Chapter 4

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The clocktower's air turned to syrup as Clara stepped forward, her rotting sunflower dress shedding petals that blackened mid-fall. Lila's silver scars burned hotter with each step Clara took, the pain carving fresh memories into her flesh:

Three children's hands clasped over a rosebush at midnight.

Blood dripping onto roots that twitched like fingers.

The whispered vow: "No more goodbyes."

Elias moved first. His dagger flashed silver, embedding itself in Clara's chest with a wet thunk. No blood spilled—only dark pollen puffed from the wound.

"Still predictable." Clara plucked the blade free, her fingers sprouting thorns as she gripped it. "Haven't you learned? I'm part of the town now."

Lila's locket grew heavier, its chain biting into her neck. When she touched it, the metal pulsed like a heartbeat. The photograph inside had changed again—now it showed only Clara's face, her eyes scratched out by what looked like rose thorns.

"Clever girl." Clara tossed Elias's dagger aside. "You feel it, don't you? The connection."

A vine shot from the floorboards, wrapping around Lila's wrist. The thorn pierced her scar, and suddenly she *knew*:

The lockets weren't just memories. They were leashes.

And Clara held the other end.

Elias lunged, but Clara flicked her wrist. The rosebush outside the shattered window erupted inward, pinning him against the wall with barbed stems through his shoulders.

"Watch closely, keeper." Clara pressed her palm to Lila's forehead. "This is what you really are."

The vision struck like lightning:

A younger Lila standing over Clara's body in the sunflower field.

Elias screaming as Lila plunged a silver knife into his chest.

The first locket snapping shut around a curl of black smoke.

The memory dissolved as Elias roared. His scars blazed white-hot, melting the vines that held him. He crashed into Clara, sending them both through the tower's rotting wall.

Lila stumbled to the gaping hole in time to see them hit the cobblestones below—Elias on top, his hands around Clara's throat as her thorns burrowed into his arms.

"Finish it!" Clara laughed, her voice distorting. "Like she did to us!"

The locket burned icy cold against Lila's skin. She understood now—the choice wasn't about remembering.

It was about which version of the past to believe.

As she climbed onto the windowsill, the pocket watch she'd dropped earlier began ticking again. The hands spun madly, and Lila realized with dawning horror:

Midnight wasn't coming.

It was *rewinding*.

The pocket watch's ticking grew louder, each *tick* making the world flicker like an old film reel. Lila's fingers slipped on the windowsill as time stuttered—one moment seeing Elias bleeding below her, the next seeing him whole again mid-fight with Clara. The locket around her neck pulsed in counter-rhythm to the watch's erratic beats.

Clara's thorns suddenly retracted from Elias's arms. Her head snapped toward the clocktower, black pollen leaking from her nostrils. "You *idiot*," she hissed at Lila. "You touched the watch!"

The cobblestones beneath them peeled back like skin, revealing the massive clockwork mechanism beneath Hollowbrook. Gears big as wagon wheels ground against each other, rusted from centuries of corrupted time.

Elias grabbed Lila's arm as she dropped from the windowsill. His scars had changed—the silver lines now formed words in a language that hurt to look at.

"The watch is the town's heart," he gasped. "You've started its unraveling."

Three things happened simultaneously—

"Clara's body disintegrated into a swarm of clockwork bees."

"The pocket watch's casing cracked open, revealing a tiny beating heart inside."

"Every locket in Hollowbrook *screamed*"

Lila's vision doubled. She saw two timelines overlapping:

- Past: Her child-self burying the watch under the rosebush

- Present: The same watch consuming Clara's remains

A gear-toothed vine speared up from the ground, impaling Elias through the stomach. "Lila!" he choked. "The *names*—remember the names—"

The pocket watch's heart pulsed once, violently, and everything went still. Even the bees froze mid-air.

The thirteenth bell's echo hung in the air like physical weight. Lila's eardrums throbbed as the soundwaves distorted around her - she could see them bending the frozen clockwork bees in strange patterns.

Elias's impaled body remained suspended on the gear-toothed vine, his mouth still frozen in that final warning. Blood droplets hovered mid-air between his lips and the cobblestones.

The pocket watch's exposed heart gave another pulse. This time, Lila felt it in her own chest - a terrible synchronicity that made her ribs vibrate. The watch was grafting itself to her, she realized. The tiny heart's veins had begun threading through the cracks in its casing, reaching toward her fingers like seeking roots.

Clara's remains swirled in their frozen state - a storm of clockwork fragments and black pollen suspended around the clocktower's base. Lila noticed with dawning horror that each bee's wings were made from miniature clock hands, their movements perfectly synchronized even in stasis.

The overlapping timelines she'd glimpsed earlier now pressed harder against her vision:

Past:

- Child-Lila's hands burying the watch under freshly-turned earth

- The rosebush's first thorn piercing her thumb

- A whisper from the soil: "We accept your offering"

Present:

- The same rosebush now grown through Elias's chest

- Its roots visibly connected to the giant gears below

- The pocket watch's heartbeat speeding up

A crack split the air as time lurched forward again. The frozen blood droplets fell. Elias gasped back to awareness, his hands instinctively clutching the vine through his stomach. The clockwork bees resumed their swirling, but their pattern had changed - they now formed arrows pointing toward the churchyard.

"The names," Elias choked again. His scar-text shimmered, the alien words rearranging themselves. "In the mausoleum. Before it's—"

The vine twisted violently, cutting off his words. Fresh blood poured from his abdomen, but it didn't drip - the red streams floated upward instead, drawn toward the pocket watch in Lila's hand. Each droplet that touched the tiny heart made it swell larger.

