Galitsin | Alice

The world fell away. She saw herself as a child, burning her hand on a samovar. She saw herself at seventy, alone in a room of ticking birds. She saw her father’s death—not from sickness, but from choosing to stop time around his heart so he could hold her mother’s ghost one last minute.

She was nineteen, with hair the color of weathered bronze and eyes that held the pale, shifting light of a winter eclipse. Her father, Dmitri Galitsin, was a clockmaker who repaired the city’s heart: a towering astronomical clock in the broken cathedral. When he died, the clock stopped. And with it, the city’s sense of time. galitsin alice

Here is a tale of . In the salt-rimed city of Verkolsk, where the Neva’s breath turns to frost before it hits the ground, they spoke of the Galitsin girl in whispers. The world fell away

She saw the Galitsin prince who had imprisoned Koschei-14, not out of heroism, but out of fear of his own end. She saw her father’s death—not from sickness, but

Alice did not want the job. She lived in a narrow apartment above a shut bakery, tending to her father’s tools, winding the small wooden birds he’d carved. But the city was falling apart. So one frozen morning, she climbed the cathedral’s spiral stairs, carrying a brass key shaped like a question mark.

Inside the clock tower, gears the size of carts sat silent. Dust covered everything. At the center, a pendulum hung still—except it wasn’t a pendulum. It was a cage.