Power Girl: Steel Heart by Jade Gretz

https://www.deviantart.com/jadegretzai/art/Power-Girl-Steel-Heart-1325615204?file=1

Power Girl: Steel Heart ANIMATION

The Sound of Null

“Do you hear it?”

Power Girl stood on a world that had already forgotten its own name. The sky was a wound—sewn shut with veins of violet lightning. Beneath her boots, the ground felt less like earth and more like the last gasp of something sentient. She turned to Superman, who hovered a foot away, his cape stirring in winds that didn’t exist.

“I hear everything,” he said quietly. “The screaming of a billion parallel versions of Metropolis. The static where a universe used to be. But that—that’s different.”

She pointed with her chin toward the horizon. There, where the curvature of reality bent inward like a broken rib, stood a tower made of negative light. It ate the colors around it. Red became grey. Blue became a hollow whimper. And from it came a sound—not a roar, not a hum, but the absence of sound. A null. A silence so deep it felt like a hand around her throat.

“The Anti-Monitor,” she said. “He’s not just destroying matter. He’s destroying the memory of matter. That’s the sound of a question being asked that no one will ever answer.”

Superman glanced at her. “You’re quoting something.”

“I’m quoting the last words of a sorcerer from Earth-87 before he turned into a vowel that no mouth can speak.” She cracked her neck. “I paid attention during the crisis briefings, Clark. Some of us do.”

A flicker of a smile crossed his face, brief as a match in a hurricane. Then the tower pulsed, and the null grew louder—or rather, deeper. It pressed against her eardrums like a seduction. A warm, velvet nothing. Her chest tightened.

“It’s trying to comfort us,” she whispered. “That’s the horror of it. The Anti-Monitor doesn’t hate you. He doesn’t want you to suffer. He wants you to stop existing, and he wants you to thank him for it.”

Superman’s jaw set. “Then we don’t thank him.”

They flew.

The space between the tower and themselves stretched like taffy. Each mile took longer than the last. Time was bleeding out here. Power Girl felt her own heartbeat slow, then stutter, then resume in a rhythm that wasn’t hers. She looked down at her hands. For a moment, they were translucent. Then solid. Then she saw herself from the outside—a woman in white and blue, golden hair streaming behind her like a battle flag—and she realized the universe was already forgetting how to hold her.

“Karen,” Superman said, using her real name. “Stay with me.”

“I’m here.” She wasn’t sure if she lied.

They landed at the tower’s base. No door. No window. Just a surface that reflected nothing, not even their own faces. Power Girl touched it. Her fingers slid through as if through oil. She withdrew them, and they came back clean, but wrong. The fingerprints were gone. Smooth skin. A stranger’s hand.

“It unmade my identity,” she said, voice steady despite the cold crawling up her spine. “Not my body. Just the proof that I was ever born.”

Superman put his palm next to hers. His hand remained whole. He frowned. “It doesn’t affect me the same way.”

“Because you’re the hope symbol. The null can’t digest hope easily. It gives it indigestion.” She smiled without humor. “Me? I’m just the pretty one with the attitude. Easier to swallow.”

He didn’t argue. That hurt more than the null.

They stepped through the wall together.

Inside, the tower had no geometry. Rooms nested inside rooms. Corridors looped back on themselves like a snake eating its own sorrow. The air tasted of ozone and forgotten lullabies. And at the center of it all, floating in a throne made of collapsed timelines, sat the Anti-Monitor.

He was not what the stories said. No armor of shadow. No giant made of antimatter. He was a man. Beautiful, in a terrible way. Pale skin, silver hair, eyes the color of a dying star. He wore a simple black tunic and smiled like a lover who knew your deepest shame.

“Power Girl,” he said, and his voice was the null given form. “Superman. I’ve been listening to your hearts. One beats with defiance. The other beats with longing.”

Superman stepped forward. “Let the multiverse go. Fight me instead.”

“Oh, I will,” the Anti-Monitor said, rising from his throne. He was taller than both of them, but not impossibly so. “But first, I want to show Karen something.”

Power Girl’s throat went dry. “Don’t call me that.”

“Karen Starr. Earth-Two. You survived the first crisis, didn’t you? Watched your universe
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