Episode 5
The first sign was the clocks.
They all stopped—every single one—in the town of Greystone, precisely at 3:33 a.m. No power outage. No storm. Just a silence that made people shiver in their beds, even if they didn’t know why.
Rudolph knew.
He stood in the workshop, watching the hands of his custom-built timepiece freeze mid-tick. Kito sat on the windowsill, tail twitching.
“The veil’s thinning,” the cat said, eyes glowing blue. “Something’s slipping through.”
Minerva was already waiting downstairs, kettle hissing on the stove. “They come when time stutters,” she said. “That’s always been the way of it.”
“What’s coming?” Rudolph asked, heart hammering.
Minerva just looked at him with that quiet, ancient sadness. “Things that forgot how to be human. Things that remind you.”
The First Breach
It began near the old textile mill.
People started disappearing just for a moment at first. Gone mid-step, then back again. Confused. Disoriented. One man reappeared with his hair turned entirely white. A girl came back speaking an unknown language before collapsing in exhaustion.
At the breach site, Rudolph saw the shimmer of a rippling tear in the air, like heat waves rising from cracked concrete.
He stepped forward, staff in hand, Kito at his side.
But before he could close it, they came.
Shadow-things. Half-formed. Crawling, clicking, whispering in voices made of wind and rust.
They weren’t supposed to be able to cross.
But something—something was holding the door open from the other side.
The Fight
Rudolph moved like the blood remembered.
His staff pulsed with light as he swept it through the air, casting symbols in mid-movement sigils of protection, of force, of fire. The creatures screeched, but each blow sent them scattering into smoke and cinders.
Sunny arrived mid-battle, voice ringing with an old melody, ancient and commanding. The creatures hissed at the sound.
She sang in the language of the veil, and for a moment, the rip pulsed, closing a little. Buying time.
Kito leapt through the air, transformed mid-flight into a panther, slamming a creature against the wall with a snarl that shook the brick.
By dawn, it was over.
But not done.
The People Remember
Word spread, though no one could say exactly what happened.
Just that Rudolph had been there. The creatures vanished when he appeared. That he moved like the wind had told him where to go.
And the people of Bellamy Street started looking at him differently. Not just as the boy who fixed clocks and made toys. But as something older. A protector.
A guardian.
Minerva’s Warning
“You can’t protect them all,” she said softly as she handed him tea that night. “Not forever.”
“I have to try.”
She smiled. “You sound just like him.”
Rudolph looked out the window. The veil had healed, for now. But he could still feel it. The pressure behind the world. The storm was waiting beyond the edge of dawn.
“There’ll be more breaches, won’t there?”
Kito answered this time. “Yes. And not all of them will come from the outside. Some… already live here.”
Next: The Enemy Within
As Rudolph rises in the eyes of the town, a hidden group—descendants of broken Makers—begin to stir. They see Rudolph not as a savior, but a threat to their rebirth. And some of them… might be closer than he thinks.
To be continued…
Brufay 
Leave a comment