Kingdom Inventions - The Stopwatch

There are clocks that count what matters — and clocks that make us forget what does.

There was, and there was not, a time when the Kingdom learned to measure its worth in moments.

Not seasons. Not cycles. Not breath or song or sunlight on stone.

Moments.

Tiny, perfect units of time—captured, calculated, and reviewed. The Council introduced a new tool to mark the shift. It was called the Stopwatch.

It was small. Sleek. Worn by analysts and planners, by builders and barkers alike. It blinked in silver or red, depending on the task.

Efficiency became a contest. Pauses became flaws. Every creature began to track their movement—how long to think, to speak, to rest.

Raven came across a broken one near the edge of the old engineering hall. It lay half-buried in dust, its glass face cracked, its numbers blinking nonsense.

She picked it up in her beak and turned it over.

She remembered how it started—how leaders in the Kingdom praised the stopwatch for helping them make decisions with rigor. How it revealed delays, tracked progress, drove urgency.

But urgency, Raven had learned, was a fire. It could warm. Or it could burn the whole forest down.

She remembered a time when she had been told to “move faster,” not because danger approached—but because stillness made others uncomfortable. She had watched ideas collapse under artificial pressure, watched wisdom ignored because it arrived too slowly.

She tucked the broken stopwatch beneath a loose stone.

Some things should be buried with care—not in shame, but in acknowledgment.

There are clocks that count what matters.

And there are clocks that make us forget what does.

© 2025 Sarah Dooley. Story and images by the author. All rights reserved.