TITLE: RÉVÉRENCE

Summary: A young magician discovers his master’s greatest secret: a diamond timepiece that allows its bearer to step into another’s memories. What starts as curiosity quickly escalates, as the master turns illusion into intrusion; forcing the young magician to witness the cost of his signature trick.

 

CHAPTER I – REVERIE

In the late afternoon, the Versailles Orangerie held the sun captive beneath its vaulted glass, as the Master lifted an orange from a narrow branch and turned it slowly between his fingers.

A boy of nine stood beside him in the long corridor of trees arranged with mathematical obedience.

There was no audience, no stage, no applause waiting to arrive — only light suspended in dust, and the calm authority of the Master’s presence.

He stood with one hand buried deep in his coat pocket, as he always did, as though guarding something unseen.

As he tilted the fruit, sunlight caught its skin and something impossible began to unfold: the dull surface deepened, warmed, and gathered a glow from within, until it shone like beaten gold.

The sun moved across it like a careful hand, coaxing colour into radiance.

Magic, he had always said, was spoken of as an art — draped in velvet, performed with flourish — but he believed it was closer to a science.

It was the patient study of angles and light, of timing and distraction, of how the eye travels and how the mind fills in the spaces in between.

The Master did not smile.

He only looked at the boy and asked, softly,

“Do you see?”

*

Twenty years later, in a packed Paris theatre, a colossal orange tree stood beneath the chandeliers, its branches arcing outward in sweeping silhouettes that nearly brushed the balcony. The trunk rose thick and sculpted, pale as polished stone, its limbs twisting upward with the gravity of something ancient and ceremonial; less a tree than a monument, as though the theatre itself had been constructed around it.

The audience shimmered in coats and silks, a low murmur folding through the hall, until attention settled on a young man in the front row, eyes wide, lips parted in expectation. The theatre had hosted comedians who split the room with laughter, actors who bled beneath stage lights, and singers whose voices rose to the rafters. But tonight it was filled for one man alone — The Master.

He lived quietly, almost invisibly, and little was known of where he travelled or how he prepared. Rumour followed him more faithfully than fact. He gave only one performance each year, and that scarcity had become part of the spectacle.

This year, the programme bore a single title beneath his name: Gold on Diamonds.

On stage, the Master stepped forward, regal and razor-sharp, positioning himself at the edge of the light. The air seemed to tighten around him; decades of performance had worn his elegance smooth and precise. One hand slipped into his pocket while the other gestured toward the tree.

“Mesdames et Messieurs,” he began, his voice calm and measured, “allow me to show you the alchemy of perception.”

The stage lights dimmed by a fraction, just enough for every shadow to sharpen and every sound to become audible. He gestured, and the crowd leaned forward as one.

The oranges began to shift, their skins glowing and rippling as though something beneath the surface were pressing outward, until each fruit shone with a deep golden sheen — not fruit, not illusion, but gold.

The Master stepped calmly into the trembling branches and closed his fingers around one gleaming sphere. He twisted it gently; the stem parted with a clean metallic click. Turning with composed precision, he placed it into the hands of a lady in the front row. Gasps rippled through the theatre as it clinked against her bracelets, cold, heavy, unmistakably solid. She passed it to the young man beside her, who stared at it in disbelief — sunlight trapped in metal.

Above them, the golden fruit shuddered again, a faint tremor running through the branches as though the tree were drawing breath. For a suspended instant, nothing happened — and then it transformed again; diamonds burst from every branch, catching the chandeliers and scattering light into a thousand trembling stars.

The Master lifted his hands, not in triumph but in command, and yet the crowd did not move. No applause came. The theatre held a vast, breathless stillness — electric and flashing, alive with light — but no one dared disturb it. Hundreds of faces remained fixed in the diamond shimmer, as if even a whisper might fracture the miracle suspended in the air. The branches shimmered softly, as though light itself had taken root in the bark; each leaf trembled with a faint metallic sheen.

Then, into the silence, the Master spoke.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said evenly,

“A magician is not a deceiver of the eye, but a master of perception”

On stage, the Master lowered his hands and offered a small, gracious bow; when he straightened, his gaze settled on the young man in the front row — sharp, deliberate, unblinking.

In that charged stillness, the young man felt something inside him shift, a belief forming that had nothing to do with God or with men, but with something stranger and more absolute — a devotion to the impossible itself.

