Reala looked up at the clock face, then to his master, torn between the instincts to chase the false NiGHTs, guard the prisoners and wait for orders. Elliot took this moment to concentrate hard on the fabric of the dream, as though it were just the sandbox dream he shared with Claris, and summon a basketball that shot out of the air towards Reala's head. He swiped it out of the way, tearing it into shreds with his sharp claws, but dropped both his captives in the act of preventing the ball from hitting him in the face.

"Jackle, Clawz, after him!" ordered Wizeman, "Reala, recapture the prisoners! Everyone else, hold defensive positions!"

"Run!" whispered Elliot, grabbing Claris' hand. They both instinctively began flying. While it wasn't graceful, more like a series of large bounds, without the help of NiGHTs, they would not fall to their deaths.

"Run where?" hissed Claris, "After the pretend NiGHTs that wants to end the world?"

"No! I don't know... just, away from here!"

"And let a pretend NiGHTs end the world? You really don't have a plan, do you?" she rolled her eyes, let go of Elliot's hand, then turned around. Before Elliot could protest, she had caught up with the rapidly pursuing Reala.

"At least let us talk to Wizeman, okay? We could be useful! If the real NiGHTs is out there..."

"Naive children. I could not care less if my brother is alive or dead, and as for Wizeman, I have never known him to bother taking prisoners. Maybe he still intends to use you as a hostage, or maybe we are running low on fuel. Why don't we wait and see, eh?" A sharp-toothed grin spread over his face.

Then, suddenly, the ground began to shake violently, then a crack tore apart the entire floor from the beginning of the shield to the sector's entrance, swallowing both armies, trees, mountains. Sickly, blinding white light began to pour from the crack, immolating anything it touched with ivory flames. Then the rumbling grew more intense as something rose from the fissure, something that vibrated and made a deafening ringing noise as it emerged in its cradle of wires, slightly sunk into a baroque throne of mahogany as though it was too unnatural to fit inside its own environment: an enormous Alarm Egg with two brass bells and only one, unmoving hand, in all its twisted and terrifying majesty, a ponderous monolith to a dead Universe. The surviving Awakers darted towards it, standing in a circle around it and channelling the remaining power of the smaller Egg Clocks into it. Several of them were casually destroyed by the amount of energy they were standing close to, overloading their essence and burning them out instantly, or were knocked into the crevasse by a flailing wire.

Bellbridge was counting down to midnight. Reala was no longer laughing.

"Get away from the outer walls! Retreat to the Tower!" ordered Wizeman. Reala grabbed them both before they could move, then he followed the order, as did all the Nightmaren, even Jackle.

Midnight struck, then the energy began to gather around the infernal alarm clock's face as though it was a sun about to go supernova. It began to rattle so vigorously that it looked as though it would wrench itself free from its firmaments and fall back into the pit. Then, with a 'ding' noise, the energy flared into a penumbra and was thrown from the clock face in a solid beam of white light. The beam shattered the force field, then slammed into the top half of Bellbridge and collapsed the pillars of the gazebo, flattening the dome. The top half of the great tower was in ruins, clockwork exposed, cogs spilling out, rubble falling to the ground. Pain was visible on Reala's face when he saw Puffy pulling Wizeman from the ruins. He looked very badly damaged. There was a crack in his metal mask, from which streams of red light were pouring out, and Claris counted only five hands.

"Master!" yelled Reala, drill-dashing towards him. He kept hold of his captives, despite his rush; he did not make the same mistake twice.

"I will live," announced Lord Wizeman, brushing the dust from his tattered cloak with two of his remaining arms, "Send all forces to destroy that thing. It needs time to recharge but it is heavily guarded. It will destroy us if it fires another shot. Puffy, you're on repair and salvage duty. Gilwing, lead the charge."

"The captives..." Reala reminded him as the demonic opera singer bounced off to the ruins of the tower and Gilwing threw himself roaring and screeching into the fray.

"What is Puffy going to repair? There's nothing left!" demanded Claris, her voice shaking from the shock of the devastation she saw all around her. It looked too much like her own Twin Seeds for her to be able to see something like this happening to it.

"Nightopia still exists. The Clock must still be operating," said Wizeman, "Their aim was off. The Countdown is not supposed to sink backwards into its throne. We never did resolve the issue."

