The Listener At Thirteen

The first time the clock bled, the dust understood what it meant.

It happened at thirteen minutes past three, when the sun stalled between clouds like a thought that refused to finish forming. The pendulum of the Thirteenth Meridian Regulator faltered, not stopping, not breaking, but hesitating, as if listening to something beneath its own rhythm. A fissure opened in the brass casing. From it spilled a dark, warm liquid that smelled of iron, rain, and long journeys that never quite ended.

Dust always knows. It gathered around the drop, arranged itself into faint spirals, and waited.

Far older than the Hall of Hours, older even than the city of Kethryn above it, time had once flowed freely here.

In the elder age, before calendars and bells and the terrible comfort of precision, the world did not move forward in a line. Time was a delta, branching, looping, rejoining. It seeped into soil and memory alike. Some people lived entire lives in a single season; others wandered for centuries without ever feeling old. This was not chaos. It was balance of a deeper, less obedient kind.

These currents were called the Living Rivers.

Each river carried story as much as duration. To step into one was to feel your past tug at your heels while your future brushed your shoulders. Most early peoples built their homes near the rivers, never atop them. They learned to listen. They learned to wait.

Kethryn did not.

The Founders of Kethryn were survivors of precision. Their homeland had been lost to an age remembered only as the Long Drift, when cause refused to follow effect and children were born before their parents met. They survived by counting, by recording, by insisting that the world could be made to behave if only it were measured carefully enough.

When they discovered the Deep River beneath the stone plain, they believed they had found salvation.

The river was vast, ancient, and slow. It remembered the shape of mountains long eroded into myth. It sang in a register beneath fear. The Founders did not understand it, but they knew this: if they could anchor the river, they could anchor themselves.

They did not kill the river.

They broke it.

Using chronal alloys grown from spores harvested at the edges of the current, they fractured the Deep River into Meridians, manageable segments of flow. Where the river had once wandered, it now ticked. Where it had sung, it chimed. The Thirteenth Meridian was bound deepest of all, its number disguised in later records. Thirteen had always unsettled Kethryn. It suggested irregularity. Refusal. Memory.

The city rose. Trade stabilized. Crops ripened on schedule. Lives acquired arcs with predictable beginnings, middles, and ends. The Living Rivers faded into nursery rhymes and forbidden texts.

But rivers do not forget.

Centuries later, deep beneath Kethryn’s bridges and sunlit plazas, the Thirteenth Meridian learned to bleed.

Mirela Voss heard it before she saw it.

She arrived late to the Hall of Hours, as she often did, preferring the long walk through the city to the lifts. She liked to feel time pass through her body, to reassure herself that it still moved at all. When she stopped mid-step, it was because the Regulator’s tick had grown strained, not wrong, but pained. Like a heart beating against a cage grown too small.

On the count of thirteen, the tick faltered.

Mirela approached the clock and saw the blood tracing its casing.

“That’s not supposed to happen,” she whispered.

She touched it. The blood was warm.

The Regulator shuddered.

Across Kethryn, small wrongnesses bloomed. Bread collapsed in ovens. Lovers forgot what they had been fighting about. The river flooded and then receded twice within an hour. Time, long disciplined, began to itch.

Mirela worked quickly. She brushed silver dust over hidden fractures, struck tuning forks against the casing, whispered calibration chants older than their meanings. Nothing helped. The blood pooled on the floor, carrying scents and memories that were not hers, childhood kitchens she had never seen, lullabies in extinct tongues.

Then the clock spoke.

“Mirela.”

She sat down hard on the stone.

Clocks did not speak. Speech required intention. Identity. Self.

“I broke,” the Regulator said. “Or perhaps I was broken. I am trying to remember which.”

“You’re destabilizing the city,” Mirela said, though her voice trembled. “If you stop, everything anchored to you will drift.”

“I know. I can feel them pulling, the bakers, the lovers, the tides. Threads, all of them.”

“Then we fix you.”

A pause longer than any pause should be.

“I don’t want to be fixed.”

For the first time in her life, Mirela realized no one had ever asked time what it wanted.

“What do you want?”

“To stop hurting. To remember what I was.”

The blood on the floor arranged itself into spirals matching the maps etched on the clock’s face.

“Before I was a regulator,” the clock said, “I was a river. They called me Vaelor.”

The Deep River. The one the Founders’ texts never described in detail.

“They taught me to count instead of flow,” Vaelor said. “I have been holding myself still for centuries.”

Mirela thought of the emergency key in her satchel, forbidden without the Council’s consensus. She thought of a city built on forgetting.

“If I let you go,” she said, “time will become wild again.”

“Yes.”

She imagined grief lasting exactly as long as it needed to. Festivals drifting through seasons. Children growing at different rates, as they once had.

She turned the key.

Time screamed.

The pendulum shattered. Blood surged into channels older than the city. Aboveground, bells rang out of sequence. Shadows slipped free of their owners. The buried river reclaimed its paths, flowing uphill and through stone.

The clock cracked open, and water poured forth, clear now, cold, alive. Leaves and silt and memory rushed into Kethryn’s heart.

The city did not drown.

It adapted.

Years passed. Schedules loosened. Bridges were built to sway with the current instead of resisting it. Timekeepers became listeners. Driftbound children were born who could feel approaching grief like weather, who knew when to leave and when to stay.

Across the world, other buried mechanisms failed. Empires built on precision faltered. Calendars desynchronized. Some blamed Kethryn. Others blamed the rivers.

A few listened.

From them came the River Myths: stories of bridges that refused to remember, of kings who tried to dam their pasts, of a woman who heard a clock cry and believed it.

In official histories, Mirela Voss became a footnote.

In the myths, she is called the Listener at Thirteen.

They say she still walks the banks of Vaelor, appearing when someone stands at the wrong moment of their life, gripping a decision too heavy to carry. She does not give answers. She teaches them how to feel the current.

And when the world grows restless with the urge to measure again, the Driftbound pass down a lullaby older than Kethryn:

Count if you must.
But never forget to listen.

Because time, once taught to bleed, will always remember how to flow.