This chapter draws a quiet breath before the unraveling.
Lira and the clockmaker have pushed the mechanism past minutes, past play, into something heavier—hours rewound, hours rewritten. But in Chapter 7, their intimacy starts to fray. Time isn’t the only thing being stretched thin.
For the first time, the key is turned without invitation. For the first time, someone pulls back.
This chapter was challenging to write. It needed to hold tenderness and misalignment in the same frame—wanting and not quite meeting. The clocks falter. So do they. The line between desire and exhaustion sharpens. And when time snaps back into place, the mark it leaves doesn’t fade.
One of the recurring themes in The Clockmaker’s Rewind is emotional erosion: not grand rupture, but quiet wear. Chapter 7 leans into that—into what gets lost in the turning, and what stubbornly remains.
As always, I’d love to hear from you.
—Eric