1066: Story 1066: The Child Who Devoured Time 1066: Story 1066: The Child Who Devoured Time In the village of Cindermoor, the clocks no longer ticked.
Time, once a gentle tyrant, had vanished—days blending into nights, seasons unraveling like frayed thread.
Crops withered in their prime.
Infants were born ancient, their eyes cloudy with years they had never lived.
The elders wept backward into youth.
Something had gnawed through the gears of reality.
The villagers whispered of a child—born under a shattered moon, swaddled in frost despite midsummer’s heat.
They called her Nerra.
Her cries bent shadows.
Her laughter fractured glass.
And when she blinked, minutes disappeared.
Dalia Graves, a horologist and former occult scholar, arrived in Cindermoor seeking answers.
She carried a watch that hadn’t moved in thirteen years, stopped precisely at the hour her brother vanished screaming into a fissure of light.
The trail of broken timepieces had led her here—to a child who never aged, and a town slowly unraveling.
Nerra was found sitting atop the twisted remains of the village sundial, eyes black as spilled ink, hands wrapped around a cracked hourglass.
“I ate the ticking,” she said.
“It was loud.
It hurt.”
The child wasn’t malicious.
She was hungry.
An accident of fate, or a curse carved by the eldritch deep beneath the skin of reality.
Nerra fed on time like a babe on milk.
Days, weeks, even decades—devoured in silent gulps, leaving behind moments like bones.
Dalia, torn between compassion and terror, devised a desperate plan.
She would trap the child within a Chronolock, an ancient device that could freeze moments like amber.
She needed a relic of strong temporal resonance.
She used her brother’s watch.
The ritual began as the town’s last sky turned green.
Shadows twisted into screaming figures.
Nerra wailed, a cry that shattered calendars and rewound dreams.
Dalia held firm, chanting words only half-remembered from forbidden texts.
The Chronolock pulsed.
Time trembled.
And then…
Stillness.
Cindermoor is now a village forgotten by maps, hidden within a time-loop stitched by broken logic.
Nerra is locked in a bubble of stasis at the village’s heart, surrounded by hundreds of stopped watches ticking all at once—each second stretched into eternity.
But some nights, travelers who wander too far hear something—like a child humming in reverse.
“Tick… tock… tick… took…”
And if they stay too long, their memories unspool.
They forget birthdays, lovers, the shape of the sun.
Because Nerra is still hungry.
And time, once tasted, cannot be untasted.