The Gearstorm Incident

As experienced by Deryn Cogwhistle, student of Mechanomancy I still remember the clicking.
That damn sound.
When I close my eyes, it’s all I can hear.
That infernal rhythm ticking away like the universe’s cruelest joke.
The day began like any other at Clockwork University. A crisp morning, the sun rising over the spires, casting its warm light on the rotating gears of Wurmwick Hall. I was on my way to the Aetherium Tower, where a group of Techno-Mägo were working on a secret project—a prototype for a time machine.
I wasn’t supposed to be there. I was never supposed to see it.
As a second-year Mechanomancy student, I had no business near such experiments, but Professor Talix Cogwright had taken a liking to me, saying I had “potential.” It was the kind of potential that landed me in trouble more often than not. So when he whispered about an experiment in temporal mechanics, my curiosity got the best of me.
Inside the lab, the tension was thick. A ring of the most elite Techno-Mägo stood around a towering device, gears and wires spilling out of it like veins of a living thing. It was beautiful, in a terrifying way—clockwork precision meshed with a strange blue glow of aetheric energy.
The professor grinned at me through soot-stained goggles as he began flipping switches.
“You’re just in time, Deryn,” he said with that reckless smile of his, eyes gleaming with excitement. “Watch closely. This might change everything.”
Then he pulled the lever.
The hum started slow at first, barely audible over the whirring gears. But then it grew. And grew. The machine roared to life, spinning faster and faster, the air itself seemed to thicken with energy. My heart raced. The ground beneath us vibrated, and the walls of the lab shimmered as if reality itself was being... stretched.
Professor Cogwright’s face, usually full of wild excitement, twisted into something darker.
The machine was out of control.
I heard someone shout to shut it down, but it was too late. A blinding flash erupted from the core of the machine, and then—everything stopped.
For a moment, I thought I had died. The light was too bright, the sound too deafening to comprehend. Then, as quickly as it began, the world resumed... but everything was wrong. My fellow students and I found ourselves back at the start of the day.
It was morning again, the sun rising over the spires, and I was once again making my way to Aetherium Tower.
At first, I thought it was a strange case of déjà vu. But when I entered the lab and saw Talix Cogwright repeating the exact same words—“You’re just in time, Deryn.”—I knew something was horribly wrong. The machine, in its failure, had trapped us in a 24-hour time loop. We were living the same day, again and again. No one outside the experiment had any memory of what was happening.
To them, it was just another day.
To us?
It was an eternity.
We tried everything—shutting down the machine, reversing its mechanisms, even blowing it up once (Professor Cogwright’s idea, obviously). But nothing worked. Every time we woke up, it was the same sunrise, the same walk to the lab, the same conversation. Each failure brought a new level of madness. Students, myself included, started to crack under the pressure of eternal repetition.
The strangest part?
The clicking.
It started after the second loop, faint at first, then growing louder each cycle. No one knew where it came from or why it intensified as the loops progressed. Some said it was the heartbeat of time itself, punishing us for tampering with forces beyond our control.
By the fiftieth loop, the faculty stopped talking about it. Some of the professors refused to even acknowledge the machine’s existence, hoping that denial might undo whatever curse we had unleashed.
But not Talix Cogwright.
No, he became obsessed, more determined with every reset to fix the machine. But the more he tinkered, the worse things got. He even forgot to change his goggles after a while... just as cracked and dirty as they were in the first loop.
The longest day of my life. That’s how we started describing it. I’m not sure how many loops we went through in the end. A hundred? Two hundred? The days blurred together, and I stopped counting after a while. The weight of it was unbearable—knowing you’d wake up to the exact same day, again and again, with no end in sight.
In the end, it was a first-year student—someone who wasn’t even supposed to be there—that solved it.
A shy Gnome girl named Talia Windrake.
She wasn’t part of the experiment but stumbled into the loop when she came to the lab to deliver a message. On the final loop, she suggested something so simple that no one had thought of it before:
“What if the machine doesn’t want to be fixed? What if it’s... alive?”
It sounds ridiculous, I know. But Cogwright’s eyes lit up at the idea.
He ran to the machine and spoke to it—literally spoke to the gears—as if he could reason with it. And, somehow, it worked. The next morning, I woke up, and the loop was broken. The sun was in a different position, the air smelled fresher, and for the first time in what felt like years, time moved forward.
No one talks about the Gearstorm Incident now.
The faculty pretends it never happened, and Aetherium Tower was quietly sealed for months afterward. Professor Cogwright? He never looked the same after that. His reckless smile faded, and though he still teaches, there’s a shadow behind his eyes that wasn’t there before.
But me?
I still hear the clicking sometimes.
Late at night, when the university is quiet, I swear I can hear it—soft and rhythmic, like the ticking of a clock.
Waiting.