The applause, when it came, seemed distant and hollow, fading quickly back into silence, while beneath the Master’s composed exterior, the diamond pocketwatch in his pocket pulsed brighter, its hidden hands spinning wildly as though time itself had been disturbed.

 

CHAPTER II – RAPTURE

A lone ray of sun pierced the vaulted glass of the Versailles Orangerie, slipping between its iron ribs and falling in a warm column upon the orange tree at its centre. The panes above scattered the light so that the entire conservatory glowed in muted gold. Beneath the dome of glass, the tree shivered softly, its trembling leaves casting flecks of amber across the tiled floor.

At the base of the trunk, the young man knelt. He brushed soil from a leather-bound book he had unearthed; when he opened it, the brittle pages crackled in the hush. They were crowded with sketches — coils and wires, strange glyphs threaded between meticulous diagrams of the human brain.

He traced the ink with his fingers and whispered the words written there:

“The current of thought… carried in sparks and blood.”

His gaze dropped to the pocketwatch resting in his palm, its craftsmanship flawless, the work of a master clockmaker. Every gear and hinge had been cut with surgical precision — and at its centre, set like a frozen star, lay a smooth diamond orb.

The Master’s voice seemed to rise from memory itself, low and measured. The watch had been fashioned by the finest clockmaker in Paris, he had once said, while the diamond orb at its centre was crafted by an inventor who believed he could communicate with lightning.

The diagrams in the book mirrored the claim. Copper coils wrapped through the casing like nerves, converging toward a diamond prism at the heart of the mechanism.

In the margin, a note had been scrawled in a hurried hand:

Memory is a circuit. A trick of light and nerve. Harness its power, and you may walk where another has walked.

As the young man read, the faint hum in his palm grew louder. Sparks danced along the seams of the brass case, biting at his skin. He tightened his grip, breath shallow, as the hands of the watch began to spin faster and faster, the buzz deepening into a low, gathering roar.

Timepieces had always fascinated him. They were designed to measure time with merciless precision — to divide it, regulate it, discipline it. Yet he had come to understand that a watch was not merely an instrument of engineering, but a mirror of consciousness. It kept time with mechanical certainty while quietly revealing that time itself is elastic, shaped less by seconds than by the mind that experiences them.

“It was no watch,” the Master’s voice continued within him. “It was a vault. An engine that ran not on gears or springs…”

The young man’s reflection fractured across the diamond face, splitting into multiple versions of himself, each blinking out of rhythm, each caught in a different moment of his own past.

“…but on the same current as the human mind.”

The diamond surface seemed to open beneath his gaze. It pulled him forward. The world beyond the glass dissolved, and he was drawn through the watch face into a vortex of fractured time.

 

CHAPTER III – RUIN

The descent through the watch was not a fall but a thinning, layers of time peeled back like gauze. Sound lagged behind sight; light fractured before it fully formed. Memories did not appear in sequence but in fragments, as though shuffled by an unseen hand.

He had the uneasy sense that he had stood in this corridor of moments before — or that someone like him had.

The rule surfaced instinctively, ancient and absolute: do not speak to the past, do not let the past see you.

The gears of the diamond pocketwatch ground softly as the young man stepped into a half-formed memory.

The theatre was empty. Rows of vacant seats dissolved into shadow while dust drifted through the dim air. At center stage, the Master rehearsed, his hands moving with impossible precision.

The young man studied him obsessively, eyes fixed on every motion, searching for the slightest tremor — a shift of the wrist, a flicker of distraction, any fracture in the illusion.

“So simple… so perfect,” he whispered.

He reached forward, and the memory rippled.

The Master froze mid-gesture. Slowly, he turned. His eyes burned.

“You trespass in shadows that are not yours.”

The young man stumbled back, insisting he only wanted to learn — to see how it was done.

The Master’s voice hardened.

“You think brilliance can be stolen with a glance?”

The stage convulsed. Chairs splintered. Curtains ignited. Flames raced along the velvet drapes as the theatre collapsed inward.

“I never sought to steal,” the young man pleaded. “Only to understand.”

The Master stepped toward him through the ruin, unflinching.

“I paid for every illusion — with blood, with soul, with time. If you want my trick, you will bear its weight. Step deeper. Witness what it cost me.”

Sparks erupted from the pocketwatch. The diamond face splintered in his palm, fractures racing outward in jagged veins, each shard glowing red-hot against his skin. The gears screamed.

