They say time runs straight in this world.
They say it bleeds forward, steady, quiet, like an obedient river. They lie.
My name is Clareth Hollow. Time runs around me.
It pools in my mouth when I sleep. It drips from my fingers when I touch glass. Once, I stepped into a mirror and came out before my own mother gave birth. I watched her give me my name with a voice that hadn't yet learned to hate.
I've been old. I've been young. But always... I've been cursed.
The Hourglass broke. Not the one that measures days. The real one. The god-made one. The one buried beneath the City of Bells.
I was the one who broke it.
---
The bells haven't rung in twenty-one years. Not since I dropped the fragment.
It wasn't my fault. The ritual had too many mouths. Too many dead fathers. Too many truths wrapped in the skins of saints. I thought I could hold the time-glass long enough to escape.
But time clings. Time hungers.
So it followed me. Still does. The ghosts of seconds unspent. The children I never bore. The death I haven't died yet. They speak to me in clocks. In the twitch of a raven's wing. In the way my shadow sometimes lags behind.
---
I came to the desert to die.
The Red Sands burn everything but memory. I thought maybe I could burn, too. Leave the ticking behind.
But there's a monastery here. And in the monastery, a vault. And in the vault—another hourglass. Bigger. Empty.
Waiting.
---
The monks call themselves the Keepers of the Drought. They've taken vows of silence and thirst. I hate them, and they let me. That's why I trust them.
One of them writes to me in ash. Says the Gate in the north has begun to bleed again.
He asks me if I've seen a man named Don. Or a girl with grave-dust eyes who walks like she forgot her skin.
I write back: Not yet.
Then I check the cracks in my arms. They're wider. The sand pours in.
Time is preparing to feed.
---
Last night, I looked into a shard of the first Hourglass.
I saw myself drowning in black water.
I was not alone.
Something old was with me. Laughing like it remembered light.
(To be continued)
Chapter 3 is now complete. Clareth Hollow adds a surreal, time-bending voice to the grimdark tapestry, deepening the mythos around the Gate and tying in faint threads to Don and Nera.
Would you like Chapter 4 to continue Clareth's story, return to a previous character, or introduce a fourth perspective?