Batgirl: Solar Vigilant by Jade Gretz

https://www.deviantart.com/jadegretzai/art/Batgirl-Solar-Vigilant-1208559044?file=1

Batgirl: Solar Vigilant ANIMATION

The Gossamer Hemlock

Gotham did not scream tonight; it exhaled a heavy, saccharine perfume that clung to the gargoyles like funeral shrouds. High above the smog-choked arteries of the Diamond District, Barbara Gordon crouched upon the weathered stone brow of a cathedral, her cape fluttering in a wind that smelled suspiciously of crushed lilies and wet earth. The skyline, usually a jagged pulse of neon and steel, looked softened, blurred by a creeping verdant haze that defied the season. It was mid-November, yet the heat rising from the alleys felt tropical, damp, and fundamentally wrong.

She adjusted her cowl, the tactical HUD flickering as it struggled to filter the particulates saturating the air. "Oracle to base," she murmured, though there was no one on the other end but the haunting echo of her own voice recorded in the encrypted logs. "The atmospheric saturation of Isley’s spore-cloud is reaching eighty percent. The city isn’t just breathing this in; it’s being digested."

A sound like the tearing of wet silk erupted from the darkness above. Barbara looked up, her blue eyes narrowing behind the white lenses of her mask. At first, it appeared to be a cloud passing before the moon—a localized eclipse. But the cloud had a pulse. It possessed a frantic, rhythmic beat that resonated in the marrow of her bones. Thousands of silhouettes, jagged and twitching, descended from the upper ionosphere where the air should have been too thin for life. These were not the common Myotis bats of the Gotham caves. These were monstrosities of bio-engineering, their fur replaced by velvet moss, their wings translucent like the leaves of a dying hydrangea, and their fangs dripping with a glowing, viscous emerald bile.

"Beautiful, aren't they, Little Bird?" The voice didn't come from a radio. It drifted upward from the shadows of the belfry, honeyed and lethal. "I call them my Night-Blooms. They don't just hunt. They sow. Every bite is a seed. Every drop of blood is fertilizer for the new world."

Barbara didn't turn around immediately. She stood slowly, her silhouette a sharp, defiant stroke of midnight against the encroaching green. "Pamela. I thought you preferred the soil to the stratosphere. Since when do your 'babies' need to fly?"

Poison Ivy stepped from the gloom, her skin a luminous, porcelain jade, draped in vines that moved with a serpentine autonomy. She looked less like a woman and more like an ancient dryad who had clawed her way out of a forgotten peat bog. "The ground is crowded, Barbara. The humans have paved over the earth's throat. If I want the world to breathe again, I must take the sky. My Night-Blooms will nest in the vents, the air conditioners, the lungs of every skyscraper. By morning, Gotham will be the largest greenhouse in the history of the Holocene."

"It’ll be a tomb," Batgirl countered, her hand hovering over a specialized cryo-pellet on her belt. "A beautiful, suffocating tomb. You’re not saving the planet, Pam. You’re just changing the flavor of the rot."

Ivy laughed, a sound like dry leaves skittering over a gravestone. "The rot is the point. Decomposition is the only honest thing left in this city. Now, be a dear and don't struggle. The venom in their veins is quite exquisite. It dissolves the will before it dissolves the marrow. You’ll feel like you’re falling into a bed of moss, forever."

With a flick of Ivy’s wrist, the swarm above broke formation. The collective chittering rose to a deafening shriek—a biological frequency that shattered the nearby stained glass. The bats dived. They weren't flying so much as falling with predatory intent, their leaf-veined wings snapping shut to increase their velocity.

Barbara moved with the fluid grace of a dancer caught in a hurricane. She fired a grapple, the titanium line hissing through the humid air, anchoring her to a crane three hundred feet above. She swung, her body a dark pendulum, just as the first wave of Night-Blooms slammed into the stone where she had stood. The impact wasn't a thud; it was a splash. The bats burst upon contact, releasing a thick, bioluminescent gel that instantly sprouted jagged, thorny creepers from the granite.

"They're living grenades," Barbara muttered, twisting in mid-air to kick a stray bat that had veered toward her throat. Her boot connected with its thorax, but instead of the crunch of bone, there was the squelch of overripe fruit. The creature’s venom sprayed across her shin-guard, hissing as it ate through the reinforced Kevlar.

"Don't
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