Hobbit: Runtime

“How long is that?” Piper asked.

He led her to the back room, where a shelf held a single, unassuming timepiece. Its face was engraved with a hobbit-hole door, round and green. The hands were made of two tiny, hairy feet. hobbit runtime

The old clockmaker, Bilbo Baggins by name (though no relation to the famous one, he’d insist), had a dusty shop at the end of a crooked lane. His specialty was not ordinary time. He built runtimes —tiny, humming devices that could compress a long journey into a single pocket-watch’s tick, or stretch a moment of courage into a small, quiet eternity. “How long is that