Nodus - Dialling Book

Before clocks ticked, walls kept time. A blade of bronze leaned toward the pole star, and its shadow walked a set of engraved lines from the first hour to the last — every stone dial cut for one town and one town only. Nodus opens that vanished craft: the sundials of Egypt and Rome, the vertical faces on Gothic church walls, the pocket dials travellers carried folded in leather, and the mathematics a gnomonist worked out by hand before a single line was cut. The screen keeps a quarry-grey calm — matte surfaces, sharp corners, numbers set in a plain monospaced hand, like a mason's tracing sheet under a north window. At the centre sits the Gnomon Bench, a working drawing table for dials. Set a latitude, tilt the wall, swing it away from due south, and the bench lays out the real hour lines one by one: the style height it demands, the angle of every hour from noon, the hours the face can never see, and the plain-language reason it loses them. The Atlas walks fourteen historic dial types with the dates and places they belong to, the Craft shelf explains declination, equation of time and the nodus itself, and the Dial Log keeps the faces you have found — bearing taken from the phone's own compass, a photo of the stone and your own reading of the hour. A Gnomonist's Test closes the book with fourteen questions and an explanation after each.