Elara Voss knew how to fix time.
At least, the kind that fit neatly into brass gears and ticking hands. She spent her days mending broken clocks in her dimly lit workshop, coaxing life back into their weary mechanisms. But there was one timepiece she refused to touch—the crimson pocket watch her father left behind.
For years, it sat in the shadows, silent. Until, one night, it ticked.
Backward.
The moment Elara’s fingers brushed its surface, the world around her blurred. She was no longer in her workshop. Instead, she stood inside a stranger’s memory—watching lives that weren’t her own unfold like brittle pages in an unwritten book.
The watch wasn’t just broken. It was a doorway.
Each twist of its gears pulled her deeper, unraveling secrets buried in time. And at the heart of them all was him.
Her father. A man she thought she knew.
But in stolen moments and fragmented glimpses, she saw the truth: he had been a thief of time, siphoning away years from others to rewrite fate. And then—the worst revelation of all.
She saw her mother, young and bright-eyed, her laughter ringing through the air. Then, in an instant, that light dimmed.
Her father had stolen a decade from her.
And for what?
To save Elara. To carve out the years her illness would have taken.
Her breath caught in her throat. The weight of borrowed time pressed against her ribs, heavy and cold. She had lived because her mother had been robbed of life.
A laugh, sharp and bitter, echoed behind her.
“You’re stitching fate with broken thread,” sneered the cynical time-specter that only she could see. It had been following her through every memory, a shadow with knowing eyes.
Elara clenched her fists. “Then maybe it’s time to unravel it.”
The watch pulsed in her palm, a heartbeat not her own. The choice lay before her like an open wound: preserve her existence or undo her father’s crimes.
Her mother’s tired smile flickered in her mind. A life returned. A love restored.
Elara took a shuddering breath—and shattered the watch.
The world unraveled.
Time rippled, folding over itself, rewriting history in strands of gold. Her parents’ future realigned—without her.
In the last fading echoes of her timeline, as the specter’s smirk softened into something almost like sorrow, Elara whispered, “Fix it right this time.”
And then, like a clock winding down, she was gone.