[i]I believe the society of Clockmasters suffers from a chronic flaw of thought: a belief that the universe is set in its place. [/i]

Her first thought is of terror. 

This landscape is alien. The interflow of plant and clockwork is like nothing she's ever seen. The safe, stable, blessed heart of her world has fallen into a strange anarchy and is drawing chaos up from the roots. The Princess Clock, the Thieftaker Chime, the Rainbow-Measure, all gone, the decades of patient study that underpinned each one annihilated.

[i]Each new occurrence they ask, 'which clock chimed at its coming?' as though the clocks were the axis mundi around which all the world revolved.[/i]

And it's worse than the incomprehensible loss of knowledge - time itself is broken here. She can see the jagged edges with her blessed eyes, so clear and sharp she could cut her lashes by looking at them. The past and the future flow together sickeningly in places, breakdowns of causality that feel like the politeness of devils giving way to twisted love.

[i]I dislike this reasoning, the pre-emptive deification of the clocks. We have not yet cracked their secrets and already we proceed from the assumption they are all wise and all knowing?[/i]

Don't these people understand the terrible danger here? That their home is [i]broken[/i], that the object of their study is [i]shattered[/i], that the Clocktower is undone? That their common cause is absent and it's time for them to disband just the same as the Watch has? That it's time for all those lovely rituals and structures and titles to just [i]go away[/i] to wherever it is everything she loves is to go away to?

[i]Is it not possible that the clocks can be tampered with? That they have makers, and those makers may in term have agendas of their own? It seems far more likely that the clocks are just as flawed and mortal as the rest of us than to assume that they exist aloof and infallible. [/i]

It turned out the Watch had their secrets from the beginning! The Cobbler had been right all along, the study of the Clocks had been subverted by the love of Princesses from the beginning, and they told nothing more than another story of heartache and heartbreak - beautiful, surely, but as surely not the topic for academic study. Not the sort of thing to be researched and discussed and teased out of the marvels of math and measurement and refined in razor debates. Love simply was, that the reminder to look to love was the simple truth of the matter, and didn't that mean there were no more questions left to answer?

No more study left to do?

No more debates left to listen to?

No more...

No more... time for any of this?

[i]I say this not to attack the essence of the great study, for the research of the clocks has already produced miracles confirmed a thousand times over. I say this because there may come a time when the clocks are broken, or their secrets revealed as base, or are somehow stolen by the genius of some princess. And then what? Shall we pre-emptively commit ourselves to slavishly follow in the service of broken clockwork? Or shall we see these as the new questions they are?[/i]

The Cobbler Clockmaster finished her recitation. A sermon Adila had heard a dozen times. That she knew the words and rhythm to and had listened to without thinking. It was the 18th Letter To A Colleague, one of the Cobbler's more unique insights.

A clockwork gear turned in her head.

The Watch had known. The Captain had known. When they had encouraged the Watch to attend to the Palatine Cobbler... had this been the message they'd left for them?