The old clock tower stood at the edge of the village, its gears long rusted and its hands frozen at 3:17. No one knew who built it or why, but the townsfolk avoided it, whispering about strange occurrences that happened when the clock struck that hour. The children called it “the place where time forgets to move.” Elias had always been curious about the clock. He was a quiet boy with a mind that wandered beyond the boundaries of normality. One autumn afternoon, he climbed the creaking steps to the tower’s top, where the air was colder and the world seemed to hold its breath. As he reached the bell, he noticed something peculiar: the shadow of the tower stretched in two different directions at once, one pointing east, the other west. He touched the bell, and the moment his fingers met the metal, the world around him shifted. The sky turned a deep indigo, and the sun hung low in the sky, casting long shadows that moved backward. Elias stumbled back, heart pounding, as the tower’s walls began to flicker between past and present. He saw himself standing there, but also a younger version of himself running down the stairs, laughing as if he had just discovered something wonderful. When the vision faded, Elias found himself back on the platform, the clock still frozen at 3:17. But something was different. The leaves on the trees below were now brown and brittle, though it was only early September. A child’s toy car lay on the ground, abandoned, and the air smelled faintly of burnt sugar. Over the next few days, Elias noticed more strange things. A woman walking her dog would suddenly appear twice—once in the present, once in the past, both moving in opposite directions. A man in the market would speak to someone who wasn’t there, as if he were having a conversation with a ghost from another time. And every evening at 3:17, the clock tower would hum, a sound like a distant train, and the world would waver for a few seconds. Elias tried to document everything in a notebook, sketching the shifting shadows and writing down the dates and times when the anomalies occurred. He became obsessed, spending hours at the tower, waiting for the next shift. One night, as the moon cast silver light over the village, he heard a voice calling his name. It was soft, like wind through leaves, and it came from inside the tower. Inside, the air felt heavier, charged with an energy that made his skin tingle. The walls pulsed with a faint glow, and the clock’s hands twitched slightly, as if struggling to break free from their frozen state. At the center of the room stood a mirror, not of glass, but of polished obsidian, reflecting not Elias, but a version of himself that looked older, wearier, and watching him with knowing eyes. “You’ve come back,” the reflection said, its lips not moving. “But you never really left.” Elias stepped closer, his breath shallow. “Who are you?” “I am what you could have become,” the reflection replied. “Or what you will become. Time is not a line, Elias. It is a river, and you have been swimming in it for longer than you remember.” The mirror rippled, and the room dissolved into a cascade of images: Elias running through the streets as a child, Elias sitting alone in the tower, Elias standing beside a grave marked with his own name. Each moment blurred into the next, and the clock tower loomed in every scene, its hands spinning wildly before freezing again. When the vision ended, Elias was back on the platform, the clock still frozen. His hands trembled as he clutched the notebook. He had no memory of how he got there, only the certainty that something had changed. The villagers began to talk about him, saying he had gone mad. But Elias knew better. He had seen the truth: time was not meant to be understood, only experienced. And as the clock tower loomed behind him, he wondered if he had truly escaped—or if he was only just beginning.