Bilbo smiled. “Long enough to lose your handkerchief, find your courage, and still be home for second breakfast.”
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. Bilbo smiled
“This is the There and Back Again ,” he said. “Wind it once. For exactly the runtime of a hobbit’s unexpected journey—no more, no less.” The hands were made of two tiny, hairy feet
“How long is that?” Piper asked.
Bilbo wound it back to zero. Inside, a tiny voice—maybe his own, maybe a memory—whispered: “The road goes ever on… but the runtime? That’s the bit you actually live.”