A clock wound from five fallen hands. It stalls, lunges, and snaps backward against itself — keeping a time that cannot be read and never points the same way twice.
The same hour, cut into stone. Vertical registers carved and weathering downward, with one true ogham column read up its stemline — the inscription wearing back into the slab as it descends.
The poem in full: no legible language, only marks. Five refrains return like chimes; the lines lengthen, then thin to a single stroke and an empty bracket holding nothing.
The Ancestor Clock keeps a time no one can read. Its face is wound from five hands that have mostly fallen silent — Tifinagh of the Sahara, the Glagolitic of the first Slavs, the Ogham cut up the edges of standing stones, the runes of the north, and the Coptic of the last writers of Egyptian.
None of them spells anything here. They were chosen because they look like meaning: the eye, trained on letters, begins to sound them out and finds nothing on the other side. That failure is the only correct reading.
The clock turns, but never steadily. It stalls, lunges, and whips backward against its own motion, so there is no hour to keep and no direction to trust. At its rim, five clusters return like the chiming of a name half-remembered. At its centre, a dark that breathes — dilating to swallow the coil, contracting to give it back.
It is named for what it resembles: an inheritance you can hold but not translate — a face full of ancestors, every one of them turned away.
of the lost hand of Vresh