The Kingdom of Unwritten Things

ZEVRAN

Kingdom of Hours

At precisely midnight and not a second past, every single clock in the eastern district stopped. All of them. Just like that. 

Well every clock except for mine which was odd given the circumstances. 

My pocket watch had been broken for centuries.

I was rather proud of that fact, actually. After all there was something rather comforting about owning an object that had finally admitted defeat. I had little patience for things that insisted on working long after they had become a nuisance.

People, unfortunately, were not so easily discarded however. 

“Your Majesty.”

I continued examining the dead instrument in my palm absentmindedly. I turned it over under the dim, amber glow of my workshop lamps, peering at the tarnished silver casing as if it held profound cosmic clues that might reveal themselves if I simply caught the light just so. I could feel the cold weight of the silver pressing into my skin, a quiet anchor against the sudden, unnatural silence bleeding into the palace from the streets below.

“Your Majesty.”

I sighed dramatically. “If you say it a third time, Veyne, I shall be forced to assume you’ve forgotten my name. And while I appreciate being admired, I find repetition terribly dull. You wouldn’t want me to find you suddenly dull now would you?” 

Lord Veyne stood in the doorway of my workshop. He looked as though he had aged a decade since breakfast, his skin a pasty, sickly gray and his usually immaculate collar slightly askew.

“But sir, the eastern district… it has lost eleven minutes.” He spit out. 

“How careless of it, really.” I sighed again, lazily twirling the heavy watch by its golden chain, letting the metallic links hiss against each other.

“Eleven minutes, Your Majesty.” he repeated, pitching his voice higher, frantic, as if I hadn’t heard the imbecile already.

“I heard you the first time. However..,”  I paused, watching the silver disc spin in hypnotic, gleaming arcs before my eyes.  “I was hoping the number might improve the second time around.” 

“It hasn’t.”

“Then I suppose we shall have to work with what we’ve got.” 

He stared at me, his eyes blinking in slow, uncomprehending horror.

I smiled.

Veyne had served my family for thirty-two years, which was a remarkable achievement considering my family had been dead for most of them. He possessed the constitution of an ox, the imagination of a brick, and a truly extraordinary ability to mistake my amusement for cooperation.  I needed his predictability. In a world where my own memories felt like dissolving smoke, Veyne’s exasperation was the only thing that felt completely real.

“Explain,” I said, finally thumping the watch down onto the cluttered mahogany table in front of me with a sharp, definitive clack that made the nearby jars rattle. 

“The bells stopped at midnight. The clocks in the eastern district ceased moving. Several residents report that they have lost time they cannot account for. One woman claims she watched her husband walk into their kitchen and emerge from it an hour younger.”

“Oh really?,” I said, a wicked, razor-thin grin pulling at the corners of my mouth as I leaned back in my blackened wood chair, interlacing my fingers. “Please do tell, did she like him better?”

“Your Majesty??” He mumbled confounded. 

“Her husband came back a whole hour younger but did he come back any wiser?”

“Well… I… I don’t know.” He stood there, completely lost for words, his jaw slack.

“Then we must make a note to ask her. It would be a terrible waste if that hour didn’t teach him anything don’t you think?”  I asked, my smirk widening as I drank in his discomfort. It was a beautiful shield, humor. It kept people from looking too closely at the gaps I kept hidden.

Veyne pinched the bridge of his nose, closing his eyes tightly. 

I adored that gesture. It was the closest he ever came to admitting I was funny.

“And what of the royal clock?” I asked.

His hand lowered slowly. The blood seemed to drain entirely from his face, leaving him looking ghost-white in the lamplight.

“The royal clock is running backward..”

Ah.

Now that was rather regrettably less amusing. A cold, sharp prickle of genuine unease darted down my spine.

I rose from my worktable, brushing a scattering of fine brass filings from my velvet coat. The workshop was a beautiful disaster of my own unique making: gears swimming like dead specimens in green glass jars, half-finished brass mechanisms hanging like metallic bats from the timber ceilings, and a clockwork raven perched on a high shelf with its head turned entirely backward.

I had named the raven Veyne.

The real Veyne had not appreciated this grand gesture.

“Fetch my coat,” I said idly, grabbing my black top hat and the silver-headed cane resting against the desk. Its handle was an ornate silver hourglass, delicate filigree curling around its narrow waist, with a tiny pocket of golden sand resting motionless inside the glass.

“But sir you’re already wearing your coat.”

“Then fetch me something useful would you?” 

