The transition wasn't like walking through a door. It was like walking into a cataract.
One moment, they were wading through the murky floodwater of the Low-Light District, surrounded by brick and plastic. The next, the world turned gray.
The Fog was cold. It stuck to Lyric's skin like wet spiderwebs. The static in Lyric's head—which had been a screaming roar in the city—suddenly muffled. It didn't stop, but it changed tone. It sounded distant, distorted, like a radio tuned between stations.
"Rook," Lyric said. "You still there?"
"I'm holding your coat," Rook's voice came from directly behind Lyric, tight with fear. "If I let go, I feel like I'm gonna float away."
"Keep holding on," Lyric said. "Val?"
"I see the tower," Valerius said. He was in the lead, wading waist-deep in the water. "Keep moving. Don't look at the shapes in the mist. Your brain will try to recognize them, and if it can't, you'll get vertigo."
Lyric looked anyway.
To the left, a streetlamp floated in the gray void. But it wasn't attached to the ground. The bottom half was missing, dissolved into pixels that scrambled and reformed in a loop.
To the right, a car was half-submerged. The front half was a rusted sedan. The back half was… nothing. Just white wireframe lines that faded into the fog.
"Entropy," Lyric whispered. "It's unmaking things."
"It eats complexity first," Valerius called back. "Digital things. Plastics. Complex alloys. That's why the Old Quarter survived. Stone and iron are simple. They're stubborn."
They pushed forward. The water grew colder, numbing Lyric's legs.
Suddenly, the gray curtain thinned.
They didn't step out of the fog; they stepped through the heavy layer of it into a pocket of clarity.
Lyric stopped and stared.
"Whoa," Rook breathed.
They were in the Old Quarter.
It didn't look like Mnemos. There were no neon signs. No holographic billboards. No sleek composite towers.
The buildings here were made of heavy, dark stone. They leaned over the flooded streets, their roofs covered in black slate tiles. Iron balconies rusted into jagged shapes. Gargoyles with eroded faces stared down from the eaves. It looked like a city from a history book, drowned and forgotten.
The floodwater here was black and still, reflecting the crooked silhouette of the Clocktower that rose in the center of the district. The clock face was shattered, the hands stuck at 11:59.
"It's creepy," Rook said, his voice echoing too loudly in the silence. "It feels… dead."
"Not dead," Valerius said, wading toward a stone walkway that rose above the water level. "Dormant. Janus chose this place because the Guild couldn't overwrite it. The memories here are too deep."
They climbed out of the water onto the cobblestone street. Lyric shook their legs, trying to get the circulation back. The boots squelched heavily.
"Okay," Lyric said, shivering. "We're in. Where's the lab?"
"The base of the Clocktower," Valerius pointed. "There should be an entrance near the—"
SPLASH.
The sound came from the water behind them.
Lyric spun around, hand going to the ceramic sword.
Rook shined his flashlight at the black water. Ripples were spreading outward from the center of the street.
"A fish?" Rook asked hopefully.
"There are no fish in entropy," Valerius said, backing away from the edge.
SPLASH.
Closer this time.
Something surfaced. It looked like a person's head. But it was smooth. Featureless. Like a mannequin made of gray clay.
Then another head surfaced. And another.
"What are those?" Lyric hissed.
"Echoes," Valerius said, his voice dropping to a whisper. "Residue. When people dissolve in the Fog, this is what's left. Just the shape. No mind."
The clay-like figures began to drift toward the walkway. They didn't swim; they just moved through the water, drawn to the movement on the shore.
One of them reached the cobblestones. It pulled itself up. It had no hands—just stumps. It dragged its body forward with a wet, slapping sound.
"They want heat," Valerius said. "They want life. Back up. Slowly."
Rook stepped back, his boot scraping on a loose stone.
Scritch.
The Echoes reacted instantly. The one on the shore lurched forward, moving faster than a legless thing should be able to move. It opened a mouth that wasn't there—a tear in the clay face—and let out a sound like static interference.
KZZZZZT.
"Run!" Lyric yelled.
They bolted down the cobblestone street.
Behind them, the water churned as dozens of Echoes scrambled onto the shore. They moved like spiders, flop-crawling over each other in a frenzy.
"They're fast!" Rook shouted, looking back.
"Head for the tower!" Valerius yelled, limping as fast as he could.
They turned a corner and hit a dead end.
A massive pile of rubble—a collapsed building—blocked the street.
"Blocked!" Lyric yelled.
"Climb it!" Rook scrambled up the pile of wet bricks.
"No time," Lyric said, looking back. The gray tide of Echoes was rounding the corner. There were too many of them.
Lyric drew the ceramic sword.
"Keep climbing," Lyric ordered Valerius. "I'll hold them."
"You can't kill them!" Valerius shouted from halfway up the pile. "They aren't alive! Cutting them is like cutting mud!"
"Then I won't cut them," Lyric said.
The first Echo lunged.
Lyric didn't swing the sword. Lyric sheathed it and held out both hands.
The Fog whispered: You took it.
Fine, Lyric thought. Let's see what I can give back.
Lyric waited until the swarm was ten feet away. A wall of gray, wet bodies.
Lyric slammed both palms onto the wet cobblestones.
Erase.
