Maja and Philip sneak into the abandoned Tower of the Magi and find a clock that should never be touched. One wrong turn of its crystal hand sends the tower and the world itself spiralling out of place.
Maja and Philip had never been able to stay indoors for long, not even when rain hammered the windows and the whole town looked grey and shut. On that Saturday, with nothing better to do and no one watching too closely, they climbed the muddy hill beyond the village to the abandoned Tower of the Magi.
Up close, the tower looked even stranger than the stories said it would. Its stones were dark with age, its windows were empty, and ivy clung to the walls like tangled fingers. The front door hung crooked on one hinge. Philip pushed it gently, expecting a fight.
It swung open at once.
Cold air drifted out, dry as old paper. Inside, the tower was dim and narrow, lit only by a weak strip of rain-light from above. Faded runes crawled over the walls in loops and knots, half-hidden under dust. Philip switched on his torch, and the beam shook once across the stone floor.
“Look,” Maja whispered, pointing upward.
A spiral staircase twisted around the inside of the tower, climbing into shadow. It looked as if it had been waiting for them.
They went up carefully, one hand on the wall, stepping around loose stones and webs that brushed their faces. The higher they climbed, the colder the air became, until even Philip stopped joking and listened to the silence.
At the top, under the slanted roof, they found a brass clock standing on a cracked wooden table.
It was far too large to belong in a tower room like this. One crystal hand gleamed across its face, and the dial was marked with symbols instead of numbers. Thin lines of silver ran between the marks like veins. At the base, an inscription was etched into the metal.
Philip leaned closer and read it aloud, slowly. “Time here does not listen to the usual rules.”
Maja frowned. “That sounds like a warning.”
Philip smiled, but it was the sort of smile that meant he had already decided not to listen.
He reached out and turned the crystal hand.
The clock gave a sharp, angry shiver. Light burst from the symbols. The brass case rattled, then jumped on the table as if something inside had woken up. Sparks snapped across the room. Below them, the staircase groaned.
Maja grabbed Philip’s sleeve just as the first steps began to fade, stone thinning and blurring at the edges like smoke.
“Philip—”
The tower lurched. A crack of white light ripped through the air, and for one dizzying second the twins felt the floor vanish under their feet.
When the spinning stopped, the village was gone.
Where the hill and fields should have been, a forest stretched in every direction, thick with giant purple mushrooms and trees that glowed softly from within. Blue light pulsed from the clock behind them.
Then something moved in the dark corner of the loft.
A shape unfolded slowly from the shadows, taller than a person, with pale, shining eyes fixed on the twins.