Chapter 1 #2
My gaze drifted out the rounded window above the sink. The last streaks of daylight had just receded over the cold, muted landscape stretching beneath a perpetual overcast, its wind-scoured dunes fading into jagged ranks of blackened mountain peaks.
Chez hopped up on the table beside me at the sink. He followed my gaze, likely mistaking my absent gaze for an assessment of our surroundings. “It’s like a different world out there.”
I stared at my reflection in the glass. Everything in my lab behind me appeared backwards.
But it was cozy. Safe. I hadn’t ventured much further than Tulgey Woods in the past few months.
I’d mostly stayed in this tower. News I had only heard in passing from gossiping flowers or passed on from Chez and the Duchess.
Still, I couldn’t help but wonder about the world beyond the mirror.
Although from my perspective, it hadn’t been the same world for me at all for longer than eight months.
I wasn’t even from this world at all.
I had only stumbled through to this mystical otherworldly land through a mysterious ‘magical doorway’ of sorts. It had been my mission for the past eight months to find a way back home—in vain, as it were.
This massive clock tower used to be a rundown, neglected dump—with nearly every level of it an abandoned heap of discarded odds and ends.
It had become my home. The tower itself was polished to shine using a steam-powered mechanical arm I’d invented specifically.
The elevator servicing the sixty-some stories of the tower—I fixed that, along with everything else in this once rusty, crumbling structure.
I fixed everything.
I can fix anything.
Except for the blasted clock on this tower.
For no apparent reason whatsoever, the tower’s huge clock had stopped ticking.
I clutched at my chest again. It was on the same day there was a momentary blinding, excruciating pain. Then…absolute silence.
And try as I might to inspect and diagnose the internal mechanisms, I could still find no fault. The pendulum would not keep swinging. The gears would not keep turning.
No matter. A different issue warranted my attention at the moment.
Wiping my hands, I turned back to Chez. “By any chance, did you find that F-capacitor I was looking for? It’s very rare.
” I moved to slide into my usual stool, at the massive oak work table dominating the center of the small room, set against the bare internal gears and cogs of the clock tower and walls lined with copper pipes and brass fixtures.
“No, sorry.”
I picked up a mechanical linkage to squint closer at it.
“I wore out the only one I had from all the calibration experiments so far. It’ll be near impossible to create another one from scratch.
” I tossed the scrap metal back onto the table with a clink on top of a cluttered pile of papers, glassware, and haphazardly arranged gadgets.
The rest of the tower might be well-organized, but in my lab, I was a bit more lax about tidiness.
Chez moseyed across the floor, his wide purple eyes focused on the scrawls on the wall.
One side of the glassed-in clock tower was always filled with my chalky scribbles of complex equations, formulas, hurriedly scrawled notes, and often smudged or partially erased sketches of the multiple evolutions for all my fantastic inventions.
My latest one would be my grandest ever. However, it was lacking one final piece that I had yet to find. But I was so close, I could taste it.
Chez’s ominous tone was careful, as if he was wary of triggering me. “Does he even know what you’re building? Or how close you are?”
Feigning boredom, I fidgeted with my nails. “Of course not. I haven’t seen him in…” I trailed off, not even bothering to count. I slid a narrow-eyed gaze at Chez. “You haven’t told anyone, right? Not even the Duchess? You swore you would keep my secret.”
He huffed. “Of course, darling. I thrive on secrets. I find them absolutely delicious.” Hopping up onto a wonky stack of pallets, he made himself comfortable, stretching out.
“Though I thought you had reached what you called ‘a stable phase’? Could you not hurry it along? Why haven’t you tested it yet? ”
“I just…” Dropping my eyes, I clenched my fists. “I can’t yet. I need—to be sure that it’s safe enough. These are delicate components, intricate configurations, and I have to… I just have to…”
“You have to…what?” Chez’s eyebrows rose.
I bit my lip before loudly explaining with a confidence I didn’t have.
“I just need to make sure there aren’t any adverse side effects.
This is highly experimental, very advanced theoretical physics.
I’m tampering with the boundaries of time and space here.
It’s—it’s complicated. And I don’t want to hurt anyone—” again , I almost said.
Furrowing my eyebrows in that odd feeling of familiarity, my heartbeat quickened. What did it mean?
My chest tightened once more.
Another slight complication.
For everything that I did know about science and this mystical otherworld, I could not for the life of me remember anything about the world I had come from. Nor, in fact, any recollection whatsoever of who I even really was.
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