#dark musing

The silence. 

It was so deafening it could make one’s ears ring. As if something normally so unnoticeable in it’s simplicity like oxygen had suddenly been torn away and left nothing in it’s wake but emptiness. 

Rain pattered on the foggy windows but the sound never reached the ears of the Yordle that sat almost motionless at his workbench. As if time itself had frozen the clocks lining the walls, now they ticked no more. 

The ticks of the clocks, the footsteps of customers, the laughs and jokes from his apprentice Arion. 

They were all gone.

The very heartbeat of the shop had silenced as it’s pulse ceased and lay dormant in tragic melancholy around a grey figure sat slumped over at a workbench in the center of the shop. The desk was at an awkward angle and scratch marks on the floor showed where it had been pushed from the corner. Piles of crumpled papers and broken parts lay abandoned around the legs of the desk never to be used again.

“Come back,” The figure murmured, “I can fix you...” 

The promise hung as empty as his heart on the air. He was speaking to no individual, but rather to a disc-like device that sat in front of him on the desk. The object was unassuming to an onlooker but to him it promised to take away everything he valued. 

Giz could barely breathe through the musty odor of dust and mildew in the shop as he heaved uneven breaths. Just like his now decrepit and dark shop he fell apart just the same. His goggles crooked and cracked like the faces of the clocks on his walls, his fur scraggly and unkempt like the surfaces and floor boards. 

The Yordle’s very pride and joy was this shop, yet he let it fall into decay. Instead he worked on that disc excessively, never letting it out of his sight even to sleep.

“I can fix you...” he murmured again, his fingers scratching his only movement as his claws dug into his skin. Then his ear flicked. 

He heard it. 

He HAD to have heard it, what else could it have been?

A tick. 

Giz’s head shot up from his hands as he almost tumbled off his stool, his wild blue eyes fixated on the device before he scrambled to pick it up and hold it in his hands, pressing it against his ear to try and hear that sweet sound again. 

“I-I heard it!” he stammered as he pushed himself to his feet, his legs wobbling as if they hadn’t been used in days before he turned and held the device straight outward to a shadowy figure in the corner. 

“Look! I heard it!” he exclaimed proudly like a child showing a crude drawing to their parent as he stumbled across the floor, eventually falling to his knees in front of the figure as his eyes welled up. 

“I... Fix?” he stated in an uncertain tone, his eyes darting wildly across the disc hoping to hear that sound just one more time. The figure before him was about the same height he was with it’s back propped against the wall. The large ears and small stature made it appear that it was a Yordle just like he was, but something wasn’t quite the same. 

Her blonde locks were still so well-kept, faint lines across her joints appeared to expose the muscle underneath, and her eyes were distant as if they were made of glass. She was so... Artificial, yet was still in so much better condition than Giz.

And there was the open space in her chest. 

Instead of the expected gore spilling from the opening it held many gears and springs all latched together in a complex mechanism that hadn’t moved for ages.  She was like a loved doll once used often by a child now dormant and forgotten with it’s power source removed to remain asleep forever. 

But still Giz spoke as if he expected the marionette to answer to no avail. His patchy eyebrows furrowed in frustration as he tried to slip the device he was holding into the ‘sleeping’ Yordle’s chest, taking multiple tries to finally slide it in place. 

His ears folded with a weak smile in satisfaction before they shot up again, his pupils shaking as the merchant desperately patted down his pockets and the floor boards. 

“Key! Key key key key key key....” he repeated obsessively as he searched for what he was after. 

“Desk!” he exclaimed after a couple minutes, recalling where he left the ‘key’ before removing the device from the chest of the marionette again. “I’ll be right back.” he assured before standing to his wobbly feet again. 

As the shop keep almost sprinted across the room he stumbled, one of his boots coming loose as he collapsed without his arms making any attempt to stop his fall. Instead his face took the full force of the impact as he tucked the device close to his chest. A guttural cry of despair leaked from his throat as he quickly pushed himself up and turned the device over in his hands looking for any damage before sighing in relief, completely ignoring the blood now dripping from his nose. 

Giz managed to retrieve the turnkey and scramble back towards his project and struggled desperately to fit the key into the center of the device. 

Then the turnkey slipped. 

The world almost seemed to move in slow motion as he watched the small piece of brass clatter against the ground and bounce beneath a loose floorboard out of sight. His jaw hung open shakily for a moment as blood stained his beard and mustache before he dived towards the floor and pawed at the board trying to will the key back into his hands.

Tears began to stain his fur and cut through the red streak on his nose as he slumped down and fell on his side, his eyes fixated on the Yordle figure and his hands clutching the device with white knuckles. 

“It’s okay... It’s okay.” Giz whimpered, not entirely clear on if he was talking to himself or the marionette. “I can... Make another.” he assured as his hand slid across the floor and took a hold of the cold porcelain hand of the doll, the ringing pouring back into his ears again.