He looked around the chaotic room hastily, his eyes darting from jars of springs to piles of parchment, utterly clueless as to what might constitute usefulness in a crisis.

I waited for him to do something anything. 

With a frustrated huff, he left the room.

I laughed quietly to myself, though the sound felt hollow in the quiet room. With a dramatic flourish, I popped my top hat onto my head, twirled my cane until it whistled through the air, and tucked it neatly under my arm as I fastened the heavy chain of my pocket watch to my waistcoat.

The watch had no business still being in my possession. Its silver casing was cracked, its glass clouded, and its hands had been frozen at a time I could no longer read. I had no recollection of purchasing it, inheriting it, or stealing it from anyone sufficiently foolish to let me near their valuables.

Yet I wore it every day without fail. 

I had tried to throw it away once.

I remembered standing near the western wall of the palace with the watch in my hand. I remembered the wind, the stone beneath my boots, and the peculiar conviction that if I were to let it go, something important would disappear with it. Something dear to me that I couldn’t let go of, though for the life of me, I couldn’t remember what that was. The emptiness of that blank space in my mind ached, a phantom limb of my own history.

 I slipped the cold watch beneath my coat, patting it flat against my chest.

“Come along, then old friend,” I told it. “Let’s see what time has done to offend us now.” 

The eastern district was a theater of pure, unadulterated chaos when I arrived. The air smelled of copper and ozone, static electricity snapping against my skin.

Clockmakers stood in the cobblestone streets arguing over brass mechanisms that had never malfunctioned in their histories, their voices sharp and panicked. A frantic shopkeeper had barricaded himself inside his own store because the pendulum above his door insisted it was yesterday. Two royal guards were attempting to explain to an incredibly angry, red-faced baker why the bread she had sold that morning had apparently unbaked itself into wet, sticky dough.

I stepped gracefully over a fallen wooden sign, twirling my cane as I went. A rhythmic whistle marked every step I took through the panicked crowd, a deliberate mask of carefree arrogance.

“Your Majesty!” someone shouted. “The bells—”

“Yes, yes, so I’ve heard. They have fallen silent,” I interrupted, letting my voice take on its finest condescending, singsong tone. “A true tragedy, really. For anyone who enjoys being rudely woken before dawn, of course.”

“The entire district is affected!” Someone else shouted distraught and unnerved that I could sound so callous about the situation I was sure. 

I offered the crowd a wicked, razor-sharp smirk. Beneath the shadow of my top hat, I could feel my eyes beginning to hum, burning and glowing a faint, brilliant golden with the sudden, intoxicating stirrings of my power. The magic thrummed in my blood, eager, dangerous, and loud.

“Then the entire district should, well, quite frankly, be grateful. Imagine the peace.”

A few people outright glared daggers at me, their faces contorted with rage. The hostility only made my smirk grow. It was easier to handle their hatred than their expectations.

One burly man stepped forward, his knuckles white, looking as though he might actually throw a heavy stone at me.

I tilted my head slightly, letting the golden light in my eyes flare like dying stars, and flashed my teeth at him in a silent, predatory dare.

He froze, the breath catching in his throat, and decided very quickly against it. He took a cautious step back into the safety of the crowd.

Excellent. The smile was still working.

The royal clock tower stood at the dead end of the district, housed inside a monolithic pillar of black stone older than the palace itself. Its face was wrought from black iron, its hands long and slender like skeletal fingers, its numbers engraved in an ancient, sweeping language no living clockmaker could read.

The hands were turning backward.

Slowly.

Deliberately.

I stopped at the foot of the tower, tapping my cane down with a sharp thud and leaning on it curiously as I observed the impossible spectacle.

For a terrifying moment, the street went deathly quiet.

Not silent—silence implies an absence of sound. It was a heavy, suffocating quiet. The sort of quiet that occurs when a room full of people suddenly realizes something is terribly, irrevocably wrong, and nobody wishes to be the first to voice the nightmare.

I felt it then.

A sharp, localized pressure just behind my eyes, hot and pulsing.

It was a peculiar, phantom sensation, like the exact instant before remembering a forgotten name that has been sitting just beyond reach at the very tip of your tongue. A sickening sense of déjà vu gripped my throat.

I looked up at the dark glass of the clock face.

A man stood reflected in it.

He was tall, motionless, and dressed in a high-collared style that belonged to no kingdom or century I recognized. His features were indistinct, blurred and shadowed by the dark glass, but I could see his pale hands pressed flat against the surface from the other side.

Inside the clock.

I turned my head sharply to look behind me. My heart gave a violent, panicked thud.

