Sam cursed the sea. She cursed it until her voice grew hoarse, until the tears on her cheeks dried, until she sank to her knees in the cold sand and beat her fists on the ground. The sea responded by inching forward. Icy waters splashed through her clenched hands and forced her retreat. Then they slipped back, whispering something insulting as its waves moved over the damp sand. Sam stared at the ocean, and continued cursing it in her mind.
Shipwrecks were supposed to occur on tropical islands with plenty of warm weather, sunny skies, and fruit and wildlife. This forsaken strip of land was too far north for even the light of the sun to be anything but bitter and freezing. Some getaway plan this was. It was unforgiving. The cold grey sea trapped her from every side. Sam stared out across its waves, and hurled a stone into the water. It splashed harmlessly.
The sea didn’t seem to even notice.
No one else would notice, either. There was no one else on the island with her. They took one look at the sigil in between her eyes, and refused to climb into the lifeboat with her. Who would want to share a boat with a witch? It was probably her fault the storm blew up in the first place.
No, she knew that wasn’t true. She wasn’t like that. Sam made clocks. Good clocks. Some normal, some magical. Clocks that showed the movements of the planets and stars. Clocks that predicted tides and currents. Clocks that help show profits in a shop. Clocks that sang songs depending on their owners’ moods. She once made a clock that could help foretell the weather, but that didn’t mean she could control it. She liked the gentle, rhythmic ticking of clocks. It was a comforting noise. The whirring of gears and the small chiming notes were what she thought a functioning mind must sound like, if such things had noises.
The gears of her own mind churned as she sat on the beach, watching the waves. Their rhythm, though repetitive, varied enough each time that it gave her no such pleasure. The way it sounded was like a heart. Violent, passionate, and prone to storms. She couldn’t bear the feeling of her heart, and so Sam retreated into her mind. Into the gears, the pendulums, the ticking, and the chimes. Into clocks.
Sam stood, done with the sea, and trudged back towards the lifeboat she’d dragged ashore. Inside was a kit of emergency provisions, mainly salt beef and hardtack, a few jugs of water and some of fortified wine, her book of sigils, and her large bag filled with her clockmaking equipment. She laid her hand on the last bag. Why, in the beating of the storm, she felt compelled to take it with her she couldn’t remember. Maybe she knew, somehow, it would end like this. Alone. At least she’d have that comfort with her. Sam heaved the bag onto the sand, then turned to the book of sigils.
“Alright… let’s see…” she said, skimming the pages. It was a generic book. There were no great spells for trying to summon spirits or to soften hard hearts. Though plenty of ambitious witches spent their lives trying to alter the entire world, these things had never tempted Sam. Not in her darkest hour, and certainly not now. It wasn’t that she wasn’t ambitious, but that her ambitious lay elsewhere. To long for greatness, she believed, was to admit a deep unhappiness with what she’d already been blessed with. To ignore such things was to invite ruin. Sam wasn’t a fool. But she was happy the book had a page on the fire sigils.
A quick sketch in the sand with her fingers, and a glowing fire erupted from thin air. The flickering firelight chased away the rapidly encroaching darkness and sent the accompanying chill packing. Sam huddled close to the blaze. She felt the slight pull of air the sigil required to keep the fires burning. It was a shame no one cared to join her on the boat. Maybe they would have survived. Such for the prejudiced. But she could have done with some company.
Sam’s fingers reach down her shirt and wrapped themselves around the small locket hanging there. It was an unconscious motion, devoid of thought, brought on by the need of some kind of comfort. Her hands brought it forth, and flicked the latch. Her eyes snapped down, and as quickly as she recognized the image as intact her fingers closed the locket again.
Her daughter’s eyes had smiled back at her.
It was a gesture at once warmer than the fire and colder than the night.
A pain which automatically loosed the spring of tears behind her eyes, and yet stilled her heart.
The picture within the locket, of Sam’s daughter lost in the grip of some unknown disease that swept through her homeland two years prior, had been enchanted by a different witch to move with all the reality of real life. At the time it seemed the best way of preserving her memory. Now it seemed a cruel mockery of her fate. A poor imitation of what had once been a bright and innocent life. But still Sam clung to the locket and the photograph within. It was all that was left.
Sam laid in the sand and watched the fire before her. Tomorrow she would find some fuel to build a proper one. It had all the warmth and light of a fire she’d build by hand, but none of the smoke and crackling that made for as much comfort as anything else in a fire. Artificial, perhaps a touch too clean. The thoughts of a real fire consumed her mind as her eyes unfocused, and then closed.
Tomorrow.
Three-thousand eight-hundred and sixty-two, give or take some for avoiding waves or clambering over rocks. Sam’s island was approximately four-thousand steps around its entire perimeter with the continuously loud sea. That was not a large island. That was barely an island. It was a spit of land the ocean had yet forgotten to consume. It was almost an insult to be on an island of this size, and not somewhere better. At least somewhere larger. Was that, Sam wondered, part of the humor of the sea?
