Sorceress: Keeper of Balance by Jade Gretz

https://www.deviantart.com/jadegretzai/art/Sorceress-Keeper-of-Balance-1301752624#image-1

Feathers and Old Hunger

The hydra came at twilight, as all terrible things do.

It did not announce itself with thunder or the theatrical clamor that lesser monsters favored. It arrived the way a bad thought arrives — slowly, then all at once. One moment the Eternian sky above Castle Grayskull burned its usual violet-orange farewell to the sun, and the next, the jawbridge trembled beneath something ancient pressing against the dimensional seams of reality itself.

Teela Na felt it before she saw it. She always felt things before they arrived at the castle — that was the terrible gift and terrible burden of being the Sorceress. The sensation moved through her like cold water poured into warm wine: a wrongness, a displacement, as though creation itself had developed a crack and something from the space between spaces had wedged a claw inside.

She stood at the parapet above the jawbridge, her ceremonial falcon headdress catching the dying light, white feathers fanning like a crown of bones. Her robes, the deep rust-orange and white of her station, rippled in a wind that did not exist. She had been here seventeen thousand twilights. She had turned away demons, warlocks, chaos-gods wearing human faces like ill-fitting masks. She had never been afraid.

She was afraid now.

"Show yourself," she said, not loudly. She had learned long ago that shouting at darkness only encouraged it.

The air below the drawbridge split open. Not like a wound — more like a seam in old cloth pulling apart, thread by deliberate thread. And through that seam came the smell: wet stone and forgotten centuries and something sweetly rotten, like roses left too long in their vase.

The first head emerged from the dimensional tear and regarded her with an eye the color of curdled moonlight.

"Sorceress." The voice came from everywhere and nowhere, smooth as oil on dark water. "You're smaller than I expected. The old stories made you sound..." It seemed to search for a word. "...substantial."

"The old stories were written by those who survived meeting me," she replied. "The ones who didn't couldn't write anything at all."

More heads came through — she counted seven, then lost count as they writhed and intertwined and separated again. Each neck was thick as an ancient oak, covered in scales that shimmered between black and a green so dark it might have been black wearing a disguise. Each head was different, she noticed. One was nearly serpentine, elegant in its horror. Another was broad and flat like a hammerhead. A third had too many eyes, arranged in patterns she refused to study too closely because she suspected the patterns meant something and she did not want to know what.

"We've been watching you for a long time," said the many-voiced singular thing below her. "Seventeen thousand twilights, give or take. Waiting for the right configuration of dimensional weakness. The old castle's wards are magnificent, truly — we mean that as genuine praise — but all walls develop hairline fractures. Even yours."

"You're flattering the architecture," Teela Na said. "That's unusual. Most of what tries to enter Grayskull leads with threats."

"Threats are for creatures that lack confidence." The hydra's central head — the serpentine one, she decided, was the spokesperson — tilted at an angle that shouldn't have been anatomically possible. "We are something rather more patient than that. Something that waited in the space outside your reality while your civilization rose and fell and rose again three times over. We have seen castle Grayskull when it was young and its stones were new and the power inside it was barely learning its own name. We knew the first Sorceress. A remarkable woman. She smelled of lightning."

Teela Na's grip on her staff tightened. "Don't talk about her."

"Ah." The voice carried something she did not want to call delight. "She mattered to you. Even across the centuries. Even across the succession of guardians who share your memories the way a river shares its water — always moving, always the same river. Does it ever trouble you? Being both yourself and everyone who came before you?"

"Hydra," she said quietly, "I know what you're doing. You're trying to make me feel the weight of loneliness and time. It's a very old technique. You said so yourself — you were watching for seventeen thousand twilights. You should have figured out by now that I carry those years like strength, not like sorrow."

...(more at https://www.deviantart.com/jadegretzai).
For more supergirl, chun li, batgirl, tifa, lara croft, wonder woman, rogue and much more, please visit my page at www.deviantart.com/jadegretzai - Thanks for your support :)