"Maybe they wanted to avoid hitting NiGHTs," suggested Elliot. This provoked a humourless laugh from Wizeman.

"That is not NiGHTs. That is Selph," he told his captives as if he were a teacher correcting a particularly stupid student, "And the Awakers do not avoid hitting people. They will not spare anything in the entire Universe. The only good thing about what Selph has done, is that he will also be betrayed."

"Like I said, if there's anything at all we can do to help..." said Claris.

"Oh, you will be of use to me. You are alive, are you not? I need you to go inside the Town Hall," he said, "They will not speak with me. Even now, they will not allow me access to the records. They have a rule that they must always help a dreamer."

"NiGHTs told me that you used to live there, but you were banished," said Claris, "Were you one of the people in charge?"

"The ones in charge are not people. They are machines. No, cogs in a machine," said Wizeman, "A faulty machine, at that. I was banished because I had the audacity to come up with a better idea of what shape my cog should be, and where it should fit. And now look at what has become of their glorious world. You should ask them what happened to Director Wizeman. After you finish your mission, of course," he added, "First, I want you to tell them that the introduction of Selph to the world was mistakenly authorised, that the Countdown must stop and that there must be no Awakening. Tell them that the Universe still has time left in it, that it still needs the dreamlands. Tell them that you are one of the dreamers that are dreaming the dreams. Can you remember that?"

"I think we can manage," said Claris.

"I suppose that is all I can expect from a mortal dreamer. Reala, escort them to the entrance. Don't let them out until the task is done. I hope for all our sakes that the machine still works well enough to recognise its own mistakes."

Half the clock face was still intact, although cogs spilled out of the jagged metal rim where the top half had been torn off, and molten metal dribbled down the face, obscuring the '3' and the '8' and giving it the appearance of a large candle that was finally burning low. Reala hovered above the '6' and dropped the two children inside from just enough of a height that it was a painful landing but not high enough to endanger them and risk Wizeman's wrath.

Elliot climbed through after Claris and walked carefully across a narrow walkway. He admired the giant cogs and gears turning all around him that were the inner workings of the clock tower. He felt dwarfed by the power and grandeur of the machine that was the spirit of the town, just as the Tower was both the seat of Government and the cultural centre of Twin Seeds, where Claris once performed, the first time he heard her sing. If the world really was coming to an end, he wouldn't be surprised if the Celestial Choir didn't have as beautiful singing voices as Claris.

After walking across the wooden beam from which the great bells of the Clock Tower hung, a feat that took a surprising amount of time as the dimensions of the Tower were rather enlarged, they jumped down from the middle of the beam, shimmying down the chains and bell-pulls and jumping from cog to cog. Despite the terrifying urgency of their situation, Elliot secretly thought that it was kind of fun. While it was dark up on the rafters, the stained glass windows washed the light of the sunrise over them in bright vivid colours, their scenes stretched over the walls in a shroud. Each one depicted one of the Ideya.

They finally found a rope – probably something to do with the bells – that led down onto a maintenance balcony, from which they could climb down the ladder into a small engineering room. They left the room, walked down the corridor, then took a steep spiral staircase into the vacuous main hall, with its chequered black and white floor and grand council table as large as Elliot's house. The light from the windows spilled down to the floor so that the colours met in the middle. The pool of colours shifted and rearranged themselves to project images. As he walked towards the table, he realised that the images were maps of various Mares and other sectors of Nightopia and live streams of the damage being done to them.

The marble statues were not those of past Mayors of Twin Seeds, and neither were the nine figures around the table, each sitting on a floating chair near one of the fancy speaker-phone systems, anything like the stuffy council members who looked as old as Elliot's grandparents. They were not human. He didn't really expect them to be, not in somewhere like Nightopia, where dreamers were only visitors, to be tolerated as long as they were polite and kept to the permitted areas. Their appearance still made him stop and stare. They were identical, and all looked like Wizeman, down to the last detail, except that they had different colour robes and sashes.

One of them was at the head of the table, so the children assumed it was in charge. As they walked purposefully towards it, it turned its metal mask to regard them.

"How may we help you?" the figure asked. Elliot had heard automated switchboards with more emotion in their voice.