Light poured from the cracks; first in threads, then in a blinding torrent.

A white flash swallowed the theatre whole; flame, curtains, splintered chairs, dissolving ruin into brilliance, brilliance into nothing.

When the light receded, the air had changed. It was cooler. Thinner. The scent of smoke had given way to damp earth and cut grass.

He stood in the French countryside at dusk.

Little was known of the Master’s early life. In Paris, he was a figure of precision and polish — immaculate, distant, self-contained. But here the land stretched wide and unadorned, fields folding into low hills beneath a violet sky. In the distance stood a modest estate, more worn than grand, its stone façade chipped by weather, its roof sagging with age. A single lantern flickered near the doorway.

This was no palace of velvet curtains and chandeliers. This was soil and labour and silence.

The illusionist had not been born beneath stage lights. He had grown from this; from poverty, from obscurity, from a life where survival demanded ingenuity long before applause ever did.

A simple orange tree rose beneath a scatter of cold stars, its branches trembling as though stirred by a wind he could not feel. The fruit quivered in a faint metallic glow.

A vast crowd encircled the tree, rows upon rows of figures packed tightly together, their outlines merging into a single dark ring that seemed to pulse with breath and heat. Shoulders pressed against shoulders; boots ground into the dirt; whispers overlapped into a low, restless hum. The air vibrated with anticipation, thick and electric.

He pushed forward through the bodies, offering apologies no one seemed to hear, slipping between elbows and coats, until he stood at the very front, alone with the trembling branches.

The tree no longer looked natural. It stood twisted against the starlit sky, its branches bending at unnatural angles, bark stretched too tight across its limbs as though something beneath were forcing its way outward. It felt grotesque and out of place in the quiet field — less a living thing than a mechanism disguised as one, waiting to reveal itself.

Then suddenly one orange split open. Its skin peeled back to reveal brass beneath, delicate gears twitching, a diamond dial spinning wildly at its core — ticking.

Another burst, then another; flesh stiffened into metal, pulp tightening into cogs, until the entire tree drooped under the weight of pocketwatches. Hundreds of them. All ticking.

The sound gathered quickly, layering upon itself — no longer delicate but insistent — a tightening rhythm that thickened the air and pressed against his ribs.

The young man staggered back and rubbed his eyes, as though he could scrub the vision away. The ticking followed him, louder now, more synchronized, less like time being kept and more like time advancing.

Was this real magic? Not the measured elegance the Master had once revealed beneath calm afternoon light, but something raw and mysterious; something that did not seek applause, only obedience. Each tick struck sharper than the last.

He turned to the crowd, searching for a face, a witness, a shared disbelief — but the ring of figures had dissolved into darkness.

The field was empty.

Only the tree remained, its branches trembling as the ticking rose in a torturous unison.

The Master’s voice cut through it, steady and merciless:

“To see is to suffer.”

The ticking surged; faster, louder, overwhelming, until it was no longer a sound but a force. The earth split at the roots. The vision fractured like collapsing scenery, and the young man was dragged backward into darkness, the relentless ticking following him down, echoing long after the light was gone.

CHAPTER IV – REVELATION

At dawn in the Orangerie, the pocketwatch lay in the young man’s palm. A fine crack crept across the diamond face, splitting the surface, as the ticking slowed to a heavy, deliberate rhythm. Blood slipped between his fingers and fell onto the pale stone at his knees.

The watch hummed, its core pulsing with a feverish light that scorched his skin. He grimaced but did not release it. Instead, his grip tightened, knuckles whitening, as though by holding it fast he could prevent whatever was breaking from breaking completely. The ticking had taken on a different form now; it threaded itself into his thoughts, settling behind his eyes.

Morning light poured through the vaulted glass, striking each pane at a different angle so the ceiling burned in shifting bands of amber and pale gold. Beneath that radiant canopy, the young man screamed. The fractured diamond pressed deeper into his palm, carving into flesh as blood spilled between his fingers and hissed where it touched the searing metal. The ticking swelled — louder, closer — until it seemed to reverberate through the glass cathedral itself, filling the vast chamber with its relentless pulse.

A tremor passed through the air, subtle at first and then chaotically. The vaulted glass shuddered, and the panes exploded outward in a rain of splintered light. For a fleeting instant, in the curved surface of a falling shard, he saw the Master’s face reflected back at him — calm, unblinking, almost mournful — before the image vanished into brilliance.

