Morning came late to Greymoor.
Not because the sun failed to rise, but because the house, it seemed, took its time remembering it was alive. The light filtered through in patches, golden and patient, as though it had been waiting on the other side of the curtains all night, unsure wether it was welcome.
Eveline stood at her window with her fingers gently touching the glass, watching as mist curled between rose vines and hedgerows. The clocktower, just barely visible through the garden haze, remained frozen — once more at five fifty-nine.
"So it wasn't a dream," she murmured. "Or if it was, it dreamed back."
The line written in the journal echoed through her thoughts,
"I'll be there when the hour turns."
Who was "I"? Snd why did she feel like she already knew the answer — like it had been left inside her chest from another life?
The library was empty when she arrived, though the lamps had been lit.
Thaddeus wa nowhere to be seen. A cup of tea sat abandoned on the windowsill, steam no longer rising. Instea, there was an envelope. Pale, aged, but unsealed. Sitting at the very center of the long table like a question.
Eveline's fingers hovered over it. No name. No seal. Just the weight of something left too long unsent.
She opened it.
Inside was a single page.
"To the one who lingers —"
"If you are resding this, it means timeas softened. The hour is no longer sealed. You may feel that you are dreaming—do not trust that feeling. Time, when it folds, always feels like fiction. It isn't."
"You do not know me yet. But I have written you into everything."
She pressed her hand to her chest. It didn't feel like fear. It felt like recognition.
"I have written you into everything."
Later that afternoon, she stepped into the garden, needing air that didn't smell of parchment and memory.
The garden was wilder than she'd realized. Moss grew over old stepping stones. Thorny rose branches climbed the wrought-iron fence as if trying to escape. But it wasn't lifeless — it was full of quiet persistence.
She walked toward the clocktower without meaning to. Her shoes crunched softly over the gravel path, birds singing somewhere out of sight. At the base of the tower was a small wrought-iron door, half-covered in ivy. It resisted her hand at first, then creaked open with a reluctant groan.
Inside, stone steps wound upward into a spiral of shadows and dust.
"I'm not sure why i'm doing this," she whispered, "Only that I feel as though I've done it before."
Each step echoed with mote than sound—it felt like memory, or fragments of it, brushing her skin as she climbed.
At the top, the chamber was circular, dimly lit by tall arched windows clouded by time. The clock's gears, larger than she imagined, stood in silence — rusted but noble, like a creature that had gone to sleep rather than die.
And there —pinned to the wooden wall with an old rusted tack — was another letter.
This one was even stranger.
It had no greeting, no signature. Just a passage, written in the same flowing hand:
"You dreamed of me once, in the hour between dusk and decision. You wore yellow, and I had forgotten my name. But I remembered the sound of your voice."
Eveline blinked back the sudden sting behind her eyes.
"This is madness," she said aloud, trying to anchor herself. "Romantic, aching madness."
But a part of her wanted to believe it. Not just that someone had written to her, but that he'd been writing toward her — across time, across silence, across everything.
That night, she returned to her balcony, the air cold and quiet.
She saw him again — the silhouette in the garden. He stood just beyond the reach of the moonlight, still as stone, his presence more felt than seen. Like a note played too softly to be heard but deeply known.
"If you are real," she whispered to the dark, "come closer."
He didn't move. But something inside her did.
She turned to go inside — and found something resting on her desk.
A pressed rose.
Deep crimson. Slightly bruised at the edges. Resting atop a folded page.
She unfolded it with trembling hands.
"You are the hour."
"You are the moment I never left."
She closed her eyes.
"If this is a haunting," she whispered, "then let it haunt me completely."
Outside, in the garden, the wind stirred the roses.
And somewhere deep in the clocktower, the gears clicked once — just once— before silence fell again.