Chapter 29 #3
My hands squeezed in fists and I closed my eyes, and I hurt together with Silas. That was not a fair question at all. That was—
“Yes.” Silas didn’t hesitate. Didn’t flinch. Didn’t stutter. “Yes, it was. He knew this was bigger than himself and his son. It’s bigger than all of us here.” He leaned in closer on the table. “And I will not let his death be in vain.”
I wanted to be impressed. I wanted to be sad. I wanted to scream and shout at Time for being so unjust, but in the end, the one feeling I settled on was inspired.
Silas was right. This was indeed bigger than even our memories. Two queens who stole from the land, from their people…
“Tell me, Master Talik,” I whispered. “What are the signs? What has their theft done to the world? Tell me the truth.”
The old Timekeeper was quiet for so long that I thought he wouldn’t answer at all—but he did.
He said, “How much do you know about the Spill?”
The Spill—the edge of the realm. The place where the Clockrealm ended.
There was nothing there but falling. That’s what we were taught since we were kids. The things that go off the Spill fall forever.
“It’s the edge,” I said, trying to think of anything else I might have learned about the spill before.
“Yes, it is. And there’s nothing near it,” said Master Talik.
Most of us nodded.
His lips stretched, but it wasn’t exactly a smile.
“There used to be, though.” The room went very still.
“Decades ago, when my mother was a girl, there were villages near the Spill. Small ones. Farming communities, mostly. People who liked the quiet, not the chaos of Neverwhen and the courts. Every court had them—little settlements at the very edge of their territory, where the land met the nothing.”
He stood up, stretched his neck, and started pacing slowly in a circle in front of the table, like he couldn’t bear to sit still while he spoke about this.
“They’re gone now. Every single one.”
“Gone how?” March asked, though I feared we knew. We all knew.
“The Great Clock distributes time outward from the center. Like a drop of water hitting a flat surface—strongest at the point of impact, weakest at the edges. Under normal allocation, even the farthest villages receive enough temporal energy to sustain life. The magic is thinner out there, yes. The days feel slightly shorter. The crops grow a little slower. But it’s more than enough.
“When a portion of the time is taken before the burst fires, the energy that reaches the edges is reduced. Not by much at first, maybe a fraction of a fraction—but it compounds. Year after year, decade after decade, the deficit grows. And the edges feel it first because they were already receiving the least,” he explained.
My mind worked—and finally it made sense. Something made perfect sense.
“From what little I know, the flowers were the first sign. They began closing earlier—not at sunset, but hours before. Then they stopped opening at all. The seasons shifted—winters stretching longer than they should, springs arriving weeks late, autumns that barely lasted a breath. The trees fruited at the wrong time, the crops failed, and the life cycle of animals, even insects shortened. Things that should have lived for years lived for months. Things that should have lived for months lived for weeks, and so on…”
The gears inside me worked and worked like I was about to come apart any second.
“And the people?” Mimi whispered.
Master Talik stopped pacing.
“The people aged faster. Not dramatically. Not enough to see from one day to the next. But a woman of forty would look sixty. A man of sixty would move like a man of eighty. The gap between generations shrank until grandparents were dying at ages when they should have been in their prime.”
“Hastenheart,” I breathed, and the word tasted like ash. That’s the disease Jinx had died of. It hit way too close to home.
“Among other things,” Master Talik said with a nod.
“Hearts giving out, lungs failing, bones turning brittle too early—all symptoms of a body receiving less time than it needs to sustain itself. Nobody had an explanation. Nothing like it had ever been witnessed before, so they just blamed it on the Spill.”
“But how come we don’t know anything about it? I’ve never heard this—never once,” Cook said.
“No, the queens made sure that the tales would be isolated,” said the Timekeeper.
“And this whole thing happened slowly, gradually. Village by village and settlement by settlement. For each of them, when the crops died and the people weakened and the magic thinned, the queens would send officials to declare that it was the Spill that was causing disruptions in time, and they would quietly make offers that sounded generous. Relocation, they called it. Safety because the edge was no longer stable. They told the people they were moving them to better land.”
“And the people believed them,” said Silas. It wasn’t a question.
“What choice did they have? They were dying. Their children were sick. Their fields were dust.” And of course, he was right.
“Where did they go?” asked Mimi.
“Where the queens took them—scattered them across the courts. A family here, a family there. Never in groups large enough to talk to each other.”
“So, they silenced them with a lie, and isolated them by separating them,” said March, his every word an extra weight over my shoulders.
“Exactly right,” said Silas. “Within a generation, the stories faded. The children who grew up in the courts quickly forgot they came from the Spill once their lives went back to normal.”
“Which means they didn’t just steal time. They also erased the evidence,” Cook said, a dumbfounded smile on his face.
“And what exactly is in the Spill now? What…what’s out there, Master Talik?” I asked, and my voice shook.
“Nobody quite knows for certain, but I’ve heard stories. The villages are gone, which is what we know happens when there’s no temporal energy in any part of the realm. Even the remains of things eventually stop existing. They say there’s no wind, no growth, no decay. Mostly just silence.”
I tried to imagine a place like that, I really did. With nothing but silence—nothing.
Impossible. My mind couldn’t picture it accurately if I tried for a hundred years.
“But how does that happen in one place, and not in the courts? Not here, in Neverwhen—how?!” Levana sounded frustrated. I wished I was, too—but I was just…off. Like someone had turned a switch on me or had wound me wrong.
“The clocks are always full in Neverwhen,” Silas said, his voice bitter. “It will be centuries before this city feels the difference—if the queens aren’t stopped.”
“Every plaque in that tower,” I said, a little surprised that my voice was steady, considering what it was like inside my chest, “is proof of what they’ve done.” I looked at Master Talik, as he was the one with the answers.
He nodded reluctantly. “It is.”
“I’m going into the tower,” Silas said. “Tonight, at three o’clock. I’m going for the plaques.”
And wasn’t it funny how I wasn’t surprised by this at all?