Psylocke: Violet Mirage by Jade Gretz

https://www.deviantart.com/jadegretzai/art/Psylocke-Violet-Mirage-1126181619#image-1

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Night of Glass

Psylocke stepped through the mouth of someone else’s sleep as if through a curtain of cold silk, and the sound of it was a thousand teaspoons striking the hollow of a ceramic skull. The dream was not a place so much as an architecture of absence: corridors lined with mirrors that refused reflection, stairways whose steps folded into questions, and rooms where conversations had been packed away into labeled boxes and left under a bed that never belonged to anyone.

She smelled salt and old ink and the faint electrical tang of fear. The comatose mutant’s name — not necessary to call aloud — hung like a paper lantern in the distance, flickering with syllables she had learned like lit candles. She knew the patient by more than diagnosis: by a memory of laughter threaded through a broken lullaby, by the ache shaped like a missing tooth, by the tiny way the left thumb had a habit of tapping out Morse on wrists that no longer answered. Such signatures are how you map a mind without trampling it: soft as memory, precise as a scalpel when you have learned restraint.

The nightmare had claws. She had felt their echo on the edge of her own skull in the briefing: a psychic lesion spreading through the cortex like mildew, a predator that dressed in the faces of friends and lovers and then ate them. The medics, white and helpless around the bedside, had called it “a parasitic dream-virus” with nervous laughter. She had called it—privately, in that small, herb-scented room where she kept her own thoughts tidy—“a theft.”

She closed her eyes in waking for a heartbeat and opened them inside the patient. The city of the dream unfolded like a map printed in negative ink; light was absence and shadow was architecture. She walked because walking was the polite way to approach a mind. Her boots made no sound. A thread of telekinesis — a soft purple filament she could unfurl from the edge of her consciousness — trailed behind her, testing doors, listening to their throats.

A figure sat in the center of the main square, dressed in a loose white shirt, hands folded around knees that trembled with the motion of a clock. The figure’s face blurred as if someone had run a wet finger across a photograph. For a moment Psylocke thought the figure was child, or old, or both — the indeterminate age of anyone trapped in a dream that keeps trying to forget how it began.

“You came alone,” the figure said. The voice was the sound a glass makes when it is cooling: fragile, ready to splinter into other sounds.

“Dreams do not receive guests,” Psylocke said. Her voice belonged to the dream now — a voice without temperature, precise edges, a blade wrapped in velvet. She watched the figure’s head tilt. The tilt was not reflective of the comatose mutant’s body in any physical sense; it was an echo, a borrow.

“I am not a guest,” the figure said. “I am their library.”

“You are their nightmare,” she said. “And nightmares will be evicted.”

A laugh echoed from somewhere behind the figure, and the pavement beneath them quivered like the skin of a plucked instrument. From an alleyway two lovers stepped out hand in hand: one of them the comatose mutant’s first crush, the other an older brother who had died before morning. They held hands in a practiced intimacy, smiles stitched together with the softest kind of mend. The lovers looked toward Psylocke like a stage audience that had been waiting for applause.

“You can sew memories together,” Psylocke said, not moving but letting her presence ripple outward. “You can wear them. But you do not own them.”

The lovers stopped smiling. Their eyes became the careful holes of mask-makers. “Who are you to judge ownership?” the brother asked, and his voice was as familiar as a word you mouthed once and forgot you knew. He stepped closer. “Why not let us keep what keeps us warm? Who told you you may invade a dream without invitation?”

“You,” Psylocke said. “Took a bed, turned it into a sea, and then told the sea to sing.” Her psychic blade shimmered into being, a sliver of light that hummed with memory. “I’m here to cut the cords.”

The brother’s jaw opened in a way that suggested patience, not malice. The lovers’ mouths parted in a chorus that smelled like regret. From their throats spilled a melody — the same melancholic lullaby that had once been half-sung in the comatose patient’s hospital room. It rose in the square as if summoned by a conducto
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