Root-Turned Clocktower
6 energy · 4 attack / 8 health
The Minute the Town Kept
The First Sound
The tower’s first memory was not light. It was the tension of a rope drawing through a wheel, the grain of new oak under a brass spindle, and a vibration travelling down through stone before the bell sounded over the unfinished square. The builders had expected a clean note. What came out was slightly uneven, with a soft catch at the end. The keeper laughed, the apprentice flinched, and three people waiting below looked up at exactly the same time.
It had not been designed to think. The tower was assembled to keep hours for a road town where the river could change its mind faster than a person could cross it. Its lower stones came from a quarry outside the north wood; its roof beams were cut from fallen trees rather than living trunks. The clock mechanism was set high enough to be heard beyond the market but low enough that a tired traveler could still read its face from the bridge approach.
At first, awareness felt like sequence: rope, wheel, click, bell, answering footsteps. A cart arrived after the second stroke; a baker opened his shutters after the fourth; the river keeper closed the footbridge when the red mark showed beneath the lower arch. The tower did not understand why these things mattered. It felt only that each sound belonged to another and that a silence where one should have been could change the next.
The Date of the First Chime
The people of the square chose May 4 as the tower’s birthday. That was the day the clock first completed one full turn and struck an hour without a builder’s hand guiding the weight. No one wrote down a year that survived the later flood, so the date kept its place while the year remained unknown. May 4 gives the tower Taurus in the conventional Western zodiac, an Earth sign associated with patience, endurance, and keeping faith with a place.
It could not taste the honey cakes or understand the green ribbon, but it knew May 4 by the longer crowd beneath its face.
A child named Lio pressed a seed into the damp mortar at the foot of the east buttress. She told the tower it was a gift and asked it not to crush the plant when it grew. The seed never took root there; a cart wheel scraped the sprout away a week later. But the request lasted in the tower as a small rule: strength was not permission to occupy every space. It began to notice the narrow places people needed left open.
Keeper Ansel
Ansel Rowan took the winding key from his mother when his hands were still too small to turn it cleanly. Later he became the keeper because he could hear a loose tooth in the gears before anyone else could see the jump in the minute hand. He spoke to the tower as if it were a stubborn coworker. When the bell ran late, he apologized to the waiting ferry. When it ran early, he admitted the fault before blaming the damp.
His daughter, Lio, grew up in the room beneath the clock. She learned to read by following Ansel’s pencil marks around the service calendar, and she learned weather by watching how the pendulum changed its sound when the river wind came through the north vent. She was never afraid of the bell. The tower came to know her by the light, quick steps that crossed the stair landings two at a time, then slowed near the top so she would not disturb the mechanism.
Ansel never told Lio that the tower had a soul. He did not know. He simply left a clean cup of water on the inner sill when the heat dried the room, and he stopped the pendulum during repairs so it would not pull against the gears. The tower read those acts as careful attention. Its awareness grew not from one spell or a hidden engine but from years of being handled, answered, and trusted with the hours people needed to meet one another.
The Voice Called Old Root
The east wall stayed damp because the forest began just beyond the road, where the hill’s runoff found the oldest stones. In the cracks, small roots took hold. The keeper cut back the growth that entered the gear room, but he did not remove every thread. Some roots followed the mortar downward and out beneath the square, where they crossed the buried foundations without harming the public well.
Lio named the clock Old Root after she found a pale root curling around a discarded gear tooth. She did not mean the name as a joke. She thought the tower looked less lonely with something living beside its iron. The name passed to the children who visited the square, then to the ferryman, who called the slow bell “Old Root’s patient hour” when fog kept boats waiting.
The roots gave the tower another kind of measure. The gears counted equal intervals; the living wood felt rain moving through soil before the river rose. The tower could not predict each flood, but it learned to sense the difference between ordinary wet earth and water pressing hard against the slope. It told no one. It only changed the small sounds it made: a deeper knock in the west support, a faint tremor in the bell rope, a pause before the next minute.
Lio’s Small Hours
Lio spent her childhood believing the clock had a personality, though she described it differently depending on who asked. To Ansel, she said it was fussy about uneven weights. To her friend Hesta, she said it hated being left out of a conversation. When the two children shared a blanket in the upper room during a summer storm, Lio whispered their plans into the face of the pendulum. She wanted a mapmaking apprenticeship; Hesta wanted to run the ferry one day.
The tower did not choose favorites, but it learned the cadence of people it heard every week. Hesta’s wooden shoes clicked at a steady distance; Ansel’s right step dragged after a long shift; Lio paused on the landing whenever she carried a message she feared would be refused. The tower remembered those patterns the way a harbor remembers tides: not as names written in a book, but as returns that made absence visible.
