The Clockmaster, or the Rise and Spectacular Fall of the Fabulist Barmal Glip

Excerpt from: A History of the Orderly Companies
by Jacnae Sostrin
Labor Historian, Chardon University

The Goddess Telene by Hauntogram

In the empire of Corcelle, 591, the goddess Telene was ascending the absent throne of Luria. Her cult was the state religion, and her priests already held a great deal of power and influence. The empire was still a kingdom, and the king was still a mortal. It was said that the goddess favored the laboring faithful and rewarded their ceaseless efforts with her blessings.

Barmal Glip was one such man. He claimed to be an inventor, a man of great vision and ambition. He declared, with an air of certainty, that the goddess had revealed to him the mysteries of the clockwork arts, and had named him chosen among mortals. She had also charged him with the holy mission of bringing a new dawn of grandeur and success to the kingdom.

Glip appeared in the capital city of Chardon during the high heat, seeking an audience with King Gepharte I. The arrival of this man and his peculiar disposition created some clangor among the citizenry. His knack for making grandiose claims and his inclination to condescend to those more learned or powerful than himself stirred deep unrest among the people one normally wants to leave undisturbed.

But the king was intrigued by Glip's audacity and boldness. He gave the inventor an audience and sponsored an assembly of the most talented and learned men in the city. Glip strutted up to the assemblage, an air of smug arrogance affixed to his every step. He clutched his wondrous device, a timekeeping piece crafted in the style of the Old Empire. He presented the device to the king and grumbled a number of rough indignations as the Royal Guard inspected the device for trap-rigging.

"Would that it were a bomb, metal man," Glip is recorded as saying. "I could use the scrap from your tin trousers to build something useful for the king."

Luckily for the insolent little man, the king was impressed by the craftsmanship of the device. It was the size of a large apple or a small melon, all smooth and shiny and adorned with gold filigree. He turned it over in his hands several times, marveling at the delicate clicking and ticking. Glip declared that the tick of the timepiece was attuned to the very pulse of the Goddess Telene. This elicited some consternation among the Telenic bishops who were present at the demonstration.

Glip proposed an extortionate sum to be granted in exchange for the schematics of this apparatus, and the many others in his possession, to the Orderly Company of Engineers. The king was intrigued, but he was not uncritical. Nor was he particularly eager to open up the coffers to this odious little stranger, who appeared unheralded in court, flashing ticking baubles and demanding a king's ransom for his so-called divine gifts. So the wise King Gepharte made Glip a counteroffer: he would appoint him as the interim guildmaster of the Orderly Company of Engineers for exactly one hundred days. If Glip could make good on his promises, he could retain the position permanantly and all the lands and salaries the position entiled.

Glip accepted, and, over the next three months, Glip and his team worked feverishly to deliver technology that was beyond anything currently in use on either of Lulalon's two great continents. They manufactured machinery, crafted tools, and even created clockwork weaponry, all based on the schematics that Glip claimed were passed to him by divine revelation from the goddess.

Glip's early successes propelled him to prominence with clockwork precision. Rather than co-opting the engineers, the king allowed Glip to commission a completely new orderly company. And thus the repellant fabulist, Barmal Glip became the founding master of the Orderly Company of Clockworkers. His name was a clarion call of the empire's might. He commanded reverence and admiration among the people for the boldness of his innovations and the novelty of his devices. Blessed by Telene, his works were seen as divine, and he became a symbol of Corcellean greatness. His fame spread like wildfire across Aezoth.

As Glip's fame grew, so did his ego. He began to make increasingly bold and preposterous claims about his inventions. He spoke of fleets of clockwork vessels that could sail through the sky in a mighty armada and autominers that could completely eliminate the need for human hands in the deadly mineral mines on the Corcellean marches. His most audacious claim, though, was his insistence that he possessed the schematics for an automaton, an artificial man that could usurp menial labor from mankind. He predicted a future where wealth and comfort would reign, all thanks to his fantastic technology.

