The Clockmaker's Vow

Rain hissed against the cobblestones as I pressed the revolver into the tailor’s trembling hands. "His pocket watch chimes at midnight," I said, tracing the scar on my collarbone—a souvenir from the fire that devoured my parents’ clock shop. "That’s when he’ll come for his new waistcoat." The tailor’s shop reeked of camphor and fear, shadows dancing across bolts of crimson silk that reminded me too much of flames.
I remember Father’s last words as smoke clawed our lungs:"Some gears can’t be reset." He’d refused to pay the protection money, you see. Now Mr. Voss—smug as a well-oiled gear—ruled the city’s clock tower, his timepieces in every bourgeois parlor.
The trap sprang perfectly. When Voss’s silver watch sang its mechanical lullaby, the bullet tore through silk and flesh alike. But his blood wasn’t red. It oozed black and viscous, speckled with clockwork shards. The room shuddered as his skin cracked like porcelain, revealing cogs where organs should be.
"Clever girl," Voss rasped, his voice grinding like overwound springs. "But who wound your springs tonight?" His remaining eye focused behind me.
Cold steel kissed my neck. The tailor’s voice, now stripped of its quaver:"Apologies, miss. Mr. Voss upgraded me in ’68." His fingers unspooled into screwdriver tips.
They forced me into the clock tower’s heart, where pendulums sliced air like guillotines. Voss’s true form emerged—a skeletal engine fused with the tower’s guts, his breath reeking of scorched oil. "You’ll make an exquisite automaton," he wheezed. "Your hatred’s pure kinetic energy."
As gears bit into my wrists, I laughed. They’d missed the tiny vial in my boot—Father’s final invention. Liquid moonlight, brewed from stolen clock-tower shadows. The explosion shattered stained-glass saints into daggers that pierced Voss’s brass heart.
Dawn found me sifting through debris. The tailor’s head still ticked: "Why… why… why…" I crushed it under my heel. In the ashes lay Voss’s watch, still ticking. Its hands now moved backward.
I wear it every day. The chill against my chest feels like Father’s ghost nodding. Sometimes, in shop windows, my reflection blurs—a glimpse of bronze beneath skin. But the tower’s rubble sprouts strange flowers with petal-like gears. Children pluck them, laughing. I keep my revolver oiled.
After all, what’s a vengeance without an encore?