🕰 The Clock Between Worlds | Issue #2
Issue #2 - Whispers in the Orchard | From Minds In Design
🕯️The Lantern Lights (Introduction)
Do you hear it? The toll of the bell. The sound that seeps between your bones, shaking loose the memories you thought you had left behind. Welcome back, traveler. I warned you last time: once you enter Burrington, the town finds a way of keeping you close.
The fog has grown thicker since you last walked these streets. It curls over cobblestones slick with autumn rain, clings to wooden signs that creak on rusted hinges, and gathers around the great clocktower whose hands, even now, twitch with impatience. Some swear that Burrington isn’t a place at all but a hunger that learned how to wear buildings.
But you’ve come anyway, lantern in hand, stepping carefully as I guide you further in. Why? Perhaps curiosity. Perhaps guilt. Perhaps a story you cannot shake.
Tonight, the town has many gifts to reveal:
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The orchard that rots no matter how many times its trees are replanted.
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The whispers preserved behind the clocktower walls.
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An account of time itself beginning to break.
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The promises October holds when the dead press closest to the living.
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Letters pulled from drawers that should have remained locked.
Breathe deeply, traveler. The air tastes of iron and cider, smoke and sorrow. Stay close. If you drift too far, Burrington may mistake you for one of its own. Explore my site Minds In Design for more.
🍏The Orchard’s Rot (Feature on The Withering Orchard)
The lantern light dims as we turn away from the square and descend a dirt road no one admits exists. The trees lean here, crooked and scarred, their bark swollen with disease that refuses to die. This is the orchard, Burrington’s orchard, though no fruit worth eating has grown here in decades.
Children whisper that if you bite into one of its apples, you’ll taste not sweetness but grief. Adults say nothing, because their parents taught them silence is safer. But every few years, someone wanders into these rows of trees and doesn’t return. Their names are added to the orchard’s roots, and Burrington pretends not to notice.
This, traveler, is the setting of The Withering Orchard; a story already told, but never finished, because the orchard does not stop with words. On my site, you may read its full telling. For those who crave the curse in another form, there is more: a screenplay. Some say the orchard looks different when filmed, that shadows caught on camera behave unlike shadows on the page. I cannot tell you which version is truer, only that both breathe.
Would you like a taste? Not the full fruit, but just the skin?
“The orchard smelled of sweetness that was long gone, as though the memory of fruit lingered but the flesh had rotted away. Every branch creaked not with the wind but with the weight of what had been lost.”
Even these words are dangerous. Hold them gently, lest the bark find its way into your skin.
The orchard does not simply rot. It remembers.
🧭Behind the Clocktower (Behind-the-Scenes Book Feature)
From the orchard, we climb stone steps slick with moss. Each footfall echoes as though a dozen others are following, though I assure you, traveler, we walk alone. At the summit stands the clocktower, face cracked, hands twitching, its tolling heart the rhythm of Burrington itself.
But tonight, the tower is not content to chime. It wishes to confess. And so I lead you inside, where each floor reveals a piece of the truth.
First Floor: Endings That Could Have Been
Here lie three doors, each leading to a future Burrington could have claimed. One whispers of release, one of eternal looping, and one of sacrifice. Only one door was chosen in the end, but the others still rattle on their hinges, desperate to be opened.
Second Floor: Maps of a Town That Never Was
Pinned across the walls are sketches of Burrington’s streets, drawn and redrawn until the ink blurred. This building was here, then gone. That family once lived in the square, then never existed. Burrington’s design shifts like memory: unreliable, but stubborn.
Third Floor: How Time Fractured
Here the air thins. Diagrams hang from beams, notes scattered across desks, all trying to explain the loops and the breaks. Time in Burrington is not broken by accident but by intent. Someone, something, pulled too hard at the threads.
These are only fragments from the first behind-the-scenes book. More lies above us, but the steps vanish here. The tower has no wish to reveal everything at once. Secrets must be earned.
🔮The Day That Broke Time (Book Two Update)
Do you hear the ticking? No, not from the tower. From beneath your ribs. That is the sound of The Day That Broke Time.
