Storm: Queen of the Skies by Jade Gretz

https://www.deviantart.com/jadegretzai/art/Storm-Queen-of-the-Skies-1288803430#image-1

Storm: Queen of the Skies ANIMATION

Nightglass

Limbo did not wear a single face; it wore a dozen, and each one smiled when you tried to leave. The sky—if a place of perpetual bruising could be called sky—was a lattice of torn mirrors through which molten violet poured like blood through a sieve. The air tasted like copper and the ash of prayers not yet uttered. Storm walked through it as a woman who had learned to be rain: measured, patient, and inevitable. Her cape hung back from shoulders that had carried storms whole countries called omens. Her bare feet left no mark on Limbo's black sand, but the winds around her answered in low, conspiratorial moans, as if the realm recognized weather when it saw it and began to envy.

Not all things in Limbo envied. Power there ate. Power there courted. Power there tried on new skins like dancers behind velvet curtains. It had an appetite for the extraordinary. It prowled toward Ororo Munroe with the delicacy of a lover and the hunger of a wolf.

She had thought she came for a simple rescue—an echo of a soul snagged in the skein of Illyana's realm—until the storms began to speak to her in tongues that tasted of iron and song. They were not her storms at first: they slithered in as black lightning, not the clean white shafts she summoned over Cape Citadels and desert plateaus. These bolts unspooled like ribbons of midnight, trailing names that weren't hers but promised everything she could hope for in a whisper that tasted like rain on glass.

"You cannot ask the sky to obey you," Illyana said from the rim of a shattered obsidian tower, her silhouette illuminated by the faint glow of her Soulsword. She was slender and terrible, the witch-princess of Limbo, all bone and mischief, with eyes older than the mountains she left behind. "You can only bargain with it. And bargains in Limbo have teeth."

Storm did not look to be bargained with. She regarded Magik with a half-smile, the kind that was more practice than affection. "You are not being hospitable," Ororo said. Her voice carried across the wind as if it could shape it. "Nor are you pretending to be."

"Hospitality is for those who cross thresholds to visit," Illyana replied. "You have opened a door from the inside and are hosting a storm that is not yours. That invites consequences." She flicked the Soulsword; etched light crawled up the blade like frost. "Lightning here has memories. It remembers the bargains it's kept—and the bargains it's broken."

They walked together through corridors where the walls breathed. Limbo's demons did not stalk them openly; they infiltrated—properly nasty things made of half-finished promises and laughter, their legs too many and their hands too few. Storm's skin prickled; the air took a sharpness, a taste of ozone that was colored a hard, dishonest black.

"What is it trying to say?" Illyana asked. There was curiosity in her tone, like a child examining a beetle under a lantern. "The lightning. Hear it?"

Storm closed her eyes and listened. The corrupted lightning whispered in a voice like a lover's shadow. It spoke of perfect hurricanes that would keep pain away, of heat that could make deserts bloom under midnight, of a sovereignty so complete that no cry would reach her again. It offered certainty. It offered dominion. It offered the erasure of the helplessness she had felt when a single child in Harlem had been afraid. No more pleading. No more small helplessness. Only mastery.

"It smells like promises," Illyana said softly. "And like iron."

"It tastes like betrayal," Ororo answered. She opened her eyes. They flashed—not with lightning but with the memory of it, of beach storms where the wind had first taught her how to be both gentle and immovable. "Power that answers only to itself is hunger, and hunger forgets names."

They approached a courtyard where statues bled and stairways curled into mouths. At its center stood an altar of braided bronze and bone, and from it spooled the black lightning like ivy. The lightning moved with the slow curiosity of drowning things, and when Ororo reached out, it did not strike; it beckoned. It slithered into the small arthritic joints of the altar and unfurled, coiling around her toes like a ribbon. Her hair rose, not as a reaction to charge but like a recognition—an old ally recognizing a face.

"Feel it," the lightning breathed. "There is nothing you cannot undo. There is nothing you cannot command." It spoke in the voice of the sea's calm be
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