The clocks had finally gone quiet.
Not stopped — quiet, as if they feared to speak.
Vyom sat in the darkness of his room, the house around him sunk in uneasy sleep. Moonlight filtered through the curtains in strips of pale silver, pooling across the floorboards. He pressed a hand over his chest where the Watcher's word still burned, unseen but heavy.
Mark.
That single word had changed everything.
He could feel it now — a cold gear turning somewhere beneath his ribs, keeping time not with the world but with something older. Every few minutes it skipped a beat, and each skip made the air shimmer faintly, as though the world itself flinched.
He wanted to cry. To scream. To wake his mother and tell her that time itself was bending inside him.
But he remembered the Watchers' eyes. He remembered how the villagers hadn't seen them at all.
If he spoke, they'd think him mad. If he stayed silent, maybe the world would stay normal.
So he did what children often do when the world tilts too far — he hid beneath his blanket and prayed that morning would come quickly.
---
It didn't.
Somewhere past midnight, a new sound broke the silence.
Not ticking — a low, endless hum, like the vibration of a string stretched across eternity.
Vyom's eyes snapped open.
The air smelled different — cold, metallic, faintly burnt. His window glass darkened, turning mirror-black.
And in that glass, a shape moved.
At first it was only a blur — a ripple in shadow — but then it deepened into form:
a tall figure without edges, robed in something that looked like smoke and clockwork stitched together. Behind it spun faint halos of broken gears, orbiting in silence.
Vyom couldn't breathe. He wasn't sure the thing was even real — the reflection seemed both inside and outside the room.
Then, the voice came.
"Be still, child of reversal."
It was not sound. It was pressure.
A resonance that rolled through his bones and found the tiny gear under his heart.
The gear answered — spinning faster, aching.
"W-who are you?" Vyom whispered.
"I am the silence between seconds. The stillness that holds their weight."
The voice deepened, neither kind nor cruel.
"They have seen you too soon. The hour is unready. The Watchers stir because the line has trembled."
Vyom trembled too. "The line?"
"The line of those who carry the Forsaken Hour. Those whose lives mark the fractures of time."
The words were impossible — and yet, they felt ancient, true.
He swallowed. "Why me?"
The figure leaned closer in the mirror. Where a face should have been, there were only layers of endless dark, and behind them the faint pulse of red light — a heart that had long forgotten how to beat.
"Because you were chosen before choice existed."
Vyom's head spun. "I-I don't understand — the Watchers said I opened something — what did I do?"
"You remembered."
Two simple words, and the glass of the window cracked down the center.
Vyom flinched back. "Remembered what?"
"A world that must remain forgotten until the Eighteenth Hour. A self that once defied the clock and broke its heart."
The reflection flickered — for a heartbeat, Vyom saw flashes of the city of upward rain, of countless shadows falling from towers, of himself standing amid collapsing time. Then it was gone.
He pressed a hand to his chest again. "That city — was it real?"
"Real enough to break you. Real enough to wait."
The figure raised one smoke-woven hand, and the cracked window stilled.
"Listen, Vyom. The Watchers serve the Flow. They will hunt the echo that woke within you. They will try to erase the mark."
"Then help me!" Vyom pleaded. "Please! You can stop them, right?"
For the first time, the voice softened — not kindly, but as though remembering pain.
"My help is not mercy. My task is balance. You must forget before they arrive again."
Vyom shook his head. "Forget? No! I want to know who I am — what all of this means!"
"And in knowing, you would end all hours."
"You were not meant to awaken yet. The seal of memory breaks only at the Eighteenth Hour, when your line converges."
The glow behind the figure dimmed to a deep scarlet, and the world grew heavy, slower, like syrup around him.
Vyom could barely move his lips. "You're the Devil… aren't you?"
The voice paused.
Then, quietly — almost tenderly —
"Names are for the living. I am older than their fear of me."
"They call me Devil, Time's End, Keeper of the Veil. I am what watches the watchers."
The room pulsed once, and the reflection reached outward. A tendril of shadow brushed his forehead. It was cold and burning at once.
"Sleep, Vyom. The memory will fade. The mark will dull. When you wake, you will not recall my face nor this hour. You will only dream of ticking."
Vyom tried to resist. "No — I don't want to forget — !"
But the shadow pressed gently to his temple, and his thoughts began to slow, scattering like dust.
Through the haze, he heard one last murmur:
"When the clock of your heart strikes Eighteen, the Veil will shatter.
And then you will remember why the world fears the hour you command."
---
Darkness folded over him like water.
He dreamed of endless staircases built of gears, of clocks melting into sand, of countless faces frozen mid-motion.
And at the top of the stair, beneath a sky of fractured stars, stood the Devil — vast, ancient, unblinking — holding a single hourglass that bled light instead of sand.
He turned it once. Time reversed.
---
Morning arrived with rain.
Real rain — falling the right way.
Vyom awoke to his sister shaking his shoulder. "Wake up, sleepyhead! You'll miss breakfast."
He blinked at her, dazed.
The window glass was whole again. The air smelled normal.
And the mark on his chest — gone. Only a faint ache lingered, like a dream half-remembered.
He smiled weakly. "Did I… sleep long?"
She laughed. "Just one night."
But as she left the room, Vyom glanced at the clock on the wall.
It ticked perfectly — forward — yet each swing of its pendulum seemed to whisper a rhythm that didn't belong.
tick — tock — shhh.
Outside, thunder rolled far away, soft and distant.
Somewhere beyond the veil of reality, the Devil watched, his eyes reflecting both the boy and the broken world yet to come.
He whispered into the folds of time:
"Sleep well, young heir of the Forsaken Hour. Your story has only begun."
---
End of Chapter 7 — The Devil's Veil