Prologue: The Clasp of Fate

The only sound in the grand manor was the frantic beat of my own heart against my ribs. Moonlight, thin and silver, cut through the library’s tall windows, illuminating dust motes dancing in the air like lazy spirits. I moved through the columns of sleeping books, a ghost in my own right, my fingers tracing the spines of leather-bound volumes as I searched. The Finnigan family, bless their opulent, oblivious hearts, were upstairs dreaming of stock dividends and racehorses. They’d never even know I was here.

Being an orphan in the Lower Grids teaches you a few things. First, nobody gives you anything. Second, a shadow is your best friend. And third, a well-fed mob boss is a mob boss who doesn’t break your fingers. Finnigan was supposed to have a small safe behind a false panel somewhere in this library, and inside, my ticket to another week of not having my fingers broken.

I found the panel behind a ghastly oil painting of some bewigged ancestor. The lock was a joke—a tumbler mechanism that clicked open with two of my best picks in under a minute. Inside, nestled on red velvet, was the usual haul: a few diamond necklaces, a stack of bearer bonds, a woman’s pearl-ringed brooch. My fingers closed around the cold gems, but then something else caught the moonlight.

It was a watch. Tucked into a corner of the safe, it looked ancient. Not gold or silver, but a dull, coppery bronze, etched with symbols that seemed to shift if you looked at them too long. A glass face revealed a dizzying array of interlocking gears and cogs, all unnervingly still. It wasn't flashy, not the kind of piece a man like Finnigan would wear. It felt… different. Forgotten. On impulse, an impulse I’d curse for the rest of my short life, I pocketed it along with the rest.

That night, sleep offered no escape. It dragged me into a strange, misty landscape where the air hummed with energy. A figure stood before me, tall and unnaturally graceful, with pointed ears and eyes that held the light of distant stars. An elf, I thought, my mind struggling to process a creature I’d only ever seen in cheap storybooks.

“The artifact has chosen,” its voice echoed, not in my ears, but directly inside my skull. It sounded like bells chiming in a deep cavern. “The Rune of Theodore has been found. You are the one, the key to the Grand Order. Time awaits its guardian.”

I woke up sweating, the elf’s ridiculous words still ringing in my head. “Chosen one?” I muttered to the grimy ceiling of my attic room. “Grand Order?” The only order I belonged to was the one that paid me to pilfer from the rich. The dream was nonsense, a side effect of bad gin and a guilty conscience.

I sorted the night’s take on my rickety table, the diamonds glittering greedily. The bronze watch sat apart from the rest, looking dull and unimpressive. It gave me the creeps. I left it on the table when I went to deliver the goods, planning to just forget about it.

But when I returned that afternoon, after getting a fraction of the haul’s worth and a gruff dismissal from my boss, the watch was there. Not on the table, but in the pocket of the coat I’d been wearing all day. My blood went cold. I hadn’t put it there. I distinctly remembered leaving it. Chalking it up to a tired mistake, I took it out, walked three blocks to the nearest sewer grate, and dropped the thing into the darkness without a second thought. I heard it clatter against the stone below. Good riddance.

Later that evening, reaching for a coin to buy a stale bread roll, my fingers brushed against cold, familiar metal. It was back. The same bronze casing, the same still gears. It was resting in my pocket as if it had never left.

Panic, cold and sharp, began to prickle at the edges of my composure. This wasn't possible. The next day, I sold it. I went to a pawn broker in the grimiest part of the city, a man who wouldn’t ask questions. He gave me a pittance for it, his greasy eyes dismissing it as a worthless curiosity. I used the money to buy a hot meal and felt the knot in my stomach loosen. It was gone. I was free.

I found it under my pillow that night.

The frustration mounted into a fever pitch. For a week, it became a dark ritual. I threw it in the river. I buried it in a construction site. I even paid a street urchin to take it to the other side of the city and lose it. Every time, without fail, it would reappear. In my boot. On my nightstand. In my satchel. It was haunting me, a silent, relentless stalker made of bronze and glass.

The breaking point came on a rainy Tuesday. I was pulling on my coat, my mind already running through the details of my next job, when my wrist scraped against it in my pocket. I pulled it out, my hand trembling with rage, ready to hurl it against the wall. But as I held it, I felt a faint click. I looked down. The watch was no longer in my hand. It was fastened around my wrist. A seamless bronze band had wrapped itself around my skin, locking into place without any visible clasp or buckle. It was part of me.

I tore at it, my nails scraping uselessly against the smooth metal. I tried to slip it off, but it wouldn't budge, as if it had been forged there. A wave of pure, claustrophobic terror washed over me. I was branded. Helpless.

That was it. Frustration curdled into a desperate fury. If I couldn't get it off, I would destroy it. I ran out of my hovel and into the slick, grimy alley behind the building, grabbing a heavy wrench from a rusted toolbox. Pinning my own arm against the damp brickwork, I raised the tool high over my head, ignoring the frantic, hammering pulse in my throat.

“Get off me!” I screamed at the indifferent air, and brought the wrench down with all my strength.

The wrench didn't crush the watch. It connected with a sound that wasn't metal or glass, but something else entirely—a resonant, pure tone that vibrated through the very bones of my arm. The glass face didn't shatter. It began to glow with a violent, sapphire light. The gears inside, still for so long, whirred into impossible motion, a vortex of spinning cogs that blurred into a single point of light.

The air in front of me tore open.

It wasn't a door; it was a wound in reality. A swirling vortex of fractured colors and screaming noise erupted from the face of the watch, sucking in the rain, the debris, the very air from my lungs. The wrench was ripped from my grasp. I scrambled for purchase on the wet cobblestones, but the pull was immense, an invisible hand dragging me into the Maelstrom. My world dissolved into a nauseating kaleidoscope of light and sound, and then, mercifully, into nothing at all.

I woke to silence. A deep, profound, and utterly unnatural silence. My head throbbed, my body ached, but I was lying on solid ground. I pushed myself up, my hand brushing against cool, dry stone. The bronze watch was still clasped to my wrist, now dormant and cold.

I looked around, and the world I saw was wrong.

I was in a city square, surrounded by towering, soot-stained buildings adorned with intricate brass pipes and gigantic, unmoving clockwork mechanisms. A heavy, perpetual twilight pressed down from a sky dominated by a colossal moon, glowing with an impossible blue light that cast everything in an ethereal, ghostly sheen. But that wasn't the most jarring part.

Everything was frozen.

A flock of metallic-winged birds hung motionless in the air, not falling, not flying. A woman in a long coat stood mid-stride, one foot hovering an inch above the ground, her face a mask of frozen surprise. A plume of steam from a rooftop vent was a solid, petrified cloud against the blue-lit sky. A newspaper, caught by a wind that no longer blew, was suspended in a perfect arc over the cobblestones. The entire world was a photograph, a single moment captured and held in place by some unimaginable power.

I was the only one that moved. A single, living beat in the heart of a dead world. Alone, under the unblinking eye of the evernight moon.