This is StoryQuest. Today's story is The Midnight Guardians.

Mira Thistledown had always been a little unusual. While other grown-ups in the village of Larkmore

were busy baking bread or mending boots or polishing brass kettles,

Mira spent her evenings staring at the sky, listening to the soft tick, tick, tick, of the giant

clock towers on the hills. There were 12 towers in all, glittering like silver needles across the land, and each one

was tended by the mysterious midnight guardians.

No one had ever seen the guardians up close.

They came after dark, wrapped in long cloaks that shimmered like moonlight.

Their job was simple.

They kept time itself running. They polished the gears

hidden beneath the hills. They wound the ancient springs. They checked the star compasses and made

sure the seconds, minutes and hours stayed in proper order. Which was why, on the morning everything went wrong, Mirro knew the

problem had to be enormous. She had opened her eyes at dawn only to discover that the sun was rising

upside down and sideways. It was both too early and too late, and completely upside down, like someone

had picked it up and stuck it on the sky the wrong way round. When she leapt out of her bed,

the floor began moving backwards. Her slippers marched away from her feet instead of towards

them. The rooster crowed, but the sound came before the rooster had actually opened

its beak. Children floated past outside, hopping backwards to school. A baker's loaf unbaked

itself into a blob of dough on the window sill. Time had gone haywire. Mira grabbed her coat. If the midnight guardians were missing, someone had to help.

Maybe this was her destiny to save the world.

I mean, that's more exciting than baking bread, isn't it?

She marched to the closet of the 12 clock towers.

...