Clockwork Reaper

Has it has been a year? A decade? A century? Maybe even a millennia?
Wrapped in my cobwebbed cocoon, I continue to stare at the copper clock beside me.
I wait for it to chime. To tick. To tock.
Its hands do not move.
Neither do mine.
We both lie broken and discarded.
The death of time; it became the scent of home.
So I created my own.
I salvaged the parts from that grand clock I had ripped and torn apart. (I had thought I could learn how to function from it: How did it know it was meant for time keeping and nothing else? Was there a possibility it could be manipulated for other purposes?)
I was enamoured by the movements of its cogs, of the ratio wheel, the chime pin, the hammers and strikes, the levers, the pendulum, the ratchets…If only I could become this, if only my own mechanisms could be figured out so beautifully; maybe I could be re-wired so my sense of justice was not so muddled.
So I had gauged out the clock's insides to re-create myself into something more understandable.
It didn't work out as I had planned.
It became messy.
Inhaling the iron smell of dried blood and old clock parts, I learned how to tell time through the ticking and tocking of my heart. By the beating of my wings as they celebrated each hour. Clockwork wings. Clockwork heart. Wind me up and watch me reap.
I am safe here, where I am trapped. Where I cannot be harmed, and where I cannot slaughter.
Now, embalmed in their homes, even the spiders know I am not a threat.
My body has become a golden vessel for a clockwork system.
But my mind still exists. It battles through the mechanics, through the cogs and hammers and levers. I'm reminded of who I am, and what I will never be.
I miss the sky.
And my scythe.
Tick.
Tock.
Find me. Unbind me. Re-wire me. Wind me. Watch me fly. Watch me reap. Your soul was pure. My scythe can change that.
Tick.
Tock.
It will be the last sound you hear.
Tick.
...