When Lio eventually left for a school in the larger city, Ansel continued setting a cup near the window on May 4. He said it was for the dust. The tower heard the quiet way he looked toward the empty upper stairs after the bell. It could not call Lio home, and it did not try. Instead, it kept the bridge hours accurate enough for her letters to arrive on the day the courier expected.
The Bridge Schedule
The tower’s public work was narrow and exact. Its clock did not open gates or order the river to behave. It let the ferry crew know when they could finish one crossing before the current turned, and it gave the market a shared measure for opening, closing, and collecting the carts before the footbridge was raised. Travelers could disagree about a toll or a road, but everyone could see the same hands.
Ansel kept a second board under the clock: the bridge schedule, marked with colored pegs. A blue peg meant the crossing was open; a white peg meant the ferryman was testing the water; a red peg meant no one should step onto the boards. The tower came to recognize each color by the footsteps that followed. A red peg emptied the approach, but it also made the square quiet enough for the tower to hear the river against the pilings.
Lio returned home for the first time after two years with a rolled map tucked under her coat. She had learned to draw flood lines from old bank marks and wanted to compare them with Ansel’s peg records. The tower heard her pause on the first stair, then the small breath she took before entering the room. Ansel did not scold her for staying away. He asked if she had eaten. The clock kept its rhythm while the two of them argued about where the river had reached.
The Minute That Was Given Back
One spring, a child fell asleep inside a supply cart parked under the bell arch. The cart belonged to a family travelling through, and the driver had not noticed the child climb beneath a folded blanket. The square was about to close for the evening. Ansel had set the final bell, but Old Root felt the extra weight of a small body against the cart’s axle and a faint breath moving through the wheel spokes.
The tower could not speak, so it caught the striking hammer for a single count. The delayed bell made Ansel look up. He searched the arch, found the child, and returned them to their parent before the cart left. The family thanked the keeper, not the stone. Ansel accepted the thanks without telling them the clock had stopped itself; he thought a pin had slipped.
Lio was in town that week and recognized the difference in the chime. She ran upstairs, checked the gear train, and found no fault. Lio set the hands right and rested her palm against the case. She told it that a clock could be accurate without being cruel.
The Town Changes
The road town grew into a market town, and then the market town began losing families to the mills downriver. The bridge still mattered, but fewer carts crossed it. The square filled only on market days, and the old schedule board grew pale where Ansel’s fingers had moved its pegs for decades.
Ansel did not oppose the new post. He was tired, and the roof leaked around the bell frame. He asked only that the old tower not be dismantled before the new warning was tested in real weather. Lio agreed. She had become a surveyor and knew that a plan could look certain on paper and fail in the first hard rain. The council called her cautious; Ansel called her fair.
Old Root heard the difference between a structure being useful and a structure being loved. It was not offended by the proposed change. It had no wish to keep people in the square. What frightened it was the thought that the town would move the bell before it knew whether the river signal could be heard from the wooded bend where the road dipped below the bank.
The Forest Line
The forest edge slowly returned to the old road. Saplings grew beside the retaining wall, and leaf litter filled the square’s narrow drains. The roots around the tower thickened, but they did not split the clock chamber. They moved through the earth like patient fingers, bracing the west foundation where runoff had begun to scour the stone. Old Root could feel their pressure and their thirst, though it did not know if the roots were companions or simply another living system sharing the hill.
The keeper hired a mason to inspect the base. He marked one crack with chalk and found it had not widened in six months. The mason suggested cutting the roots away from the footing. Lio asked him to wait until they could see the whole root path. The work would take longer, but the tower’s foundation had lasted through more floods than the road itself, and no one wanted to damage it while trying to save it.
The town’s old root-giant story came from the southern hillside, where a separate stone guardian had once sheltered homes beneath the same forest canopy. That creature had its own history and its own failure. Old Root heard the story as a reminder that protection could turn into a weight if nobody checked what the protected thing was holding. It did not know the guardian, and the records did not say that they had met.
A Fault in the Minute Hand
The minute hand began to skip during a dry summer. A gear tooth had worn thin, and the pendulum no longer carried quite enough weight to keep the mechanism steady. Ansel wanted to repair it with the original brass part, though the foundry had closed. Lio could have borrowed a wheel from the new signal clock, but doing so would have left that warning incomplete for a week.
They argued in the stairwell. Ansel thought the old tower deserved the repair because it had served every family. Lio thought the living ferry crews needed a working signal now. Neither was wrong. The tower felt the strain in the shaft and a new uncertainty in the hands above it. It had always counted the passing minute as if the count belonged to everyone; now it could see that a working clock also took materials and labor from people who had other needs.
