The Clockmaker’s Apprentice

The Clockmaker’s Apprentice

The town of Nareth had no clocks, yet everyone knew the time.

The sun rose when it was supposed to. Bells rang from the chapel steeple exactly when the baker’s loaves browned. Children returned home from the woods just before night fell, and candles were lit with a synchronicity that defied logic. No one asked why. In Nareth, time simply… behaved.

But at the very edge of town, where the cobblestone road turned to moss and the birds sang in odd, syncopated rhythms, there stood a crooked little shop. Its sign read:

“Aurelius & Timepieces – Restorer of Moments”

Inside, clocks of every size and era filled the walls. Grandfather clocks with brass pendulums, pocket watches suspended mid-tick, dusty sundials mounted like relics. Some ticked. Some tocked. Some hummed like breathing.

And in the heart of the shop, beneath the golden light of an oil lamp, sat Aurelius—the old clockmaker.

He was a man of parchment skin and silver eyes, bent at the shoulders and always murmuring to himself in a voice like wind through chimes. But what unsettled most was this: each time you visited, he looked a little younger. A wrinkle gone. Hair darkened. Steps lighter.

When fourteen-year-old Eliot arrived at the shop one misty morning, it was with nothing but a satchel and the letter his father had pressed into his palm before disappearing.

“He owes me,” the letter read, scrawled in ink. “He'll take you in.”

Aurelius examined the letter without a word. Then he simply nodded, pushed open the ticking door, and said, “Come in. We’ve little time.”

Eliot became the apprentice.

Days melted into weeks. The clocks, he noticed, were never in sync—but they weren’t wrong, either. Aurelius would stare at one, listen, and nod as though it had told him a secret.

“Every clock keeps a truth,” the clockmaker whispered once. “The trick is knowing which truth it tells.”

Eliot polished brass and sorted gears. He learned to wind delicate mechanisms and sketch minute etchings. But the more he worked, the more peculiar things became.

The hourglass in the back room refilled itself when no one was looking.

A watch once chimed just before thunder rolled over the hills.

One morning, Eliot saw Aurelius studying his own reflection in a silver pocket watch. He looked no older than a man in his thirties. His once-frail hands now moved with the confidence of youth.

“You’re getting younger,” Eliot said.

Aurelius smiled faintly. “No. You’re catching up.”

It was near midnight when Eliot found the door he wasn’t meant to open. A velvet-curtained archway at the back of the shop, always locked. But that night, it stood ajar, revealing a spiral staircase made of ticking cogs and drifting motes of golden dust.

Drawn by curiosity stronger than fear, Eliot stepped through.

He descended into a chamber unlike anything he’d imagined. A dome of glass and shadow, filled with towering timepieces, their pendulums swinging in unison. In the center stood a massive gear, larger than any creature, turning with a sound like heartbeat and thunder.

And on the walls—dozens of clocks. Each marked not with numbers, but names.

One said Aurelius. Another: Eliot.

He reached for it. The hands began to spin.

Aurelius appeared beside him, not angry—but solemn.

“This is the Heart of Time,” he said. “It beats beneath all things. Every life is a cog. Every choice, a tick.”

Eliot’s mouth was dry. “What am I?”

The old-young man looked at him, eyes filled with sorrow and pride. “You are my apprentice. My successor. My beginning and my end.”

The clock marked Eliot chimed once.

“You see,” Aurelius continued, “I don’t age backward. Time folds around me as I fulfill my cycle. And now... it folds around you.”

From that night on, Eliot felt the change.

When he adjusted a broken clock, rainstorms stopped early. When he repaired a cracked watch, two feuding neighbors suddenly forgave each other.

He began to dream of moments before they happened. He would wake with the scent of morning before the sun rose.

And Aurelius?

He began to fade.

His hair returned to gold. His body to boyhood. Then to a child, silent and blinking. Until one morning, Eliot awoke to find a small brass pocket watch resting on Aurelius’s pillow.

It was ticking.

Years passed.

The town of Nareth remained timeless.

In the crooked shop, a young man with silver eyes now tended the clocks. He murmured to the walls and hummed to the pendulums. He smiled at the hourglass that refilled itself, and sometimes—just sometimes—he stared into a mirror and swore he saw a boy watching him from the other side.

Over the door, a new sign had been carved:

“Eliot & Timepieces – Restorer of Moments”

And beneath it, in small letters:

“We are all parts of the same clock. Let it tick.”