Mirelda, the Minutesmith

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The city lay like clockwork in the dust of the evening, its towers bearing faces of numbers and shadows. In a high window arch, Mirelda, the Minutesmith, sat among countless clocks. On her workbench lay bowls of seconds dust, tins of collected breaths, and jars in which time slowly evaporated. For decades, people had brought her lost minutes, stolen pauses, and lost hours. She pieced them together, polished them, gave them direction—and somewhere, someone breathed a sigh of relief. But today, the Twelfth Tower had struck twice and then fallen silent. They brought her a black case, sealed with rain dust that smelled of memories. Inside lay no clockwork, but a ring of dark metal, smooth on the inside, toothed on the outside like a crown. A note lay beneath it: Place it where time stumbles. Mirelda raised her head. Outside, the city moved lazily; Children held toys in the air, old people paused mid-gesture. She took the ring, felt the cool trembling of a mechanism without a stop. The large grandfather clock behind her suddenly skipped a beat. "So there," she murmured. She put the magnifying glass around her neck, took the ring, and descended into the streets, where shadows hung on the walls like suspended pauses. A boy was waiting in front of the Third's tower. A chain without a watch clacked in his fist. "My mother stopped talking yesterday," he whispered. "In mid-sentence. Since then, the soup has been pouring into the bowls earlier. Can it be fixed?" Mirelda looked him in the eyes. "You can only postpone it," she said. "Show me where time has gone." He led her through alleys to a loggia above the market. A small clockwork mechanism was embedded in a wall, half-submerged, its wheels still. "Here," he said. Mirelda put the magnifying glass to it. She saw fine cracks in the metal, numbers carved into it like notes from a forgotten day. "Someone has shortened the city here." She took the ring and held it over the gap. It grew heavier, as if the silence wanted to swallow it. "If I set it, something I don't know will be missing somewhere," she thought. "If I don't, something this boy knows will be missing here." She turned the ring. It clicked into place, and a barely audible sound rippled through the square. Down in the market, people breathed a simultaneous sigh of relief. The clockworks are working again. "Thank you," said the boy. "Whom did you take it from?" Mirelda smiled sadly. "From the one who today will forget why he loves you. Tomorrow he will remember again—without beginning." She returned to her workshop. The grandfather clock ticked again, but with a different heartbeat.