Mystique: The Imitation Soul by Jade Gretz

https://www.deviantart.com/jadegretzai/art/Mystique-The-Imitation-Soul-1296384104?file=1

Mystique: The Imitation Soul ANIMATION

The Taxonomy of Unmade Men

The air in the Ward of Forgotten Husks tasted of copper and wet clay, the olfactory signature of a thousand bodies desperately trying to be something they weren't. Raven Darkhölme, known to the world as Mystique, allowed her skin to ripple—a subtle, undulating wave of cobalt blue that felt like silk sliding over obsidian. She wasn't supposed to be blue here. In the Oubliette, to have a "true" form was a heresy against the chaos of the flesh.

She stood before the Great Gate, which was less a door and more a massive, calcified sphincter of living bone. It pulsed with a rhythmic, wet thrum. Beside her, the Warden—a man whose face was a smooth, featureless expanse of alabaster skin—tapped a silver cane against the floor. He had no eyes, yet he watched her with every pore of his being.

"You're late, Number 704," the Warden said. His voice didn't come from a mouth; it resonated directly within Raven’s inner ear, a vibration of pure intent. "The harvest is already beginning. The others have forgotten their names. They have even forgotten the concept of a name. Why do you still cling to that pigment? That stubborn, arrogant blue?"

Raven let her form melt. In a heartbeat, she was a replica of the Warden—smooth-faced, featureless, draped in the same charcoal-grey robes. "Habit is the only thing that separates us from the Slough, Warden," she replied, her voice a perfect mimicry of his silent resonance. "And I have very expensive habits."

The Warden tilted his head, a gesture of predatory curiosity. "Seductive, isn't it? The idea that you are a person. But look around you. This is the Oubliette. Here, identity is a currency that has been hyper-inflated into worthlessness. We are all just meat waiting for a shape."

He touched the bone-gate, and it groaned open, revealing the Hive. It was a cathedral of mirrors, but the mirrors were not made of glass. They were sheets of frozen, translucent plasma. Inside, hundreds of inmates wandered in a daze. None of them were human, yet all of them were trying to be. One man had three arms, each belonging to a different ethnicity. A woman in the corner was half-composed of peacock feathers and half-composed of rusted chainmail, her face shifting between a crying child and a snarling wolf every three seconds.

Raven stepped into the fray, her senses screaming. As a shapeshifter, she was used to the psychic "noise" of others, but this was a cacophony of shattered souls. These were the world's most dangerous mimics, spies, and monsters, imprisoned in a place that stripped away the one thing a shifter needed to survive: a sense of the "Self."

She was here for one man. An information broker known only as The Root. He was rumored to have the encryption keys to every mutant-tracking satellite in the hemisphere. But The Root had been in the Oubliette for a decade. By now, he might be a chair, or a puddle, or a breeze.

She bypassed a group of inmates who were huddled together, their limbs fused in a grotesque knot of shared anatomy, trying to remember whose leg belonged to whom. She found her target near the back of the Hive, seated on a pedestal of calcified salt. He looked like a masterpiece of unfinished sculpture—a man of marble and moss, with eyes that flickered like dying embers.

"I’m looking for a secret," Raven whispered, shifting her form into that of a breathtakingly beautiful woman with hair like spun gold and eyes the color of a stormy sea. She leaned close, her breath smelling of jasmine and ozone. She was a vision of everything a man might want to remember. "I’m looking for the man who knows where the eyes in the sky are hidden."

The Root looked at her, his jaw shifting from stone to flesh. "Beautiful," he croaked. "I remember 'beautiful.' It was a color, wasn't it? Or a sound? I used to have a wife who was beautiful. Or perhaps I was the wife. I forget the polarity."

"You were a king of secrets," Raven said, her voice a velvet trap. She ran a hand down his arm; where she touched him, his skin turned to warm, living flesh. She was seducing his biology, reminding his cells of what it felt like to be whole. "You held the world in your palm. Don't you want that power back? To be a man again, instead of a statue?"

The Root shuddered. A tear of mercury rolled down his cheek. "Power is heavy. It makes you sink. I like it here. I am light. I am nothing."

"You are a coward," a voice hissed from the shadows.

A figure emerged. It was a woman, or something that had once be
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