Moonstar: Inner Horizon by Jade Gretz

https://www.deviantart.com/jadegretzai/art/Moonstar-Inner-Horizon-1254121008

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The Whispering Wood of What Was

The snow began to fall just as the screaming stopped. It was not the soft, forgiving snow of the Rockies, but a silent, granular ash that clung to Dani Moonstar’s skin like frozen dust. She stood in the husk of the old Charles J. Epstein Memorial Library, the scent of ozone and burnt paper a funeral shroud around her. The lower levels were a tomb of her classmates. The upper levels were her runway.

She hadn’t seen him, not with her eyes. Her mutant power, a prism that made thought and fear into tangible phantom forms, had shown her. A projection, a premonition of a shadow so vast it drank the light, crowned by a helmet that was a fist of ruby. It had thrummed with a single, devastating psychic signature: momentum. Unstoppable. Inevitable.

“Juggernaut,” she whispered, the word tasting of iron and finality.

A quarter-mile away, a stone wall the thickness of a tank’s armor ceased to be. There was no explosion, only a profound, grinding absence of sound as matter was told to no longer be. Then came the footfall. It wasn’t a sound you heard with your ears; it was a pressure wave you felt in your marrow, a tremor that said the earth itself was flinching.

Dani ran. Not towards the Blackbird’s hangar—that was a deathtrap, a straight line he would intercept. She ran for the treeline, for the dense, ancient forest the locals called the Whispering Wood. Her boots crunched on the ashen snow. The air, cold enough to sear her lungs, was a blessing. It felt real.

She hit the tree line as the second footfall shook the ground, sending a cascade of brittle icicles shattering from branches like fallen knives. She wove between towering pines, their boughs heavy and groaning. Her mind, a weapon she was trained to hone, was a terrified bird in a cage. To project an illusion now would be like lighting a signal fire for the monster at her back. She had to be a ghost.

“Little bird!” The voice boomed through the forest, not loud, but heavy, each word a boulder dropped into a still pond. “You can’t fly far enough!”

She ducked behind a moss-covered monolith, her chest heaving. The fear in her was not just her own. The forest was afraid. She could feel it, a green, primal thrum beneath her fingertips on the stone. Her power, always brushing against the psychic essences of living things, tapped into it unintentionally. She saw flickers: ancient things with too many legs, shadows that drank starlight, a deep, slow consciousness rooted in the bedrock.

A new sound joined the crushing footfalls: the splintering of trunks. He wasn’t going around the trees. He was going through.

“What do you want?” she screamed, the words ripped from her. She couldn’t help it. Terror demanded dialogue.

The destruction paused. The silence was worse.

“You saw me,” his voice came, closer now, conversational. A socialite at a gruesome party. “In the library. Before I even stepped inside. You made a pretty little picture of me in your head. No one’s done that before. It was… intimate.”

The revulsion that washed over her was colder than the snow. It was a form of intimacy, her power. To see the image of another’s soul, their fears, their desires. She had seen the void in Cain Marko, but also the terrible, grinding hunger that filled it. The hunger for more. More power, more destruction, more proof that he could not be denied.

“I saw a brute,” she spat, moving again, silent as a stalking lynx.

He laughed, and a tree thirty yards to her left exploded into a cloud of pulp and kindling. “Brute’s a word used by people who can be stopped. I liked your vision better. You saw the source. The Crimson Bands of Cyttorak. You felt its itch. Its promise.”

Seduction. This was the seduction. Not of flesh, but of complicity. He wanted her to acknowledge his god, to make his power seen, understood, worshipped in a way simple terror could not provide.

She plunged deeper. The wood changed. The pines gave way to gnarled, black-barked oaks that twisted towards a sky now obscured by a perpetual, twilight canopy. The ash-snow stopped falling. The air grew thick, warm, and smelled of damp earth and decaying flowers. The psychic pressure of the forest intensified, a chorus of whispers at the edge of her mind.

He must not reach the heart, the rustling leaves seemed to sigh.

The man of breaking things, a root beneath her foot hummed.

Feed us your fear, child of
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