No other flowers or plants had mouths or spoke to us as we went closer to the trunk.
We spreadout to better search for a way down. The others were close by, but I was breathing a bit easier than in the beginning. I searched the branches, tested them, touched them, went close to those rings, the ones that had faded and the ones that still glowed slightly, but I found nothing else unusual, and no way to move down.
The deeper I went, the more distant the voices andfootsteps of the other Hands, but I didn’t mind. I knew they’d shout if they found something—and I’d do the same, too, regardless of whether I preferred to do this whole thing by myself.
All I saw were more of those branches and leaves and flowers and mushrooms—until I finally began to make out a shape that didn’t seem to fit in with the rest of its surroundings.
At first, I thought it was just darkness, a shadow of a trunk or something, but the closer I went, the clearer I saw the details and the faster my heart beat.
Of a back.
Of an arm.
Of a head.
It was a man half lying underneath a blanket of moss and grass and tree roots.
“Uh…guys?”
My heart jumped and I turned to see Levana some fifteen feet in the distance, her hands raised in surrender, slowly moving away from a thick branch—and her eyes were downward, on the shadows.
Thoseshadows looked like a man, too.
And the men were moving.
“Get back!”someone called, but they didn’t need to. We were all moving back, coming together again, because the men that were suddenly everywhere, lying on the floor near the trunks were slowly waking up, moving, pulling themselves from under roots and moss, making to stand up.
“Should we help them?”
“Who are they?”
“Didwedo this to them?"
“How long have they been here?!”the others wondered, but a bad feeling had already settled in my gut, and I doubted we were supposed to behelpingthem. In fact, I was pretty surethattheywere who the flowers meant when they told us to keep quiet.
I realized this even before the one closest to us, still on his knees, turned his head and looked at us.
He was not a man at all.
He was a timewraith.
Someone screamed. Someone cursed. My mind was stuck on the lifeless eyes of the creature built so similar to a man that he could have fooled anyone. He could have fooledus,too, had there been just a little less light and had the sun outside not begun to unset and turn the sky lighter. We couldn’t see it from the canopy all around us, but the light still seeped through.
We saw all four timewraiths in perfect detail as they made it to their feet.
There were only two chronovore creatures—beings that fed on time—that lived in the Clockrealm: clockbeasts and timewraiths. Clockbeasts were animals, mindless, and they tore through flesh to get to the time of a person, but the wraiths were different. They could latch onto your time and suck it right out of you as long as they were in contact with your body, no tearing of the skin or blood required. You also couldn’t use magic on them because they could transform it back into pure energy (time) and suckthatdry as well.
Nobody really knew where wraiths came from or why they were all shaped like adult male men. Theories varied fromone of the original Hands of Time was corrupted and its offspring are the wraiths,toa cult once tried to defy death and bring back the dead from the ground when their time was already spent, and the result was wraiths, alive but not, forever in need of time to feed on, to stay functional.We had systems in place to protect ourselves against wraiths. They fed on Sparetime mostly and lived far away from populated areas. They weredangerous, indeed—they could easily drain you of all your seconds and leave you there to die.
Which was why I wasshockedto find them here, inside the Tree of Years.
Clockbeasts were different—they could be killed simply by smashing their clocks. They were created on purpose to serve the people, and they were easy to manage—but wraiths?
“Everybody, move back, slowly…” Helen said as we retreated, and the wraiths were already on their feet, and they had all seen us, all four of them.
They looked so strange, their skin near gray, their eyes completely dull save for hunger forever reflecting in them. They wore rags for clothes, and they were skinny, their bones protruding from every angle. They had hair on their heads here and there, patches of it. Black. Greasy. Disgusting.
Sharp teeth lined their jaws, their lips nonexistent. They had slits for mouths and they looked absolutely horrifying—but to me, the scariest part of a wraith had always been their hands. They had four fingers on each hand, and their fingers were long, at least twice the length of ours. They had no fingernails and the tips of them were bruised, the skin calloused.
