In a small village, at the very beginning of the first age of machines, there lived a toymaker most clever and skilled. Like the watchmakers and doll-makers of the middle cities, the toymaker was able to craft wondrous clockwork devices of mystifying complexity and multifarious function. Year round, the toymaker would work at his craft. He would never sell his toys, nor take any money for his services, and so the people of the small village would gift him with food to eat, and wood to burn, and clothes to keep him warm. In this way the toymaker lived, and every year in the month after the first frost, he would travel through the village and present each person with a gift.

The children of the village would scour the countryside and sneak off to the newborn cities, returning with scraps of iron and broken dolls thrown away by the urban children. They brought these scraps to the toymaker, and thus he always had material with which to craft his devices.

But time passed, as time often does. And as time passed, the village grew larger and the toymaker grew older. One day he begged a favor from the wealthiest man of the village, to ride into the middle cities and bring for him back a supply of materials which he listed in precise handwriting on a narrow scrap of parchment. Now, the wealthy man was wise (as few wealthy men are) and so he agreed to the task without question, and journeyed far over fields and through dark forests to the middle city. There he gathered the toymaker’s supplies, and he returned in less than a fortnight.

The toymaker thanked the wealthy man, and for seven days and seven nights he worked hard, single-mindedly crafting the materials brought by the wealthy man into the only device he had ever made for himself alone. On the eighth day, he took a simple key of iron and wound his newest toy, a raven made of chrome. The bird came to life, and the toymaker placed one of his unfinished projects before the clockwork raven. Immediately, the chrome raven set to work, using beak and talons, putting the toy together with the same deftness of the toymaker.

Life continued on its way for the toymaker. He made his wonderful toys, and the chrome raven helped him. Who is to say how he constructed the raven’s clockwork brain, imparting to it his craftsman’s eye and delicate touch, but the bird worked tirelessly, needing only to be wound. Soon the toymaker devised a way the raven might wind its own springs, and even that task ceased to trouble him. Thus, as the village grew, the toymaker still traveled to every home at the first frost with a brand new toy.

But as happens with men who grow old, one day the toymaker died. The village was very sad, and there was nothing else to do but to bury the beloved toymaker, and chain shut the doors of his workshop (for no man or woman, boy or girl among them all could bring themselves to disturb his tools and unfinished toys). Sometimes, when passing by the shop, some people thought they still heard the toymaker at work. While this was in no ways true, the toymaker had never spoken of his chrome raven, and upon his demise, the clockwork bird had continued about its work, completing those toys the toymaker had not finished, and building more from the scraps about his shop.

Eventually these scraps ran out, and the raven ceased its work. It sat, unmoving save for the occasional winding of its springs, for seven days and seven nights. At last, on the eighth day, it left through a window in the loft of the workshop and flew through the village. As it happened, a small child’s toy from several years past had broken that night, and he left it on an open window sill. Seeing this toy, the raven alighted, and took it back to the locked workshop. It fixed the toy in a trice and returned it that same night.

Soon enough children throughout the village began leaving their broken toys, and odds and ends out on open windows. Every night the chrome raven would collect the broken toys, and the next night it would return them, repaired. On the first frost of that winter, it flew through the village, leaving the toys it had made over the year on the window sills of all the children. People of the village began to leave scraps of metal and broken toys discarded by the middle cities on the workshop’s doorstep again, and so the rumors grew to legends of a toymaker who would bring presents to all good children every winter after the first frost.

The people of that village still leave their broken tools and toys in open windows for mending, and it is still said, if you leave a broken toy on the window sill, the toymaker will come to repair it in the night. These are only stories, of course. The toymaker is long dead, and resting as he well deserves. But as to the chrome raven, who could know for certain? Never rusting, crafted by such a man as the toymaker, it may yet be repairing the broken toys of the village to this day.