Seventeen-year-old Iga finds a strange pocket watch in a Krakow antique shop, and the world around her begins to shift in ways she cannot explain.
At the beginning of summer, Krakow always felt stuck in place to Iga: heat trapped between apartment blocks, nights that came too late, days that stretched without purpose. That afternoon she slipped out through the Planty, needing air, noise, anything that wasn’t her mother’s questions or the stale boredom of home. She had no idea that one ordinary turn off Grodzka Street would change the shape of the day.
She had passed the same antique shop a hundred times and never looked twice. It was narrow and dim, the kind of place that seemed to lean inward on itself. This time, though, something in the window caught her eye: a flash of brass, a face blurred by dust, as if the glass had briefly reflected not the street but another room entirely. Before she could talk herself out of it, she pushed open the door.
The air inside smelled of old paper, polished wood, and a faint metallic note she couldn’t place. Shelves crowded the walls from floor to ceiling. Lamps with cracked shades glowed in the corners, making the shadows look heavier than they should have been. Iga drifted past porcelain figurines and stacked frames, drawn at once to the display of watches. She had always liked the tiny certainty of them, the logic of gears hidden beneath a perfect surface.
At the far end of the shelf lay a pocket watch no larger than her palm. Its cover was engraved with a pattern of twisting lines, almost like vines, though not quite. It looked out of place among the dusty trinkets around it, as if it had been placed there by mistake. The second she touched it, a cold shiver shot through her fingers.
The shop fell silent.
Not quieter. Silent. Even the faint street noise outside vanished. Iga tightened her grip, and a low pulse thudded under the metal, slow at first, then faster, like something waking up. The hands jerked, spun ahead in a blur, and snapped to a stop at 13:17.
A soft rustle came from behind her.
Iga turned.
The shop was no longer the same. The shelves looked deeper, older, crowded with objects she was sure hadn’t been there a second ago. The light outside the window had turned gold, thick and unfamiliar, as if the afternoon had been replaced by another century. In the tall mirror by the door stood the reflection of a man she had never seen before, watching her as if he had been expecting this exact moment.
He lifted one hand and made a sharp, urgent gesture toward her.
The watch in Iga’s palm began to tremble again, harder this time, and somewhere beyond the back room something heavy unlocked with a sound like a lock being opened in another time.