Caleb and the others followed as Midnight led the way down from their high perch and into the city proper of Clockworks. Vapors of steam and mist swirled around them. The constant ticking of clockwork machinery sounded everywhere they went.
For some time during their descent, everyone was silent. Midnight had dropped a bombshell on them and then started leading on with no further comment.
He was born here.
Caleb knew of Midnight’s connection to Sunset Square, and with his sister living there, he’d just assumed that Midnight had been born and grown up there. He hadn’t even considered alternatives.
A Time Mage born in a city named Clockworks. It’s poetic.
And yet Midnight wasn’t rushing to explain further, and his usual reticent demeanor was more pronounced than ever. Silence rolled off of him like a cloud, enveloping the rest of the group and inspiring them to silence, too.
But in that silence, Caleb was more able to take in the sights and sounds of Clockworks, and he was completely smitten. They walked down stairwells with mechanisms beneath them both providing and venting heat — the natural air itself was quite chill, so the stairs themselves were heated, and the steam regularly rising to mingle with the frigid air made it difficult to realize just how cold the natural temperatures of the city were. When their path opened up on wide terraces, Caleb could see more of the city, steadily getting lower and closer to ground level, and each new sight was amazing. Gears turning, pendulums swinging, pistons firing, clocks ticking… all of this was the accompaniment for a city in motion. Bridges rotated, stairs rose and fell, panels swiveled, doors slid open and closed, and there were many conveyor-style walkways for easy travel. Curiously, while there were numerous automatic walkways on flat surfaces, there didn’t seem to be any escalators, leaving all vertical travel to be done either by climbing up and down stairs, or riding the numerous cable-driven lifts Caleb spotted all over the place.
Midnight opted for stairs, and so the rest of the group climbed down after him. Ahead, Caleb realized that Mineria was very softly talking with Midnight, who occasionally gave very brief replies. He couldn’t hear what they were saying, but Mineria was often smiling, gently holding Midnight’s hand.
And then they’d reached the ground level, exiting out onto a wide street swirling with misty vapors. It was now that Caleb realized — for how massive of a city Clockworks was, there seemed to be very few people. The street was practically empty, and they were at an intersection, for Caleb to look in four directions down four different streets. All of them were the same, as far as he could see. He spotted a couple walking here, a man walking there, a woman riding a conveyor walkway over there. There weren’t any vehicles around, either, despite the streets divided like most modern Earth streets, with sidewalks along the perimeter and wider vehicular lanes in the center.
“Don’t be too put-off by the emptiness,” Midnight said, breaking the long silence. “After the Beast Murders, the city was sealed off as a means of protection from outside evils. Despite that, the damage was done, and a mass exodus resulted shortly before the implementation of the clockwork doors. Since then, people have only left the city, with no one new coming to live. Enchanted don’t have children very often — more a biological quirk of ours than a lack of desire — so the population has slowly been recovering, thanks to our long lifespans, but it’ll be many more human lifetimes, or changes that make people actually feel safe living here, before Clockworks is a proper city again.”
“But it feels so alive,” Ingrid said, gazing up at the mechanized city.
“The city largely runs itself,” Midnight said. “A small staff of Winders is all it needs for maintenance.”
“What were the Beast Murders?” Chelsea asked.
Midnight’s eyes narrowed. “When the Radiance were exiled from Earth by the Crystal Family, they weren’t immediately imprisoned. They managed to evade capture, go into hiding, and work for a very long time from the shadows. While Sunset Square is the major incident associated with them, their first act of violence against the Enchanted Dominion was perpetrated here, by one girl.”
“Nyx,” Caleb said softly. Her Summon was known as the Beast.
Midnight nodded. “She killed one person every week for one hundred weeks, spreading terror the longer it went on and the longer she went undiscovered. Who would suspect a little girl of such grisly violence? And when she was discovered… hardly anyone felt safe anymore.”
“She killed someone close to you,” Caleb said.
Midnight was silent for a moment, then nodded. “Come on,” he said, starting down the street that had the giant central clock tower in clear view in the distance. “We’re heading to the center.”
