"I thought you were dead," Silas said, bolting the door. "Or worse, promoted."
"I was a ghost for a while," Lyra said, her mechanical hand clicking as she flexed the fingers. She reached into her coat and pulled out a heavy object wrapped in oil-stained silk. "But I found something in the Sunken Archives. Something that shouldn't exist."
She unwrapped the silk to reveal a gear. But it wasn't brass, steel, or iron. It was carved from a single piece of Obsidian, and the teeth of the gear seemed to swallow the light around them.
"When the shadow-gear turns, the machine of the world shall skip a beat, and the Old Gods shall wake in the gaps between the seconds."
— The Lexicon of the Unmaker
"This is a Primal Gear," Silas whispered, his face turning pale. "The legends say these were used to calibrate the flow of time itself."
"It's not just a legend," Lyra said, her amber eye شروع to glow brighter. "The Great Crank is failing, Silas. The Emperor thinks he can replace the city's heart with these. He doesn't realize that if he starts the machine with shadow-metal, he won't just be powering Oakhaven. He'll be rewriting reality."