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SilasCrane t1_jd5a2cf wrote

I:

Tick-Tock. Tick-tock.

The people within and without the Great Marketplace waited with bated breath, all eyes on the clock tower in the square.

Tick-tock. Tick-tock.

The tension grew as the clock's hour hand edged towards the golden sigil at the apex of its face.

Tick-tock. Tick-tock.

The eager merchants made last-minute adjustments to the carefully displayed and positioned wares laid out in their stalls. Their just as eager patrons shifted from foot to foot excitedly, just outside the market gates.

GONNNG

The clock's ornate hand fell upon the Sigil of Wealth, tolled a clear note upon its great brazen bells, and the marketplace guards threw open the gates. The people rushed in, quick but orderly, and the merchants began calling out to them, loud and bold, yet still respectful. Any patron who battered or shoved another, and any merchant who was obnoxious in hawking his wares, would be seized by the guards, and barred from the market during the Span of Wealth for a year and day. No one wanted to risk that. Far better to risk losing out on a good trade today, than to risk that long exile from the Great Marketplace -- especially since you could always try your luck again tomorrow.

For during this special Span, a subtle magic was laid upon the world that nudged fate in the direction of abundance, and ever so slightly bent the laws governing reality towards largesse. Not always, but once in a while, a minor miracle would occur, when trade was conducted at this time:

Sometimes a patron would make his purchases, and he would find that the coins he'd given the merchants had somehow not diminished the number of coins that he held in his pouch. Similarly, a merchant would sometimes find that the coins in his coffers at the end of the Span were somehow well in excess of those that he'd made selling his wares.

As the people went about their business, hoping for one of those infrequent blessings, above them all stood that shining clock tower, and the patrons moved, and the merchants moved, and the world itself moved, according to the ticking of the Terelandrian Clock.

Long ago, Terelandrius the Great, the immortal mage whose understanding of time and space was said to have grown so vast that the passage of time no longer aged him, had given his wondrous masterworks to the world freely.

Every great city in the world had been given one of his glorious clock towers, every small town had been presented with one of his standing pedestal clocks for the town square, and even the larger farming villages had been gifted with intricate wall clocks to place upon the wall of the local tavern.

As a result, almost all civilized folk lived according to the Spans, the mystical segments of time delineated by the Terelandrian Clock, that were auspicious for doing one thing or another. Trading of course, was best done during the Span of Wealth. Likewise, work done on planting and harvesting was most fruitful when it took place during the Span of Growth, as were the amorous exertions of couples who wished to be blessed with children. The work of craftsmen and artisans was at its finest when it was done during the Span of Making, and the creations of artists and scholars were most inspired in the Span of Mind.

None doubted the benign nature of the Clock. How could they? The great wizard, otherwise aloof from worldly affairs, had asked nothing in return for his gifts, and indeed the histories recorded that when he first bestowed them, he openly swore upon his name and his magical power that he would never ask repayment from the people of the world.

Moreover, the subtle magics of the Clock seemed utterly harmless -- Terelandrius had not, after all, made any Spans well suited for war, strife, or suffering. A belligerent king might have spears and arrows crafted during the Span of Making, true, but then so too could his enemies craft shields and armor during that same time.

And the blessings of the Clock were applied equally to all the people of the world, favoring no nation or kingdom above another: each of the four spans recurred across the clock multiple times per day, so that no matter where on the globe you were, you had a fair chance to benefit from each Span at least once during the day. The only singular point on the clock was the smallest Span of all, the one that existed at the bottom of the clock face: The Span of Renewal. This Span lasted only as long as the time between tick and tock, and occurred all over the world at once.

It was scarcely remarked upon by most, who experienced it only as a transient moment of malaise, as though they had dozed off for a second or two and then come back to their senses. Then it was gone, and the clock moved on to the next Span in order. This, Terelandrius had explained when he presented his clocks to the world, was when the magic of the Terelandrian Clock recharged itself, so the Spans could begin again.

