Tymon and Lidia break into the sealed cellar beneath an old library and awaken a hidden clock that throws them into an unknown time, where one wrong choice could trap them there for good.
The staircase groaned under Tymon’s weight as he and Lidia climbed down into the library’s sealed cellar, each step colder than the last. Dust drifted through the air in pale sheets, catching the torchlight and turning the narrow passage into something half-real, half-dream.
They should not have been there. The warning sign on the door, the locked chain, the stories whispered by the town’s oldest residents - none of it had been enough to stop them. Tymon had come for answers. Lidia had come because she refused to let him go alone.
People said the library hid more than books belowground. Most of it was nonsense, the kind of tale that stuck to old places and got repeated until it sounded true. But then there had been the watchmaker, the one who vanished a century ago without leaving behind so much as a goodbye. A legend, until tonight.
At the far end of the cellar, Lidia froze.
“There,” she said, barely above a breath.
Half-buried in cobwebs stood a brass clock taller than either of them, its surface dulled by age but still strange enough to draw the eye. There were no numbers on its face. Instead, unfamiliar symbols circled the dial in neat, precise rings, as if someone had designed it for a language no one alive remembered how to read. The hands stood rigidly still.
Tymon stepped closer, the beam of his torch sliding over the metal. Up close, the clock seemed less like furniture and more like something waiting.
“Do you think it works?” he whispered.
His voice echoed off the stone walls and came back thinner.
Lidia crouched beside it and found a small metal box tucked behind the base. Inside lay a key, dark with age, its handle cut with a spiral pattern so intricate it looked like a maze. She held it up for Tymon to see, then frowned.
“There’s a slot.”
She did not wait for him to answer. She fitted the key into the side of the clock and turned it.
A click sounded in the silence.
Then another.
The clock began to tick.
Slowly at first. Then faster. Harder.
The air changed. The torch flame bent sideways as if a wind had blown through the sealed cellar, though nothing had moved. The brass face shivered. The symbols flashed once, pale and sharp, and the floor seemed to tilt beneath Tymon’s feet.
“Lidia—”
The world folded in on itself.
Light split into colors. Sound stretched and snapped. The cellar vanished, replaced by a rushing blur of heat, cold, paper, smoke, rain, and something like the scent of old ink. Tymon felt as if he were being pulled through every page of every book in the library at once.
Then, all at once, it stopped.
He stumbled forward and nearly fell. Lidia caught his arm, both of them staring at the street around them in stunned silence.
They were no longer in the library.
Above them, the sky glowed with a strange orange haze. The buildings around them were unfamiliar - taller in some places, narrower in others, with windows lit by a light that was too clean to be fire and too bright to be moonlight. In the distance came the low hum of machines, deeper than any engine Tymon had heard before. People passed by in clothes that looked wrong somehow, too sharp, too precise, as if they had stepped out of another world entirely.
Did we really...?
Tymon turned toward Lidia, but stopped.
On the wall beside them, half-hidden in shadow, was another clock.
The same shape. The same symbols.
Only now the hands were moving.
Backward.
A sharp sound cut through the street - footsteps, fast and closing. Tymon looked up.
Someone was coming straight toward them, holding something that flashed silver in the strange light.