Clock of the talk

Previously

…The doll was gone. Swallowed. And the hall, that monstrous maw, had returned to its slumber, waiting for the next tick, the next tock, the next rhyme to stir its ancient hunger. I felt a phantom pressure on my own chest, a sympathetic ache, as if the hall’s embrace had reached out, a chilling premonition of what awaited us all in this world spun from broken rhymes and forgotten promises. The silence that followed was not a relief, but a void, a testament to the life that had been so effortlessly erased.