The Second that shouldn’t Exist

Clockwork Realm world where time is alive, dangerous, guarded by mechanical Keepers.

Time died at 3:14 p.m.

At least, that was the moment Elara Quinn’s pocketwatch exploded—silently, impossibly, like a star collapsing in her palm. One heartbeat it ticked in its usual stubborn rhythm… the next, the hands spun backwards, metal dissolved into a whirl of brass dust, and the air around her shimmered with heat that wasn’t heat at all.

Elara staggered back from her workbench, knocking over a tower of scrap gears. They clattered across the floor like panicked insects.

“No, no, not again…” she whispered.

The watch had never behaved. It wasn’t even hers. It belonged to her father—a man who vanished eleven years ago, a man every clock in town hated so much they refused to keep time around him. But nothing like this had ever happened.

The shimmer in the air thickened, stretching into a long, vertical tear. Light poured from it in slow, syrupy strands that didn’t obey gravity. A scent drifted out—ozone, autumn wind, and something sweet like sugar melting on stone.

Elara’s breath caught.

A doorway. A literal tear through the fabric of time.

She should have run. She should have screamed. She should have called the authorities—though the Temporal Division hadn’t set foot in their dusty outskirts town in years.

Instead, a thought rose like a tide she couldn’t push back:
Is this where he went?

Before she could argue with herself, the tear widened with a soft, mechanical groan. Not organic. Not mystical. But the grinding hum of thousands of gears turning beneath reality.

A figure stepped out.

He wasn’t human—not exactly. Tall, jointed in strange segments, with pale gold skin etched in clockwork filigree. His eyes were spinning irises of shifting numbers. Seconds. Minutes. Hours. Constantly rotating.

He bowed with perfect precision.
“Elara Quinn,” he said, voice like layered chimes. “Daughter of the Lost Watchmaker. You’ve triggered a forbidden second.”

“I what?” Elara backed against the bench. “I—my watch just—”

“Collapsed,” he finished. “Because it hid a sealed moment. A second removed from your world, stolen, preserved, and forbidden. Only someone tied by blood could release it.”

Her heart thudded. “You mean… my father did this?”

“Your father created the breach, yes. He set a second aside.” The figure tilted his head. “Only a dangerous man attempts to edit time.”

Elara’s throat tightened. She’d spent years searching for answers—travel logs, abandoned blueprints, listening for rumors in the mechanic’s guild. Every trail ended cold. Every clue dissolved into nothing.

Now a golden automaton was accusing her father of crimes she didn’t understand.

“And you are?” she demanded.

“A Keeper,” he replied. “A guardian of the Clockwork Realm. And you, Elara Quinn, must answer for releasing a second that was never meant to exist.”

The air thickened again. Gears clicked somewhere deep in the room—except Elara didn’t have gears on her walls.

The sound was coming from the tear behind him.

He extended a hand. “You will come with me.”

“No.”

He blinked, surprised. “No?”

“I’m not stepping through some… some cosmic rip with a glittery metronome who talks in riddles.”

The Keeper stared at her for a long, uncanny moment. Then his spinning irises flared red.
“You misunderstand. The forbidden second is already unraveling your world. You will come with me if you wish to save it. Every sixty seconds that pass now cost someone, somewhere, a life.”

Her stomach dropped. “What do you mean?”

“Time is leaking.”

As if in answer, the lights flickered. The ticking of the wall clock slowed… then sped up… then stopped entirely.

The Keeper turned toward the tear. “Your father disappeared because of that second. If you want to find him—”

That was all he had to say.

Elara grabbed her father’s old leather satchel, slung it across her shoulder, and marched toward the tear before she could lose her nerve.

“Fine,” she said, stepping beside him. “But if this realm eats people, rearranges my atoms, or turns me into a walking clock like you—”

“You should be honored,” he replied.

“Not comforting.”

A faint smile flickered across the Keeper’s metallic features.
“No one enters the Clockwork Realm unchanged.”

Then the tear swallowed them.

Light broke apart. Gravity inverted. Sound warped into ripples. For a heartbeat—or maybe an hour—Elara felt her bones vibrating with unfamiliar seconds, as if time itself was sifting through her memories like pages in a book.

When the world snapped back into place, she stood on a bridge made of interlocking gears the size of moons. Above her, an endless clockface sky ticked with constellations shaped like machinery. Below her, rivers of molten time flowed like silver lightning.

And in the impossible distance…
A tower rose, spiraling upward into infinity.
Around its base, seconds dripped like golden rain.

The Keeper pointed. “Welcome, Elara Quinn, to the Realm Your Father Broke.”

Elara swallowed hard.
If this was her only path to answers—
She wasn’t turning back.

Not now.

Not ever.