Dellen’s masterpiece sat atop an anvil set atop a complicated assemblage of gears. The entire room shifted and spun. The floor was a moving mosaic of large and small machine parts. His hammer swung, and his work glowed white hot, without a visible heat source. His assistants were spread throughout the space, attending to the machinery.

Beams of sunlight cut through glass apertures, making shadows dance. Dellen thought he saw patterns of time even in the interplay of light and dark. He was close; he could feel it. He had spent forty-seven years of focused research and experimentation on the singular pursuit of this one masterwork, forging the alloy of time.

Dellen’s hammer swung.

The tower shuddered and rocked. He spared a glance at the room and the building around him; he needed it to last just a little bit longer. It could collapse when he was done.

Each gear in the room was inscribed in the traditions of timekeeping that Dellen had encountered, researched, and unearthed over the centuries. Each slow tick of the room heralded a swing of the hammer and infused the metal on the anvil with Chronometric Aether.

Seven thousand four hundred and twenty-three unique clockwork creations were spread across the room. The smallest timepiece was no larger than Dellen’s pinky nail, and the largest stretched over two storeys tall.

Dellen swung his hammer.

The metal before him was white hot yet, somehow, it left behind dark afterimages. Darksilver was almost a legend in its own right, the secret of making it all but lost to craftsmen.

He felt the impact of the hit before, during, and after the swing. Reverberations ran up his arm before the hammer landed, continuing after they should have ceased.

Dellen felt Electrical Aether flowing through him, a river of power normally hidden from sight. For this undertaking, Aether blazed through his steelskin, illuminating him from the inside. Light shone from his eyes, a barely contained brilliance turning his goggles into lamps.

Dellen gritted his teeth and swung again.

The clangs of metal on metal seemed louder each time. Echoes hung in the room, fading a little less each time the hammer landed.

He thought the metal was ready for his next shaping. Holding it steady with tongs, he bent it into a smooth, hourglass shape around stoneglass, with one end left open.

Next, Dellen moved the hourglass to the forge, heating it until it glowed red-hot. He then poured sand, already imbued with Chronometric Aether, from a small pouch into the hourglass. It poured and poured without filling the small timekeeper, somehow compressing within.

With a steady hand, Dellen closed the end of the hourglass and positioned a graver tip against its surface. He began to carve an intricate design, taking care to keep his lines even. He watched as the patterns took on a life of their own, twisting and turning, seeming to glow with a faint blue light.

He worked, and his mind drifted into a state of deep concentration, focused entirely on the task at hand. The only sounds were the ticks and tocks of the room turning, and the rhythmic tapping of the graver on darksilver.

After what seemed like hours, Dellen stepped back and examined his work. The intricate pattern was etched into the surface with a level of precision and detail that thrilled him to his core.

With his left arm, he picked up the hourglass in a pair of forceps and swung it to within an inch of the leather apron on his chest.

Inches inside him, hidden behind his right lung, there was a cradle waiting to connect the darksilver hourglass to him.

Dellen knew what the hourglass’s cradle looked like, a sphere, peaking out from behind his right lung. Made of a combination of whisper steel and moonstone, two materials that were difficult to obtain and even harder to work with but which were prized for their ability to amplify the power of attuned objects.

The hourglass was attuned to Chronometric Aether, it stood apart from the flow of time, it could no longer interact with objects without such an attunement. Objects like the forceps which held them now, or like the cradle in his chest.

He hesitated a moment before bringing the still-glowing metal closer to his torso. Dellen could still see sand falling from top to bottom through the stoneglass. Every second of hesitation was a chance for the imbuement to destabilise and ruin his work.

Dellen brought the hourglass to his chest, and then released it watching it pass through the apron, and out of sight.

Unfamiliar Aether flowed into his body, settling alongside his Electrical Aether. He closed his eyes and guided the unfamiliar energy across familiar pathways.

The Aether spilled out, a river bursting its banks. Dellen’s body jerked, a sear of pain running through his senses. His eyes sprang open and he reached in all directions, forceps and hammer dropping from his hands.

Around him, standing on their own platforms before their own anvils, were afterimages or perhaps mirrors of him, expressions of horror painted on every face.

The afterimages exploded in rapid succession. Metal burst from their bodies, hitting Dellen’s assistants, knocking them down.

Dellen’s left arm exploded in a haze of organic metal.

Sharp fragments of bone tore steelskin open across his body.

Dellen’s right leg buckled. He fell forward, a scream froze in his throat, toppling from his place of safety into the complicated meshwork of the room.

When he opened his eyes, all he saw was a blur. He blinked several times trying to clear his vision.

The world swam into focus.

There were body parts everywhere.

The air was thick with the acrid smell of smoke and burning metal.

