Thief of Time recap

The Auditors of Reality, who loathe the disorder of living things, plot to stop time forever by having a perfect glass clock built, a device that will trap Time itself and freeze the world into tidy stillness. Working through one of their number in human form, they commission the obsessive Ankh-Morpork clockmaker Jeremy Clockson to construct it. Sensing the coming catastrophe, Death gathers the other Horsemen and calls on his rational, reluctant granddaughter Susan, a schoolteacher, to intervene. At a remote mountain monastery, the humble History Monk Lu-Tze and his extraordinarily gifted apprentice Lobsang Ludd race to reach the clock in time. When it is completed, time stops and shatters, leaving the world frozen. Susan, Lu-Tze, and Lobsang, able to move outside ordinary time, fight to put it back together. Lobsang and Jeremy prove to be two halves of a single being, the son of Time, and Lobsang takes up that inheritance. The Auditor who wore human form is undone by her growing love of human sensation, and the Auditors themselves are defeated when the sheer overwhelming pleasure of taste destroys them. Time is restarted and the world remade.

Previously, in earlier books: Susan Sto Helit is the granddaughter of Death, the skeletal personification who gathers the dying and rides a pale horse. Through her family's strange history she was born part mortal and part something stranger, and inherited abilities she would rather do without: she can go unseen when she chooses, pass where solid walls should stop her, step outside the ordinary flow of time, and command a voice that compels obedience. Practical and fiercely rational, she has always resisted the uncanny side of her nature and built herself a normal life, working first as a governess and then as a schoolteacher. When the world has faced supernatural danger before, Death has called on her, against her wishes, to do what he cannot do himself. As this book opens, she is once again living quietly, teaching her class, and hoping to be left in peace.

Several threads begin far apart. At a remote mountain monastery, the humble sweeper Lu-Tze, secretly one of the History Monks who keep time running as it should, takes on a talented and arrogant young apprentice named Lobsang Ludd. In Ankh-Morpork, an obsessively precise clockmaker, Jeremy Clockson, is approached by a strange and wealthy patron and commissioned to build the most perfectly accurate clock ever made. And Death, sensing something terrible drawing near, begins to stir, aware that a danger is gathering that could threaten the whole of the living world.

Time is restarted and the world is put back together. The perfect clock does stop time when it is finished, but Susan, Lu-Tze, and Lobsang, all able to act outside the frozen moment, undo the disaster. Lobsang Ludd and the clockmaker Jeremy are revealed to be two halves of the same entity, the son of Time, and Lobsang embraces this identity, merging with his other half to become the new personification of Time itself. The Auditor who took the human name Lady LeJean, seduced by the richness of physical sensation and turned against her own cold kind, helps bring about the Auditors' defeat: unable to withstand the overwhelming experience of taste, they are undone by chocolate. With their scheme broken, ordinary time resumes and the world carries on as though the interruption had never happened. Lobsang, now Time, remains bound by a lasting connection to Susan, who returns, as she prefers, to her ordinary life.