From the corner of her eye, Lila saw movement in the churchyard. The oldest mausoleum's iron door creaked open on its own, revealing utter darkness within. The floating blood droplets changed course mid-air, streaming toward that open doorway instead.

Clara's voice came from everywhere at once, though her physical form remained dispersed: "You wanted the truth, sister. Go meet it."

The pocket watch's hands began spinning again, faster this time. Lila felt the world start to dissolve around her - first the colors leaching away, then the textures flattening. Even the metallic scent of blood faded as reality itself seemed to unravel.

Elias's mouth moved in a final, silent plea as the vine dragged him fully into the exposed clockwork below. The last thing Lila saw before everything went black was the scar-words on his arms detaching like silver threads and flying toward her.

Then - impact. Cold stone beneath her knees. The taste of mildew and old roses.

When her vision cleared, Lila found herself kneeling in the mausoleum's center. The floating blood droplets hovered around her like crimson stars before splashing against the walls, revealing hidden names carved there in jagged script:

Every Keeper's name since 1672

Including Elisa.

Including Clara's.

The pocket watch's heartbeat synchronized with her own as the tiny heart inside sprouted new veins - these ones burrowing into her wrist, fusing with her silver scars.

The fourteenth bell's chime vibrated through Lila's bones. The carved names on the mausoleum walls pulsed with eerie light, illuminating dust particles that now hung frozen mid-air. The pocket watch's veins had fully merged with her silver scars, forming a grotesque bridge between flesh and metal.

She tried to stand, but her legs wouldn't obey. The veins from the watch slithered further up her arm, branching like cracks in glass. Each one burned with memories not her own:

- A woman in 1672 carving names into the stone with a rusted nail, her mouth sewn shut with silver thread.

- A child in 1803 weeping as the rosebush's thorns stitched themselves into his skin.

- Clara, just days before her disappearance, whispering to the earth like it could answer.

The pocket watch's heartbeat quickened. The frozen dust trembled, then began flowing backward—toward the mausoleum's far wall, where a new name etched itself into the stone in jagged, bleeding letters:

LILA HART

A whisper slithered from the walls:

"Claimed."

The moment the word left the air, the watch's hands snapped to midnight.

Reality split.

Lila was no longer in the mausoleum.

She stood in the sunflower field at dusk, the golden blooms swaying despite the absence of wind. Before her stood two figures—herself at eight years old, and Clara, whole and unrotted, her yellow dress pristine. Between them, the rosebush stood small and frail, barely knee-high.

Young Lila held a silver knife.

Young Clara smiled.

"It's easy," the memory-Clara said, guiding the blade to their joined palms. "Just a little blood. Then we'll never be apart."

Lila tried to scream at her past self to stop, but her voice was gone. She could only watch as the knife sliced deep, as their blood dripped onto the rosebush's roots—

—and the earth *inhaled*.

The field darkened. The sunflowers withered mid-bloom. And from the soil rose something vast and shapeless, its formless body swallowing the last of the light.

"We accept," it whispered with a hundred voices.

The memory shattered.

Lila gasped back into the mausoleum just as the pocket watch's heart *stopped*.

Silence.

Then—

A single, shuddering beat.

The watch's casing cracked apart, falling to the floor in jagged pieces. The heart remained, now embedded in her palm, its veins branching up her arm like creeping ivy.

The mausoleum door slammed shut.

The floating blood droplets rained down in reverse, splattering against the ceiling instead of the floor.

And from the darkest corner of the tomb, something stirred.

A figure emerged—not Clara, not Elias, but something wearing their faces like masks that never quite fit. Its movements were wrong, disjointed, as if time itself stuttered around it.

"Little Keeper," it rasped, its voice shifting between the dead and the living. "You've come to pay your debt at last."

The heart in Lila's palm pulsed in agreement.

The fifteenth bell's toll shook the mausoleum walls. Dust rained from the ceiling as the thing wearing stolen faces stepped forward. Its movements flickered—one second a child's awkward stumble, the next Clara's predatory grace, then Elias's pained limp.

Lila's silver scars burned black. The veins from the watch's heart now covered half her arm, pulsing in time with the unseen gears beneath Hollowbrook. She tried to back away, but her body wasn't hers anymore. The scars moved her instead, forcing her palm open toward the creature.

The thing smiled with Clara's mouth. "You gave us your blood first. That makes you ours."

Elias's voice leaked from its throat: "Should've let me die properly, Lila."

The mausoleum's name-carved walls began bleeding. Crimson droplets snaked toward Lila, circling her ankles like shackles. The heart in her palm throbbed, whispering directly into her bones:

"The only way out is deeper in."

The creature lunged.

Lila's body moved without her consent—the scars yanking her sideways as her infected hand shot up. The creature impaled itself on her protruding veins, its stolen faces melting like wax.

"Clever girl," it gurgled, now wearing only Lila's own face. "You always were the best of us."

Its body collapsed into a puddle of liquid clockwork. The gears dissolved into the blood-soaked floor as the mausoleum door burst open.

Midnight sunlight poured in.

Not golden—*silver*.

Elias stood framed in the doorway, his scars gone, his eyes pure white. Behind him, Hollowbrook lay unchanged yet utterly different: the clocktower whole, the roses vibrant red, children laughing in the sunflower field.

"Welcome home," he said softly.

The heart in Lila's palm dissolved. The veins retreated. The scars faded to faint white lines.

She understood now.

This was the trap.

The *real* curse.

Not to forget—but to remember perfectly, forever, in an endless, beautiful loop.

Elias held out his hand.

Somewhere, a sixteenth bell began to toll.

Lila took his hand.

To be continued...