Story 1066: The Child Who Devoured Time

In the village of Cindermoor, the clocks no longer ticked.

Time, once a gentle tyrant, had vanished—days blending into nights, seasons unraveling like frayed thread. Crops withered in their prime. Infants were born ancient, their eyes cloudy with years they had never lived. The elders wept backward into youth. Something had gnawed through the gears of reality.

The villagers whispered of a child—born under a shattered moon, swaddled in frost despite midsummer’s heat. They called her Nerra.

Her cries bent shadows. Her laughter fractured glass.

And when she blinked, minutes disappeared.

Dalia Graves, a horologist and former occult scholar, arrived in Cindermoor seeking answers. She carried a watch that hadn’t moved in thirteen years, stopped precisely at the hour her brother vanished screaming into a fissure of light. The trail of broken timepieces had led her here—to a child who never aged, and a town slowly unraveling.