Story 1172: The Hourglass Murmurs

Time had stopped in the attic of Thornwick Orphanage.

Not metaphorically. Not nostalgically. Literally.

The great iron hourglass that sat in the corner—its sands a sickly gray, neither liquid nor dust—hung frozen mid-drip. The children never touched it. They were told not to by the matron. But whispers rose from it in the quiet hours, curling into ears like lullabies of despair.

They said it spoke to you if you were alone long enough. Promised to show you what you missed. Or what you feared.

Clara Veil, no stranger to whispers, had returned to Thornwick not as a child, but as an investigator of the arcane. She stood now in that very attic, breath shallow, her gloved hands brushing against the relic’s cold rim. It had belonged to Father Eryx, the old headmaster, who vanished the night the hourglass froze over thirty years ago.

The hourglass ticked once.

She jolted back.

A whisper slithered up the walls, low and unhuman:

“Do you want to see how it ends?”