Dellen’s body jerked, and the sound of metal screeching on metal tore the air. He looked to his left, jutting from his shoulder was a collection of metallic bone and muscle, flaps of steelskin covered the wound, like a grotesquely wrapped gift. Blood trickled from the torn edges.

A dull, throbbing pain, beat at him from the joint. He frowned, he didn’t want it to hurt, but he knew it should hurt, hurt more than it did; it should have been a fount of agony, not a challenge to be mastered. A crackle of electricity danced between metal points and faded with a weak gasp of sparks.

Dull red and orange light cast sinister shadows.

Dellen pushed down with his right hand, levering himself to a sitting position.

His right leg was twisted, his pants were torn, marred with lines of blood, steelskin sporting rips, showing patches of metal beneath.

He pulled his feet beneath him and pushed up. The ground lurched, and his chin clipped the floor.

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Dellen pulled himself up, resting on his knees, and looked around.

The dull red and orange light came from hot metal above and in the distance, and the entire floor was a series of interconnected gears. He was perched close to the edge of a larger gear, making it hard to balance.

A background roar made its way to his ears, and Dellen heard a rumble coming up from the darkness beneath the floor.

Dellen closed his eyes, felt the movement of the gear beneath him, and rose to his feet. His weight shifted to his back foot, and he adjusted his balance to the slow momentum.

He felt energy flickering through his body, a candle guttering in the wind. Sensing within, he could feel his Aether was low, barely enough to sustain him and keep him moving.

He scanned across the surface of the gear he stood on, aged green copper, pitted with old scars except where his shoulder had torn through to the dull color beneath.

Red and orange light provided some illumination, but there was more shadow than anything else.

He took a step forward and his legs wobbled. His foot came down, and his weight adjusted the position of his ankle rather than his will. His body felt disassociated from his mind.

Dellen gritted his teeth; saliva ran over his dry tongue. Another step brought him closer to the edge of the gear. There had to be something, somewhere. He refused to believe that he would fall, alone, in the near dark.

There was something, somewhere. He just needed to keep taking steps.

Eyes tracked through the gloom; another gear, six feet across, was coming up. He stepped to the outer edge of the gear he was on and waited on a tooth. Just one step.

Dellen stepped, and like that, he was on another gear moving in another direction.

Wait, step, wait, step, wait, step.

Dellen crossed gear after gear, each crossing a little more challenging than the last. Moving his legs stopped being automatic; he directed energy through his body to individual muscles, pushing it to where it was needed.

He could sense his Spark Core straining to absorb ambient Aether. The air was bursting with Electrical Aether; he just could not access much of it.

Dellen took another step and missed.

His body plummeted from the tooth and into the dark below.

Spinning mid-fall, he reached up and grasped at the air.

His back hit something hard, and a crack climbed up his spine to his ears. The pain came a moment later. Unlike his shoulder, it was red, it was hot, and it kept coming.

Dellen slammed into something that crunched beneath him. It poked into his chest and tore through steelskin.

Despite the complaints of his back, Dellen rolled and felt across his torso.

Something was sticking out of his chest. Dellen probed it with his fingers. Perhaps three inches long, he wrapped his hand around it and pulled. A feel of scraping metal shuddered through him; his lips pulled into a grimace, then it was free.

A faint glow cut through the dark, coming from just below his chin.

Dellen stopped moving, joints frozen by fear.

His Spark Core was exposed.

It wasn’t enough to cast more than a few feet of radiance, but all around, he could see indistinct piles. He crawled closer; they were piles of bone, muscle, and steelskin. All of higher grades of Aetherforging, like the bone, muscle, and steelskin on his body.

“Welcome!” Came a cheerful, almost chirpy voice.

Startled, Dellen’s legs jerked to the left, and he toppled over.

He looked around for the voice.

“Up here.”

About three feet above him was a whirring assembly of gears and spokes hovering in the air. “Yes, here.” Said a voice from within. “Eighth Trinity, very impressive.”

In a voice colored with confusion, Dellen said, “What are you?” He pulled himself to an upright position while waiting for an answer.

“Who, not what!” The voice became brash, like burnished copper in a midday sun. “I am Gilgamesh; I have been assigned to assist you in your escape from the Refinery.”

Dellen glanced at his missing left arm and the ripped steelskin all over his body. “Escape? Assigned? Assigned by who?”

“By the Refinery.”

The Refinery wasn’t a name that meant anything to him. “What is this place?”

Gilgamesh stared at him for a long minute. Dellen picked up the impression of being intensely scrutinized, but he was not sure what gave him that impression. “Oh, I see, you’re here out of order.”

“Out of order?” Dellen asked.

“Yes, is that a Synthetic Chronometric Core? You are here, early, or perhaps late, linear time is confusing. In any case, that is impressive.”

“I don’t understand.”

“No matter,” Gilgamesh sounded fascinated. “You are not ready to be here.”