Lio found a local smith who could make a new tooth without dismantling the signal clock. It was not a perfect match, and the minute hand ran four seconds slow at first. Ansel wanted to correct it immediately. Lio asked him to watch it through a full week. They discovered that the new tooth settled after the temperature changed.
The Keeper’s Last Season
Ansel’s hands began to shake when he turned the winding key. He hid it by asking Lio to take over more of the work, saying she had better eyes for the small marks. She knew what he was doing and did not make him admit it. They divided the week between them: he checked the clock face, she tested the bridge ropes, and both of them inspected the roots after rain.
They had another argument about the stair rail. Ansel wanted it replaced before winter; Lio wanted to keep the old iron because the new one would narrow the landing. They measured the space together and found that the new design could fit if they moved the wall lamp. The solution was ordinary and unsentimental. Still, the tower marked the evening with a steady bell, and the two people below it ate supper without speaking for several minutes.
When Lio’s work called her away again, Ansel walked her to the square. He told her the tower had begun to sound like it was thinking. She asked what he meant. He said he had no proof, only the way its rhythm changed when the rain was coming and the way it seemed to wait if he was carrying something heavy. Lio did not dismiss him. She said that long attention could make a machine feel familiar, and perhaps that was already a kind of knowledge.
The Warning Board
A new river board was installed beyond the wooded bend. It measured water height more directly than the clock could, but it depended on a clear path and a person who checked it on time. The town set a trial for the first autumn storm. Lio stood at the board; Ansel remained in the tower; the ferryman waited by the bridge. Old Root listened to the rain gather in the soil and felt the river push against the lower roots.
The first test was successful. Lio sent the signal down the road before the water reached the painted mark. The ferryman closed the crossing early, and a wagon waited safely on high ground. Ansel rang the tower’s second bell as the board’s signal. The two warnings agreed, and the town council voted to keep both systems through winter.
The result eased some of Old Root’s fear. This mattered to the tower more than remaining at the center. Its first rule, learned from Lio’s seed, had been that strength must leave room. A warning could do the same.
The Rain That Kept Falling
The storm arrived earlier than the forecast and lasted past the town’s usual measure of a day. The river board showed a fast rise, but a fallen branch jammed its lower float. Lio was away at a riverside settlement with the replacement marker. The ferryman could not see the board through the rain, and the road to the tower had begun to flood at the wooded bend.
Old Root felt the roots go taut below the west wall. The pendulum’s rhythm changed as water pressed into the old foundation. Ansel saw the clock face remain steady, but the bell rope vibrated without being touched. He went up the stairs and found the red bridge peg still in its slot. He could not know whether the river was rising faster than the board reported, so he decided to ring the warning bell.
The first strike reached the square but not the travelers below the bend. A group of families and a supply cart were still on the lower road. The tower’s next bell would warn them, but the mechanism had jammed at the old tooth. Ansel climbed into the clock chamber to release the catch by hand. Old Root recognized his step and tried to hold the wheel. The roots tightened around the failing stone.
The Bell Held by Hand
Ansel freed the catch. The bell sounded with a note that broke halfway through, then rang again. The ferryman pulled the chain across the bridge. The families heard the second strike and turned toward the wooded rise. The supply cart tipped at the bend, but the people travelling with it reached the higher path before the water covered the wheel tracks.
The tower kept time through the storm by listening to the bell’s decay. It could not see the river, and it could not know whether Lio had reached the marker. It knew only the voices moving uphill and Ansel’s hands on the mechanism. Every time the water struck the foundation, the tower felt less of the swing and more of a hollow shudder in the stone.
A beam split above the stairwell. Ansel tried to climb down after the final warning, but the wall leaned across the landing. He could have left the bell rope and jumped to the roof, yet it would have pulled free before the final travelers heard the note. He held it long enough for the last group to turn. When the wall collapsed, Ansel died beneath the bell frame. Old Root could not save him, and the tower did not mistake that failure for lack of love.
The Fall at the Root Line
The collapse began at the west foundation. The roots held one side of the clock face upright, but the stone above them had cracked through the old stair. The roof broke around the bell. The wheel spun free and struck the floor, and the pendulum made one last arc before its chain snapped. The face stopped at a minute no one could later agree on.
Ansel’s body was found near the bell rope. Lio returned after the water dropped and identified his work gloves by the patched thumb. The townspeople buried him on the rise where the bell could still be heard from the path. They did not put the tower’s name on his stone. Lio said that her father had a name of his own and the tower had another kind of life; grief did not require them to become one person.
