In the fall of 1952, beneath a blood-orange sky over Marrakesh, Indiana Jones chases a man through a labyrinth of sandstone alleys. The man clutches a brass relic—a broken timepiece with thirteen hands and no numbers, ticking backward. Jones tackles him through a fruit stall, and they crash into the dust. The man is bleeding, eyes glowing unnaturally. With his final breath, he utters a phrase in dead Sumerian: "It strikes once. And never again."
Later, at Marshall College, Indy meets with an old acquaintance: Dr. Fenton Shaw, a horologist and occult researcher now half-mad from years in Berlin’s hidden basements. Shaw reveals the relic isn’t a clock—it’s a temporal dial, a fragment of a long-lost mechanism created by a forgotten sect during the reign of Ashurbanipal, meant to mark a thirteenth hour. An hour that never existed. A window in time where fate becomes pliable—for those willing to bleed for it.
That relic, Shaw says, was one of seven keys. When brought together, they assemble a device called The Meridian Engine, capable of collapsing time into a single moment. The Nazis searched for it. Now, remnants of the Ahnenerbe—operating in secret across South America—are close to reactivating it.
Jones isn’t convinced. Until someone tries to kill him.
That night, his home is broken into. His books are burned. A man in a silver mask attacks him using a strange curved blade that shimmers like heat. Jones barely escapes, grabbing the broken dial before his house goes up in flames. He’s officially back in the game.
Following the clock’s origin, Indy and a wary but loyal Lydia Kessler travel through Peru, Malta, and southern Spain, racing against time itself. Along the way, they discover a chilling pattern: at each site, someone already tried to use the dial—and failed. The aftermath is always the same. Villages frozen in moments, people caught mid-step, birds motionless in midair. The world didn’t move. Time didn’t stop—it fractured.
In Seville, deep beneath an old cathedral, they discover an ancient mural depicting time bleeding from a wound in the sky. In the center: a man crucified upside down on a sundial, his shadow stretching into a mirror. Lydia, translating feverishly, mutters, “The one who walks through the Thirteenth Hour sees all—but belongs to none.”
They are not alone. A fanatical time cult called The Hemovants has reassembled the engine beneath the Sierra de Grazalema mountain range, inside a ruined observatory that now pulses with gears, wires, and dying light. Their leader is Herr Tollen, a former Nazi engineer who survived the war by vanishing—literally—for years. Now gaunt, pale, and wearing a brass exoskeleton to keep him rooted in time, he intends to use the machine to rewind the final days of the Reich, erasing its defeat by entering the 13th Hour and changing the outcome.
Indy is captured trying to sabotage the machine and chained to an iron gimbal that rotates with the Meridian Engine. Herr Tollen activates it. As the thirteen keys click into place, the moon freezes in the sky, the stars blur, and the machine emits a scream—not mechanical. Human. Time begins folding inward.
Jones sees his own memories shattering in reverse. His father. Marion. The Grail. War. Whips. Dust. Blood. Then… nothing.
But Lydia, having snuck into the control chamber, realizes the paradox: the Engine needs a sacrifice caught outside of time—someone tethered to all possible timelines. That’s Indy.
She pulls the failsafe lever, but it’s jammed. Indy knows what has to happen. He locks eyes with Lydia, then throws himself into the core of the machine, shoving one of the ancient dials into its heart.
The Meridian Engine explodes in a swirl of light, screams, reversed music, and silence.
When Lydia awakens, the observatory is gone. Herr Tollen is gone. No sign of cultists. No gear. No blood. Only a crater… and Indy’s fedora, half-buried in ash.
Back in New York, months later, Lydia receives a package. No return address. Inside: her old notebook… and a photo of Indy, older, wearing a dark suit, standing beside the JFK inauguration podium. Dated 1961.
He looks directly at the camera.
Smiling.
