Legend XX – The Last Hand of Orunoid

More about Legend XX – The Last Hand of Orunoid

In the archives of the star clocks, tales are told of Orun, the great celestial clock that hung beyond the night, above all worlds. No one knows who built it. Some believe it was the first instrument of creation—a circle of black light within which time itself was born. Others say it was the mouth of the heavens, which spoke the word "Yet" before being began. Of all its countless hands, only one remained in the end: the last. It no longer measures the hours, it is said, but oblivion. Once, Orun turned with majestic serenity. Its rings of copper and glass sang in unison with the stars, and along the paths of the ether, hands of pure energy glided, cutting through the shadows of the worlds. But at some point, the rhythm became impure. A subtle dissonance gnawed its way through the song of the revolutions. Seconds began to stumble. Nights shifted against one another, and entire epochs fell out of sync. The gods who had once built Orun had long since vanished, and no one remained who understood the trembling. Then the last pointer began to move on its own. Slower than any light, more precisely than any end. With each turn, it cut not only through space, but through memory. Wherever it glided, the stars forgot who they had been. Entire constellations vanished, as if someone had erased their names. And yet it did not remain cold: in its movement lay a strange sorrow, as if it knew that what it measured was its own end. The chroniclers of Miravel, the last observers of the heavens, tried to map it. They saw that it wandered across the bowl of the cosmos like a black splinter, accompanied by a light that was no shadow. "When it reaches the center," wrote the last of them, "the night will remember itself—and then cease." Nevertheless, they looked up every night, and some believed the pointer was alive. In some dreams, he appeared as a figure, a being of metal and light, walking through empty halls whose walls were frozen in time. In his hands, he carried the remnants of the other hands—broken tracks, shimmering fragments—and inserted them, piece by piece, into himself, as if trying to remember the whole he had lost. An ancient myth says that he once had a voice, the ticking of the world. But with the silence of the Orun, he too fell silent. Since then, he wanders through the celestial machinery, soundless, like a thought that arrives too late. Wherever he lingers, the stars flicker briefly, like eyes opening one last time before falling asleep. It is said that when time itself dies, he will complete the final circle. No sound, no light, only the soft beat of a movement that measures nothing anymore, because nothing remains.