As Glip's claims became more outrageous, his leadership of the Orderly Company of Clockworkers became more erratic and unpredictable. Rumors of mutiny began to circulate within the guild, as complaints about Glip's increasingly temperamental behavior grew louder. In spite of this internal dissent, the vast majority of Corcelleans regarded Glip as a virtuoso artificer, endowed by Telene's own hand. His fame only grew, and the constant public adulation inflamed his megalomania, immunizing him from the critical clockworkers within his ranks.

In 595 PL, Barmal Glip's reign came to a gruesome end, during the unveiling of the Tower of Order, a massive ornate clocktower spire that was to be the centerpiece of the Telenic Temple in Chardon. As the chimes of the grand tower bells boomed through the streets of Chardon, Guildmaster Glip made his ascent. Glip wore a cleverly concealed rigging harness—ostensibly the goddess' final divine design—that was secured to a winch atop the tower's facade. The contraption groaned and creaked, as it inched its way to the heavens, drawing the daring man with it. The watching crowd's applause rang out with thunderous approval. He was a conquering hero, and they held him in awe. Finally, when he reached the tower's pinnacle, suspended above the churning gears below, he shouted down to the crown in a thin, constricted voice, "Behold the splendor of Telene!"

It was at this point that Glip's rigging began to fail. The entire structure lurched, and a loud clanging reverberated over the rooftops on Chardon's High Street. To his credit, he never broke character. Obviously unhappy with his first invocation of the goddess, he began again.

"Behold!" This time, he bellowed with conviction, his arms spread wide as he looked down lovingly on the terrified crowd, which was watching the rigging above him twist and bend.

Sometimes, however, the splendor of the gods is self-evident. Before he could finish his re-invocation, the machinery above him gave way, sending Glip crashing into the enormous clock face. He clung to the hour hand for precisely six seconds, his eyes wide with terror, like a man adrift in time. As he plummeted down into the giant, exposed gears on the external facade of the tower, the crowd issued a collective gasp. The sound was terrible—a jagged cry, crashing metal, the sound of bones snapping, followed by something much worse, like an oxcart rolling over a patch of rotten apples.

"Behold the splendor of Telene!" by Hauntogram

After Glip's death, there was much speculation about what had truly happened. Some suspected a plot by disgruntled members of the Orderly Company of Clockmakers, or a conspiracy between the Corcellean Intelligence Service and the Telenic Church. The devout believed that Glip's hubris had been an affront to the goddess, and that his death was a dispensation of divine justice. Others even suggested that Glip, knowing he was a fraud, had orchestrated his own death—a suicide as grandiose as the man himself.

When Crown investigators raided Glip's guildmaster's office, they discovered a secret workshop filled with a trove of clockwork schematics bearing the seal of the Old Empire, which had been destroyed during the Beholding. Glip had somehow come into possession of these pre-Beholding technical schematics and had been passing them off as revelations from Telene for years. The schematics were seized by the Crown and remain under the highest order of imperial secrecy.

But the damage had already been done. The people of Corcelle were in an uproar over the revelation of Glip's deception, and the Orderly Company of Clockworkers was in disarray. The empire's rapid technological rise had come to a halt, and the people were left to grapple with the fallout of Glip's lies and the consequences of their own blind faith in him.

The Orderly Company of Clockworkers was thrown into disarray for a time, as guild members struggled to come to terms with the damage wrought by their founder. Some members were angry and bitter, feeling that they had been duped by Glip and his grandiose claims. Others were simply confused, unsure of what to believe or how to move forward. As the guild struggled to reestablish their identity under new leadership, technological advancements slowed, much to the displeasure of King Gepharte I.

In the midst of this chaos, the Telenic Church was quick to seize the opportunity to assert its authority and reassert its role as the spiritual center of the empire. The church had always been uneasy about Glip and his bold claims, and many within the clergy saw his fall as a sign of divine displeasure.

Despite these setbacks, the empire of Corcelle remained a beacon of technological progress. The Clockwork Revolution had fundamentally transformed the empire, and the people remained fascinated by the possibilities of clockwork technology, in spite of it's fraudulent faundations.