Clockwork Doll Novels & Stories

And then I found the word, bold and clear, right there in the title. Doll. I looked up at him. He was watching me, his expression unreadable, but there was something in his eyes that hadn’t been there before. Something that looked like satisfaction. “I want you to be my Doll,” he said. Mia made a sound behind me, a sharp intake of breath, but I didn’t turn around. I couldn’t. I was standing in my doorway, holding a contract that said I was his, and the man who’d been following me for two weeks was waiting for me to sign it.

And beneath it all, a new scent: the cold, dead-universe smell of mercury and silence. The workshop was ransacked. Tools scattered. Dimensional components shattered on the floor. And sitting in the center of the destruction, on his own workbench like a puppet with cut strings, was the Hollowsmith. The clockwork man's bronze body was cracked and tarnished. His mismatched glass eyes flickered, one red, one green, both dimming. His needle-thin fingers were broken, bent at impossible angles. "Ah," the Hollowsmith wheezed, his voice grinding like stripped gears. "The boy who broke the sky, come to break the clockmaker."

He rolled up the first of his sleeves and stretched his hand out so it caught the light. His entire sleeve was a canvas of intricate tattoos, with a clock dominating the design, its inner gears showing and extending down to his wrists. Surrounding the clock was a blooming rose flower, its petals wilting. Delicate rose flowers bloomed around it, their petals hugging the clock, yet also wilting, as if succumbing to the passage of time. Dominating the top part of his hand was what I assumed was an angel, with a dark cloak over his body and a blade buried in his chest

She nodded to Sera, who tapped a specific sequence on the pedestal’s interface. Suddenly, the "stopped" clock didn't just restart; it transformed. The pedestal’s glass cleared, revealing that the "stopped" gears were merely a holographic projection—the "Ghost Pedestal" Elias had created. The real Medici clock was perfectly functional, its golden gears moving with a silent, mesmerizing fluidity.

Desire and fury collided in his chest, an unstable alchemy that made his beast form strain against the edges of itself, as though his own skin no longer quite fit. He turned back toward her. His little doll. The thought tasted wrong the moment it formed—doll suggested fragility, obedience, glass. She was none of those things. She was a knife that had forgotten it was meant to stay sheathed. She scrambled to her feet. Blood dripped from her palms. Her dress was torn. Her hair tangled. And yet she stood tall and proud. The forest clung to her—leaves in her hair, dirt on her knees, his blood on her hands—marking her as surely as any rune.

Her finger then traced the rim of the cup. Round and round. A circular motion of her nerves. Tick. Tick. Tick. The old clock in the corridor was purchased from an auction in London by Grant. And the ticking of the clock had always been reassuring to her, but now it was as if the countdown of a bomb was ticking inside her.

Zinjo smiled at Aurelia, "Are you ready to disassemble the Clockwork guild?" Aurelia nodded, "Let's show these people the power of flesh and blood."

My name is Elora and I reside at the Blue Mountain Packhouse. I have a slim figure, long curly blonde hair which I usually wear up in a bun so it is out of my face. My eyes are a deep blue which I love. I am not a normal girl though. You see I am a shewolf, my rank at the packhouse is an omega. I don’t know my parents because they passed away when I was just a tiny baby, so I don’t have any memories of them. The only thing I have is a necklace locket from my mother. I have never taken it off because it makes me feel close to her spirit.

This night had little to do with Minnow becoming an adult and everything to do with her parents building connections for the Venandi empire. "Hurry up, people. I am not paying you to stand around with your hands in your pockets!" Dovie barked in the background, making the people scurry around the room to please her mother. Minnow sighed, annoyed at her mother's sharp voice threatening to give her a migraine. She desperately wished she could sink through the floorboards and escape this madness. Next to her, the make-up artist, a middle-aged woman with shoulder-length silky black hair and a perfectly styled face, was busy rummaging through her large make-up case for the right application tools

Instead, a hidden latch hidden behind the carved wooden crown of the clock released with a dull thud. Vikram reached out, his fingers brushing against the cold, aged wood. The entire face of the grandfather clock swung open like a narrow door, revealing not the intricate gears and brass weights of a standard timepiece, but a dark, hollow shaft leading straight down into the foundations of the old house.