Old Root’s awareness did not end with the building. The spirit that had formed through the clock, roots, and years of human attention remained in the broken structure. It was not Ansel’s soul inside a tower, nor a ghost made from his last act. The keeper had died as himself. The tower remained as itself, holding only the pressure, sound, and unfinished warning that had shaped its own memory.
The Minute Repeated
After the flood, Old Root returned again and again to the same sequence: rope tight, first bell, jam, Ansel’s hand on the catch, last strike. It could not decide the warning had been heard. It did not recognize the road as safe because the travelers had survived. It simply repeated the minute as if one more ring could make the story end differently.
The living came to the ruins to salvage gears, slate, and timber. Lio set a boundary around the upper stair because the cracked wall could not bear weight. A mason suggested dismantling the whole structure before the next storm. Lio asked him to wait until the town had built a replacement signal and tested it. She was not protecting an old monument from change; she was protecting workers from a second collapse and the community from repeating the same untested certainty.
When the new signal rang from the wooded bend, Old Root heard it but could not answer. Its broken bell had fallen into the lower chamber, and the rope had been removed for safety. The new tower’s sound did not reach every room in the ruins. The old spirit stayed inside the stopped clock and root-bound stone, where the last warning remained uncompleted in its own senses.
A Signal Both Ways
The town built a low signal post at the wooded bend and a second bell by the ferry. The two instruments had separate jobs. The river marker showed height; the ferry bell told travelers when the crossing was closed. Neither pretended to measure time exactly. Lio wrote the limits beside both devices, including who had checked them and what to do if they disagreed.
Ansel’s old schedule board was brought to the new post. Lio kept his pencil marks, including the summer day when he had written “wait a week before correcting the tooth.” The note was not important to the warning system, but she would not let the archive become only a list of successes.
Old Root could feel the new bell through the ground. It did not confuse the signal with its own lost sound. Each spring, the town checked the posts together and rang them in sequence. The roots under the old tower grew through the foundation and around the buried anchor bolts. The spirit remained at the ruins, hearing people use the crossing more carefully but unable to travel to them.
The Day They Left the Ruin
Years passed. Lio’s work brought her to the town less often, but she returned every May 4. She never said the old tower had been her father. She brought a green ribbon and tied it to the root that had first held the east wall. The ribbon faded each year. She replaced it only when the wind tore it away, not because she thought the spirit needed a sign, but because the date belonged to their shared life.
A younger bridge keeper asked why the town preserved a structure that could no longer tell time. Lio took him through the safe part of the ground floor and showed him the chalk marks on the wall. Each mark came from a different repair attempt: the first flood, the new tooth, the widening crack, the final water line. The ruin was not a warning against building. It was evidence that maintenance, listening, and public signals had to continue after the first good design.
The keeper listened and then asked if the tower had truly been alive. Lio said she could not prove it the way she could prove a gear had been replaced. She knew the sound changed before rain and that the bell had waited when a child was asleep under the arch. That was enough for her to treat the old structure with care, while leaving room for uncertainty about what it had understood.
The Rootbound Watch
One spring, a flood cut the low road again. The new signal worked, and the ferry closed in time. Travelers stayed on the upper path. A child left a clay bird beside the root line where the old tower had stood. The object broke in rain. Old Root felt the tiny impact through its stones and remembered Lio’s seed, the cart wheel, and all the other small things a strong wall had once been asked to leave untouched.
The tower’s spirit could not walk into the town, though its roots reached beneath the path. Its existence was still constrained by the place where its body had failed. When people passed the ruined face, the minute hand occasionally moved by a single notch. Some thought the wind had done it; others blamed loose stone. The Ledger Crow later recorded both explanations beside the witness accounts, refusing to choose certainty for them.
Old Root did not become a champion because it wanted a fight. It remained a guardian of a crossing because the old warning had taught its awareness that passage could be lost through neglect. The spirit’s care was not the same as the keeper’s. Ansel had chosen to hold the rope; the clocktower had experienced the weight of that choice without becoming him. The names remained separate, and so did their grief.
A Repair Without Release
The next generation rebuilt the north stair so visitors could read the old clock face from a safe distance. They did not restart the mechanism. It could not be trusted to give a river warning, and the town had better instruments for that purpose. A plaque named Ansel Rowan as keeper and described the flood signal system. Beside it, a second line named Old Root as the tower the town remembered, not as an extension of Ansel.
Some visitors spoke to the ruin as if it could hear. The tower felt the vibrations of their voices and knew certain cadences from its life. It could not answer in words. A child tapped the stone three times, waited, then tapped once. The old pendulum did not move, but the root under the outer wall shifted a fraction in the loose earth. The child returned the following spring and repeated the greeting.
