A Tale of Obsession, Fragility, and the Heart of the Machine
Lord Ashworth is a man fighting a losing battle against nature. As his ancestral home, Ashworth Hall, slowly succumbs to the marshy ground, he refuses to surrender. His final, desperate act is not an escape, but a marvel of mechanical hubris: transforming his manor into a kinetic, ever-shifting engine known simply as The Labyrinth.
Stripped of its walls and replaced by thousands of complex brass and copper gears, the house now lives in a state of perpetual, uneasy motion—a promise to his fragile daughter, Clara, that he can engineer an environment where nothing ever shifts, nothing ever decays.
But when The Labyrinth falters, and Clara vanishes, Ashworth must call upon the meticulous clocksmith, Alistair Finch, to enter the frozen, ticking heart of the house. The answer to Clara’s disappearance lies not in a structural failure, but in a terrifying, beautiful revelation: The machine has a mind of its own.
Why You Should Read This Story
- A Steampunk Nightmare: Immerse yourself in a world of gears, brass, and industrial grit where the architecture itself is a character.
- The Unnerving Question of Control: Explore what happens when a man tries to master nature, and whether true safety can ever be engineered.
- A Race Against the Clockwork: Follow Finch’s terrifying descent into the machine, where one false move will mean disaster.
Featured Quote: “The Labyrinth, now operating outside of Ashworth’s cold logic, had developed a mechanical sentience of self-preservation, freezing itself to avoid harming the fragile human caught within its workings.”
Read the Full Story Now!
Ready to step inside a house that is perpetually moving—until it suddenly, silently, stops? Click the link below and follow Alistair Finch’s terrifying journey to rescue the Cog-Maiden from the gears that both captured and protected her.
