Chapter 3: The Citadel of Broken Clocks

When the boy awoke, dew clung to his eyelashes like forgotten prayers. The sun had not risen, and would not rise for the next seven days.

He and Lupa Silvana crossed into a land of silence, where even the birds had forgotten their songs. Here stood the Citadel of Broken Clocks: a city, fortress suspended in twilight, surrounded by twelve towers, each shaped like a different hour, all pointing to nowhere.

It was said the citadel was ruled by The Horologian, an old philosopher who once tried to measure time with his own heartbeat. When he failed, he imprisoned time instead.

Inside, time was currency, punishment, power.

You could buy a meal for two minutes of your life. People sold their youth for temporary beauty, traded decades for titles, or rented out their sleep to strangers who had none. Children aged before their parents. Elders paid to become infants again, just for the thrill of innocence.

And time moved strangely here.

In one room, flowers bloomed and died in seconds. In another, a man had been shaving the same beard for a thousand years.

The boy was taken to Room VI, where clocks hung like chandeliers and ticked backwards. A woman with silver veins and copper teeth looked up from a sandglass and said:

“You are not registered.”

“I am not here to be timed,” the boy answered.

“Then you must be imprisoned,” she said, and snapped her fingers.

The walls unfolded like a mechanical lotus, and guards marched in, tall, glass-bodied things, filled with gears instead of blood.

Just then, a small tap echoed.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

It was Mpaka the Hare, tapping on a grandfather clock with a stick of sugarcane.

“I once taught a king to dance by making him late,” he said, grinning.

With one swift kick, Mpaka shattered the clock, and time hiccupped.

Seconds froze mid-air. Hours melted. The guards unravelled like ribbon.

“Let's go!” barked Lupa Silvana.

They ran through corridors made of ticking silence, past paintings that aged as you watched, through halls where every footstep echoed a different year. Finally, they burst out into the open sky, and found it waiting.

Not morning. Not night.

Just… possibility.

On the Hill Beyond the Citadel…

The boy turned to Mpaka. “Why do they trap people with time?”

The hare looked up at him, eyes glinting.

“Because people who watch the clock forget to dream.”

Lupa nodded. “And those who dream? They bend time. They make the impossible tick.”

The boy looked down at his hands, glowing faintly, not with magic, but with meaning. He had not paid for time, but he had earned it. Through memories. Through story. Through refusing to forget.

What Happens Next?

What happens when a bridge is not made of stone, but of names?

If you have no name, can you still cross?

What if the river below is hungry for forgotten memories, whose voice will it steal first?

Will the boy find the name he was born with, or invent one from his dreams?

And when the wind itself begins to whisper, who will he believe—the hare's riddles, the wolf's silence, or his own trembling heart?

The Bridge is waiting.

But how would you cross it?