#118 The Counter-Clock Tower

Age: Emerged on the 33rd Hour of the Ninth Day

Hidden or Lost?: Lost

History: Like a monkey’s paw, the power of chronal magick tempts every great mage at some point in their studies, but every great sorcerer knows that the most sacred rule of magick is: don't play with time. While most heed this ancient warning, those who do not are likely to find themselves trapped in the Counter-Clock Tower.

Located in a timeless void known as the Aether-Between-the-Hours, the Counter-Clock Tower is an accidental prison where every aspiring chronal magus ends up. The tower was originally the workshop of rogue mage Helene Swift, who would become the first magus to ever successfully unlock the secrets of chronomancy. She began with little tricks like slowing the flap of a hummingbird’s wing or accelerating the maturation of a house plant, but then Swift unlocked the ability to actually travel through time.

In the instant she successfully performed her first time displacement hex she was flooded with future memories. They showed her that her time travel innovation would act as an apocalypse, as every possible future time traveler would return to that first moment of discovery, instantaneously exploding reality. In that endless moment Swift sabotaged her own spell causing her entire clock tower to wink from existence. While it was not destroyed, Swift’s workshop clocktower was torn from the normal flow of time to float forever in a chaotic unplace.

Even though she was able to halt the spell before it cascaded too far, as Swift predicted, her discovery still acted as a receiver for future time travelers who appeared in a regular succession to the tower. The broken laws of time in the Aether meant that they didn't all arrive at once, but still they came, and with no way out of the timeless void, they soon threatened to drown the tower in bodies. To prevent this Swift adopted a ‘Rule of Three.’ She would only ever allow two others to remain in the clocktower at a time, and when anyone new arrived she would kill or experiment on the oldest.

Even after uncountable ages, Swift has remained in that timeless place. She rules over the Counter-Clock Tower, ever using her increasingly unhinged time magick to try and find a way out of the Aether. In the process she has created a legion of horrific ‘timeheras,’ horrific, cobbled together creatures made from random, time-shifted parts. She has also managed to amass an arsenal of powerful chronal artifacts that could change the course of history, and make her an unstoppable force should she take hold of even a second to escape.

1. The Closing Door

2. The Patient Rot

3. Aging Baths

4. Atrium of Growth and Decay

5. The Traveler Traps

6. The Counter-Clock

7. Helene Swift’s Laboratory

8. Horologist’s Scraps

9. Chronal Arsenal

10. Exhaustion’s Gyre

11. Wildtime Vault

12. Timehera Dungeons

13. Weapons of Foreknowledge

14. Time-Locked Meteor

15. The Frozen Year

16. Moment of Discovery