Witchblade: Shadow Relic by Jade Gretz

https://www.deviantart.com/jadegretzai/art/Witchblade-Shadow-Relic-1195886871#image-1

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Ink of the Navy Yard

The hulls of forgotten ships slept in toothy rows beneath a low sodium sky, their keels half-swallowed by mud and rumor. At the far edge of the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where cranes remembered how to be cranes and the tide kept its own counsel, a particular shadow had learned to whisper.

Sara Pezzini came for noise. The city had been a drum in her bones all week—sirens, arguments, the pneumatic staccato of subway rails. Here, in the filtered hush between rust and salt, she hoped to hear a single honest sound. Instead the yard answered with a false melody: a susurrus like cloth sliding over bone, voices braided inside each other, each voice a small and patient knife.

She kept her hand near her side because the Witchblade was never content to be polite. It lay under her skin like an alliance and a question, a cool vice that would tighten in the face of danger and hum when hunger remembered her. Tonight it drummed against her ribs with a cadence that made her scalp prickle. The metal of the yard seemed to wake at its beat; a lamplight flickered like a pulse; an abandoned winch sighed as if letting out old secrets. Sara did not move faster. She never moved faster than the thing in her head.

"You're hunting," the voice came—part memory, part metal—soft as black silk. The Witchblade's voice had no mouth. It offered no pretense of human warmth. It took delight in efficiencies.

"I'm following something," Sara said aloud. The sound of her own voice startled a flock of gulls into a cold, chalky flight. "Something picked clean."

"Not picked," the Witchblade corrected. "Stitched. Binding is artful."

Together they rounded the bow of a derelict tugboat. The planks had splintered into a fan of fibreglass teeth. Beneath them, the water clung like a film to things that wanted to be remembered: an iron anchor, a child's shoe, a brass porthole rim that winked like a small eye.

On the dock, something moved that should not have. Not moving like a person, nor like an animal—more like a shadow attempting the mimicry of both. It rose from a ring of flaxen rope, threads unbraiding and then regrowing as if obeying an internal, obscene patience. Its torso was a knot of old tar-black nets; its head was a bellfish skull slipped out of season; its arms were ropes threaded through with human hair, slick as algae.

It turned to her with a courtesy it had never learned, and the dock around it hummed: metal responding to metal, blood to cold metal. The creature—if creature was the right shape—tilted its head and smiled a grin raw as a ship's keel.

"Welcome, Sara Pezzini," it said, and the syllables came not from its mouth but from every crack in the yard. "You wear the blade like a pocket, like a secret kept from a lover."

Sara tasted old copper and a memory she couldn't own. She stepped closer until the Witchblade flared across her palm like a living map, its edges wanting to be named. "Speak properly," she said. "Who are you? How do you know my name?"

"Names are for pulling flesh apart," the thing cooed. "I know what anchors. I know what holds. I—am—Harlot of the Keel, Bride of the Dock. I was made tidy by broken promises and kerosene. I am what men forgot to set free."

It offered a hand braided with rope. The motion was theatrical, a stage ruffle meant to seduce attention.

"You don't answer questions with titles," Sara said. "You answer them with truth."

"Truth is heavy." The creature's voice softened. "Lighter to be coy. Besides—" A strand of rope lifted and brushed Sara's jaw like a lover's fingertip. "You know what I will ask even if you ask me nothing."

There was a seduction here that smelled of machine oil, cigarettes, and a child's breath. It was not human and yet it remembered how to reproduce human intimacy the way a sculptor reproduces a face from memory—right eyes too wide, nostrils too small, the teeth slightly off. It tried to coax. It tried to remember her loneliness and wear it like a shawl upon its shoulders.

The Witchblade pulsed against her palm, preference like a martyr's hymn. It shaped itself outward—an arm of living obsidian and whorled bone, sinew blooming in metallic filigree. A blade shivered into being, catching the lamplight and splintering it into a dozen small suns.

"Don't make me relish you," the Witchblade murmured; its voice was all texture now, a suggestion felt under the skin. "You are sewn of wr
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