Time is not a river—it's a machine. And it's breaking down.

In the steam-choked empire of Arcaevia, time doesn't pass—it's controlled. Giant time engines, powered by interlocking gears and arcane engineering, regulate every moment of every day. History itself is locked in a repeating imperial loop, each cycle stamped and pressed like clockwork.

But not all cogs turn willingly.

Korrell Vale, a disgraced clocksmith with a mechanical heart and a haunted past, has vanished from public record—only to reemerge as a saboteur. Armed with forbidden knowledge and a rogue time key, he begins dismantling the empire's time engines, one sabotage at a time. Every broken machine shatters the loop, rewriting reality and birthing new timelines where nothing is predictable—and everything is dangerous.

As fractured versions of the past clash with unraveling futures, Korrell finds allies in unlikely places: a runaway historian who remembers too much, a rebel general lost in her own rewritten history, and a child who may be the last living link to a forgotten era. Together, they must navigate shifting cities, mechanical monsters, and the ticking countdown of a war that no longer has a clear beginning—or end.

But the empire doesn't surrender to entropy. An elite order of horological enforcers, the Chronosect, will stop at nothing to preserve the loop. And the deeper Korrell delves into the secrets of time, the more he realizes that every choice he makes could erase a life, a world, or even himself.

In a world where history is manufactured and rebellion can unmake reality, how far would you go to fix what time broke?

The Clocksmith's War is the first volume in a bold new steampunk fantasy series that blends high-concept alternate history with clockwork intrigue, deep moral questions, and relentless adventure. For fans of Philip Reeve, Brandon Sanderson, China Miéville, and Arcane.