It depicted a storm-tossed sea in grays and blues and greens, the water parted to reveal a dark ocean floor. In that waterless cavity stood two large figures, one red and one gold. They faced each other, prepared for a difficult fight. Lightning forked above their heads.
Danny touched his fingers to the golden figure and thought of the golden tower in Enfield. The more he focused on it, the heavier his body grew. What if these incidents meant more? What if they were a prelude to something else?
Away from Matthias’s calming presence, Danny’s stomach twisted into knots again. Sometimes clocks fell apart with age. It was to be expected when the towers had been maintaining time for hundreds of years.
But this was not the same thing. A numeral had been melted. A hand had been bent.
What was strong enough to tamper with time?
Danny’s mother and Matthias had told him stories when he was younger, but his father had kept a few up his sleeve as well. The first time Danny remembered seeing Big Ben, really seeing it and feeling it for what it was, he’d asked his father how the clocks ran in the first place.
“Don’t you know?” Christopher had asked, feigning shock. “How on earth will you be a clock mechanic if you don’t know your origins, Ticker?”
Every story originated from myth. Different cultures had their own gods. Their world had both.
Chronos was the father of time. After the world was shaped, he awoke within the cosmos, wrapped within galaxies and energy. He saw the earth and how wild and untamed it had become. How it needed to be maintained. So he created time out of the restless power within him, a tiny stream that became a raging flood as it spun the earth on its axis. Men and women aged, trees grew, plants withered. Time moved all things. Killed all things.
But Chronos couldn’t keep an eye on everything, so he cut four fingers from his hand. From his fingers grew the Gaian gods, each one chosen to oversee an element. Terra, earth. Caelum, sky. Oceana, sea.
Aetas, time.
“Aetas was called the Timekeeper,” his father had said, one hand resting on Danny’s shoulder. He remembered the familiar weight of it, the strength of those fingers gently squeezing his shoulder, the calluses on his father’s palm. “He made sure the pattern of time never became unbalanced, never got too tangled. He made sure our pasts, presents, and futures never collided.”
While the Gaian gods maintained the earth’s elements and humanity advanced, Chronos grew hateful. He saw lives of greed, lives of gluttony, lives of pride and blood and sin. Weary of this corrupt world, he retreated into slumber.
Aetas also grew weary, and mad with the power of time, which was too enormous for him to bear alone. His sister, Oceana, begged him to return his domain to Chronos. When he tried, Chronos turned him away and told him to forget the burden. The world could burn. He no longer cared.
But Aetas cared.
Desperate, he gifted some of his power to humans so that they might help him control the wild beast that was time.
“Chronos found out, and oof, was he mad.” Christopher smacked the side of his leg for emphasis. “He woke and confronted Aetas. Said that humans should never have been given such power.”
Chronos descended to where Aetas lived within the ocean. The water parted for their battle, roiling walls of gray and blue, the crash of lightning and waves above. They fought among dry coral reefs and seashells that broke beneath their feet, the sea a raging storm for three days and three nights, until Aetas grew weak enough for Chronos to land the final blow.
Danny had looked up, his eyes wide. “Chronos killed Aetas?”
“Yes. And when he did, time shattered. No one could control it. And so we built the towers.” Christopher had gestured to Big Ben. “The towers are conductors of Aetas’s leftover power. Through them, we can control time—or give ourselves the illusion we can. The burden is ours now. We are the Timekeepers.”
There were no Gaian gods to help anymore. The other three had receded, choosing to fade to little more than myth. The demand for technology grew in their absence, a demand for humans to control what was once out of their grasp. People held fast to their Bibles and their churches, to the belief that perhaps a benevolent creator looked on, and did nothing.
Everyone leaves, in the end.
It took an hour to reach Enfield. As he got closer, Danny nearly hit a bump in the road and swerved to avoid it. He cursed as his heart jumped into his throat. This bloody town would kill him.
The town was holding its weekly market, and people were clogging the path. He parked on the outskirts and lifted the thin, long parcel containing the new minute hand from the back of the auto.
Immediately he sensed the cracks in time, the empty pockets of missing seconds and moments. It made the air heavy and the sky appear frozen, as if the town were being forced to slow down until the next hour. Time wanted to move in leaps, just as the Lead had said.