Baroness: Obsidian Charm by Jade Gretz

https://www.deviantart.com/jadegretzai/art/Baroness-Obsidian-Charm-1266248842#image-1

Baroness: Obsidian Charm ANIMATION

Static Courtship

On the seventy-sixth floor, the windows kept their secrets like teeth. They offered nothing but a black, wet suggestion of the city, and behind them the wiring shivered with a loneliness that smelled faintly of ozone and old perfume.

She moved through the corridors as if she owned their silence. Her gloves picked up no dust; her heels made no noise she could not control. The building—an exoskeleton of glass and bone—had been evacuated when the first lights winked out; cameras blanked as if snuffed by a polite hand. Security radios went tongue-tied mid-sentence. The city's heartbeat thinned into a nervous, electrical wheeze. Whoever—or whatever—ate a metropolis' appetite for power, it had chosen this tower for its gluttony.

"You're late, my dear," a voice said from a doorway where darkness pooled.

She smiled without flattery. "I prefer my entrances to arrive precisely when I intend them." She stepped into the doorway and the man found himself reading her as if she were a book whose ending he'd already purchased. He was broad-shouldered and anxious, a corporate vice-president with a taste for control and a hand that trembled at the thought of scandal. His name was Pryce.

"Security says you can't come in." He tried to make the sentence into law.

She walked across the threshold like a ship slicing calm water. "Security says a lot of things that didn't predict the things that happened," she observed. "Why are you still here, Pryce? Didn't they tell you to—"

"They told me to leave. I couldn't. My files—" his hand fluttered toward the safe behind him, "—my life is in there. The building is in there. Without power, the servers go dark. We're ruined."

She laughed softly, the sound measured, like the prelude to rainfall. "Ruined, Pryce, is a state of mind. Besides, ruin makes for better beginnings." Her hand found his wrist. The touch was a lesson in temperature; he felt steadier, as if hands could be anchors. She leaned in, the shadow of eyelashes like a question mark.

"Tell me where the generator room is," she said.

His breath caught. "Why do you—"

"Because something is feeding," she said. "And when something feeds in a building that prays to sockets and transformers, you must follow its appetite."

They descended together through stairwells that smelt of copper and old anxiety. On the sixty-second floor a bank of vending machines lay like dead islands; their LEDs were dim, like lighthouses gone to sleep. On the elevator shaft, cables hummed faintly, as if the creature had left a hymn. She listened to the silence and found it full of a presence that made the hair rise along her arms.

"Do you believe in monsters?" Pryce asked at last, actually meeting her eyes.

"Only in appetites," she answered. "Monsters are polite. They always announce themselves by taking something that does not belong to them."

They found scorched metal where wiring had been devoured cleanly; the insulation melted in lace patterns, the copper fingers of conductors nibbled away. The building's emergency signs blinked with the last residue of dignity: EXIT, EXIT, EXIT, and then nothing.

In the bowels of floor twenty-three, the generator room breathed on a different frequency. The backup engines sat cold as altars, and yet the room was crowded with the smell of hair singed, and a faint, soft, metallic whisper that might have been teeth.

"Are you sure it's in here?" Pryce whispered.

"It isn't in here so much as it is around here," she said. "It tastes for current and for the little sparks people leave when they are terrified. Fear is electricity, Pryce. Don't you know how often panic short-circuits a heart?"

He fumbled for his radio; the flatline static felt obscene under this hush. "We sent maintenance last night," he said. "They couldn't find anything. Cameras—" He swallowed. "They burned out."

"Of course they did." She pressed her gloved palm to the dark steel of the generator housing. A prickle of resistance ran up her arm like a memory. "It remembers where power pools. Like a lover remembers the places they have been touched."

She smiled then—not cruel, but with an intimacy that made him suspect she held secrets he lacked a key for. "You're thinking of shutting everything down. That won't stop it. It feeds on the very idea of flow. It chews the suggestion of electricity even when the current sleeps."

Pryce hesitated,
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