Supergirl: Wings of the Infinite by Jade Gretz

https://www.deviantart.com/jadegretzai/art/Supergirl-Wings-of-the-Infinite-1274762338

Supergirl: Wings of the Infinite ANIMATION

Salt Under Glass

The first tremor traveled through the Hall of Justice like a held breath deciding whether to become a scream. It rattled the exhibits—glass cases shivered, plaques chimed, and the great ceiling, all star-map geometry and polished light, sighed as if remembering an ocean it had never seen.

Kara Zor-El felt it before the alarms woke. She was alone, boots dangling from the balcony rail, watching dawn thin itself across the Potomac. She had learned the Hall’s moods: the way marble warmed under morning, the way the building hummed when truth was near. This was different. This was a pulse with depth, a cold pressure that carried a smell—salt and old iron—through stone.

“Please tell me you felt that,” came Batman’s voice, quiet and already armored with calculation.

“I did,” Kara said, already moving. “It’s under us.”

They converged in the atrium. Diana’s eyes had gone distant, as if she were listening to a story told by the earth. Barry vibrated in place, impatient and pale. The Watchtower’s comm line hissed with static, then steadied.

“Seismic activity localized beneath the Hall,” Batman said. “No known fault. No explosives. No magic signature on record.”

“Magic rarely announces itself,” Diana said softly. “It prefers invitations.”

Kara’s senses slid downward, peeling layers of history like pages stuck together by time. Beneath the Hall’s foundation lay older halls: catacombs of records, the bones of a city that had moved its capital and left secrets to rot. Beneath those, a vault carved by a government that had believed in monsters enough to prepare for them. And beneath that—

She recoiled. “There’s water. Deep water. But it’s not… behaving.”

The second tremor came with a sound like a knuckle rapping on a coffin lid. The floor cracked, a spiderweb of fissures racing toward the Justice League seal. From the fractures seeped not water but darkness, thick as oil and threaded with bioluminescent veins. It pulsed, tasted the air, withdrew.

Barry swallowed. “That’s not a leak.”

“No,” Diana said. “It’s a mouth.”

The thing spoke before it rose. It spoke with the sound of tides grinding cities to gravel, with a choir of pressure and patience. The words came wrong, bent by ages without throats.

“House of mirrors,” it said. “House of vows. I have been called.”

“By who?” Batman demanded, already deploying countermeasures that fizzled like struck matches.

A ripple of laughter came from the dark. “By longing. By the ache that builds temples over bones. By the weight you place upon what you bury.”

The floor gave way.

Kara did not remember choosing to dive. She only remembered the pull, a seduction in gravity, an invitation dressed as a fall. She plunged through the breaking marble into a cavernous shaft that yawned wider as it descended. Her cape burned against the cold. The darkness swallowed sound, swallowed light, swallowed certainty.

She slowed herself with a thought, hovering in a cathedral of rock veined with old pipes and forgotten conduits. Below, water spread like a bruise, a lake held in stone. Something vast coiled there, its mass suggested rather than seen, a presence that rearranged the idea of size.

“Kara Zor-El,” the thing murmured, savoring syllables. “Last daughter. Bright survivor. You glow like bait.”

“I’m not bait,” Kara said, though the cavern answered with a low, amused tide. “And you’re not welcome.”

“Welcome,” it said. “Is a surface word.”

Tentacles rose, not all at once but in careful increments, testing. Each was a city’s width at the base, tapering into delicacy. Suckers opened like eyes. They brushed the cavern walls with a lover’s curiosity, leaving frost where they passed.

Kara felt it then—the pull not of gravity but of attention. The abyssal kraken did not want to crush her. It wanted to know her. To read her the way oceans read continents: slowly, irresistibly.

“You were summoned,” Kara said. “By whom?”

The water brightened, bioluminescence blooming like constellations drowned and remembered. “By the House itself. By the lie of permanence. You build monuments and think you can nail time to stone. I come when you forget what you have sealed.”

“What was sealed?” Kara pressed.

A tentacle lifted a relic from the silt: a rusted bell, cracked, its rope long gone. It rang anyway, a sound that tasted of mourning.

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