The Town Where Clocks Don’t Tick

The wind was not coming from outside.

Mira and Lucan stood frozen in the hallway, the velvet pouch dangling from her fingers, the silver key warm in her palm. The wind seemed to curl around their ankles like smoke cold and deliberate rising not from the front door, but from beneath the floorboards.

Lucan dropped to one knee beside the old grandfather clock. "There's something under here."

Mira stared at the warped wooden floor. It had always been uneven in that spot, but her mother used to say the house was just "settling in."

Lucan pressed a hand against the floorboard. It groaned, Then shifted. A seam appeared. Faint but real. 

 A trapdoor. They exchanged a glance, and Mira knelt beside him. Her heart pounded. "Help me lift it."

It came up easier than she expected, revealing a dark, narrow stairwell winding downward. Cold air rushed up to meet them, carrying the scent of damp stone and something older earthy, metallic, and vaguely sweet. Almost like rusted silver and overripe fruit.

Lucan grabbed a lantern from the entryway shelf one of her mother's old hurricane lamps. It still worked.

The light flickered, painting golden shapes on the descending walls.

"You don't have to go first," Mira said quietly.

Lucan offered her a crooked smile. "You've got the key. I'm just the backup."

They descended, the steps groaning beneath them. As they went deeper, the walls turned from wood to stone, carved with spirals and unfamiliar symbols. The passage twisted, and somewhere in the dark, water dripped steadily, echoing like a second heartbeat.

At the bottom of the stairs was a circular chamber.

No door.

No furniture.

Just a mirror.

It stood tall, framed in bone white wood that curled like roots around its edges. The surface shimmered not with reflections, but with smoke. And behind that smoke shapes moved.

Mira stepped closer, breath fogging the glass. Her own face did not greet her.

Instead, she saw herself but different. A girl with the same eyes but silver hair. Wearing a locket. Standing in a burning forest.

Lucan's reflection didn't appear at all.

"Is it a memory?" he whispered.

"No," Mira said slowly. "It's… a version."

The girl in the mirror turned suddenly and looked directly at her.

Mira stumbled back.

"She saw me," she whispered.

The smoke thickened, then cleared just enough to reveal words scratched across the glass from the inside:

The door only opens when you forget your name.

Lucan stepped in front of the mirror. "What does that mean?"

Mira was still staring. "Maybe it's like the book said. To open the door, we have to give something up."

"Like memory."

She nodded. "Or identity. The idea of who we are."

Lucan looked shaken. "Would you really give that up?"

Mira looked down at the key in her hand.

"I don't know," she said. "But I think… my mother did."

They left the mirror chamber in silence, the shadows pressing tighter the higher they climbed.

When they emerged into the hallway again, the clock was silent once more.

But someone had lit a candle in the living room.

They hadn't.

Lucan stepped in front of her instinctively. Mira tightened her grip on the key.

And then a whisper, curling through the air like breath against her neck 

"You are not the first. You will not be the last."

Mira turned sharply, but there was no one behind her.

Just the smell of violets.

And the sound of ticking.

Not from the clock.

From her locket.

The scent of violets lingered like a ghost.

Mira stood frozen, eyes darting toward the walls, the windows, even the ceiling. But there was no source. No vase. No breeze. Just that sharp, oddly floral presence clinging to the air. The ticking from her locket continued soft, rhythmic, unnatural.

Lucan looked at her. "That wasn't just a whisper, was it?"

Mira shook her head. "No. It was… in me. Like a memory I never had."

She unclasped the locket again, half expecting it to pulse or burn or glow. Instead, the photo of her mother still stared back, calm, unwavering. But something had changed in the background. A shadow in the photo that hadn't been there before barely visible, shaped like a figure standing just beyond her mother's shoulder.

Lucan leaned closer. "That wasn't there earlier."

"No," Mira said. "And it looks like…"

They didn't finish the thought. Neither of them wanted to say it.

She tucked the locket beneath her shirt. "Come on Let's go back down that mirror"

But when they reached the trapdoor again, it was gone.

Just floorboards,Seamless and Smooth.

Lucan knelt, ran his fingers along where the groove had been. "It's like it was never here."

Mira touched the grandfather clock. It didn't respond. The pendulum was still, the face cracked, as it always had been. As if the ticking had been a dream.

"I hate when things pretend they were never real," she whispered.

Lucan looked up. "Then let's make sure we remember. Even when the town wants us to forget."

Mira's thoughts buzzed. The mirror chamber. The other version of herself. The message etched in the glass.

"The door only opens when you forget your name."

"What if that's not literal?" she said suddenly.

Lucan blinked. "You mean… symbolic?"

"Sort of. What if it means shedding who we were to become who we have to be?"

Lucan gave a soft, dry laugh. "That sounds like the kind of thing a keeper would say."

She glanced at him. "You believe me now?"

"I believed you the moment the trees whispered your name."

They both fell quiet at that.

Then Mira frowned. "Did you hear anything when we were in the mirror room?"

"No." Lucan looked unsettled. "But I felt something."

"What?"

"Like I didn't exist."

Mira tilted her head.

"I don't mean I was invisible," Lucan said. "I mean… in that room, I felt like the version of me that matters wasn't there yet."

She understood more than she wanted to admit.

Later that night, long after Lucan had gone, Mira sat cross legged on the floor of her room, the key between her palms, her notebook open beside her. She was sketching not the mirror or the stairs, but the symbols carved into the stone walls.

They wouldn't stop haunting her thoughts. Spirals. Rootlike curves. A symbol that looked like a broken hourglass surrounded by thorns.

She had drawn that one three times already. And each time it looked less like something imagined.

It looked familiar.

She turned to the back of the locket, examined the barely there engraving.

Same hourglass. Same thorns.

And beneath it, too faint to read before, the inscription shimmered into clarity:

"To forget is mercy. To remember is power."

A knock sounded at her window.

She jumped, heart lurching.

She crept over, expecting Lucan.

But it wasn't him.

Standing in the darkness, barely visible under the moonlight, was the girl from the mirror.

The other Mira.

She raised her hand and pressed it against the glass.

Mira reached out slowly and did the same.

Their fingers aligned.

The glass went cold.

And then the girl spoke, though her lips never moved.

"The second key lies where the velvet roots dream. Bring the boy. But beware he is not who he thinks he is."

The mirror version of Mira gave a sad smile.

Then vanished into smoke.

And in her place, on the other side of the glass? a reflection of Mira's room, as it should be.

Empty.

But the window latch was now undone.