“Just gonna leave off there, huh?” Chelsea muttered, shrugging as she followed with everyone else.
“It’s the way he is,” Caleb said. “And… this is more sensitive than anything else I’ve heard him talk about before. I’m surprised he told us this much.”
“You have that effect on people,” Chelsea said with a smirk.
They walked the wide, empty streets towards the clock tower, lightly shadowed by the skyscrapers on either side. Like many skies in the Enchanted Dominion, there wasn’t a sun, no centralized source of light high above. It meant shadows were vague, phantasmal shapes that didn’t hold a steady form. Most came from light diffusing through wisps of steam, casting strange, coiling shadows on the street.
“Why are you guys walking?” Addie asked. She was riding a conveyor walkway, standing sideways and smirking at the others. Ingrid stood rode along with her, her expression less teasing.
“Exercise is good for you,” Chelsea said.
“But moving sidewalks are fun,” Addie said. “And fun is super good for you.”
“She’s got you there,” Caleb said with a chuckle.
After several blocks, Midnight turned left down a narrow side street, and the others followed.
“Aren’t we going to the center?” Addie asked, trotting up to walk right alongside Midnight.
“There are things worth seeing along the way,” Midnight said.
It was dimmer here due to the closer walls and numerous overhanging bridges, terraces, and balconies. The ground here wasn’t well-maintained, with potholes and puddles to maneuver around as they followed Midnight. The dingy street eventually opened up into a small plaza, almost the size of Grimoire’s Lunar Square. Decrepit houses lined the perimeter, all clearly abandoned.
Midnight walked across the plaza to the house in the center of the far side. He stopped at its entrance, placing a hand on the doorway. “This is where I was born,” he said. “And where I spent my childhood.”
“It must have looked so much prettier back then,” Addie said.
Midnight stared at his childhood home. “It did,” he said. He turned to look at Caleb. “I was like you — born with Time Magic, with no one to teach me. I didn’t know about Hawthorn Academy or Midnight Bridge back then. So I was self-taught. And I had… a lot to focus on right here. Not much time to turn my attention to the wider universe.”
“Because of your sister,” Caleb said, earning a nod from Midnight.
“She was born with a condition so rare it was unheard of at the time, and there have still been no other known cases of it. Temporal displacement. Back then… it wasn’t so bad.” Midnight sighed. “She had our parents, for one thing. None of us had much, but our parents were clever and resourceful, and they passed that on to the two of us. They found a way to manage her symptoms, and they also built the house you saw in Sunset Square. For a long time that wasn’t her home, not a permanent place of residence. Just a regular retreat, a place that, due to a lot of complex magics that would take too long to explain, helped ‘reset’ her symptoms, so to speak. It was a place of rest and healing, not a home from which she couldn’t leave.” He shoved his hands in his pockets, staring up through the narrow shaft formed by buildings to the distant light of the sky high above.
“What kind of life did you have here?” Ingrid asked. “Living in such a huge city… there must have been all sorts of things for you to do and see.”
“Lancelot had a very violent childhood,” Mineria said. At Midnight’s sharp glare, she simply smiled, laughing. “Oh, come on, Lance. It’s not such a bad thing for them to know, is it? And it’s quite informative about the man you are today.”
“We didn’t come here for a history lesson,” Midnight said.
“So why are you giving us one?” Addie asked, cocking her head to the side.
Midnight stared back at her for a moment, then sighed. “Because all of you would ask too many questions otherwise,” he said, then cast a glance at Mineria. “And she’d spill it all on her own if I didn’t say anything.”
“Guilty as charged,” Mineria said, smiling brightly.
“My sister’s condition caused a lot of people to consider her a freak,” Midnight said. “Plenty of bullies in the world, no matter which world you’re from. I protected her. When they escalated to try and get past me, I responded in kind. And besides them…” He stared off into the distance. “Despite what the Governor would have everyone believe, Clockworks never was a very safe city. They just did a good job of hiding the violence and horrors, pushing it off to the side, keeping the nastiness cordoned into the right places where most people wouldn’t see — and if they did see, they probably wouldn’t care. But I did. So yes, I spent my formative years fighting.”
