Power Girl: Strength Unfeigned by Jade Gretz

https://www.deviantart.com/jadegretzai/art/Power-Girl-Strength-Unfeigned-1252715421

Power Girl: Strength Unfeigned ANIMATION

The Pallid Crown of Slaughter Swamp

Power Girl felt the swamp before she saw it.

Even with her senses dulled against overload, the place pressed against her skull like a damp hand. Slaughter Swamp had always been an unpleasant corner of the world—too old, too saturated with sorrow and chemicals and forgotten sins—but tonight it breathed. Its breath stirred reeds, peeled bark, whispered between cattails like someone leaning in far too close.

She hovered above the treeline, cape stirring in the putrid updraft.

“All right,” she muttered. “Let’s see what’s calling for help this time.”

The distress signal had been faint—more like a pulse than a message—but unmistakably artificial. Someone, something, had built a transmitter out here. And that transmitter had sent a single repeated burst: Someone awakened it.

She didn’t like the sound of it.

Power Girl descended, boots sinking an inch into spongy marsh, the vegetation recoiling from her like a living thing. The swamp absorbed sound; her footsteps vanished in the muffling fog.

What was left of a research shack leaned drunkenly on its pilings ahead. Rusty tin panels flapped like broken wings. Light flickered inside—sickly green, rhythmic, almost breathing.

She pushed the warped door aside.

Inside, the smell hit first—rot, brine, and something sweet underneath, like overripe fruit left in the sun. Busted monitors and shattered tools littered the floor. In the center sat the transmitter: a mess of wires and scavenged tech arranged around a coffin-shaped tank. The glass had blown outward, leaving cracks like ice on a winter pond.

A man huddled against the wall. His lab coat was soaked, his eyes wide and streaming. He looked up when she approached.

“You came,” he croaked.

“I did. Who are you?”

“Dr. Harker. I… I didn’t mean to wake it.”

“Wake what? What were you doing here?”

He shook. Not from cold—fear had hollowed him out.

“We were studying regenerative compounds in the swamp water,” he whispered. “Something ancient lives under the mire. Something that doesn’t die. We wanted to sample it—just a sliver.”
His voice trembled. “A sliver was enough.”

Before she could ask more, the shack’s roof groaned.

No—not groaned. Answered.

A warbling note rose from beneath the floorboards, vibrating the nails, the walls, her bones. It had the quality of a lullaby sung underwater.

Dr. Harker clamped his hands over his ears. “It’s calling to anything that breathes,” he whimpered. “Don’t listen too long. It will ask things of you.”

Power Girl squared her shoulders. “I’m fine. But you’re getting out of here.”

Before she could lift him, a shadow pooled under the doorframe—too fast to be natural, too slow to be lightning. Wisps curled upward, forming a silhouette taller than any human, broader than a tree’s trunk.

It stepped into the hut.

Skin the color of damp parchment stretched over an impossible shape. Its chest rose and fell with a tidal rhythm. Where its face should have been, there was only a smooth expanse of bone-white hide—no eyes, no mouth—until the hide wrinkled and split like old paper, revealing a single vertical aperture glowing swamp-green.

A mouth? An eye? Both?

The creature regarded her without expression.

Then it spoke—not in sound but in pressure, a pushing sensation against her skull, intimate as a whisper against the ear.

“Daughter of the Sky-Fire… you shine too loudly.”

Power Girl stiffened. “Back away from the scientist.”

The creature tilted its faceless head, skin stretching like wet cloth.

“You are not meant for this place. But I am.”

Dr. Harker sobbed.

Power Girl stepped forward. “You’ve frightened him enough. And the swamp isn’t your playground.”

The aperture widened. A ripple passed across its form, as though something inside shifted beneath a thin skin.

“You misunderstand. I do not play here. I remember here.”

Power Girl didn’t flinch. She didn’t give it the satisfaction.

“You’re coming with me. Quietly.”

The creature quivered once, then a thin appendage unfurled from its torso with shocking speed.

She grabbed it mid-strike.

It felt like grabbing cold muscle dipped in oil. The creature’s body swayed as though surprised.

“Wrong woman to surprise,” she grunted, hurling it through the sha
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