The Clockmaker in the Tower of Time

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It is said that whoever follows the chime of a forgotten hour will eventually reach the Tower of Time. It is not found on maps, wandering through the years like a shy animal, revealing itself only to those seeking an answer to a question they do not yet know. The tower is not a building in the classical sense. Its walls consist of stacked calendar pages, framed by tendrils of old pocket watches, whose hands sometimes run backward. Gears grow there like mushrooms. Pendulums hang in the windows, swinging in ancient languages. At the very top, in the highest room – round like a forgotten coin – lives the Clockmaker. She is old. Not in years, but in memories. Her gaze is calm, her movements precise as the beating of wings in the fog. Her workshop is filled with tables scattered with time: seconds in glasses, minutes like strips of fabric, hours made of brass wire, tangled in old songs. The Clockmaker does not make ordinary clocks. She repairs those that live within people—broken timekeepers, lost senses of rhythm, ticking questions. She mends with golden thread, sews dreams into lost years, restores soft tones to silent days. One evening, the wind brings her a strange package. Inside: a crumpled sketch of time, a heartbeat wrapped in a cloth, and a note with the words: "I no longer know when I was." The clockmaker unfolds the note, reads it, closes her eyes. Then she begins. She arranges memory dust, lets pasts run through small hourglasses, checks the ticking of a folded thought. She pours a new slice of time out of tears, sprinkles in a smile that was never shown—and a gasp just before a word that never came. At the end, she places everything in a small clock, barely larger than a walnut. She packs it in an envelope of light and hands it to a cloaked raven. "Take it back," she says. "Where to?" asks the raven. "To where I felt I'd missed something." And the raven flies off, through night, through days, through heartbeats. The clockmaker stays behind in the tower. She listens to the ticking, which she herself doesn't know. And continues to work. Hour after hour. For all those who have lost their time—or never noticed it beginning.