“Or as your mother liked to say…” Mineria said.
Midnight sighed. “ ‘You’re steeped in violence, Lance’,” he said softly.
“You knew his mother?” Ingrid asked.
Mineria nodded. “Oh, yes. We only met a few times, but she was a wonderful woman. Strange, in the best sort of way. And very clever.”
“She never did try to stop me from fighting,” Midnight said. “All the other bullies were scolded, some of them even disowned, by their mothers. But mine just smiled, always trying to come up with different tongue-in-cheek descriptions for my lifestyle.”
“What about your father?” Caleb asked.
Midnight’s eyes flickered with something, but it was too brief for Caleb to read. “He was sick, as long as I knew him,” he said. “By the time I was old enough to remember anything, he was paralyzed from the waist down, with no cure by magic or science to be found. He had a weak heart, weak lungs. Sharp as the keenest blade, though. He’s the one who named my sister’s condition and invented her treatments and the web of magics making up her home. Always inventing, always researching. Too altruistic for his own good, though. Rejected every stable, high-paying job offer that came his way. Always said we had ‘more than enough.’ ” He pursed his lips slightly, then turned back towards his childhood home.
“I was the one who discovered Nyx,” he continued. “Freelance detective work, you might call it. It paid well to offset my father’s overabundance of generosity, and it sharpened my mind and my skills. When the Beast Murders started, I was constantly on the trail. These were the first string of crimes that affected everyone in the city, no matter your class or region of residence. Equal opportunity murder. Every week the uproar grew wilder. After one hundred weeks, I finally realized what was wrong. What I’d missed all along. The murderer had been right in front of me so many times, but I’d never even thought to suspect her. She was… just a child.” He nodded back to Caleb. “Caught you plenty off-guard in Grimoire, too, right?”
“Yeah,” Caleb said, thinking back to his brief battle with Nyx. She didn’t even look as old as Delilah. How easy it was to expect innocence of her, to think of her as a broken, traumatized victim.
And then to see just how cruel she was, how aware she was of her cruelty, how much she delighted in it…
“When I discovered her…” Midnight said. “She… picked her final targets. She came here. Killed everyone else, in every other house, leaving ours alone. I was away, and by the time I made it back…” He strode to the center of the plaza, planting his foot in a dark stain, “she was standing right here in a pool of blood, waiting. She wanted to me to see. Then she attacked my family. I… tried to protect them. But I was far too weak, back then. She killed my mother, first. Then my father. And then…” He turned his back from the group. “The trauma was too much for my sister. She wasn’t physically harmed, but seeing all of that… she was still a child, back then. And she just… vanished. Into thin air. I was beaten, I knew it, but when someone does that to your family… you don’t think about whether you can win or not. You just fight. And I did what you did, kid. I overused Time Magic without understanding it, and ended up in Chronoshin.”
No one said a word, and Midnight remained silent for a long time, standing in the center of the plaza with his back to the rest of them. Finally, he turned walking straight past all of them and back down the side street towards the main road. “Come on,” he said, his voice as serious and hard to read as ever. The others followed him out onto the main road and started once more towards the central clock tower.
“Without her medicine,” Midnight started after a time, “and with such psychological trauma as a trigger, my sister’s condition went wild. She experiences time out of order compared to the rest of us, but before I found her again and brought her to her home, and made that into a home rather than just a retreat for her… she was physically lost to time. Bouncing through past, present, and future, all out of order, seeing and experiencing all sorts of things. She’s only ever been able to talk about a small amount of it all. After she was safe and sound, I went to train under the previous Mister Midnight. And also searched the entire Dominion for Nyx. Even when I was there for the massacre at Sunset Square, even though I was able to fight so many of the fool’s gods… I never found her again. Not until our most recent fight.”
Caleb still couldn’t find any words.
