A Clockwork is a made thing of pale metal and clear crystal, from the size of a hand-bell to the height of a tall man, and no two travellers describe the same shape. Some are upright frames like a skeleton of a tower clock, a column of nested wheels behind a face with no numbers; others are low and many-jointed, or nothing but a ring of teeth turning inside a ring. Their colours are the plane’s: icy blue, silver, and pearl, washed out as if seen through frosted glass. Frost never forms on them, and they cast the same unmoving shadow the plane gives everything.

What moves is small. A wheel steps forward by one tooth, a crystal pendulum swings one stroke, and then nothing, and then the next step, in time with every other Clockwork in sight. The Frozen Moment is silent, so the tick is seldom heard as a sound. It is felt, a faint, even pulse in the ice underfoot and in the teeth, and seen, a shiver of light passing across a field of crystal at once. They have no smell.

The Clockwork stand among the frozen waterfalls and crystalline structures of the Frozen Moment, alone or in loose ranks across the ice. Travellers report them near the plane’s gates more than anywhere else, ancient ruins and places of deep meditation, though whether that is where they gather or only where travellers go is not known.

The Clockwork have no temperament that anyone has found. They do not hunt, guard, speak, or answer. They keep the count. A Clockwork does not turn to watch a visitor and does not step aside for one; it was ticking before the visitor came and goes on after.

Their unison is exact. A traveller who stands among them long enough begins, without meaning to, to breathe and step in their time, which is restful and is also the first step towards the stillness that takes the Caught.

A Clockwork moves where nothing moves. Motion in the Frozen Moment is hard to begin and impossible to stop, yet each Clockwork begins and ends its single step again and again without effort, as though the plane makes one exception and it is them. Nothing a traveller has done is known to break their unison: one carried a distance off still ticks with the rest.

What they count is not ordinary time. A traveller who keeps tally of the ticks comes out with a count that matches neither the days lost outside nor the moments felt within.

The Clockwork give nothing that can be carried away. Some travellers use them to keep their purpose, holding a count against the pull of the stillness; others say the count is what lulls them. The real danger is the place, not the automata, but the Clockwork make it easy to forget that, because they show a traveller that something can go on moving here, and it cannot be the traveller for long.

On the Material Plane the Clockwork are known only from travellers' accounts, and those differ (see Knowledge of the Cosmos). Some say they are the works of the world’s great clock, the hidden count by which the gods measure every age; scholars who honour Aion call the Prime itself the clockwork of the universe and take the automata for its likeness. Others hold that each tick is a moment being stored and that the Clockwork are filing the world’s past. Some clock-keepers in the towns believe a clock that stops at the hour of a death has been heard by them. What is so is only what the travellers saw: they keep a count, and nobody knows of what.