Title: The Clockmaker’s Promise

Level: Intermediate (B1–B2)

Follow the YouTube channel to see the text of the stories or hear the story in English and several other languages.

https://www.youtube.com/@Readiolingua

Story :

Emma is having a terrible day where time seems to work against her. She misses her train by seconds and wanders into an old quarter of the city, where she discovers a small shop called “The Clockmaker.” Inside, she meets Adrien, a calm and mysterious clockmaker surrounded by old clocks. She feels strangely drawn to a silver pocket watch engraved with stars. Adrien warns her that it does not behave like normal watches and gives her two rules: do not open it exactly at midnight on purpose, and if she does, never let go until the second hand moves again.

That night, unable to resist curiosity, Emma opens the watch at exactly midnight. Reality bends and she is pulled back in time to an older version of the same street, where Adrien’s shop exists in another era. She learns that the watch can bend time under special conditions, allowing her to cross between her present and Adrien’s past. They begin to meet again and again through different “crossings.” For Emma, only days may pass; for Adrien, sometimes months. They share stories, fix clocks together, and slowly fall in love across centuries, even as they both realize that every use of the watch makes time more fragile.

Adrien explains that the watch has limits. Each crossing bends the lines between their timelines like metal that can eventually snap. If they keep using it, reality itself may crack: streets that change, days that repeat wrong, lives that are erased. He tells Emma that he once met a version of her who promised to find him again if time ever allowed. Emma begins to understand that she may be repeating an old story without remembering all the previous attempts.

One night, the watch pulls Emma into a terrible moment: Adrien has fallen from a roof in a storm and lies dying. A ghostlike version of him appears and tells her that if she saves this version of him, the damage to time will spread and hurt many innocent people. Instead, he asks her to use the last power of the watch to “move” his life somewhere else in the future, to a version of him who never climbed that roof and is free from this in-between existence....

Vocabulary :

• pocket watch – a small watch that you carry in your pocket on a chain

• bend time – to change or distort the normal flow of time

• crossing – a moment of moving from one time to another

• fragile – easily broken or damaged

• ordinary – normal, usual, not special or magical, but real and everyday

Grammar Focus :

• Narrative past tenses (past simple + past continuous) to create a cinematic, story-like feeling

• First and second conditionals to talk about choices and consequences (“If they keep using the watch, time will crack.”)

• Reported speech and thought to show inner conflict and emotional decisions (“She thought that maybe this was the version of them that could survive.”)

Website:

https://Readiocast.com

YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/@Readiolingua

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