Chapter Text
It seemed, for a time, that the moon would fall.
The moon did not fall. After those strange three days had passed, however, none of the clocks in town worked properly.
And this was odd, Zelda mused, because there was no reason for this to be the case. The river running under the central tower moved the gears that powered the device for which Clock Town was named, and the water certainly hadn't stopped flowing. Even if it had, that still wouldn't have explained why none of the other clocks in town could keep time.
Zelda dangled her feet over the wooden scaffolding surrounding the clock tower. She leaned back against its stone wall as she looked south. The late afternoon light stained the pale bricks of the townhouses gold, and the cheerful blue banners that had been hung to welcome visitors fluttered in the breeze. Not a single tourist had come to the Carnival of Time this year, yet none of the decorations had been taken down. Was the Town Council still expecting people to arrive? Had anyone actually come last year? She couldn't remember.
Zelda wished she could ask her father, but he had passed away when she was a child. Of course, most people still considered her to be a child even now, and she suspected that much of the work she was given originated from a sense of charity. Still, she was proud of her skill. Who else could keep the finicky sound system in the Milk Bar operational? Who else could keep the ventilation fans in the Bomb Shop spinning? And who else could keep the mechanisms of the clock tower, the town's pride and joy, perfectly calibrated?
With proper maintenance, clocks did what they were supposed to do. Zelda liked that about them. She could take them apart and put them back together, and nothing would change.
Meanwhile, time itself swept everything away. The mayor's wife, who had once been like an aunt to her, grew bitter and cantankerous when her son Kafei left the house. Her friend Cremia took longer to answer her letters as she grew more serious about managing the ranch left to her by her parents. Their friend Anju, who had once sworn that she would never be interested in romance, had just married Kafei. Kafei's grandmother, who once baked poffertjes for the three girls while they sunbathed on the balcony of the Stock Pot Inn, had been confined to a sitting room where she endlessly muttered to herself, all the while believing that she was speaking to her son Tortus.
Time changed everything, but clocks were reliable.
Or at least they used to be. Now every single clock in town kept a different time. Some had stopped working altogether. Zelda knew that they hadn't all been built by the same person. In fact, she’d made a good dozen of them herself under the guidance of her father. It might be, Zelda hypothesized, that they all used the same part from the same faulty batch, which was why they had all gone weird at roughly the same time.
People could deal with their own clocks as they saw fit, but Zelda's main responsibility was to the clock tower. She felt a strong sense of duty toward the town. In a way, the clock master had more power than the mayor, for the schedules of people's daily lives were regulated by the rhythms of the time kept on the town's clocks. Every brick and roof tile and paving stone had its place in the town, and people needed to be able to find their places as well. Harmony was built on the foundation of well-regulated time, and Zelda saw it as her job to maintain this order. Everything in Clock Town had its proper place, as well as its proper time.
The rules governing this order could be broken in special circumstances, of course. It was said that the door to the upper portion of the clock tower only opened at midnight during the Festival of Time, but this was not precisely true. The springs and pulleys and levers that held it closed for most of the year could be coaxed into submission, but they would need a great deal of lubrication.
Zelda purchased her machine oil from the two chemists who lived in the Southern Swamp, but deliveries had fallen off recently. None of her orders had been filled since the unpleasant business with the moon. The swamp was only a few hours' walk south, and Zelda figured that she could use the exercise. Until the clock at the top of the tower was repaired, she had nothing to do, so she might as well make the journey to procure the oil herself.
She always enjoyed her conversations with the two Gerudo chemists, and perhaps they might be able to help her make sense of why all the clocks had failed. And who knows, they might even remember where the original parts had come from. Zelda had heard stories about the technological witchery of the Gerudo who lived on an artificial island in the bay. Now would be as good a time as any to ask for an introduction to one of their machinists. Zelda smiled to herself as she imagined riding to their city on one of their motorboats. She had always wanted to visit the Gerudo Fortress, and now she finally had an excuse.
It was a perfect plan. There was only one problem, and that problem had a name: Ganon.