Lyric didn't erase the monsters. Lyric erased the friction of the street again.
The result was instantaneous.
The charging Echoes hit the patch of friction-less stone. Their momentum turned against them. They slipped, piling into each other, sliding uncontrollably like pucks on an air hockey table.
They crashed into the walls of the buildings on either side, sliding backward, unable to gain purchase to move forward.
It was a chaotic, flailing pile of gray limbs.
"Go!" Lyric shouted, turning and scrambling up the rubble pile.
Lyric slipped on a loose brick, scraping a knee, but Rook reached down and hauled them up.
They tumbled over the top of the barricade and slid down the other side.
"Nice trick," Rook breathed. "World's worst slip-and-slide."
"It won't hold them forever," Lyric panted, clutching their chest. Using the power on a wide area like that was exhausting. The hollow feeling inside was growing. "They'll crawl over each other eventually."
"We're close," Valerius said. He was pointing ahead.
The Clocktower loomed directly above them now. It was massive, built of black iron rivets and dark stone. At the base, there was no door. Just a solid wall of iron gears, fused together by rust.
"Where's the entrance?" Rook asked, panic rising again as the sound of the Echoes scrambling over the rubble started behind them.
"It's a puzzle," Valerius said, stepping up to the wall of gears. "Janus loved puzzles."
He ran his hand over a large central cog.
"It needs a key," Valerius said. "A physical key. I don't see a keypad."
"We don't have a key," Lyric said, listening to the KZZZZT sounds getting closer. "We have a sword and a laser cutter."
"Wait," Valerius said. He leaned in closer to the gear. "There's an inscription. In Latin."
He wiped the moss away.
"Tempus Edax Rerum," Valerius read.
"English, please!" Rook yelled, shining his light back at the rubble pile. A gray hand was clawing over the top.
"Time, the devourer of all things," Valerius translated. "It's a riddle. What stops time?"
"Nothing stops time!" Rook shouted. "Except maybe a broken clock!"
"A broken clock," Lyric repeated. Lyric looked up at the tower. "The face is smashed. The hands are stuck."
"Stuck at 11:59," Valerius realized. "One minute to midnight."
He looked at the gears. There were two smaller cogs near the bottom that could be rotated.
"We have to set the gears to 11:59," Valerius said. "Rook, help me turn this one. Lyric, watch our backs."
Lyric drew the sword again. "Hurry."
The first Echo tumbled over the barricade, hitting the ground with a wet thud. It pushed itself up and shrieked.
"Turning!" Rook grunted, heaving on the rusted iron wheel.
Creak. Clank.
"That's the hour hand!" Valerius said. "Again!"
Lyric slashed at the Echo, severing its head. As Valerius predicted, it didn't die. The body just kept crawling, blindly groping for Lyric's legs.
"Gross," Lyric muttered, kicking it away.
Two more dropped down. Then four.
"Rook!" Lyric yelled.
"Almost there!" Rook strained, his boots slipping in the mud. "Last click!"
CLUNK.
A heavy mechanical sound echoed from inside the tower. The wall of fused gears shuddered.
Slowly, agonizingly, the center of the wall began to rotate. It unscrewed like the vault door of a bank, retreating inward.
A dark opening appeared.
"In!" Valerius shouted.
Rook dove through. Valerius followed.
Lyric took one last swing, knocking back a lunging Echo, and jumped into the darkness.
Rook slammed a heavy lever on the inside wall.
The gear-door spun shut.
BANG.
The sound of the Echoes throwing themselves against the metal rang out, then muffled as the seal locked.
Silence returned.
They were in a dark, circular room. The air was dry and smelled of oil and old paper.
"We're in," Rook gasped, collapsing on the floor.
"Janus's Antechamber," Valerius said, clicking on a light switch.
Nothing happened.
"Analog," Valerius reminded himself. He found an oil lantern on a hook and used a match from Rook's kit to light it.
The warm yellow glow illuminated the room.
It was filled with clocks. Hundreds of them. Grandfather clocks, cuckoo clocks, pocket watches hanging from the ceiling. They were all ticking.
Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.
And in the center of the room, sitting in a high-backed leather chair, was a figure.
He was old. incredibly old. His skin was like parchment, his hair wild and white. He was asleep, a thick book resting on his chest.
Around his neck, he wore a pendant.
Lyric froze.
It was a circle of tarnished silver with a jagged crack down the center.
It was identical to the one Lyric had thrown into the sewer.
"Janus?" Valerius whispered.
The old man didn't stir.
Lyric walked closer. The static in Lyric's head flared—a sharp, piercing note.
Lyric reached out to touch the old man's shoulder.
"Don't," a voice said from the shadows.
Lyric spun around.
Stepping out from behind a row of clocks was a young woman. She held a heavy wrench in her hand like a weapon. She wore grease-stained overalls and had welding goggles pushed up on her forehead.
"Who are you?" Lyric asked.
"I'm the apprentice," the woman said, eyeing Lyric's sword. "And if you touch him, he dies."
"Dies?" Valerius asked. "Why?"
"Because," the woman said, lowering the wrench slightly but not backing down. "He isn't sleeping. He's projecting. His mind is holding back the Fog. If you wake him up… the Old Quarter dissolves."