When it gets to the “lessons to teach/Divinity’s Reach” part it throws off the rythm for me. The rest seems good, though. A fumble on the writer’s part or intentional hint at Scarlet being a calculating, but still crazy woman? Not sure.
I’m guessing fumble. It’s been a long time since high school english and I’m not a poetry expert by any means, but because of the situation, it really ought to be a sing song chant, so the stress and rhythm ought to be consistent. After rereading it and thinking about it a bit, I guess it’s a little better than I thought. There are still things that bug me though.
Tick tock goes the clock
It’s al-most time for time to stop
Aside from clock and stop not being full rhymes, the rhythm seems right. The first line doesn’t have the same number of stresses but I can forgive that on count of it being the first line, and “Tick tock” being … er whatever that word is that means it sounds like the object or effect it’s describing. Anyhow, very singsong. You can imagine a little girl voice chanting along. I think counting syllables is probably beyond analysis here and I was never very good at sorting that out anyway. But stress rhythms are natural to hear.
Some-thing you all must un-der-stand
Your world is built on fog and sand
Putting the stress on the second syllable on “Something” feels unnatural, but it’s workable as long as you keep the sing-song in mind. It might have been better to write it as “Some thing” rather than “Something” which very definitely has the emphasis on “Some”.
You’re out of time, your jig is done
It’s time for Scarlet to have her fun
And here I am imagining their writer cursing the design team for giving the antagonist a two syllable name, because “Scarlet” completely screws up the line. The best you can do is try to slur Scarlet into a single syllable, but it’s not a name that does that very easily.
She has some hard lessons to teach
To the people of Divinity’s Reach
And here, you’re right. It’s completely broken at this point. I’m not even going to mark stress patterns because there’s no way to read this the way the prior lines have been read. I can’t even come up with a good alternate. You either go past tense with taught which doesn’t rhyme with reach, or you abandon the ‘*each’ rhyme and go with something else thematic. And referring to Scarlet again is going to be problematic every time it occurs because it’s Scar-let and never Scar-let.
So mark the date in perm-’nent ink
The hour is late-r than you think
“Permanent” and “later” are awkward as hell but you can kind of fudge past it with some slurring.
On the twent-ieth day she’ll start her games
And warm her hands over Kry-ta’s flames!
And again “twentieth” is awkward and “over” is awkward. “On” might have been better on the latter. I’m not sure there’s a good solution for 20th.
So overall, I’m forced to agree it’s not quite as bad as I thought, but there are still a lot of rough patches.