Place · Observatory-clock
Halvar’s Tower
“From outside it looks like a lighthouse someone forgot to finish… Inside, it’s a clock.”
The tower stands at the narrowest point of the Line, which the Pilgrims call the Waist, on a round hill of grey stone: “the tallest thing between Auren and Nocturna”. From outside it looks like a lighthouse someone forgot to finish: round, tapering, with a roof of green bronze and windows in no order a stonemason would approve of. Its walls are as thick as two men lying end to end. On the south slope of the hill you can still see the foundations of the Clockmakers’ houses, where hundreds once lived.
Inside, it is a clock. For a thousand years its gears bound the tower, in some way no one ever fully understood, to the rings of the Celestial Astrolabe above, and the Clockmakers corrected them whenever the sky fell a hair behind. On night 31 the tower started running again, with a tick-tock “like a heartbeat”.
Stillrock lies a quarter of an hour’s walk down the hill. It is where Teo and Nyra are taken after the Crater Field.