"The mouse ran up, the clock chimed wrong... time itself began its song."
In the heart of the Forgotten Quarter stands a clocktower that no longer tells time.
It looms like a sentinel of regret, rust bleeding down its stonework like dried tears. The bell at its crown, once proud and golden, hangs cracked and blackened. The hour hand ticks... but not forward. The minute hand trembles. And the second hand, crooked and rusted, jerks to life only when someone tries to forget.
This is the Clock of Thirteen.
And inside, something waits to finish the rhyme.
The Tower That Counts Backward
The townspeople used to call it "The Heartbeat of the Kingdom." Every hour, its deep bells rang across the rooftops, keeping the world steady. Even magic, they said, danced to its rhythm.
But then one evening, a thirteenth chime rang out at midnight.
The sound was not just heard... it was felt. A pulse, a rupture, a broken breath. Time stuttered. Candles flared. Dreams turned bitter.
No one spoke for minutes afterward. Their eyes simply watered, and their skin crawled.
The next day, the mice began to die.
All but one.
The Mouse
No one knows where he came from. A pale little thing, with coal-like eyes and fur the color of parchment.
They called him Whittle, for he made no noise save the ticking of his tiny feet on glass. He didn't flee from people. He didn't nibble crumbs or chew wires.
He only ran.
Up and down the clocktower. Round and round the gears. Never stopping.
Children sang the old rhyme like a dare:
Hickory Dickory Dock,
The mouse ran up the clock...
But now they added a final line:
...The clock struck thirteen...
And time forgot the lock.
The Watchmaker
Before the thirteenth chime, there was a man.
Master Tolemus.
An ancient watchmaker whose hands were steady as still water, and whose face bore the quiet sadness of a man who had loved and lost time itself.
He lived within the tower, tending the gears, tuning the bells, winding the mainspring of the world. People said the stars followed his heartbeat. They weren't wrong.
But the night before the thirteenth chime, he vanished.
All that remained was his cloak, folded atop the central mechanism, and a scrap of parchment that read:
"I can no longer bind what refuses to be kept. Time has turned against itself. Forgive me."
No signature. Just a smear of black oil... or blood.
The Chime
No one remembers how long it's been since the thirteenth bell rang.
Because no one remembers anything correctly anymore.
Days blur.
Seasons bleed.
Children are born with the memories of dead kings. Old women wake up in their cradles.
Birthdays shift.
Weddings double.
Deaths repeat.
The clocktower still ticks... but its time is broken, and everything bound to it unravels.
Inside the Clock
Those who dared enter the tower found staircases that curled impossibly... upward into downward. Gears that turned both ways. Hallways that aged you or turned you into memories before you reached the next landing.
The air hums like a music box wound too tightly.
And Whittle is always there.
Watching.
Waiting.
Running.
Some say he's not a mouse at all, but the soul of Time itself, shattered and frantic, running loops to hold the last threads of the story together.
Others believe he is the last apprentice of Master Tolemus, cursed into fur and silence for failing to prevent the breach.
But all agree:
He runs for a reason.
And when he stops... the world ends.
The Visitor
One day, a girl came to the tower.
Her name was Cressida, and she had no shadow.
Not because of magic, but because Time had forgotten her. She was born during the chime...the exact moment the thirteenth bell rang. Her mother vanished in labor. Her father forgot he had a daughter.
Cressida grew up in alleyways, gathering scraps of forgotten lullabies and discarded hours.
She did not age like the others.
She remembered what no one else could.
And the rhyme? She sang it backward in her sleep.
The Descent
Cressida entered the tower on the hour of the thirteenth moon... when all thirteen constellations aligned above the Kingdom like cracks in the sky.
As she climbed the stairs, the air folded around her. Voices of past versions of herself echoed up the stone.
She saw visions in the gears:
- Her future self screaming behind a clock face.
- Her younger self holding the mouse like a doll.
- A version of her falling through the bell as the world froze mid-tick.
Still, she climbed.
Whittle raced beside her, faster than her breath, his eyes flickering with mirror-light.
The Core
At the heart of the tower lay the great Pendulum.
It no longer swung.
Instead, it hovered... still as death, humming with forgotten seconds.
Wrapped around its base was a spiral of golden thread. Tolemus's final working. A knot that, if pulled, could unravel or reset everything.
Whittle stood atop the thread, trembling.
Cressida reached forward.
"Stop the chime," she whispered.
And for the first time, the mouse... nodded.
Then he leapt into the mechanism.
The Unwinding
The tower groaned.
The bell rang once... low and wrong.
Then the clock shuddered backward.
Time hiccupped.
Reality rippled.
All around the kingdom, strange things began to happen:
- The Queen of Glass blinked and found her throne whole.
- Red Riding Hood howled as a child again, lost in her mother's arms.
- The sea retreated from the ruins of a kingdom it had swallowed.
- And Jack… paused mid-fall, his scream cut short.
For a moment... just a breath... the Kingdom remembered its place in the story.
And then...
The bell rang a fourteenth time.
The Breaking
The golden thread snapped.
The Pendulum fell.
And Cressida vanished.
In her place stood a new timekeeper... one forged from gears and grief, from shadows and song.
She wore a crown of minute hands.
And her eyes ticked.
The tower exhaled.
Whittle ran once more... up and up, into forever.
But now, he was not alone.
The New Rhyme
A new nursery rhyme now echoes through the back alleys and underbreaths of the Kingdom:
"Tick tock, the mouse won't stop,
The tower bleeds the hour drop.
Strike fourteen and shadows blend...
Run fast, dear child, or meet your end."
Legacy
The clock still stands.
Broken.
Beating.
Waiting.
Some say the Kingdom will never fall so long as the mouse runs.
Others believe that when he stops again, it won't be a thirteenth chime.
It'll be the last.
And when it strikes, not even stories will remember how time once turned.
Next: Chapter 7: The Red Hooded Curse (The Fall of Red Riding Hood)