Chapter 8

-

 Chapter 8: A Day Without Time


They ran.

Not from danger, but from clocks.

They turned off their phones, left behind their watches, and took a train to the countryside. No plan. No destination.

They laughed, picnicked beneath the wide spring sky, and danced to the sound of birds and wind. Elias taught her a waltz. She taught him how to eat a mango without making a mess. He failed.

They kissed under an oak tree. It was slow, sacred, and full of everything lost and rediscovered.

“You feel like home,” she whispered.

That night, as they lay beneath a blanket of stars, Elias stared into her eyes and said:

“If this is all we have, it’s enough.”

But inside, he heard the clock ticking.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Chapter 2

-
  Chapter 2: Stepping Into Now What happens when a man built for candlelight and carriage wheels steps into a world buzzing with artificial stars and voices trapped in glowing rectangles? The journal never recorded what it felt like. But the photograph did. Elias Thornwell’s eyes, captured in black and white, said more than ink ever could. He stood still on a bustling sidewalk somewhere in London—though not the London he knew. The street was littered with electric scooters, the air thick with the sound of honking cars and music leaking from wireless earbuds. His Victorian coat clung to him like a costume, out of time, out of place. He had made it. The journal's mechanism had worked—or, at least, it had hurled him across time with uncanny precision. The year was 2025. He wandered the city like a ghost that nobody noticed. He marveled at the skyless skyline, at the little black boxes people spoke into, and the lights that didn’t flicker like candle flames. But nothing captured h...
Read more

Chapter 1

-
 Chapter 1: The Clockmaker’s Secret Stories exist within the pages of worn books, concealed within the passage of time, patiently awaiting remembrance. This one began with a box tucked inside the attic of a decaying Victorian townhouse in Bloomsbury—a house forgotten by most, but not by fate. I didn’t expect to find anything that day. I was merely cataloging antiques for an estate auction. But there it was: a leather-bound journal, cracked with age, the initials “E.T.” faintly embossed on the cover. The first entry was dated April 16, 1872 , written in a hand so meticulous it could have belonged to a man who measured time not just by hours, but by heartbeats. "The gear must align with the lunar tooth—no sooner, no later. Midnight is the key. I will go to her, even if time itself breaks beneath me." — Elias Thornwell Elias Thornwell was a clockmaker by trade, but his writing revealed something more. He wasn’t just building clocks. He was building a portal— a time mechani...
Read more

Chapter 4

-
  Chapter 4: Of Names and Echoes They kept meeting. Ella would perform, and Elias would listen—devoted, silent, enraptured. Afterward, they’d talk. She was curious about him in the way you might be about a haunting: drawn, unsure why. “You speak like a man from another era,” she teased one night. He smiled softly. “Maybe I am.” As the days blurred into soft evenings and rain-dappled streets, their connection deepened. Ella began to share her art—paintings, dreams, songs—and Elias saw something that made his breath catch: The artwork depicts a beautiful garden. Their garden. Every detail was identical to the one outside his home in 1871: the iron gate, the wild violets, the way the light fell through the hedges. She had never been there. Yet somehow, she remembered . “It came to me in a dream,” she said. “A man was waiting beyond the gate. I couldn’t see his face, but I knew he was waiting for me.” Elias reached for her hand then—trembling not from fear, but from wonder...
Read more