The story has begun. Ink on page, heavier with each word. Beck is awake again, though what she’s done to Burrington lingers like a wound. Amber stirs, carrying blood that ties her to survivors and chains her to ghosts. And the curse, it leaks. Burrington no longer contains it. The outside world begins to notice.
Writing this book feels like carrying a clock that grows heavier the longer you hold it. Every page groans beneath the weight of memory and consequence. This is no longer a story confined to a forgotten town. It is a fracture in time itself.
Traveler, do not mistake progress for safety. The book advances, yes, but each sentence risks pulling the curse closer. Still, it must be done. And so I write.
🪦October’s Hauntings (Halloween Special)
It is October in Burrington now. The leaves are crisp, curling into the shapes of hands reaching up from dirt. Lanterns glow faintly in windows, though half of them should be empty. The streets smell of smoke, though no fires burn.
This is when the veil thins. When Burrington’s curse breathes hot against the neck of every traveler. And so, in mid-October, I will bring you more, a collection of Halloween short stories set within these cursed streets.
📜Letters the Dead Shouldn’t Write (Character Letters Tease)
In the library’s basement, where no one has dusted in years, I find drawers swollen with damp. Inside are letters that should have crumbled to dust, yet remain intact, ink fresh as the day they were written. Shall I read a few?
Letter One: A Mother’s Regret
“My dearest boy,
If you had left when I begged you, perhaps the orchard would not have taken you. I leave bread at its edge each morning, though the crows eat it before you can. If you are hungry still, forgive me.”
Letter Two: A Merchant’s Note
“To whom it may concern,
If you value your goods, leave this town. Each week, one of my wagons disappears. The wheels are found in the square, but the horses and drivers are gone. Burrington swallows them as though it were hungry. I am no longer safe.”
Letter Three: A Student’s Plea
“Mary,
I wrote you every week, but you never wrote back. They tell me no such town exists beyond the valley. How can that be? You promised to visit. Please, do not forget me.”
The ink smears here, as if a hand reached across the page. Whether that hand was living is uncertain.
⏳Echoes of What’s Next (Closing & Teasers)
The lantern sputters. Our walk must end, but before you leave, Burrington wishes to whisper what comes next.
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Another behind-the-scenes book waits, its release by month’s end. It will guide you deeper into choices made and choices avoided.
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The Halloween special draws near, mid-October, when the town is loudest.
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Book Two, The Day That Broke Time, grows, page by page, like a heartbeat.
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And the letters, oh, there are so many more. You’ve only read the first drops of the flood.
Remember this, traveler: Burrington does not let go easily. When you leave tonight, the gate may not be open tomorrow.
🦉Walk the Whispering Streets of Burrington
You step off the main road, and immediately the world changes. The air grows heavier here, not with heat or humidity, but with something else...memory, shadow, and the faint pulse of secrets that refuse to leave. Your footsteps crunch against gravel that seems older than the town itself, worn smooth not just by human passage but by the weight of unseen things moving just beyond sight.
The houses of Burrington lean slightly in the late afternoon light, their timbers groaning softly as if telling stories no one else can hear. Windows reflect the gold of the sun, yet in those reflections, sometimes you glimpse something more, a figure that isn’t there when you blink, or a shadow that moves against the grain of reason. You catch your breath, though no one else is around. Burrington has that effect on people.
Turning a corner, you follow a narrow lane flanked by high stone walls and creeping vines. The scent of apples drifts faintly on the breeze, sweet and rotten all at once 🍏. Somewhere ahead, an orchard waits- gnarled, old, impossibly thick. The branches twist toward the sky, yet when you glance down, you sense roots weaving through the earth like silent sentinels, holding every secret buried beneath the soil...
Read the full post here inside Burrington
Parting Whisper (Signature Ending)
The fog curls tighter now. Lanterns fade. The cobblestones beneath your boots grow slicker, as though trying to trip you before you escape. But I will guide you one last step, beyond the arch of the gate.
Tell me, traveler. If Burrington remembered you, not just your name, but the way your laughter sounded, the way your shadow bent, would you want it to?
The town waits for your answer.
Until the clock tolls again,
The Storyteller
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