Those who lived in lands where it was night when the Span of Renewal occurred hardly knew it existed at all, as they were either already asleep when it happened, or if not it simply blended into the ordinary fatigue at the end of the day's labor. It could occasionally be inconvenient, and obliged folk to try not to do anything extremely delicate or important at that precise moment, but otherwise it seemed as harmless as everything else about the Clock. All believed this was true for centuries.

The first to doubt it was a man named Martin -- Martin, the watchmaker.

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SilasCrane t1_jd5zt5k wrote

II:

Martin sat on a bench in the Great Marketplace, like a rock in a stream, as the crowd flowed around him on both side. For all that, he was blind to the multitude of people of milling around him, and to the merchants beneath their bright awnings.

Martin's eyes were fixed upon the Clock.

Like most watchmakers, Martin had made a study of the Terelandrian Clock in its many forms, which was surely the pinnacle of his craft. Though he could not hope to duplicate the magic that made it run eternally -- much less the subtle sorcery of the Spans -- the ordinary motions of the Clock were mechanical in nature, driven by springs or hanging weights and pendulums, and it was eternally precise, never requiring adjustment.

In theory then, Martin thought that it ought to be possible to replicate the inner workings of the clock to produce a mundane clock just as precise, though of course it would need to be wound now and then, and probably reset once or twice a year.

The problem was that it wasn't possible.

Since watchmakers and other masters of clock work had first begun adapting the workings of the Clock in miniature --based on their study of the mechanical parts of the clock, which could be easily viewed from inside a Clock tower -- they had noticed that their own timepieces, no matter how well crafted during the Span of Making, were simply never as accurate.

They always lost time, and lost it quickly enough that if you wanted to keep your clock precisely synchronized with the Terelandrian Clock -- which almost everyone did -- you had to reset it constantly.

Most people had no reason for such great specificity, and were content to reset theirs every few days. But there were some who kept more precise schedules, like those whose business was trade or travel. Such people still marked the arbitrary "hours" and "minutes" that had been used to divide up the day before the Clock was introduced, watching each minute as a miser watches each penny, and so they set their watches anew each morning, by the nearest Terelandrian Clock.

Most watchmakers had accepted this as a natural limitation of their craft, presuming that some spell or enchantment was what kept the Terelandrian Clock from losing time, and that this precision simply could not be replicated with mere springs and counterweights.

But Martin did not accept this. Though the Clock had magical springs that never wore out, and enchanted gears that never seized, it seemed to Martin that these merely prevented it from breaking -- the magic did not appear to change the fundamental nature of the parts, or of the materials they'd been made from. Perhaps you could not make a mundane clock that was correct forever, due to its components eventually wearing out, but he saw no good explanation for why such a clock couldn't keep time for more than a day.

Or at least he hadn't before.

It had happened by accident, on a day when his passion for unravelling the mechanical secrets of the Clock had been running especially high, and he'd decided to remain in his workshop during the Span of Wealth, instead of taking his stock to the Great Marketplace to sell, as usual.

He had two newly made watches, that he'd set by the Terelandrian Clock only an hour before, and both were as precise a work as he'd ever constructed. Both were set on his workbench while he worked on a third of the same type, hoping that by observing the workings of identical pieces, he could deduce something about the problem that made them lose time so readily.

He worked all the way through the Span of Wealth, until, as it always did, that Span ended, and gave way to the momentary Span of Renewal. As the two watches ticked down to the end of the Span, he lifted his tools from the delicate clockwork, so the Span of Renewal would not take him unaware while he was making a fine adjustment. The disorienting fugue rolled over him like a wave, and was just as quickly gone, as the Span of Making began.

He had been just about to go back to work when he noticed it: in the space of a eyeblink, both of the newly set timepieces had advanced by a minute.

By exactly one minute.

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AB_Wordsmythe_Esq t1_jd680j0 wrote

The amount of worldbuilding and reader investment in the world and character you've done in two replies is goddamned respectable here.

I feel like I could take notes off of this on how to write. Wow.

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chacham2 OP t1_jd6e16a wrote

Very nice setup.

Thank you for the story!

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RyanKneeya t1_jd5ft1n wrote

I absolutely love world you’ve built here, and the system of Spans is intriguing. Masterful work as always!

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