The clicking had snuck up on Asphodel. 

As they left the overgrown cavern, the corridor around them was quiet, but it was an ambient silence.  It possessed a softness that the airless cavern had lacked.  

Asphodel, because he was not welcome at the front of the party, because he did not intend to take the lead from Xochitl or Frisk anyway, had fallen to the rear, trailing after Meleph:  He remembered the quiet, then.  Leonard bobbed at his heels, but the click of the skeletal servant’s motions was a familiar one, so intrinsic now that Asphodel did not perceive it separately from the click of his own hooves across the stone floor. 

Otherwise, the quiet. 

---

Somewhere, though, the clicking had begun. 

He noticed it only when he had subconsciously integrated it into himself already — it settled into his heartbeat.  It flexed his lungs, shaping his breath.  It snagged at his thoughts.

Asphodel flicked his ears forward. 

“What is that sound?”  It had a peculiar grinding, an off-key. 

Ahead of him, Frisk threw a glance at him over her shoulder.  The whites of her eyes shone back at him in the shadowy dungeon.  

“I was wondering when you’d notice,” she said.  “Not paying attention, are we?” 

Asphodel flattened his ears sharply.  His nostrils flared. 

“It’s getting louder,” Meleph said. 

“It is just ahead,” Xochitl said.  The Cavedweller had not stopped or turned; they had merely rotated one ear to listen to them bicker, continuing onward.  “You will see it then.” 

---

Asphodel quickened his pace.  But he still turned the corner last—

Ahead of them, the corridor parted around a great mechanical thing which occupied the full length of one wall.  Cogs spun around brass axles, teeth catching the next, shuddering forward.  The clicking reverberated — a precise tick-tick-tick, measuring time in something that was not exactly seconds, was not any timekeeping metric that Asphodel recognized. 

Frisk shrugged.  “Cool.” 

“You’ve been here before?  Has it always been, y’know, going?” 

Interesting, Asphodel thought, casting a cool gaze towards the puck, that Meleph would be the most fascinated by it.  

Xochitl shrugged in answer.  “Yes.  I think so.” 

“I wonder who made it,” Meleph murmured.

“Sometimes it’s not a matter of being made.” 

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Frisk snapped. 

“Things do not need to be made.  They simply become.” 

Leonard was tugging on Asphodel’s tail.  The delicate bones in his hand were cold, rattled with nerves.  The white skull of his face, beneath the hood, peered upward at the clockwork mechanism.  The unchanging, empty eye sockets, incapable of emotion, seemed to Asphodel to have the kind of focus that came with fear. 

Tick-tick-tick—

Tick—

The cogs shuddered.  The mechanism stopped. 

---

The silence was shocked. 

Even Xochitl, who had not seemed bothered even in the center of the spinning room, who had scarcely noticed their fear in the overgrown caverns, paused. 

“What—?” 

Something fell. 

A distant, titanic thump.  Something ancient and inorganic, crumbling away. 

“Restart it,” Meleph said. 

The walls trembled around them.  The heavy cogs with their bracketed teeth sat motionless.  Something else fell—

“How?” Frisk snapped.  She was already dancing on her toes, muscles poised to run.  “Let’s just go.  It’s not ours to fix—”

The next thing to fall was nearer.  Asphodel could hear the collapse of stonework.  The grating sound of mortar peeling apart.  The crack of rock on metal. 

“Give me—”

Meleph lunged for Asphodel.  Leonard’s bony hand closed around Asphodel’s tail, frantic.  He had nowhere to go, nowhere to turn; Meleph seized the pitchfork that hung at his side, yanked it from its straps.  He hefted it by the embossed metal handle, tossing his head clumsily with its weight. 

“Don’t—” Asphodel snarled, snaking his head forward to grab it back. 

He was too slow. 

Meleph jammed the prongs into the great cogs, threw his weight forward along the handle. 

For a moment, he seemed suspended in the motion — the weight of a Courser against the dead momentum of the clockwork—

Asphodel shoved his weight alongside Meleph’s. 

The cogs gave — an incremental forward shudder— 

Another.  Gravity tugged them downward.  The cogs grated forward, motion spiraling outward from the epicenter of the pitchfork across the wall.  Meleph lost his balance with the sudden drop of it; tumbled away from Asphodel, folding to the stone floor.  

Asphodel stepped away delicately, yanking his pitchfork free, stony-faced.  

Near him, Meleph began to laugh.

The ticking had resumed.