Lune Ashenveil's Arc

Chapter 1 of 2

Lune Ashenveil had spent three days in the library searching for one word about the Tictocs, and had found nothing. She sat at a reading table on the fourth floor, surrounded by open books that told her only what she already knew. A brass gear on her sleeve caught the lamplight. She had stitched it there last winter, along with all the others she'd found while chasing ticking sounds through ruins and market alleys. None of the books explained where the gears came from. None explained why the ticking calmed her when nothing else did. She was about to close another useless volume when she heard it. Tick. Tick. Tic-toc. Faint, from somewhere below the floor. Her hand stilled on the page. The sound was steady, patient, waiting for her to notice. "You look like you've found a ghost." The assistant archivist, Mira Bellflower, set a stack of returns on the table. Her glasses were crooked. A pencil was stuck in her bun. She had been kind to Lune all week, fetching texts nobody had asked for in a century. "Or a nap. Both are allowed, technically." "Do you hear that?" Lune asked. Mira tilted her head. "Hear what?" Lune stood. The ticking pulled her toward the west wall, where a shelf of astronomy volumes met the floor at an odd angle. She ran her fingers along the wood until she felt a seam. A latch. The shelf swung inward on silent hinges. Mira dropped her pencil. "That is definitely not on the map." Stone steps spiraled down into black. Lune took them without waiting. The ticking grew louder with each turn. After a while an amber glow began to warm the walls. She rounded the last curve and stopped. A tree stood in the center of a domed chamber. Its trunk was polished wood banded with brass. Its leaves were tiny panes of glass, each one lit from within. Gears turned slowly where branches met the trunk. Fruit-shaped lamps hung from the boughs and dropped soft golden light onto the flagstones. The whole tree ticked, thousands of small movements keeping one enormous rhythm. At its base sat a small figure. Round head. Blue-glass eyes. A body of gears and springs that clicked as it lifted its face to her. A Tictoc. A living one. Boots scraped the stairs behind her. A man stepped into the amber light, older, grey at the temples, dressed like a scholar who had walked a long way to get here. "So you found it," Elian Voss said. He did not sound surprised. He sounded relieved. "I have been waiting seventeen years for someone the tree would wake for." The small Tictoc stood up. It walked to Lune and touched her coat, right where the first brass gear was stitched. The gear on her sleeve began, softly, to turn.