She looked at the waves, and cursed them again. As part of her curse, she claimed and christened her island.
“This!” she declared to the surf, “Is Nosea! Soon-to-be Greatest export? Witches!”
Sam raised a piece of seaweed tied to a stick on the beach, and saluted it. Nosea had no trading partners or official diplomatic negotiations as yet, but it was nevertheless important that visitors should be greeted with her country’s banner upon arrival. She had dragged the lifeboat and its contents a couple dozen steps from the makeshift banner to form the capital city under the shade of the few trees that grew in the center of Nosea. They were perhaps the island’s greatest natural resource. That and the still burning fire sigil Sam left on the beach beside Nosea’s banner.
During her tour of the new country, Sam had found a few other tattered pieces of luggage Nosea’s surrounding rivals had offered in way of tribute. They contained damp clothing, and various personal artifacts from the unfortunate souls who thought having their lives saved by a witch somehow inferior to losing them entirely. By far the piece Sam was most happy to have recover were two personal clocks bound up in a suitcase. Though damp, a natural hazard of travel to Nosea, they were nonetheless fairly intact. She spent most of the afternoon dissecting them and running through some of her notes on clockmakers in other countries and their designs. These were good clocks. Sam grinned. There were so many uses for them, and their pieces. Once cleared of sand and salt, then carefully wound, they ticked. It was beautiful, melodic. Sam stared into the swirling mess of springs and gears so like her own mind. They brought her peace, and for a moment touched her heart with joy.
She turned from her notes to another book after a while. It was a general guide to the kinds of magical clocks she specialized in. Page after page of possibilities to keep her entertained on the great wait for rescue. How long that would be, she didn’t know.
A clock for helping estimate the tides around her island nation would be useful for gathering food. A clock to predict the weather for when she needed to collect more rainwater. A clock with a particularly powerful alarm for helping to signal ships. If she had anymore gunpowder lying around, even a clock that sent up a flare on the hour if she set it right. A clock that pointed to whatever she loved the most…
Sam’s fingers traced over the words on the page.
Heartclock.
Her free hand traced the shape of the locket under her shirt.
That wouldn’t be much help.
But a clock that doubled as a compass!
“Well…” Sam muttered, turning to look at the boat. Its oars were intact, and there didn’t seem to be any damage on the hull. She knew how to row. She’d obviously been able to make it to Nosea in one piece. No one else could claim that honor. She’d been traveling east, so west would be her best bet and finding back the way she came. How long had they been sailing?
“Give it a shot,” she said. She propped the book up onto a rock and read over details. It seemed a simple enough proposition. She reached into her toolkit and set to work re-dismantling the two clocks. It pained her, a little, to stop their ticking and whirring. But such things were for the greater good, namely the survival of the leader of the world’s newest country. For that reason, the sacrifice of the foreign clocks was a necessary diplomatic…
She stopped for a moment and shuddered.
Her fantasies sometimes got a little dark.
A bit too dark.
She spun the tiny screwdriver in her hand and thought of something else.
These were the ruins of a past empire, washed ashore and repurposed into something grander. The remains of a forgotten people and time, no intentional jokes there, helping contribute to a new future for Nosea.
That was better.
She went back to work.
It was nearly dark when Sam had all the pieces of the clocks laid out before her in the sand. They glistened with the light of the fire sigil like a myriad of diamonds. Each gear arranged by size, the two faces beside each other facing the purple sky, the hands all pointing towards the sea. Sam stood over them. She began to sketch her own sigil into the sand around them. A wide circle with swirling numerals and twisting hands that connected all the gears and hands and springs together into a menagerie of whirling, ticking, rhythmic perfection. The sigil of a clockmaker.
The sigil glowed once completed. The echoing noises of all the clocks Sam had ever made sung through the breeze and the surf. Each piece required for the creation of the compass clock shone with a golden light and rose into the sky. Sam stood back and watched them fall into place. Pins into their proper holes. Springs winding themselves up. Gears locking their teeth and swirling in perpetuity. The compass clock lowered itself into her hands.
She cheered, and showed it off to the sea.
“Tomorrow, you will be defeated!”
The waves crashed onto the sand. With the high tide, they succeeded in loosening the banner of Nosea and dragging it away. The waters hissed as they reached the rim of the fire sigil. It flickered out. The cold breeze blew. The waters whispered mocking words to her. Sam shivered.
“You’ve been warned…” Sam said through chattering teeth. She fumbled around to get another fire sigil burning to keep her warm through the night.
Tomorrow.
The navy of the island nation of Nosea consisted of a single-ship, the flagship HMS Unconquered. She was a simple rowboat used mainly as storage by the Nosean Navy. But these were dire times for the country, and so the HMS Unconquered had been pressed into active duty. Her captain, the Queen of Nosea, and her crew, also the Queen of Nosea, looked out at their rival and shuddered.
