The Clockwork Rose

Once upon a time, in the golden-spired halls of The Old Keep within the great city of Craysilt, there lived a clever and curious young woman named Princess Jessica. She was the daughter of a High King but bore none of the haughtiness one might expect. Instead of attending endless courtly dances, she often crept away to the palace archives, where she read of ancient inventions, forgotten magicks, and the strange creatures that walked the world before the Unified Kingdoms rose.   Jessica's mind ticked like a watchwork—sharp, restless, and full of questions.   Far across the river, in a crooked workshop nestled at the edge of Fisher’s Row, lived Norman Greenbaum, an eccentric artificer with soot-stained gloves and eyes that gleamed like polished brass. People said he had once studied in Taisha's Tulara University, beneath the domes, and that his creations sometimes whispered in languages no one could name. He was a man who built clockwork sparrows that sang forgotten lullabies, lanterns that burned with bottled moonlight, and boots that left no prints.   But Norman was quiet, humble, and rarely left his shop. He believed he was too strange to ever be loved by the world. His was a face, he believed, that only a mother could love.   One winter’s evening, a strange illness swept through Craysilt—not a sickness of the body, but of the mind. Scholars forgot how to read. Musicians plucked nonsense from strings. The great judges of The High King's Seat wandered the halls speaking in tongues. Even the High King himself sat still as a statue, lost in a fog of confusion.   It was the work of the Gray Wyrm’s Breath, an ancient curse from the time of the Impact, said to emerge once every hundred years. The only known cure was a bloom from a flower that never dies—the Clockwork Rose, a legendary creation thought lost in the old wars between the dwarves and elves.   While the court’s alchemists fumbled and the priests wailed, Princess Jessica remembered a name hidden deep in a dusty ledger: Greenbaum, Norman. Apprentice to the Clockwrights of Tulara.   Without hesitation, Jessica disguised herself in a cloak and stole away into the city.   She found Norman at his bench, bent over a silver fox with faceted eyes. At first he mistook her for a lost noble’s daughter, but when she rolled out the schematics for the Clockwork Rose—half-remembered diagrams from her readings—his brow furrowed with recognition.   “You… you remembered the harmonics,” he whispered. “Even the torsion values. You shouldn’t know this.”   “I remember everything,” Jessica replied softly. “And I think you’re the only one who can help.”   Norman tried to warn her—about the danger, about the magic, about how he wasn’t made for fairy tales or palaces—but Jessica only smiled and said, “Then let’s write one of our own.”   Together, they traveled to the deepest levels of Craysilt’s forgotten sewers, to an ancient dwarven vault sealed since the Forge Covenant was broken, and the Dwarves fled to Dwarvenholme. Inside, past traps and runes and mechanical beasts, lay the last piece of the Clockwork Rose: a core forged from a falling star, held in a stasis field of glimmering time-glass.   In that quiet place of bronze and memory, Jessica helped Norman complete the Rose.   It bloomed at midnight, petals of golden gears and crystal leaves unfurling in impossible motion. The moment she held it, the spell upon the kingdom broke. The city sang again.   When they returned to The Old Keep, the people rejoiced—but Jessica’s heart had already made its choice.   Before the gathered court, she stood beside Norman, her cloak still stained with rust, and said:   “I have walked the broken pipes of our forebears and returned with wonder. I found not just a cure, but someone who looks at the world as I do—not as it is, but as it could be. If that is not the makings of a prince, then our stories are written poorly.”   And so it was.   Jessica Grey and Gnorman Greenbaum were wed beneath the shining gears of a rose-shaped chandelier, and from that day on, Craysilt had a new kind of fairy tale—one where royalty met ingenuity, where courage walked hand-in-hand with curiosity.   And if you walk past their tower even now, you might hear the gentle ticking of wonder, and a girl’s laugh echoing beside the whir of a man who once believed he’d never be loved.