By Avery Corey, TIWP Student

The Ninth Ring

No one went into the clock tower anymore. The door stuck when it rained, and the steps smelled like rust and old birds. From the square, it looked exactly as it always had: a narrow spine of stone, a face with numbers rubbed pale by years of being glanced at but never really seen. People trusted it anyway. They trusted the bells.

Inside, the first ring arrived as a hollow pulse, felt more than heard. Then the space followed. The stairwell loosened. Walls drifted in tune with each other. Stone underfoot stretched into something that was no longer stairs.

A street extended forward, narrow, but patient. Buildings leaned towards me as though listening, their surfaces unfinished, waiting to see what they would become. When I watched too closely, the city corrected itself, but when I let my attention drift, it relaxed.

The second ring of the bell.

It sank, distant and soft. I walked on. Later I would notice the light had shifted, a doorway had delayed, a street seemed slightly different from memory.

I didn’t see it happen all at once. It arrived in details: a crack in a wall that hadn’t been there, a shop window boarded over, a tree in the square inside the tower dropping leaves it hadn’t had before. Streets curved away from where I remembered them. A café slid closer to a corner, as if trying to overhear.

The third ring.

This one closer. Streets shifted: shortcuts lengthened when I hurried, longer paths compressed when I slowed. Direction responded less to intent than to routine.

People began to appear more often, though never fully arriving. A woman crossed a square with flowers already browning at the edges. A child practiced a melody that ended before it began. They moved like continuations, not beginnings.

The fourth ring.

Each corner felt foreign. Streets I thought were familiar became unreliable. I began to understand: The city advanced every time the clock struck. And when it was watched too closely, it changed its face. The city remembered selectively, choosing what to preserve, what to let drift.

The fifth ring.

I noticed my hands differently at my sides. Small aches had rearranged themselves. The morning I had remembered seemed to stretch backward, twisting into a shape that I did not recognize.

By the sixth ring I understood why no one stayed. The city did not trap you. It learned you.

I tried to keep track, but the numbers refused to stay still. Time pooled in doorways. The bells rang, and entire conversations ended. Someone’s childhood closed its last window. Not consciously, not personally, but through pattern and presence. It shaped itself to my movements, my attention, my pauses.

The seventh ring.

The city began to accommodate me. Where I hesitated, space widened. Where I faltered, details softened. My hands looked the same, but the space behind my eyes felt rearranged. Memories slid into new alignments, some pushed too far ahead to reach. 

The eighth ring.

In the distance, something vertical took shape. It was narrow, familiar. A structure organizing the surrounding streets. Whether it was being built or remembered, I could not tell. I had stopped trying to map the streets. They didn’t want to be named.

The ninth ring.

I circled back. The route I had entered by was gone, replaced by something equally true. The door was warm in my hand. Outside, the square remained unchanged. People passed, laughing, checking the hour on their phones. The clock face read the hour correctly.

I didn’t turn back. I didn’t need to. I could feel the city adjusting itself slightly, preparing for the next bell, confident I would carry the hour forward whether I meant to or not.