The Clock-Keeper

Overview

Clock-Keeper is a title, not a kind. Every Stopped Clock has one: the local anchor that holds its instant in place, most often the shade, remnant, or preserved Pattern of whoever caused the zone to form. A mage whose working ran away, a parent who wished for one more moment, an Echo shaped by desperate prayer: each Keeper is its own story. There is no order of Keepers and no greater power behind them. Each holds one moment, and the zone ends only if it is destroyed, persuaded to let go, or brought to accept the cost of time resuming.

Appearance

A Keeper is found near the centre of its Clock and looks at first like any of the frozen: a person caught mid-gesture in the faded, paused colours of the zone. What sets it apart is small and wrong. Its eyes are the only frozen eyes that seem to focus. The air around it is a little thicker, the hanging rain a little denser, as though the stillness were heaviest there. A Keeper that died making its Clock may be no more than a pale shape standing in the place where its body fell, or seated beside the bed, the cradle, or the window it could not bear to leave.

Habitat and Range

One Keeper to one Clock. It does not move from the centre, and it does not leave; the Clock and its Keeper end together.

Behaviour and Temperament

Most Keepers are remorseful, desperate, or mad, and many are all three by turns. They have watched their frozen neighbours suffer for as long as the Clock has stood, and they know why. Some plead with visitors to free them and then refuse when the moment comes; some bargain, offering what is preserved in the zone for a promise to leave the frozen street untouched; some argue, endlessly and well, that the moment they hold is worth the prison. A few have reached a terrible calm.

Abilities

The Keeper holds the instant. While it does, nothing in the zone ages, decays, or changes save what a visitor moves. It can reach any visitor's mind by thought alone, and it can hear their thoughts answer. If it is destroyed, or lets go, the zone collapses and time resumes for everyone at once, with every moved object left where it was put. A Keeper whose Clock causes paradox may draw the attention of the Keeper of the Unbroken Sequence, and one whose refusal keeps a rightful ending from coming that of the Warden of Irreversible Endings.

Uses and Dangers

Visitors seek the Keeper to bargain for the zone's release, or for leave to take a preserved text or artefact. The danger is in the bargain. A Keeper persuaded too fast may let go while a traveller still stands among moved knives and shifted feet; one refused may hold its visitor in conversation until the Clock's silence takes their sense of time. Survivors' advice is not to speak to it unless ready for what follows.

Lore and Belief

People tell of the Clock as a cautionary tale against clinging to what must pass, and the Keeper is its central figure: the one who wanted the moment kept and is the only one who can end it. Folk belief often makes the Keeper a sorcerer to be slain. Many are not; some are grieving parents, and the frozen around them may be their own family. Some of those aligned with Aion Prime hold that every Keeper can be brought to let go, if someone will sit with it long enough.

The songs are fuller of heroes who went in to slay a Keeper than of those who sat with one, and the slayers' songs end badly: the Clock does not resume for a killing, only for a letting-go.

Where It Appears

• The Stopped Clock
• Overview: Cosmology