The Clockmaker's Paradox

In a small, fog-covered village nestled between two ancient mountains, there lived an old man named Elric Dorne, known to the villagers simply as The Clockmaker. His tiny workshop sat at the corner of Elder Street, a humble space filled with ticking, chiming, whirring clocks of every shape and size.

But among all his creations, one was never displayed.

It was a large, brass and silver contraption hidden behind a velvet curtain in the back room. Elric called it Aeturnum—a clock that didn’t measure time but controlled it.

No one believed the legends. People called it the ramblings of an old man with too much time and too little company. But what they didn’t know was that Elric had succeeded—he had cracked the code of time itself.

Aeturnum had a single button at its base. Press it once, and the world would rewind by precisely one hour. But there was a rule: it could only be used once a week. Any more than that, and the price would be... uncertain.

Elric never dared to press it. Not until the evening of November 12th—the day his granddaughter Lily fell through the ice at the frozen lake.


---

Lily was all he had left. After losing his wife and daughter in a train accident years ago, the child had become his light. The village searched for her in vain, but when they found her body pulled from the lake, the silence that followed was worse than any scream.

Elric brought her home in trembling arms. The warmth in the house was meaningless. Her favorite toy rabbit sat by the fireplace, untouched. And that’s when he did it—he ran to the back room, pulled the curtain away, and pressed the button on Aeturnum.

The world shimmered for a second.

The clocks in the room stopped ticking.

Then—tick...tick...tick—they resumed.


---

An hour earlier, Elric rushed to the lake. He shouted her name, and this time, he saw her walking toward the ice. He ran faster than he thought his old legs could carry him. He called out. She turned. He fell to his knees, out of breath, but she ran into his arms, confused but safe.

He saved her.

It worked.

They went home, and for days, everything was back to normal. Laughter returned. The fire warmed more than just the room. Lily painted again. Life moved on.

But the temptation lingered.

Elric wondered: What if I used it again? Just a little more. One more hour—maybe to fix a mistake in his past. Maybe to save his wife. Maybe to stop that train.

On the seventh day, he pressed it again.


---

The changes were subtle at first.

The clocks in his shop ticked out of sync. His reflection in the mirror sometimes moved a second late. Lily mentioned strange dreams—people calling her by different names, places she had never visited.

Then it got worse.

On the third use, Elric lost two teeth overnight. His hands began to tremble uncontrollably. When he walked into the village, people whispered—not about the clockmaker—but about how they'd never seen him before. To them, he was a stranger.

Reality had started rewriting itself.


---

The fourth time he pressed the button, Lily disappeared entirely.

Gone from her room. Gone from the paintings. Gone from the memories of the villagers. He asked people—no one had heard of her. Not even the schoolteacher, who once gave her gold stars for reading aloud. Elric’s heart collapsed under the weight of silence.

He stumbled back to his workshop and stared at Aeturnum, now ticking backward all on its own. He realized what had happened: each use of the clock had removed something from his timeline—a punishment for altering fate too often.

Now, he had a choice.

Use it one last time—and possibly erase himself completely, or leave it alone and live in a world where Lily never existed.


---

Elric didn’t hesitate.

He pressed the button.


---

The villagers say the clock shop has always been empty, its sign swinging gently in the wind. Some claim they hear ticking when they walk past. Others remember a girl named Lily who used to paint by the lake—but they’re not sure where she went.

No one knows what happened to the old man who once lived there.

But sometimes, when the fog clears, a strange brass clock can be seen glowing faintly in the window, ticking not forward, not backward—but in circles.