After all that time, so much time I can’t even fathom it, he searched for the girl who killed his parents…
And he never found her until just yesterday. He finally got to fight her again, and yet…
And now she’s gone again.
“Ah!” Mineria said suddenly. She stepped off the main road, into a garden between two skyscrapers. It was a beautiful little place of rest, with three stone benches arranged in a semicircle, and an empty fountain in the center beneath a statue of a man holding aloft a large clock with both hands.
“What is it?” Ingrid asked.
Mineria smiled, looking aside at Midnight. “This is… where Lancelot and I first met.” Midnight nodded.
“What a romantic first meeting place!” Addie said, running around the small garden with a grin on her face. “So you’ve known each other since you were kids?”
“Oh, yes,” Mineria said. “We’ve spent far more time apart than together, due to our very different lives, but that hasn’t mattered so much.”
“You were a messenger for the Crystal Family, right?” Caleb asked.
“When we met, I was a maid,” Mineria said. “Or rather, an apprentice maid. You could say I grew up in the Crystal Palace, under the guidance of other servants, apprentices, messengers, and many others. Staying in one place cleaning and tending gardens didn’t suit my talents, though, and I was eventually made a messenger.”
“And traveling all over the place meant you could see Mister Midnight more often!” Addie said, beaming.
“That’s exactly right,” Mineria said, her copper cheeks glowing a soft red. She slipped her hand into Midnight’s.
They walked on — or in Addie and Ingrid’s case, rode the conveyor walkways on — towards the clock tower, ever edging closer to that central landmark. They saw a few more people on the way, but for traveling fifty big city blocks, they were so few. The city really was nearly empty, its size only emphasizing that fact, its autonomous, self-sustaining machinery sounding strangely haunted to Caleb’s ears.
And all along the way, he had Midnight’s story weighing on his mind. After so long just picking up bits and pieces about his teacher from words, attitude, body language, and his interactions with others, now he suddenly knew so much more all at once. And he felt like he understood Midnight so much better.
There’s still a lot of his life I don’t really know about. But that makes sense. He’s lived so long… longer than I can wrap my head around.
But I can understand him better now. Despite his personality, he really does love his sister. He spent his whole childhood defending her. And she’s only where she is now, safe and sound, because of him.
Caleb smiled. If there was one thing he could respect and understand, it was looking out for one’s siblings.
When they got close to the central clock tower, the towering city opened up. A vast park was established around the clock tower in a circle, dotted with trees, ponds, flower gardens, benches, and statues. Long, straight lanes went out from the tower itself, twelve in all, working their way around it like the twelve hours on a clock.
“It’s going off of Earth’s clock,” Ingrid said as she walked along the lane.
“Twelve is a meaningful number even in Universal Time,” Midnight said. “The clock itself is a Celestial clock.”
Caleb craned his neck to see, and stopped for a moment just to take in the clock high above on the tower. It was made up of one giant circle with dozens of symbols around its perimeter. But then there was a second, smaller circle within it, offset to the right, overlapping with a third circle smaller than that one, offset towards the bottom. Each had many different hands ticking around each circle at different speeds.
“Celestial?” Caleb asked.
“It’s tracking several different measurements of time at once,” Midnight said, “while also tracking things like the patterns of the Dominion’s Locations, major movements of celestial bodies… it’s complicated. Takes a lot of study to learn how to read it.
“What’s the point of a clock that’s hard to read?” Addie asked, leaning back so far to look up that she would have fallen over if Ingrid hadn’t stood behind her and held her shoulders.
“It isn’t hard once you learn it,” Midnight said.
“So what are we doing at this tower, anyway?” Chelsea asked.
Midnight, for the first time since arriving in the city, managed a smirk. “Just a fun little adventure, for old-time’s sake,” he said, looking at Caleb. “We’re breaking into a highly secure vault to free some VIPs.”
“Another break-in?” Caleb asked. “Wait… a vault?”
“The most impenetrable vault in the entire universe,” Midnight said. “The Chronos Vault.”