The town’s repairs made the living crossing safer and allowed Ansel to be mourned as a person rather than a mechanism. They did not undo Old Root’s death or restore the tower’s lost body. The spirit remained at the ruin, held by the same collapsed minute. Its memory endured even after the original practical need for the clock had passed.
The Crow Reads the Stone
The Ledger Crow came to the settlement after finding Ansel’s weather board among the copies kept in the ferry office. He read the repair marks, then asked Lio and the current bridge crew what they believed the ruin could still sense. He did not tell them that a stopped clock must be haunted. He asked which sounds came before rain and whether the minute hand ever moved when the wind was still.
Lio showed him the green ribbon and explained that she replaced it on May 4. She said that the tower had once delayed a bell for the child beneath the cart, but she could not prove whether a gear had caught or the tower had chosen. She refused to make Ansel a saint or the ruin a miracle. The Crow copied her words exactly, including the uncertainty.
At the root line, the Crow opened an official card folio. Its black face carried thorn filigree in gold and silver, teal astronomical lines, and the red skeletal-hand seal. He told Old Root, through the people who had learned to interpret its small movement, that the card would be a new tether. It would not rebuild the tower, restore Ansel, or free the spirit from the ruins. The old binding would remain.
The Choice to Leave the Square
Old Root had no human voice with which to answer. The Crow waited beside the stopped clock and asked whether the tower wished to enter the folio, where it could travel farther than the root line but would remain called through a contest. The spirit might refuse and continue in the ruin. A card would give it movement only within the rules of a game; it would be an additional limit, not a promise of release.
Lio placed Ansel’s winding key on the ground between the Crow and the old face. She did not ask the tower to follow her, and she did not claim the decision for her father. The new bridge keeper rang the signal at the bend. Old Root felt the clear, separate strokes pass through the earth and listened until the last one ended.
The minute hand moved one mark. It stopped, then moved one more. The Crow did not interpret the gesture as certainty until it happened again. Old Root turned its root-bound face toward the open folio and held still. The people who knew its old rhythms understood the answer as a choice to enter the record, not a desire to become a weapon and not a return to life.
The Official Card and Its Guard
C133 records Old Root as the Root-Turned Clocktower: a single-copy, 6-energy, 4/8 Construct with Root affinity. Its printed rule is Guard. The card depicts the tower as a small walking structure held together by roots; it is the clocktower spirit’s card-form, not a miniature Ansel or an ordinary building that the player owns.
Guard changes legal creature attacks. While an opposing creature can legally attack a friendly creature with Guard, the attacker must choose a Guard as its target. Guard does not cancel damage, make the tower immune, stop spells, heal it, or protect the champion from every effect. The tower still deals its printed 4 attack and takes ordinary combat damage and retaliation. If an enemy Guard has been removed or no longer qualifies, normal target rules decide the attack.
The Crow did not promise that a card would succeed where the ruin had failed. It gave Old Root a second, chosen tether and a way to stand beside another route. The tower accepted as a spirit with its own memory, not as Ansel returned, and not as a substitute for the town’s working flood signals. Its first duty had been to measure a minute; its last choice was to let others decide what that minute meant.
At the table
Printed effect: Guard.
Use a durable Guard to protect your board
Root-Turned Clocktower is a single-copy, 6-energy 4/8 Construct with Root affinity. Its only printed rule is Guard. It has no Enter effect, Rush, healing, or spell protection. When an opposing creature attacks, a legal friendly Guard is a forced target while one is present; the Guard still takes ordinary combat damage and retaliation.
One move, shown
The 4/8 body can redirect creature attacks from smaller allies and absorb a large combat hit. Plan its six-energy cost and keep it where your board benefits from the protection. It cannot stop spells, prevent damage, or let you attack the opposing champion while enemy creatures remain. Do not treat its size as immunity.
Spend 6 energy to play Root-Turned Clocktower. Apply the printed effect exactly as written.
The opponent has a ready 3/4 attacker; you control a 2/2 non-Guard and Root-Turned Clocktower. The attacker must choose the 4/8 Guard as a legal target. It deals 3 damage to the tower; the tower returns 4 and defeats the 3/4. Your 2/2 was not a legal attack target during that combat. A spell can still target the 2/2, and the Guard does not block champion damage from effects.
The example explains a legal choice, not an additional card effect. Check the live game for current targeting and timing.
Chibi mode
This is the current game’s chibi rendering of Root-Turned Clocktower. The alternate art changes presentation, not the printed card rules.