# 📖 STORY I — CHAPTER II## **When Night Turned Back Time**

The night was heavy, damp, and thick as smoke. When Marek's disappearance became a fact, the townspeople began to avoid the edge of the old garden. Not because they were afraid of the house—it no longer existed, after all—but because where it stood, the earth looked scorched.

No one dared touch her… except Anna, Marek's sister.

She was small, delicate, but never afraid of the dark. Even as a child, she had walked the garden at night, listening to the whispers of the wind. But now she felt the darkness wanting something from her.

When she touched the black earth, she felt a cold so sharp, as if she had touched ice hidden in stone.

"Marek…?" she whispered.

The earth… echoed back.

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## **Returns**

From that night, Anna began to hear a ticking sound. At first, it was faint, as if coming from behind the wall, then it grew louder and louder. So loud that she couldn't sleep.

One night, she sat up in bed and saw that all the clocks in her house—even the broken ones—had started ticking backwards. But the hands were moving backwards.

The room was cold, and the air smelled of metal.

The closet door opened of its own accord.

A hand reached out from the darkness.

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## **Conversation in the Dark**

A voice she didn't recognize whispered:

"Time returns to claim what was taken."

"Who are you?" Anna stepped back, her back pressed against the cold wall.

"I am that… that keeps the hours…"

"Where is my brother?"

The hand disappeared, but the clocks began to strike the thirteenth hour.

Anna screamed.

There was no one to hear her.

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## **Secret Archive of Time**

The next day, she found a forgotten volume in the old library:

**"Chronicle of House Vorheim"**

On the first page was a lithograph of the house that had just vanished.

Underneath, an inscription in ancient letters:

**This house belongs not to space, but to time. And time demands its due."**

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