A Clockwork Valley

 A place tainted by order rather than chaos. 

A medieval fantasy land, a high European fairy-tale. A valley up in the mountains, big enough for a forest, a lake, a city, and a very small desert. Several days ride across, well protected by mountains, and an army.

Something happened here long ago. The mines in the valley mine clockwork, deposited in great veins that strain against each other, or lie dormant. The metal is unknown, and does not corrode or melt. Immense physical damage will cause a piece to break into two smaller intact pieces.

As a result, the clockwork produced here surpasses anything available anywhere else, its small size and complexity simply beyond the reach of contemporary manufacturing technology. Guards wear cogs as platemail, and every citizen has a few “lucky” pieces.

The city is like a beautiful Swiss mountain dream, with towers that can rotate, and walls that can reconfigure. It is grand and powerful, its armies supplemented with clockwork constructions that work only in the valley.

For the truth is, only the most mundane of their creations can leave the valley. Watches and accurate measuring devices, etc. Anything too complicated, too far beyond what should be possible, breaks once it leaves the valley.

And the valley has secrets. 

In the forest, the trees tick, each wooden branch brushing cog-leaves against neighbours, a great green machine moving in sync. The birds have fractal patterns on their wings, and the antlers of deer cause odd visual effects when looked at from the wrong angle.

The lake is deeper than it should be, vanishing into cold dark depths. Sometimes things are caught in it that seem wrong. Fish with corkscrew-propeller fins, eels that only ever move clockwise, and, rarer still, things that might have been lobsters once, but now are angular and bony; platonic solids with shells and claws. People rarely swim in it, for its waters are too cold year round and its sides too sheer, but it is said if you dive as deep as you can into it, you can hear something below rumbling rhythmically, or perhaps, beating.

There is a passage in the northern mountains, but it twists and turns, moving in a slow cycle days or weeks long. The mountains don’t visually rotate, but its end is unreachable when the entrance is open. No one has ever returned, though there are still reports of lights on the far peaks.

The desert isn’t very large, more an old lakebed that dried to sand not long ago. From a decent vantage point in its centre, you should be able to clearly see the edges. But people go missing in it all the time. The dunes shift and flow in some strange pattern. A small group of scholars chart their movement, claiming they are the teeth of huge underground gears, made not of buried metal, but of flowing sand and shifting wind. They think they’ve almost figured out the shape of the device, but their scale model has them very worried.

Sometimes the people click as they get older, the bony teeth on their joints starting to give out with age. Everyone knows this, and is fine with it. Afterall, it's only in the older ones you can actually hear it. There was a brief attempt by university scholars to perform autopsies, but the public backlash stopped them. Some still do research in secret, but their findings leave them grey and shaking.

Clockwork miners in the deep mines know that if you feel pale or weak, get out. Cog-Rot causes anaemia first, as iron precipitates out from blood, but kills quickly if not treated, every mineral in the body turning to sharp gears. Death is quick, but not quick enough, as sufferers haemorrhage and collapse. Their bodies feel like sacks of wet sand, soft but gritty.

In some places, liquids and fine powders trace symbols and shapes. Each is unique, but always specific to the location. Quartz dust works best, and glyph-prospectors wander hill and dell with bags of quartz dust and backpacks of paper, ready to record precise details to later sell to hungry academics.

The study of the valley’s secrets is the hobby of everyone, at least a little. It bends thought around, friends turning to conversation about it regularly, academics moving between study groups and schools of thoughts, nobles sponsoring interesting theories, and anyone who is anyone having an informed opinion. The Royal Family, it is believed, know more than any other, and say less.

And some gears are different. They are not mere clockwork, and in fact will not turn when placed within any device. They perform other tasks. Some orientate themselves in an unknown direction, some heat when blood is spilled on them, and some sink into skin, becoming a metallic mark on the surface. Collectors prize them, and again, it is said the Royal Family’s true power comes from a great vault which hides many anomalies.

One theorist says that every mine, every strange location, every pattern-glyph, points in the same direction, thought most disagree with the strange math used to prove this. That, and what could possibly lie over a mile below the valley floor?