Sweeping past the minutes of its face by Himring

Chapter 1

It was Frodo who brought Bilbo’s old clock to Tol Eressea. He had been watching as its hands moved past its face in the days before he left: counting his last hours in the Shire, counting the hours until his departure. The clock had come in at the beginning on the story he had been writing down, with Thorin & Co.’s letter under the clock on the mantelpiece; he decided to take it along at the end. Bilbo might like to see it again, although the elves might think it quite strange to take a timepiece to a timeless realm.

It turned out that the elves of Valinor apparently thought quite a lot about counting time. They even had clocks—the great water clock of Alqualonde was a miracle of engineering—but none quite like his. Quennar, a lore-master who had written a book about the Reckoning of Years, came to see the clock and got on famously with Bilbo.

It was Quennar who helped Frodo replace the spring, when it wore out. By then, Quennar could explain to the smith exactly how the mechanism worked. Frodo wound the clock and set it ticking again: a new lease of life.

Chapter End Notes

I have written a bio about Quennar, posted to this site. (He also has featured previously in a drabble of mine where he wasn't tagged on SWG.)

The water clock of Alqualonde is, I think, borrowed from somebody else's 'verse. Possibly it was mentioned in a fic of Anna Wing's? 

The title is from the lyrics of "The Windmills of Your Mind", written by Alan and Marilyn Bergman and first sung by Noel Harrison.

This double drabble was also written as a fill for three prompts from the Clock Challenge at Tolkien Weekly, a drabble community on LJ (2 x 100 words in Word).