The ticking wouldn't stop.
It pulsed in Eiden's chest, steady and hollow, like a countdown to something only he could hear. Every time it skipped a beat, the walls around him seemed to flicker — a heartbeat out of sync with the world.
He sat up on the cot, staring at the words scratched into the metal beside him.
"Wake up before it stops."
The letters were etched deep, burned into the steel as though carved by fire. They glowed faintly when he looked too long — symbols shifting beneath the surface like insects under skin.
Eiden gritted his teeth.
He'd been a soldier once. He'd seen hallucinations, heard the dead whisper his name, but this… this was different.
The whispers were waiting.
He tugged at the shackles. The metal was cold, thick — but brittle. Someone had cut the hinge on the left wrist. Recently.
He took a breath, braced himself, and twisted. The shackle snapped.
The sound echoed far too loudly, like a gunshot in a church.
Eiden froze.
Nothing.
No guards. No voices. Just that rhythmic hum, as though the asylum itself was alive and listening.
He rose unsteadily, chains dragging behind him. His boots met the floor — metal, not stone — and with each step, faint symbols flared beneath his feet. Circles within circles, runes that turned and rearranged like clockwork gears.
The door wasn't locked. It opened itself.
Beyond it stretched a corridor that shouldn't have existed.
The walls were lined with glass panels, each containing something floating in amber fluid — people, perhaps, though their faces were blurred, distorted by time. Some looked ancient. Others… familiar.
He moved closer to one.
The figure inside was him.
Younger.
Smiling.
Unscarred.
The reflection blinked.
Eiden stumbled backward. The hallway shuddered, the glass cracked — and suddenly the corridor stretched farther, twisting into impossible geometry. The ceiling became the floor, the floor the sky, until the entire passage resembled a great hourglass, the figures inside trapped within the turning sands of memory.
He could hear whispers now. Faint. Overlapping. Dozens of versions of his own voice, whispering the same phrase:
"You were never supposed to wake up."
The ticking in his chest grew louder. A metallic whine filled his skull.
He ran.
Doors blurred past him — Ward 11, Ward 9, Ward 3 — numbers looping backward, the hallway spiraling into itself. He could feel something following him, something vast and unseen that moved like a tide behind glass.
At the end of the corridor stood a single door. Brass. Engraved with an emblem he recognized — a serpent biting its own tail. The symbol of the Order of Horologium, the secret faction that once commanded him during the War of Cogs.
His pulse quickened. He shoved the door open.
The room inside was dim, circular, filled with clocks hanging from invisible wires — all stopped at different moments in time.
And at the center stood the woman from before.
The doctor.
Her back turned.
"You shouldn't be here," she said softly.
Eiden's hand found his blade. "You lied to me."
She exhaled, and when she turned, her eyes were no longer silver. They were empty. Like glass blown from memory.
"Because the truth breaks people like you," she whispered. "You died eighteen years ago, Eiden. The war ended without you."
He laughed — hoarse, bitter. "Then what the hell am I now?"
She hesitated. "A reconstruction. A remnant. A mind wound around a clock. The Order rebuilt you to hunt your own sins."
The ticking in his chest stopped.
Completely.
The silence hit like a scream.
And then, behind her, the clocks began to move backward.