The Hero’s Curse

This story is by Laura Oviedo and was a runner-up in our 2025 Fall Writing Contest. You can find all the writing contest stories here.

Steel meets steel momentarily and silence consumes the forest. The final robber falls, gasping for breath, hands bound. Birds scatter, then settle again as my heartbeat steadied.

Another day saved. Another hollow victory.

As far back as I can remember, everyone has called me Alex, the local hero of Eras. It’s all I’ve ever known, though, sometimes, I wonder if this is all there truly is to life.

Triumphant, I stride back through the trees, leaving the crooks for the sheriff. Applause, gratitude, handshakes, the usual act. Yet every cheer echoes empty. I love this role, but some part of me feels like it’s too perfect to be true.

Eras is just brick and mortar surrounded by forest. Streets bustling with vendors, and in the center of it all stands an ancient clock tower frozen at 11:11. Legend says a great evil was sealed inside, and that’s why time itself stopped. As long as the clock stays still, peace prevails, or so we believe.

My life is like the gears of that tower: predictable, unchanging.

Wake. Patrol. Protect. Praise. Sleep. Repeat. 

I sigh as I drop my sword at home, brushing my messy blond hair from my eyes before collapsing onto my bed, waiting for that angel to visit my dreams again.

She’s always there for me in my sleep, a woman with dark-sheen hair and eyes the color of deepest forests. Always distant, always smiling, as if protecting something I’ve forgotten. That beautiful smile makes every day worthwhile.

But tonight, she’s not smiling.

Her lips move soundlessly, tears sparkling in her eyes. My chest tenses, I can’t breathe. I jolt awake, drenched in sweat, my pulse pounding.

Morning bleeds through the window, but the light feels wrong. The sky blazes with streaks of magenta and gold, too vivid to be real. My stomach drops when I look toward the clock tower.

It now read 13:13.

For years it had never moved.

I stop an old woman passing by. “Have you seen the clock? The hour’s changed.”

She smiles politely. “You’re mistaken, young man. It’s the same as always.”

But when she walks away, her feet leave no footprints. 

Cold ripples down my spine. My hand finds the sword’s hilt, the only anchor I trust. The world looked the same, yet different.

The air glimmered between the town gates, cobblestones rippled like water, buildings warped in and out of focus. I saw two guards overlap for just a heartbeat.

As the sun set, I trudged home, lost in thought, until the fading light revealed something terrifying: I had no shadow.

Fear curdles into resolve. If that so-called “evil” was stirring again, I’d protect this world, even if it killed me. 

People avoided the tower, terrified of the legends spread around it. I’d never been superstitious, but everything today whispered to me that the world I knew was breaking apart slowly.

The streets are deserted. The tower looms above, its doors chained and corroded. I tear them open. I feel a bit of dust and chill as I walk inside. 

The spiral staircase groans beneath my boots as I climb, torchlight licking the walls. The gears above had frozen by rust, a massive mechanism that had lost its center, its escapement.

So this was the prison of the world’s greatest evil? I almost laughed. Even this ruin was more exciting than the last ten years of my life. Then something catches my foot, a small wooden box, half-buried under debris.

Inside lies a faded photograph and a diary. The woman from my dreams smiles in the picture beside a man whose face is smeared beyond recognition. My pulse quickens. 

I take them home.

By candlelight, I open the diary. Elegant handwriting curls across the pages. On the inside cover, one name: Sylvie. 

The name tastes familiar, like something once whispered through my sleep.

I start to read.

“Damian was angry again today. I told him heroes could still change this world. He laughed. He doesn’t see the good left in people, but I do. I’ll keep believing for both of us.”

Page after page unfolds a love story beset by sorrow: Sylvie and Damian, her faith and his fall.

“He stopped turning his eyes to the stars, and now he studies maps and battle plans. When I touched his hand tonight, it was cold, not from anger, but from distance. He said the world is rotten to its core, and burning such would be mercy. I tried to reach him, but he only smiled and asked if I’d still love him after the fire.”

The final entry then went as follows:

“He plans to destroy the world. The man I love is gone. But I can’t live without him. I found a forbidden spell, I’ll offer my life for his. I’ll erase his memories, give him another chance. If he ever remembers, I pray he forgives me. When he’s free, I hope he can live a life he’s proud of.”

My throat burns. Damian, the great evil. Sylvie, his redeemer.

And me.

My voice cracks as I whisper it.

“I was never the hero… I was the villain.”

The name chews at my tongue in a sinusoidal bite and a guilt-laden weight.

“I am Damian.”

The truth burrows under my skin, frigid and cold-blooded. That peaceful world I had struggled to protect was not mine. I shut the diary, shaking. If Sylvie’s words were true, the cemetery could be the last clue. Grabbing my sword, I ran through the rain toward the truth I feared most.

Rain falls as I run through the dark streets of the collapsing town. Lightning tears the sky open, illuminating the cemetery gates. My heart hammers like the ticking of a clock that I no longer trust. 

I rummage through stacks of stone until I find it, half-buried in a slovenly tree beneath the crooked ground.

I kneeled in the mud, my breath hitching in my chest. The inscription read:

Sylvie Eras

My fist slammed into the ground. She had sacrificed herself for me, for a man so consumed by hatred he’d tried to end the world and forgot about her.

Grief and rage twisted inside me until I noticed words carved faintly at the bottom of the stone, in her same graceful script:

“When you remember me, time will move again.”

Ripping rain from my skin, I rise and run through the storm until I return to the tower. I understood now: I was the secret buried in this world. The clock had always been the heart of everything, the end justifying the means.

“Atone for my sins…” I let loose a long breath “Sure…this is a prison.”

I made it to top of the tower in a drenched, gasping state. The gears hover like ribs around an empty chest. A hollow cavity waited where the escapement should be; the clock was missing its heart. 

I couldn’t help but chuckle ironically.

“What do you want from me, Sylvie?” My voice cracks, swallowed by the storm.

I pressed my palms to my temples, choking on questions with no answers. 

“Why this false life of a hero?”

Then it strikes me, she didn’t want me to suffer. She wanted me to see what she had seen in me.

This was my purgatory.

Knees giving, I sank to the ice floor. Memories spill in: her face the day it ended, tearful and ferocious. She had battled me with words, not blades. I’d ridiculed her, ignorant of her love, until she smiled one last time, that quiet, soft smile I dreamt of.

The one that still held faith in me.

With trembling hands, I lifted my sword and used it to pull myself upright. I staggered toward the clock’s center and stared into the hollow space where the heart belonged.

She was my heart.

The void inside felt alive, humming faintly like a heartbeat waiting to restart. 

I rest my hand within it. 

A click breaks the silence. 

Then another. 

The gears shudder and groan as they start to operate. The pendulum swings. The tower trembles. 

The clock ticks again, slow, steady, alive.

The cracks in the stone glow with light. Before everything disappears around me: the village, the forest, the rain; it dissolves like smoke.

When the sun rises again, I stand on a quiet hillside beneath a calm, blue sky. The air smells like new beginnings. 

I don’t know how long I was gone, centuries, seconds; but I’m alive.

I wasn’t Damian the destroyer, nor Alex the false hero. I was something in between, a man still searching for the life she believed I could live.

Her final words echo in my mind like wind through leaves:

“I hope he can live a life he’s proud of.”

I smiled softly and took my first step towards the unknown, the steady rhythm of the clock pulsing in my chest.

From now on, I will live as Adrian, the hero Sylvie always knew I could become.