“What’s your role here?” Dellen asked, struggling to keep up.

“I am one of the Observers,” Gilgamesh said with pride.

“What does an Observer do?”

“I’m going to lead you back to your place in time,” Gilgamesh said in that same cheery tone.

Dellen stared up at Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh was a small, but intricate being, made entirely of gears and mechanical components. At first glance, he appeared to be a jumble of interlocking pieces and parts, but on closer inspection, it was clear that every gear and spoke was placed with precision and purpose. His body was roughly cube-shaped, about one-foot square, with a mesh of gears and cogs forming his exterior.

“How do I leave?”

“All you need to do is walk through your gate.”

Dellen looked again at the mountains of broken parts and bodies ahead of him. He’d made his way across several spinning gears with only a gasp of Aether coursing through him. He could scale a mountain or two.

He could scale all the mountains.

“Which way is the gate?”

“Behind you and to your left.”

Dellen turned and trudged, each step feeling heavier than the last. “Tell me about the gate, what happens next?”

“If I understand things correctly, you’re going to have a chance to redeem a mistake.”

“Do I get to know which mistake?”

Gilgamesh did his approximation of a shrug, a heaving of machinery that, under other circumstances, Dellen would have found fascinating. “I don’t know; my information on the world bound by time is limited. You will be re-integrating soon, though.”

Dellen walked, one careful step after another, making sure that his footing was stable before pushing forward.

“You’re just about there.”

He took another few steps, and light shone up from beneath the carpet of limbs.

“Prepare to exit the Refinery.”

The light flared, blinding him for a few moments with its intensity.

When he could see again, Dellen found himself within a chaotic jumble of flowing energy. It felt like streams within streams. Vast torrents of power passed around him, buffeting him like winds in a storm.

There was no up, no down, and no ground. A leaf in a stream, he was without a point of reference, but he somehow felt as though he could feel time passing faster and slower in constant flux around him.

A series of parts unfolded out of nowhere in the space around him, assembling themselves into the almost familiar shape of Gilgamesh. “Chaotic in here,” Gilgamesh said in everyday tones. “Don’t worry; you’re almost at your portal out.”

Dellen felt himself pulled out of one current and into another. He felt more than saw that this current didn’t continue into chaos around him but instead flowed out and left. “What is this? Where am I going?”

“Back to the moment you left the timeline.”

“When was that?” Dellen said.

Before Gilgamesh could answer, Dellen passed through the exit.

His head and shoulders had partially emerged from a tear in space. Around him, he saw a collapsing room filled with clocks and swirling energies, perhaps a hundredth of a hundredth as intense as what had just been around him.

Then came a burst of energy from around the middle of his chest.

Dellen was blown backward away from the room of clocks into the jumble of energy.

Moments later, Gilgamesh appeared, his voice shot up in pitch. For the first time, he sounded confused and more than a little alarmed, “What are you doing here? How are you here? You have to go back. You have to go back.”

“How? Why?” Asked Dellen.

Without a point of reference, it was all but impossible to understand where he was in the chaos, but he had the sense that he was already far from whatever portal had taken him to the room of clocks.

The energy stream tried to spit Dellen out through another tear but failed. Then another, and another, and another.

Dellen saw scenes that were almost familiar - the sky full of lightning, mines ripping precious metals from the ground, open plains, airships, a gladiatorial stadium filled with combatants, a bathysphere deep beneath the ocean’s surface, a bazaar filled with illicit materials - scenes rushing by him in an ever-increasing blur. Each time, his passage out was interrupted and he was flung back into the maelstrom of energy.

Faster and faster, he was flung back and forth, unable to focus long enough to see where he was.

Then it stopped. Dellen lurched in place, startled by the abrupt cessation of movement. His fingers wrapped around a balcony railing in front of him. He stopped and tried to take stock of his surroundings.

He was out of the time stream and standing upright on a railed balcony with the landscape spinning by.

“Where am I?” Dellen wondered aloud to himself.

“How should I know?” Gilgamesh said voice harsh with irritation, “This is your past.”

Dellen turned his head to look at Gilgamesh.

“Somehow,” he said slowly, “I thought you were staying behind.”

“I am,” Gilgamesh said before pausing, “I was,” then more quietly, “I should have.”

“We were in your time stream; you should have been ejected back to when you left, to what was your present.”

“Should have; well, where are we now, then?”

“We’re in your past. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to get back to the Refinery.”

“Maybe I’m wrong, but I think the fact that you’re here means you can’t go back just yet.”

“My knowledge of the world outside the Refinery is,” Gilgamesh trailed off, and Dellen could almost feel him struggling for words, “Limited.”

“This may have been my life, but I don’t remember it.”

Gilgamesh sighed. “Thinking out loud, speaking strictly hypothetically, not to be misconstrued as absolute factual knowledge? I believe we’re in Copperopolis.”