Seventeen-year-old Igor takes a wrong turn in the rain and walks into a clockmaker’s workshop where time behaves badly and one strange clock seems to know his name.
The city always felt dull to Igor, as if someone had painted it in the same tired shade and forgotten to finish the job. From his bedroom window, he watched rain smear the glass and turn the streets below into a blur of gutters, tramlines, and wet stone. It was the sort of afternoon that made every minute feel heavier than the last.
He should have gone the long way home. Instead, sheltering under his hood and cursing the storm, he cut through a narrow street he had never noticed before. It was squeezed between two leaning tenements and so shadowed that even in daylight it looked unfinished, as though the city had hidden it from the map on purpose.
Above one doorway hung a small sign: Clockmaker. Repair of All Time.
Igor stopped. The words were ridiculous, but something about them snagged at him. He reached for the handle before he had fully decided to go in.
The door shut behind him with a soft click.
Warm air, dust, and the faint metallic scent of oil wrapped around him. The workshop was crowded with clocks. Tall clocks, pocket watches, kitchen clocks, glass-faced clocks with numbers that shifted when he looked away. Some were old and carved from dark wood. Others were all polished brass and pale lights, as if they had fallen out of a future that had never quite happened. Tiny mechanical birds perched on shelves, their glass eyes reflecting the room in sharp little flashes.
At a workbench in the middle sat an old man with white hair and a stillness that made the air around him feel tighter. He did not look up from the mechanism in his hands.
“I knew you would come eventually, Igor,” he said.
Igor froze. A cold prickle ran down his spine.
He had never seen this place in his life.
“How do you know my name?” he asked.
Only then did the clockmaker raise his eyes. They were bright, unnervingly sharp, as if they belonged to someone much younger. He gave Igor a small, unreadable smile and pointed to the far corner of the room.
There stood a huge golden clock, taller than Igor himself.
“That one does not belong to this world,” the clockmaker said. “Touch it, and you will have to choose. Forget what you see. Or learn the truth and live with it.”
Igor stared at the clock. Its hands moved the wrong way, slow and certain, as if they were dragging time backwards by force. In the polished glass above the dial, he expected to see the workshop behind him.
Instead, he saw a city blazing with colour, rooftops that curved like waves, and streets lit by a sky he had never seen before.
The clock struck once.
The sound hit the room like a blow. Blue smoke curled through the air. The floor trembled under Igor’s feet, and the shadows along the walls began to move, gathering themselves toward the golden clock as if something on the other side had just woken up.