Chapter 1: The Stillness and the Spark

The world was a profound, crushing silence. There was no wind, no distant city hum, just the faint thud of my own blood. I pushed myself onto my elbows, my head throbbing. My eyes fell to my left wrist. The watch, a bronze manacle, was still there, but a hairline fracture now split the glass face. The gears were still, but from the crack, a faint, golden-yellow light bled out, pulsing slowly. The skin beneath it tingled with a strange, residual energy.

I looked up and my breath caught. The city square was a perfect, impossible diorama. A man stood frozen mid-laugh, a joke dying on his lips. A couple leaned in for a kiss that would never land. A newsboy’s paper hung in the air. A metallic-winged courier-bird was locked in an effortless glide. Time was a prisoner here.

A wave of vertigo washed over me. I scrambled to my feet, my boots making the only sound in the universe. My first thought was raw terror. My second, a more practical, thief-born instinct: Was I in danger? I scanned the unmoving faces. No one could look at me. They were statues. All of them.

A hysterical giggle escaped my lips. Then a full-blown laugh. It bounced off the silent buildings. I, Theodore Rune, a boy who’d spent his life trying to be invisible, was now the only thing moving in the entire world. The irony was so thick you could choke on it. After the initial panic, my old habits took over. You can’t leave a thief alone in a city of statues and not expect him to get curious.

I sidled up to a portly merchant and plucked a gold watch from his waistcoat. “Nice piece,” I whispered, “but I’m afraid your appointment is indefinitely postponed.” I held it to my ear. Silence. All the clocks were broken. I slipped it into my pocket anyway. Force of habit.

I walked into the street, weaving through frozen carriages and motionless automatons. In a small café, I found a woman holding a porcelain pot, a dark stream of coffee hanging in a perfect, solid arc. I stuck my finger in the petrified stream. It was hard as glass and surprisingly warm.

This whole world was under the unending gaze of a vast, glowing moon. It wasn't the pale, silver orb I knew. This one was a brilliant, sapphire blue. It felt like an eye. The great, unblinking eye of whatever god had decided to put the world on pause. The Evernight, I decided to call it.

Days blurred. My only clock was the rumbling in my stomach. The initial thrill gave way to a routine born of a desperate need for structure. “Alright, Your Majesty,” I’d announce to no one, “First on the royal agenda: breakfast.” I’d find a bakery and sample pastries thankfully preserved at the peak of freshness. Then, it was time for the wardrobe. I’d wander into the city’s finest clothiers, trying on silk shirts and velvet coats, leaving my old rags in a pile. For recreation, I’d rearrange things. I once spent an entire afternoon posing the stuffy-looking statues of the city council into a can-can line. Loneliness was a constant shadow, but I kept it at bay with sarcasm and a king’s ransom in stolen, useless goods.

It was during the third, or maybe fourth, week of my reign that I found it. The silence was getting louder. I was exploring a dusty old bookstore near the university district when I saw something impossible.

It was a magazine. While every other book sat frozen, this one hovered in the air, its pages slowly turning on their own.

My heart hammered against my ribs. Movement. Something other than me. I approached it slowly. The cover read Chronostead Monthly: The Minds of Progress. The image was of a man with silver-streaked hair and a kind, calculating smile. As I watched, the image on the cover shifted. The man turned his head and winked.

My fingers trembled as I took it. The paper felt slick and strangely warm. I opened it to the cover story. The images inside were alive, miniature scenes playing out on the page.

“Silas Thorne doesn’t live in a house; he lives in a hypothesis,” the article began. A moving picture showed a sprawling manor of brass and dark wood.

I turned the page. Silas Thorne was sitting in a study filled with whirring contraptions. “People see magic as a gift,” his voice, a smooth baritone, seemed to whisper from the page. “I see it as a puzzle. A force to be understood, contained, and distributed.”

The next page showed his inventions. A rune-etched cartridge that bloomed with the light of a captured sunbeam. A pair of metal gauntlets that allowed the wearer to shape and mold scrap metal with a thought. They called it Magitek—a fusion of machinery and spellcraft for the common man.

The interviewer’s text appeared. “But why? What drives the wealthiest man in Chronostead to democratize the arcane?”

The image changed to a memory. A small, younger Silas stood in a classroom, his hands stubbornly empty.

“I was born a null,” the voice explained, laced with the ghost of an old hurt. “In a world defined by Magic, I was… inert. Powerless. While my peers drew on emotion and instinct to bend reality, I had only my mind. So, I used it. Science became my spellbook. Engineering, my incantation.”

The final page showed him standing before a massive, complex machine in a laboratory. It was a dizzying array of gyroscopes, lenses, and rune-covered brass rings, all aimed at a single point in the center. A faint, golden-yellow energy—the same color leaking from my watch—was visible deep within its core.

“My current work?” Silas’s moving image smiled. “Let’s just say I’m attempting to solve the ultimate problem. Not poverty, not war… but decay. The relentless march of time that wears all things down. I believe true salvation lies not in progress, but in preservation. In perfect, beautiful, eternal stillness.”

The magazine snapped shut in my hands. My blood ran cold.

The wealthiest man in Chronostead. An inventor obsessed with stopping time. A genius who created the very Magitek that defined this steampunk city. And his laboratory contained a machine radiating the same strange energy that was seeping out of the cracked watch shackled to my wrist.

It wasn't a clue. It was a signpost, blazing in the endless twilight.

I looked out the shop window at the silent, frozen city. For the first time since I’d arrived, I had a destination. I had a name. Silas Thorne.

My thief’s instincts, honed over a lifetime of sizing up targets, kicked in. The richest man in the city. A mansion full of secrets, impossible inventions, and, most importantly, richness!

It was time to pay Mr. Thorne a visit.