The sea and Nosea had been enemies since time immemorial. Ever since the founding of the country two days ago, the sea had attempted to consume the tiny nation. Most recently, an errant faction within the sea defiled Nosea’s national flag. This was an insult no Nosean citizen could stand. So, with a heaving breath and sheer force of will, the Queen of Nosea set out into the waves on the HMS Unconquered to free her people, herself, from the sea.
This was a more graceful way of describing how, barefoot and knee-deep in freezing water, Sam fumbled to drag the ungainly rowboat through the first few waves in the surf, had tripped, emerged soaking wet and gasping, then had verbally cursed the sea only to receive a mouthful of saltwater in response before to clamber back into the boat and set to rowing. The compass clock sat on the seat beside her. She heaved at the oars and forced herself through the surf and into open ocean. Pull by pull, she moved away from her island nation.
The waves had not yet consumed Nosea on the horizon before the doubting whispers of the sea flooded into Sam’s ears. She turned back, afraid of losing sight of Nosea, and listened to them.
Had the ship been traveling east when it crashed?
Had the storm blown the ship off course?
Was she even going the right direction?
What if she was blown off course?
Did she have enough food or water to make it?
Could she even row all the way?
Did she even want to go back?
Sam froze in the sea. Her mind raced, then stopped. The gears in her head refused to budge. As did her arms. The waves rippled before her, continuing to whisper.
The sea that day had been too much for the Nosean Navy. It had been recalled to port to find a new mission. In the meanwhile, the Queen of Nosea retreated into her palace to consult with her advisors. It was said she was not seen for three days after the Battle of Doubt.
The Fourth Day After the Battle of Doubt.
Dawned arrived to find the queen of Nosea in the same position the previous three had: lying on her back, eyes closed, beside the fire sigil’s artificial glow. Paralyzed with the realization that Nosea would be her grave, for her rivals were too numerous to counter. She would die a hermit queen of a micronation that would fade into obscurity like the rest of her peoples’ history. There was no guarantee of finding home, of returning to where she’d been. Her head spun in circles, clicking numbly like a clock with a stuck hand.
Like a clock…
Sam’s hand inched through the sand towards her books. Her fingers closed around her magical clock book and dragged it towards her. Sam’s eyes fluttered opened and she tore through the pages.
Heartclock.
There was one snag about this plan, besides all of the other doubts incurred during the battle.
Sam’s hand closed around the locket.
Sacrifice.
A piece of that something you love.
“I love you…” Sam whispered to the closed object between her fingers.
She sat up and stared out at the sea.
“You were supposed to take me away from all this,” she whispered. “Not back towards it. A chance to get away!”
The waves rolled onto the shore and offered no response she could discern. The same annoying, just barely rhythmic sloshing and whispering.
They would be preparing for the festivals back home. Fried dough dipped in honey. Colorful lanterns hung from rooftops. But what was the point of it all without her daughter there? Last year’s festival had felt hollow as a winter breeze. There wasn’t a point in trying to return. It wasn’t as though she was coming back.
But if there was a joke crueler than the photo that would forever smile back at her, Sam realized as the sea whispered to her, it was the fact that she’d never get the chance to see where her daughter was again. What memories they had would bring her pain, sure. But it was a kind of necessary pain. It reminded Sam that she was healing. Moving forward like the hands of a clock. Never reverse. Nor stopped. If she ran from this, maybe she would stop. Her ticking would cease. The gears would stop spinning. She hated that she knew it. She hated that the sea whispered it to her.
She cursed the sea.
Then she thanked it, and reached for the book.
Tomorrow.
Sam waited until morning to finish drawing the sigil in the sand. The sun rose slowly above the sea. It was calmer than it had been since Sam had first arrived in Nosea. The light of the morning sun replaced the grey and green tones with a dappled combination of purple, gold, and orange. The waves lapped lazily against her island fortress. Sam smiled at the sea, and turned to her work.
A final stroke completed the sigil. The gears and springs and pins of the disassembled clocks floated into the air on a golden glow. Sam’s locket rose with them, open to the ever-smiling image of her daughter’s face. The clock formed around it. Gears locked into place, spinning as springs set them to motion. The frame formed out of the golden glow. Heart-shaped hands spun round until they fixed on a set location. The clock lowered from the sigil to rest in Sam’s outstretched hands. Behind the reflective face, her daughter smiled to her one last time before the glow consumed the picture. Sam held it to her heart, and wiped a tear away.
“I’m going to see you again,” she said.
She boarded the HMS Unconquered and set out across Nosea’s new ally, the sea. The waves seemed to part for her vessel. The rippling waters saluted the voyage. Sam turned the ship towards home, and bade farewell to her minute nation. This time, as she sailed away, she refused to look back.