The Clockmaker’s Secret



‎Prague, 1874

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‎In the mist-soaked alleys of the Old Town, where gas lamps flickered like forgotten stars, there lived an old man known only as Master Horak—the finest clockmaker in all of Bohemia. His shop sat tucked between a crumbling bookbindery and a bakery that always smelled of burnt rye. People came from as far as Vienna and Budapest just to touch his timepieces—delicate contraptions of brass and mahogany, etched with strange runes that whispered secrets in the silence.

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‎But no one ever noticed the boy.

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‎Jakub, Horak’s apprentice, was barely sixteen, and blind since birth. He moved through the cluttered shop with eerie precision, fingers dancing over cogs and pendulums like a pianist over ivory keys. His world was not made of sight but of ticking, vibration, and the scent of machine oil. He could hear time. And sometimes, he swore it listened back.

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‎Jakub never questioned why the clocks in Master Horak’s shop were never sold. Visitors would come, admire the artistry, ask for the price—and be politely declined. “They’re prototypes,” Horak would say with a cough and a shrug. “Unstable.” Yet Jakub knew these were more than clocks. They hummed with energy, resonated in strange frequencies, and sometimes ticked backward when no one was looking.

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‎One rainy night, Horak didn’t come down for supper.

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‎Jakub waited. When the grandfather clock struck midnight and no footsteps echoed from the attic workshop, he climbed the narrow staircase—guided by memory, not sight. The door was unlocked. Inside, the air was thick with smoke and the scent of ozone. The great workbench was empty—save for a pocket watch unlike any Jakub had ever touched before.

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‎It was warm.

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‎He picked it up. The case was engraved with a spiral that pulsed beneath his fingertips. He opened it. There were no numbers—only symbols, like the phases of the moon, and a single brass dial that spun with impossible speed. As he held it, the ticking grew louder. Louder. Until—

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‎Silence.

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‎Then, a voice.

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‎Not Horak’s. Not his own. A woman, whispering in a language he didn't know, yet somehow understood: “Time is not a river, child. It is a wheel. And you are now its spoke.”

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‎Jakub awoke on the floor. The pocket watch had stopped ticking.

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‎Master Horak was gone. And no one—not the neighbors, not the baker, not even the town’s constable—remembered a man named Horak. The shop was now registered to “Jakub Vlk,” as if he’d owned it all along.

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‎Confused and frightened, Jakub tried to leave the city—but each time he crossed the bridge out of town, he would blink and find himself back in the shop, the bell above the door chiming like laughter.

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‎So he stayed. Studied. Experimented.

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‎He began repairing the strange clocks Horak left behind, decoding their inner language. Each one seemed to affect time differently. One slowed a single moment into an hour. Another reversed the last ten seconds. The largest—the “Heart of the Shop,” a pendulum-driven monstrosity—could freeze time in the building completely… but only for a cost.

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‎Memory.

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‎With each use, Jakub felt pieces of his past slip away. First, his mother’s voice. Then, the smell of summer hay. One day, he opened a music box and couldn’t remember what music sounded like.

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‎He understood now why Horak never sold the clocks.

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‎Time, when bent, bends back.

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‎Years passed—or perhaps only days. Jakub no longer aged. He became the city's mystery, the blind clockmaker who never slept, whose shop never closed. Children whispered that he had been cursed by a fallen angel; others said he was protecting the world from what the clocks truly wanted.

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‎And beneath the ticking, in the silence between seconds, Jakub could still hear that voice:

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‎“You are its spoke, and the wheel must turn.”

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