the walls.
He tried to move. His wrists clinked. Shackles.
For a moment, he thought he was dead. Then the pain came — sharp, precise, real. The world was too detailed to be a dream.
A door opened somewhere behind him with a hiss of steam. Footsteps followed, slow, deliberate, as if pacing time itself.
"Good morning, Eiden Varos," a calm voice said.
He turned his head. A woman stood at the threshold, dressed in a long gray coat. Her eyes were the color of tarnished silver, her hair neatly braided beneath a black cap. A single clock ticked on the chain around her neck — one second off-beat from the rhythm of the room.
"Where am I?" he rasped. His throat was dry, his tongue tasted of iron.
She smiled — not kindly, but clinically. "You're in Ward 13. The Asylum for Temporal Disorders."
"Temporal…" Eiden's mind struggled to focus. "You think I'm mad."
"Madness is a term for minds that don't fit the present moment," she replied. "You, on the other hand, don't fit time itself."
She approached him, clipboard in hand. Her gaze was unnervingly steady, as though she were dissecting him with her eyes.
"Do you remember what happened in the shop?"
"The clocks," he said. "The voices. The heart-shaped timepiece."
She nodded. "All found destroyed. But the shop no longer exists. It burned down six years ago."
Eiden froze.
"I was there last night," he said. "I—"
"You were found two blocks from the ruins," she interrupted. "Unconscious. No wounds, no burns. And your heart…" She paused, choosing her words carefully. "It stopped for exactly fifty-nine seconds."
Eiden stared at her. The ticking around his chest — the faint echo of the symbol burned into his skin — began to pulse again.
"I want to see it," he said. "The shop. The remains."
Her expression hardened. "You will — once we finish your evaluation."
Then, almost absently, she added: "Tell me, Eiden… what year is it?"
He frowned. "1439."
She looked at him as though he'd just confessed to murder.
"It's 1457."
The room's heartbeat grew louder.
For a long moment, neither spoke.
Then, the clock on her neck stopped ticking.
The silence that followed wasn't empty — it was listening.
Eiden felt something stir deep in his chest, a mechanical whir hidden beneath his ribs. A faint hum spread through the shackles, and for a fraction of a second, the world glitched — the ceiling melted into gears, the woman's face split into a thousand reflections, and the air tasted of memory.
When it settled, the woman was gone. The door was closed.
But on the floor, scratched into the metal beside his cot, were five words that hadn't been there before:
"Wake up before it stops."
He didn't know whose handwriting it was.
But he knew what it meant.
The ticking heart inside his chest had only so much time left.