The street was empty. There was nobody there.

When I looked back at the glass, he remained.

I had seen him before.

As a lonely child in the grand palace, I had caught brief, haunting glimpses of a stranger hiding in the windows of empty rooms. Sometimes he appeared at the far end of a corridor, only to vanish into thin air the moment I approached. Once, when I was twelve, I had woken in the dead of night to find him standing right beside my bed, his silent presence filling me with an unexplainable, aching sorrow.

I had told my tutor about him, of course.

My tutor had promptly prescribed more sleep and less imagination. Less imagination for someone like me. What a pathetic, uninspired joke.

I had never mentioned the stranger again after that. Let them think me mad. It was so much more fun this way, wearing madness like a crown before they could use it as a weapon against me.

The stranger inside the clock lifted his head.

His gaze locked directly onto mine through the glass.

I narrowed my eyes, trying desperately to make out his expression through the distortion, a sudden, desperate urge to know him surging through me.

But I knew, with a sudden, unsettling certainty that chilled me to the bone, that he was frightened.

He wasn’t frightened of me.

He was terrified of something standing directly behind me.

I spun around sharply this time, my coat flaring out, my hand flying instinctively to the hilt of my hidden blade.

The street was still empty, the crowd having dispersed even further from my immediate presence.

When I faced the clock again, the stranger had grown desperate. He pressed one hand flat against the glass, his fingers splayed.

Suddenly, the broken pocket watch beneath my coat gave a single, faint, visceral tick.

I froze. My breath hitched in my chest.

The sound was so small, so impossibly quiet, yet it echoed in my ears like a thunderclap.

Slowly, my fingers trembling slightly despite myself, I reached beneath my lapel for the metal casing.

Another tick. A physical thrum against my chest.

Then, absolute, maddening stillness.

I pulled the watch free and stared down at its cracked, clouded face. The hands had not moved a millimeter.

Of course they hadn’t.

I was beginning to suspect the universe had developed a rather wicked sense of humor, and I deeply resented being excluded from the joke. I was the one who made the jokes around here, after all. If I didn’t laugh, I would have to acknowledge how terrifying this actually was.

A low, subterranean groan rolled through the cobblestones beneath my boots, vibrating up through my legs.

The massive stone tower shuddered violently, as if releasing a breath it had held for a thousand years.

The ancient stone split wide along its base. A narrow, jagged seam tore open in the wall right beside the clock face. The seam widened rapidly, revealing a void of absolute darkness where solid, impenetrable masonry had stood only a moment prior.

A doorway.

There was no handle. No hinges. No frame.

Just a ragged tear into a darkness so complete it seemed to actively drink the ambient light around it, pulling at the air, pulling at me.

Inside the clock, the stranger struck the glass.

Once.

Twice.

I watched him, fascinated, my heart hammering a frantic rhythm against my ribs as the glass refused to shatter.

Then, in the blink of an eye, he disappeared.

“How interesting,” I murmured, a slow, dangerous smile returning to my lips as I twirled my cane, entirely intrigued by the unfolding disaster. The terror receded, replaced by the beautiful, intoxicating rush of curiosity.

Veyne arrived at my shoulder, completely breathless and panting like a winded hound.

“What… what is that, sir?”

“If I knew, Veyne, surely I would have the good manners to tell you,” I jeered, not taking my eyes off the void.

“Should we send a team inside?”

“Certainly. You may lead it.”

He looked absolutely horrified at the prospect, his skin turning a magnificent, greenish shade of bile.

I laughed aloud, a sharp, barking sound, adjusting the tilt of my top hat and smoothing my coat.

Then, I took a step toward the doorway of darkness.

“Your Majesty, wait.”

I glanced back over my shoulder.

Veyne’s expression had changed. The irritation, the bureaucratic panic, the confusion—it had all vanished. He looked genuinely, deeply concerned.

For me. How endearing.

It was a thoroughly unfamiliar, unsettling expression on his rugged face. It made something small and vulnerable twist painfully inside my chest.

“Whatever is in there,” he said softly, his voice dropping an octave, losing its usual stiffness, “it may be dangerous.”

I considered his warning for no more than a fraction of a second, letting my cane twirl through the air one last time before catching it neatly by the silver handle. I forced the vulnerability down, burying it deep beneath layers of steel and charm.

Then, I offered him my most dazzling, dangerous, and charming smile.

“Veyne, my dear man, if I waited until things were safe before investigating them, I’d have very little to do and no fun whatsoever.”

And with that, I stepped forward into the dark unknown, letting the blackness swallow me whole.