The Grand Chronometer.

Murkstone-Snatchly was a bustling city. Fires and forges, grime and graft made it a place where the sun was an occasional guest, and mostly seen only as a dim yellow-ochre orb through soup-like clouds. The rain generally failed to keep its distance, and generally failed also to have any cleansing benefit upon the place.

A peculiar thing seemed to be happening at the Murks Hall University. The wizards had been unusually quiet, which, given their normal propensity for loud debates over the nature of magic and the size of their latest vanity projects, was deeply unsettling. It seemed that for the present, their greatest concern was not an imminent magical bonanza or a new form of enchanted celery, but a clock. Not just any clock, but the Grand Chronometer. This monumental timepiece had been ticking away since time itself.

It was, in fact, the clock that regulated time itself, although that minor detail had been more or less forgotten by all but the most venerable, wizened and antique Wizard Emeritus.

The clock was a vast thing of jagged-toothed cogs and levers. Of falling weights, coiled springs and swinging pendulums large enough to knock the head off a running horse. It was housed in the University’s most secure, magic-proof room. Unfortunately, the clock was no longer running correctly. Other, more modern, although less portentous timepieces indicated the errors. But since none of the other timepieces agreed with each other either, nobody was entirely sure what time, in the truest sense of measuring the flight of the arrow of time, it actually was. Celestial calculations, whilst useful, were only good to a few minutes or so, so they were no help. Naturally, this was the sort of thing that would unsettle even the most stoic of wizards. Without the Grand Chronometer, time in Murkstone-Snatchly, and the Multiverse in general, had developed a troubling tendency to meander alarmingly and unpredictably. Unpredictability was not a good thing when it came to time.

As is often the way with matters of huge, multiverse-terminating importance and complexity, nobody was sure what should be done. The Guild of Clockmakers had shamefully admitted that none of their members would attempt a repair since none of them knew how to fix the Chronometer, it being more ancient and complex than anything they could contrive. It fell to magic and wizards to save the day. As usual. Naturally, no wizard of any seriousness wanted to be involved in anything that was likely to end in disaster. The end of the multiverse was considered to be, on the scale of things, more than moderately disastrous.

Enter Bors, the most inept of wizards and, accordingly, the seemingly perpetual student of the Murks Hall University. His greatest achievement in life was keeping himself from being killed in increasingly hair-raising and improbable ways. He was widely considered the most un-promising member of the current cohort of undergraduate wizards. Bors was desperate to redeem his wizarding reputation and consequently he was the only wizard foolish enough to volunteer to fix the Grand Chronometer. He was attracted by the fact that the Guild of Clockmakers had promised a large sum of money to anyone who was successful. More importantly, if Bors succeeded, and it was, let’s face it, a big if, he would also avoid expulsion from the Guild of Wizards.

And if he failed he could be written off as a hopelessly inept meddler, working unlicensed, and therefore leaving no taint on any proper wizards.

Bors’s attempts to repair the clock began with advice from the greatest minds the University could muster who, in the face of all logic and evidence, were currently of the view that time was not a straight line at all, but a rather complicated knot.

As Bors delved into the mysteries of the Grand Chronometer, he discovered a series of realities within the clockwork mechanism. Each gear and spring contained a miniature world of its own, each governed by its own set of rules and inhabitants. It was not that surprising considering that the Grand Chronometer was supposed to govern all of time itself, and time, as every thinking person knows, is both scarce and very big. All pervading and finite, in an infinite sort of way. There are, after all, numerous parallel realities in a Multiverse, many of them inside the Grand Chronometer. And indeed, he found himself navigating a sequence of increasingly bizarre realities - an underwater kingdom where everyone communicated through interpretive dance, a realm where logic was strictly forbidden, and a dimension where the concept of time was replaced by an endless series of tea parties.

What unfolded was a series of adventures, in which he learned that the Grand Chronometer was not merely a timekeeping device but a sentient being with its own agenda. The clock had grown tired of being a mere instrument and sought to reshape time itself into something more entertaining - preferably a form that involved less linear progression and more opportunities for dramatic plot twists. In part, therefore, the luminaries of the university proved to be correct in the Grand Knot of Time Theory. Although, correctness did not really help avert the impending end of the multiverse.

Bors, entirely by fluke, discovered that the key to restoring order lay in understanding the clock’s own internal narrative. This realisation came to him by means of Mrs Maslow, the fishmonger’s preferred squeeze. She was an expert fish-cleaner, filleter and de-scaler. Mostly though, she liked to talk. One of her favourite topics was a her firm belief that everyone existed within a hierarchy of their own wants and needs. Indeed, her partners’ business was entitled: “Fish. Satisfying That Need.” Bors had been buying afternoon tea for him and his cat, Shrowdingle. As usual, he’d listened to Mrs Maslow sharing her pearls of wisdom, but later, whilst wrangling a fishbone from between his teeth, he realised the true value of a fishwife's words.

Each nested reality within the Grand Chronometer was an expression of the clock’s desires and frustrations, and the only way to fix it was to address these existential concerns. For most people, the received wisdom on how to deal with situations of this sort would be to first confront their own fears and insecurities, But this was for Bors, of course, a complete waste of time. His life was fearsome enough as it was, he decided. So, with absolutely no idea what he was doing, he just, sort of, blundered on, hoping for the best.

Nevertheless, with his newfound, if dimly perceived understanding of the Grand Chronometer’s complexities, Bors managed to convince the clock that perhaps it was not time that was flawed but rather its own approach to it. He proposed a compromise: a harmonious blend of linear and non-linear time that would allow for both structured progress and spontaneous adventure, so that at any one moment, time within the Chronometer could be in total flux as much as it wanted, although, when consulted the clock would tell the accurate time. Furthermore, when measured over the course of aeons, the chronometer would be bang on time. Bors decided that he would name this new-found elastic approach to time after his cat and accordingly it became known as Shrowdingle’s Principle.

And so it was that the Grand Chronometer was persuaded to recalibrate itself. Time in Murkstone-Snatchly began to flow more predictably, though with just enough quirks to keep life interesting. The clock’s internal worlds remained an incomprehensible mish-mash of absurdities, but the multiverse was harmonised into a coherent, if somewhat eccentric, whole once more.

Bors returned to the Murks Hall University, not with a heroic triumph obviously, but with a slightly less imminent threat of being expelled. The Archchancellor was surprisingly magnanimous, having been rather pleased by the newfound predictability of his breakfast schedule. Naturally, the Guild of Clockmakers refused to pay up - citing the minor detail that Bors was not a member of the Guild and therefore was forbidden by statute to earn a living from the business of clock making or repairing. The city of Murkstone-Snatchly continued to thrive, albeit with a new found awareness that time, like magic, had a tendency to be rather peculiar.