He collapsed beneath the orange tree, the shattered diamond still clenched in his bleeding hand. The ticking did not cease. It swelled instead, rising from the ruined watch and settling inside him, each measured click striking behind his eyes, beneath his ribs, hammering through bone and nerve until there was no boundary between mechanism and flesh.

When the light faded, he lay sprawled beneath the orange tree, his limbs slack against the cold stone. Butterflies burst upward from the branches in frantic spirals, circling his unmoving body before dissolving into the paling air. In his bloodied palm, the watch continued to tick, steady and indifferent, its shattered diamond dial catching the first light of morning and scattering it in fractured glints across his face.

Beyond the broken panes, just outside the glowing frame of the conservatory, a solitary figure stood motionless, watching without stepping inside.

 

CHAPTER V – RETURN

He is only a boy when he plants the seed in the stubborn soil at dusk, pressing it down with his thumb until the earth lies flat and sealed. The cut along his finger opens again, and a bead of blood slips into the dirt and vanishes beneath the surface. He does not notice. He stands and looks at the small patch of ground as though something has already begun below it.

A glint in the gravel draws him back to his knees. He pulls free a shard of diamond, jagged and raw, its edge sharper than it appears. It bites deep into his palm, not a scratch, but a clean split. Blood wells at once, running into the fractured seams and settling there instead of falling away. He inhales but does not release it.

When he lifts the shard to the sinking sun, the light gathers unnaturally within it. White warms to amber. Amber deepens to a gold, as though the stone has drawn the evening inward. The field dims around him, the wind stills, and only the shard remains luminous in his bleeding hand.

He stares at the blood pooling in the diamond’s broken veins, and in the hush of the field a voice returns to him.

“Do you see?”

He turns sharply, breath caught in his throat.

There is no one there.

Decades pass, and the tree rises where the boy once knelt, its roots thick, its branches reaching beyond the roofline. The man who returns to it is no longer young. His hands are lined and scarred, the old cut across his palm faint but permanent. In a narrow workshop beside the tree, he sets the shard upon a wooden table worn smooth by decades of work.

He builds the watch slowly, deliberately, as if completing something that began long ago. He cuts the brass and files the casing smooth, drills the hinge and fits the stem, seats the mainspring and aligns the gear train with patient precision. The escapement falls into place. The balance steadies. Copper threads through the body like hidden veins. Each tightened screw presses against the old scar in his palm, and he feels the echo of the first cut as though it has never truly closed.

At last, he lifts the diamond and lowers it into its cradle at the centre of the mechanism. He turns it carefully, aligning the fractured edge with waiting teeth until it settles—heart-first—into the core. He closes the casing.

The watch does not tick at first.

Outside, the orange tree shudders in a sudden wind.

Inside, a single click.

At the same instant, the branches tremble along their length, and the air tightens as a thin metallic whizz cuts through the room, sharp and swift, as though time itself has drawn breath. The walls blur. The tree swells impossibly large beyond the glass.

For a moment, he stands somewhere else, beneath chandeliers, before a silent crowd suspended in expectation,  and sees a future he has already shaped.

Then the vision folds inward.

The watch begins to tick.

CHAPTER VI – REVERENCE

On the stage of the Theatre of Wonder, the young man gestured toward the tree, his voice steady despite the blood trailing down his wrist.

The theatre was full. Every seat was taken, from the front row to the highest balcony. People stood along the walls and crowded the aisles, unwilling to miss what they had come to see.

For a moment, as he looked out at the rows of faces, he felt the strange pull of recognition. He had stood here before, not in body, but in memory. The same lights. The same silence before astonishment. He was not simply performing; he was stepping into a moment that had already happened.

Then something shifted.

The pull was magnetic, but it did not feel chosen. It felt automatic. His posture straightened without effort. His breathing slowed. His gestures aligned with a rhythm older than thought. The crowd leaned forward as one, and he responded before deciding to respond. Every movement followed the next with mechanical certainty, as if he were tracing grooves worn long before he arrived.

“Memory is a circuit,” he declared. “A trick of light and nerve.”

The crowd shifted, uneasy but transfixed, as he began to circle the potted tree.

“Harness its power… and you may walk where another has walked.”

The fruit trembled. A shimmer passed across their skins, and the oranges turned metallic, rippling until they shone as gold. Gasps broke across the hall. One lady clutched a fallen fruit and recoiled at its heat, nearly dropping it from her gloved hands.

