The Clocktower That Rewound Time

Part the Second: In Which the Impossible Becomes Quite Visible Where there had always been simply

a narrow alley—damp and shadowy and unremarkable—there now stood a clocktower. But oh,

what a clocktower it was! It rose into the sky like a impossible dream made of brass

and moonbeams and mathematics. The base was built of stones that seemed to shift color as

you looked at them—now grey, now silver, now the deep blue of twilight.

The tower itself spiraled upward in a corkscrew pattern, as if some giant had taken a normal

tower and twisted it while it was still soft, like taffy. Windows punctuated

its height at irregular intervals, some round, some square, some shaped like