The Architect's Auction
Your life is a forgery, and tonight the auctioneer is selling the truth.
You thought you were a quiet horologist, restoring antique clocks in a sleepy town. But when a stranger hands you an auction catalog, you discover your entire existence—home, memories, identity—was staged by a mysterious benefactor. Now, as you navigate a labyrinthine auction house where each lot is a piece of your fabricated past, you must decide: reclaim the life that was stolen from you, or uncover the architect behind the illusion. In this adventure of survival and hidden identity, every bid could be a clue, and the final lot might cost you everything.
The story begins
The envelope had been waiting on your workbench when you returned from the shop—black linen paper, a wax seal the color of old blood. You'd opened it with a horologist's precision, using the thin blade you kept for prying apart stubborn watch cases. The invitation inside smelled faintly of sandalwood and something else. Something you couldn't place.
Now you stand in the auction house's grand foyer, catalog clutched in your gloved hand, and the chandeliers overhead hum with a frequency that makes your teeth ache. The room is a fever dream of gilded mirrors and velvet drapes, every surface cluttered with objects that prick at the edges of your memory. A music box on a marble pedestal—you know its tune. You'd know it anywhere.
The Auctioneer appears at the top of a curving staircase, white suit immaculate, smile like a knife wound.
"Ah," he says, descending. "The horologist. We've been expecting you. Your lot is up tonight."
The catalog in your hand lists items you've never seen. But the photograph on page twelve—a woman with your eyes, laughing at a camera you don't remember—makes your chest seize.
What happens next is up to you.
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