Cyris stepped out into the main floor of the clock tower. The moon shone in through the gaps around the circular clock face to their left and a bit of starlight could be seen through the gaps of the clock face to their right. Everything else was dark. And just as the captain had said, the gears and mechanisms were still and silent, having stopped a day before. It was eerie being near such a large clock and not hearing the gears turn or the constant ticking.

Cyris reached beside the lift doors on the wall, feeling around until he found the smooth stone he was looking for that slightly bulged outwards from the rest of the wall. At his touch, lights along the bottom of the outer walls lit up, casting the mechanism room in a yellow glow. But even these lights didn’t reach all the way to the ceiling above them. The room was just too big. And long, dark shadows stretched above them.

Beside Cyris, Timetheo gave a slow whistle. “My father sure won’t be happy to see this,” he said as he stepped forward and surveyed the still gears.

Baronet Cronwright, Timetheo’s father, was the one to design the clock and would be the one the Emperor called upon to repair it as well. Surely word of the clock no longer telling the correct time or moving at all had gotten back to him already. And as Cyris stepped towards the gears–some twice or three times as tall as he was–he had to agree with Timetheo’s assessment.

This went beyond a simple repair. One of the largest gears had a giant crack running through it, and one side of it was leaning enough out of place that it was jamming the rest of the gears. Thankfully though, that tension is what kept the two halves of the gear from crashing down. But there was something other than the crack as well. Towards the center of the same gear, there were huge gouges and scrapes, almost like claw marks or the marks of some claw-like tool. But what claw or tool could gouge out metal like that, Cyris had no idea.

“Go see what you can observe from the other side and around the ledge of this floor. I’m going to see what I can find here.” Cyris had a habit of sending even Timetheo away when he examined the main area of an incident. There was just too much of a risk of someone–even someone he worked well with–learning about his unique skill.

Timetheo flashed him a smile and mimed tipping an imaginary hat to Cyris. “The usual,” he said, sounding a bit disappointed but unsurprised. “Just shout if you need me then.” He walked around the stand of gears to the other side of the floor and out of sight, his eyes surveying the room for further damage.

Cyris waited until his companion’s footsteps were far enough away before approaching the gears fully and resting his gloved hand on the nearest large one. He couldn’t quite reach the bottom of the large, cracked one, but this was close enough for what he needed.

He closed his eyes, readying himself for the jarring sensation to come, and after a deep breath, thought, Activate Prequel.

Cyris felt as if the whole room and floor had undulated, causing his stomach to tighten. And then, though his eyes remained closed, he saw the clock tower room. It was as if he were looking through the perspective of a recording crystal–which were extremely expensive and restricted, so hadn’t been used in the clock tower. He witnessed himself pulling his hand down, walking backwards, Timetheo walking backwards as well. The whole of their entrance to the room played out in reverse.

With the strain of trying to walk up-current in a river, Cyris pushed the scene backwards in time faster. He saw the sun come up in the west, to the right of them. He saw the captain and a few other City Knights enter, inspect the damage, and leave, but he didn’t slow down the images to hear what they said. The City Knights weren’t his main focus.

Beads of sweat were now forming on Cyris’s brow. The current he was pushing against intensified and thickened the farther back he went in the images’ timeline. The thought that he was glad to only have been called one day into the investigation crossed the back of his mind. More than three days, and he wouldn’t be able to use his skill at all. And even that amount of time would cause him to collapse and have to stay in bed at least a full day.

It was this limitation of his skill that caused him to never reveal it to anyone. Only himself, the Emperor, the Elder Mage, and his father knew about his skill, and of the three, only he himself knew for sure of its limitations. He could only imagine what chaos would ensue if others–or, Gods forbid, the type of criminals he helped arrest–learned of it.

He refocused and kept pushing the images back in time, watching the sun and shadows roll through the day until the full moon rose in the west and charted its course in reverse. Finally, he reached the moments just after sunset. He let the images slow back to a normal pace and looked around for someone coming off the lift or someone scaling the railing that was around the open floor, but what he saw didn’t match what he’d had in mind.

Cyris had to firmly press down the shock that went through him so as not to lose control of the images when the perpetrators came into view.