Ihlex

In a gaslit city where time is currency and memories are traded like coins, Linden Hawthorn, a reclusive archivist, inherits a broken pocket watch and a blood-stained journal after his father vanishes. The watch doesn’t tick—it feeds. With every cryptic vision it offers, it devours fragments of Linden’s past: the scent of his father’s pipe smoke, his sister’s voice, even the reason he began his search.

The journal leads him to a drowned barge filled with corpses clutching coins from the future, a porcelain doll that whispers of a faceless figure called the Woundless Man, and a hidden underworld where aristocrats trade seconds of life and cultists worship gears instead of gods.
As Linden uncovers his father’s sins—a legacy of stolen time and mechanized horrors—he must decide what he’s willing to lose: his memories, his morality, or his very soul. But the watch hungers, and the shadowy Tockmen who pull its strings demand payment in blood.

Time is running out. And it’s taking Linden with it.

Table of Chronophage

Table of contents

Volume 1