Jinx: Firecracker Fury by Jade Gretz

https://www.deviantart.com/jadegretzai/art/Jinx-Firecracker-Fury-1329015590

Jinx: Firecracker Fury ANIMATION

The Geometry of Screams

Zaun’s breath was always heavy with the scent of rusted dreams and ozone, but tonight, the air tasted of cold glass and violet static. Jinx sat atop a crumbling gargoyle overlooking the Sump, her boots dangling over a drop that promised nothing but a messy end and a quiet funeral. She wasn't looking at the smog-choked horizon, though. She was staring at her own hands. The tattoos on her pale skin were twitching—the blue ink of the clouds swirling as if trying to escape her flesh.

"Did you see that, Fishbones?" she whispered, leaning her head against the cold, shark-shaped steel of her rocket launcher. "I think the sky is trying to get inside me. Or maybe I’m leaking. Am I leaking? That would be messy. We don’t like messy unless it involves a fuse."

Fishbones didn't answer with his usual imaginary, judgmental grumble. Instead, the weapon felt unnervingly cold. A silence had fallen over the Sump, a silence so thick it felt like cotton being stuffed into her ears. The constant thrum of the chem-pumps had vanished. The distant screams of the factories had been snipped away by a giant pair of invisible scissors. In their place came a sound that shouldn't exist: the sound of a color. A deep, vibrating amethyst hum that resonated in the marrow of her bones.

A tear opened in the air three feet in front of her. It wasn't a hole; it was a fracture in the geometry of the world. It looked like someone had smashed a mirror made of twilight. From the jagged crack, a limb emerged. It was spindly, translucent, and covered in eyes that didn't blink because they didn't have eyelids. They were just apertures into a dark, swirling infinity.

"Oh, look at you," Jinx said, her voice trembling with a cocktail of terror and genuine curiosity. She reached for Zapper, her neon-lit pistol. "You’ve got way too many eyes. Are they all for looking at me? Because I’m not wearing my best paint today."

The creature didn't climb out of the rift so much as the world rearranged itself to accommodate its presence. It was a Void-born, but not one of the chitinous, hungry beasts that prowled the deserts of Shurima. This was something older, a weaver of dimensions. It shimmered between states of being, its form a shifting kaleidoscope of violet plates and weeping shadows.

"Jinx," the creature said. Its voice didn't come from a mouth. It echoed from the corners of her own mind, sounding like a chorus of everyone she had ever failed. "The girl of broken gears. The architect of beautiful ruins."

"Hey! I’m an artist," Jinx snapped, leveling Zapper at the creature’s central mass. The pistol’s glow flickered, the bright pink energy turning a sickly, pale lavender. "And I don’t take commissions from things that look like a bad math problem. Who are you? Or what are you? Actually, don't tell me. I want to guess. Are you a very ugly birthday present?"

"I am Xal’Kiri," the being vibrated, its many eyes focusing on her with a predatory grace. It drifted closer, ignoring the laws of gravity. "I am the pause between heartbeats. I am the space between the stars where the light grew tired and gave up. I have watched you, little spark. You create chaos because you fear the stillness. You build loud things to drown out the quiet voices. But I am the Ultimate Quiet."

"I like loud," Jinx said, her finger tightening on the trigger. "Loud is honest. Loud doesn't pretend to be deep. You, on the other hand, talk like a textbook that’s had too much to drink."

She fired. The bolt of electricity surged toward Xal’Kiri, but as it reached the creature, the space warped. The bolt didn't hit; it bent. It circled the Void-born in a perfect, glowing ring before being swallowed by one of the rifts following the creature like a cape.

Xal’Kiri laughed—a sound like tectonic plates grinding together. "Your toys are made of matter. Matter is a habit the universe is trying to break. Let me show you what lies behind the curtain, Jinx. Let me show you the perfection of None."

The creature lunged, not with claws, but with a shift in reality. Suddenly, the gargoyle Jinx was sitting on wasn't stone anymore. It was made of memories. She felt the cold granite turn into the warmth of her sister’s hand, then into the bitter sting of Silco’s tea, then into nothing at all. She tumbled through the air, but she wasn't falling down—she was falling sideways, through layers of Zaun that had never been built.

She slammed into a floor that felt like frozen smoke. She was in a version of her workshop,
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