Kacper and Lena break into the abandoned palace attic and find a clock that should not exist. When it wakes, it drags them into another century, where someone already seems to be waiting.
For years, the attic of Count K.'s palace had been the kind of place people pointed at and lowered their voices about. Kacper had grown up hearing stories of footsteps overhead, doors that opened by themselves, and things that vanished from locked rooms. Most of the adults laughed when they said it. None of them ever went inside.
That summer, Kacper and Lena decided to find out why.
The stairs groaned under their weight. Dust floated through the air in slow silver clouds, and the smell hit them first: old wood, mould, forgotten paper, and something colder underneath, like rain trapped in stone. Piles of cracked trunks leaned against the walls. Books had collapsed into soft, brown rectangles. Then Kacper saw it.
A clock.
It stood in the centre of the attic like it had been placed there on purpose, not abandoned. Tall and dark, carved with vines and faces worn smooth by time, it had a pendulum shaped like a silver sphere. But the face was wrong. No numbers. No hands. Only symbols he had never seen before, sharp and deliberate, as if someone had designed them to be read by the wrong century.
Lena stepped closer. "Kacper," she said, barely above a breath. "The pendulum's moving."
He looked again. The silver ball was trembling, though nothing in the attic was still enough to make it move.
The light changed.
A blue sheen spread across the room, thin at first, then so bright it seemed to wash the dust out of the air. Kacper reached for Lena's sleeve just as the clock struck once. The sound hit them like a physical blow. The walls seemed to tilt. The symbols on the face spun faster and faster until they blurred together, and the attic bent around them like heat above asphalt.
Then everything vanished.
Kacper stumbled forward and caught himself against a wall that had not been there a second before. Stone. Cold, rough stone. He turned sharply.
He and Lena were no longer in the palace attic.
They stood in a narrow chamber lit by trembling candlelight. A window looked out over a medieval town packed tightly beneath a grey sky. In the street below, people in long robes hurried past with chests, bundles, and rolled scrolls pressed to their chests like they were running from something or toward it. The air smelled of smoke and wet stone.
And at the far end of the room stood a man in dark clothes, rigid and still, his face sharp and pale in the candlelight.
Count K.
The same face from the portrait in the palace hallway.
He stared at them as if he had been expecting them all along.
"Who are you?"
The voice came out low and echoing, and it made Kacper's skin go cold. Lena took one step back, her hand finding his wrist.
Before either of them could answer, the chamber door slammed open hard enough to rattle the frame. A girl in black rushed in, out of breath, her eyes wide with fear.
"If you want to go back," she whispered, "you have to move now. The clock won't wait."
Behind her, somewhere deep in the palace, something began to strike again.