The pocket watch had been ticking backward for three days when Elara finally understood why her father had disappeared.
She found the brass key hidden beneath a loose floorboard in his workshop, wrapped in velvet the color of midnight. The key bore an inscription in a language that seemed to shift before her eyes, letters rearranging themselves like restless spirits. When she held it to the lamplight, the workshop filled with the sound of chimes—not from any clock present, but from somewhere beyond the walls of their cottage.
Her father had been the village clockmaker for thirty years, crafting timepieces that never lost a second. But in recent months, he’d grown obsessed with something he called “the lost hour”—that mysterious thirteenth hour that existed between midnight and dawn, visible only to those who knew how to look.
Elara pressed the key against the grandfather clock that dominated the workshop’s corner. The clock face shimmered, revealing numbers she’d never seen before: thirteen, fourteen, fifteen. The pendulum swung in impossible directions, cutting through dimensions like a scythe through wheat.
The workshop dissolved around her.
She found herself standing in a marketplace that defied physics. Vendors sold bottled laughter and crystallized memories. Street performers juggled floating orbs of pure starlight. The air tasted of cinnamon and possibility.
“You’re late,” said a voice behind her.
Elara turned to see her father, but not as she remembered him. His hair flowed like liquid silver, and his eyes held the depth of centuries. He wore robes that seemed woven from the aurora itself.
“The thirteenth hour chose you,” he continued, gesturing toward the impossible bazaar surrounding them. “As it chose me, and my father before me. We are the keepers of lost time, the shepherds of moments that slip between the cracks of ordinary existence.”
A woman approached, her skin luminescent as moonwater. She carried a basket filled with pocket watches, each one ticking to its own rhythm. “The repairs are finished,” she said, offering the basket to Elara’s father. “These lost hours can return to their proper streams now.”
Elara watched as her father examined each timepiece with practiced care. Some glowed with warm amber light—happy moments that had been misplaced. Others pulsed with deep blue—sorrows that needed to find their way home.
“Every broken heart leaves fragments of time scattered through the universe,” her father explained. “Every moment of pure joy creates echoes that ripple through dimensions. Our family has always been responsible for gathering these temporal orphans and returning them where they belong.”
The marketplace began to fade as the thirteenth hour drew to a close. Elara felt herself being pulled back toward the workshop, toward the ordinary world of ticking clocks and measured seconds.
“Will you stay?” her father asked, though his voice already sounded distant.
Elara looked at the brass key still clutched in her palm, then at the grandfather clock whose face now showed familiar numbers once again. She thought of the village customers who would need their timepieces repaired, of the ordinary life she’d always known.
But she also thought of bottled laughter and crystallized memories, of broken hearts leaving temporal fragments scattered across the cosmos.
“I’ll return,” she said. “When the thirteenth hour calls again.”
Her father smiled, and for a moment she saw him as both the mystical keeper of lost time and the gentle clockmaker who had raised her. “The key will know when you’re ready.”
The workshop materialized around her once more. Dawn light filtered through the windows, and the pocket watch on her father’s workbench resumed its forward ticking. But now Elara could hear what she’d missed before—the subtle harmony of all the timepieces in the room, keeping not just the passage of minutes and hours, but the rhythm of lost moments finding their way home.
She tucked the brass key into her apron pocket and began preparing the workshop for customers. After all, someone had to keep the ordinary clocks running while the thirteenth hour did its work.
Leave a Reply