Machinae mundi

i. clockwork universe

WAS HE REALLY DOING THIS?

Mori stared at the low metal door. He knew he shouldn't be here. This was Ren's private space, and he knew the value of places like these. Spheres of solitude to retreat into when the scrutiny of the world grew too intense.

But he couldn't ignore the groans in the clock tower. Something was wrong with the grand system — the gears that controlled the world. And Ren hadn't been seen in months. Breaking into his mentor's workshop was an act of desperation, but it had to be done.

Mori turned his attention back to the door. Amidst the overlapping network of gears and bars on its surface, he could just about make out what he was looking for. A small indentation in the centre of the door, about the size of a small pocket watch.

Mori retrieved the timepiece from his pocket. The small open-face pocket watch had taken him nearly a month to make. Thirty days of tinkering by lantern-light, late at night in the Tower of Clouds, working from a schematic he'd drawn of the door the last time he'd tried to get in.

Hopefully not thirty wasted days.

He wound the watch up and slotted it into the hole. His breath stilled in his throat. For a moment — silence, jarred only by the gentle tick, tick, tick of the timepiece and the flutter of his heartbeat. But then, the gears in the watch meshed with the network on the door. The wheels and pinions turned and clattered. The entrance rumbled and slid open.

Mori let out a quick, breathless laugh. It actually worked.

He stepped inside. Guilt trailed behind him as he walked.

I have to do this, he told himself. A skilled clockmaker would have been able to fix the tower. Descend the rickety staircase into the core of the tower, adjust the wheels in the grand system that controlled the energy of the world, and tweak the system until the tremors faded into silence.

But he had no idea how. Ren had only taught him to make timepieces.

One timepiece, he corrected himself. Everything else he'd learned himself, the results of hours of late-night experimentation, fiddling with spare parts in the workshop until he managed to tease out the mechanics behind them.

So his presence here was justified. If Ren had taught him properly — or even returned to the tower once in the past few months — he wouldn't need to be here.

But just like with everything else, she'd left him to find all the answers himself.

And so, here we are.

The room was dark, but he had a timepiece for that. He brushed his cloak off his shoulder and unclipped another watch tucked into the side pocket of his jacket. Mori twisted the crown of the timepiece, setting the gears within into motion. The face of the watch lit up like a beacon, illuminating the room.

A smile fluttered at the edge of his mouth. He still remembered the wonder of that first timepiece Ren had shown him, here in this workshop. Still shivering with the cold, he'd watched with growing fascination as Ren set into place the gears and jewels which would soon manipulate the laws of the world.

She showed him how to use it, winding the small watch up and letting the wheels turn. And like magic, the cosmic disturbance she'd orchestrated played out. The seed on the ground in front of them quivered and sprouted, as if commanded to.

He knew now it wasn't magic. Feats like that could only be obtained through a rigorous, intimate understanding of the world. And one timepiece alone couldn't help a defect in the grand system itself. The tiny cogs and wheels within the small pocket watch could only nudge, imperceptible ripples in the ever-turning cycle of the universe. The real power to change came from the tower.

Mori turned, shining the light onto the walls. Unlike the elaborate detail Ren embellished her timepieces with, the room was barren. The walls were bare brick, unadorned save for two chalkboards on opposite sides. Scribbled calculations filled the first, while the second had been taken up with some kind of exploded diagram. Overlapping wheels, loosely arranged in a vertical pillar — vaguely evocative of the gears in the grand system, Mori thought.

A square table stood waist-high in the centre of the room, tools and watch parts strewn across its surface. Intricate assemblages of gears and wheels — far more complex than anything he could hope to create — lay half-assembled on the desk.

Mori shook his head. Whatever Ren was working on was of no business to him. He was looking for notes, plans — anything to shed light on the workings of the tower and the system within.

The first shelves held a jumbled mess of pocket watches, small clocks and dials; heavy-looking geodes of rough-edged, coloured crystals; then an assortment of glass tubes and vials, coils of wire and scrap metal. Right at the bottom lay several bundles of paper, some tied together, others stuffed haphazardly into any available crevice.

Mori crouched to sift through the piles of papers on the bottom shelf. Many were calculations and diagrams — precursors to the writings on the chalkboard, perhaps? A battered notebook with a sketch of the tower caught his eye. His bony fingers leafed through the ream of papers. It looked good, perhaps something he could use...

The soft creak of the door behind him grabbed his attention. Before he could move, a hand clamped down on his shoulder, and he froze.