The glow climbed the branches, the gold hardening and then fracturing; beneath the cracks, light refracted in blinding shards. The audience rose to its feet, suspended between awe and terror, as if uncertain whether they were witnessing mastery — or the unraveling of it.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” the young man said, his voice carrying cleanly through the charged air, “this is not mere fruit. It is a vault.”

A hush settled over the hall, dense and breathless, as though the entire theatre were suspended on the edge of a single inhalation. The golden branches trembled faintly behind him, and no one dared to move.

His hand burned openly now, blood dripping onto the stage boards. In the shadowed galleries, the Master gripped his own fist and winced, as though feeling an echo of the pain. The young man forced a composed smile and lifted the blazing pocketwatch higher.

“An engine that runs not on gears or springs…” he began, the silence thickening around him as the audience strained for the final words.

“…but on the current of the human mind.”

A heartbeat of absolute stillness held the crowd.

Then the golden fruit loosened and fell, one by one, each impact ringing sharply against the floorboards before splitting open in violent bursts of white light. The explosions answered one another across the stage in a chain of blinding flashes, until the entire hall seemed to pulse as a single, luminous organism.

Applause faltered into gasps. Yet when the brilliance faded, no one moved. Not a single body rose, not a hand reached for the aisle. Programs slipped silently from trembling fingers. Faces remained fixed in stunned disbelief, eyes wide and unblinking, as though the theatre itself had been struck motionless by the force of what it had witnessed.

In the shadowed gallery, the Master remained still, one hand buried deep in his pocket, his gaze fixed on the stage.

Below him, through the stunned silence, the young man stepped forward to the edge of the boards. He lifted his eyes and held the Master’s stare. Then he lowered himself into a performative bow; slow, deliberate, immaculate, shoulders squared. It was not a gesture of thanks but of completion, a measured movement of an immaculate performance brought to its conclusion.

The young man stood at centre, where the light had burned brightest.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said into the lingering hush.

“Magic is the art of turning pain into gold… and suffering into diamonds.”

As he ascended, he slipped off his coat and let it fall. Beneath it, his forearms and torso were etched with burns and bruises that spread across his skin like the roots of a tree, not random wounds, but a network, branching and burrowing, as though something had been growing inside him for years.

Light poured in from every direction, from the chandeliers blazing overhead, from the stained-glass windows burning with colour, from the trembling shards scattered across the floor. It did not soften him; it exposed him. The glow surged from the pocket watch in his palm and raced along every mark, tracing each scar as though following a map carved in flesh. One by one, the wounds answered. They brightened. They awakened. What had once been damage now gleamed like living script; a record of blood, soul and time.

Beneath his skin, something tightened and brightened, until flesh began to crystallise. Veins became filaments of brilliance. Burns hardened into facets; bruises deepened into seams of gold. His hands rose, blazing with a cold, impossible clarity — not healed, but remade. From the chandeliers overhead, molten light descended and gathered in the air above him, sealing the final moment of his transformation – a shimmering crown of gold and diamonds.

The young man tilted his head back, eyes bright with something fierce and unnameable — not triumph, not madness, but something that burned between the two. The air tightened — and then the applause erupted, crashing through the hall like thunder, relentless and exultant.

Across the theatre, the Master slowly rose to his feet, withdrew his hand from his pocket, and began to applaud, revealing beneath the lights the same scars etched into his withered hand.

On stage, for a fleeting instant, the young man’s shadow stirred.

It climbed the wall behind him, rigid and unmistakable; the Master’s outline, severe and precise, but only for a breath.

Then it began to change.

The shoulders broadened, the edges thinned, the arms unfurling into branching limbs. The spine thickened and rooted, spreading downward in dark veins.

The silhouette stretched farther, widening and rising until it no longer resembled a man at all, but the tree itself.

THE END 

*Authors Note: While researching 19th century France, I became fascinated by Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin, a trained clockmaker who became known as the Father of Modern Magic. One of his most famous creations was the Marvellous Orange Tree, a trick in which a barren tree appeared to blossom, grow fruit, and produce glittering surprises before a stunned audience.

Years later, a young Ehrich Weiss admired him so deeply that he reshaped his own identity and became Harry Houdini. Their connection formed a lineage built on admiration, ambition, and inheritance. It was not only about imitating, but about stepping into the shadow of someone you respect and trying to grow beyond it.