By Blue Cicada
In the quiet town of Eldridge, where the church bells still rang true, there lived a clockmaker named Elias. His workshop was a maze of gears and pendulums, each piece telling a story of time passed and time yet to come. But Elias was old, and his hands trembled when he reached for the smallest screws. That was when he found his apprentice—not in a guild or a school, but in the form of a girl who had wandered into his shop one rainy afternoon.
Her name was Liora, and she had no memory of where she came from. The only thing she carried was a small, broken pocket watch, its face cracked but its hands still moving. Elias took one look at it and knew: this girl was no ordinary wanderer. She was a keeper of time, even if she didn’t know it yet.
"You’ll stay here," Elias said, his voice rough but kind. "And you’ll learn." Liora nodded, her fingers brushing the watch in her pocket. She didn’t know then that the watch wasn’t just broken—it was waiting. Waiting for her to fix it. Waiting for her to understand what it truly meant to measure a life.