Power Girl: Solar Resolve by Jade Gretz

https://www.deviantart.com/jadegretzai/art/Power-Girl-Solar-Resolve-1252714960#image-1

Power Girl: Solar Resolve ANIMATION

Red Liturgy

They wrote their prayers in the margins of the city — in ash, in the lipstick of broken streetlights, in the metallic taste on the tongues of dogs that howled at empty alleys. The survivors called it sanctuary, though the place was more like a promise: glass towers sheathed in ivy, an old observatory whose dome had been repurposed into a greenhouse, a subway station turned library. Power Girl had seen sanctuaries burn before. She had seen civilizations fold like tissue when star-rolls of fate nudged a wrong lever. This evening, the sanctuary smelled of iron and something older — of moons broken in the throat.

Kara Zor-L landed on the observatory dome without announcing herself. Her cape fluttered once, the shadow it cast briefly swallowing a bed of bioluminescent moss before the light returned, bent and polite. She had been invited, more precisely summoned, by a thread of static that had threaded itself through solar flares and space-borne currents until it found her: a call carved in desperation. Survivors. Kobold-bright eyes; names she didn't know. The syntax of pleas. The whisper of a relic.

She stepped inside and felt it immediately: a pressure like a hand cupping the hollow behind her ribs. The air vibrated red. The greenhouse, supposed to be a refuge of green, was ablaze with an unnatural hue; vines that had learned to bloom under fluorescent glass now ooze a sap that glowed like dried blood. Pots overturned, glass husks shattered, the seedlings of worlds wilted.

Atrocitus stood among the wreckage as if he had always been there — as if the greenhouse had been constructed around his fury. He was taller than the old tomes said and the red fury pool at his throat pulsed like a heart. The ring at his hand seethed, a miniature god of spite. Around him the air tasted of prophecy and metal.

"You should have stayed in the sky, Kryptonian," he said, voice rasping like pages being torn. The ring flared and the greenhouse answered with a chorused whisper — hundreds of voices, each one an accusation. "The sky is where you belong. The ground is where the debt is to be paid."

Kara's laugh did not quite fit. It was a small, surprised sound. "You never liked the sky, Atrocitus. You think vengeance needs breath?"

"No," he said. "It needs blood."

A survivor coughed from the shadows. Small, blond, something about the jaw gave the human away. Kara moved to shield them, posture strict and nonnegotiable. She wanted to move, to lift, to carry everyone to a place where red-lantern fever couldn't follow. But Atrocitus's ring had tethered a tide, and tides answer the moon designs.

"Why Kryptonians?" she asked instead, eyes steady. She used no secret name. There was a softness in the question she couldn't fake — curiosity, sympathy, a way to thread silk through steel.

Atrocitus's laugh was a cantrip of iron filings. "Because you are survivors. Because the name Krypton tastes like thunder in my mouth. Because your kind survived a sun and called their survival a miracle. Miracles incense me."

He waved his hand and the radial light convulsed. From the soil rose shapes: red-lantern constructs shaped like spectral horsemen, each trotting on hooves of memory. They did not speak, but their presence suggested a litany of past sins. They advanced on the survivors without malice; instead the hunger in them was like the way winter collects itself: inevitable.

Kara inhaled, and the seduction of the ring brushed at her — not sensual in the common sense, but a guileful thing: a promise that rage could be turned into purpose. That she could channel it, use it, make a weapon of it. Even now, standing in the glare of a being whose existence was an indictment of emotion, she felt something like warmth. The red whispered of absolutes and yeses.

"Your ring," she said aloud. "It feeds. It twists. You don't have to be its servant."

Atrocitus tilted his head. For a man whose face was a map of hatred, he showed curiosity. "And what would you have me be, Kryptonian? A gentleman of forgiveness? A librarian of regrets? I was forged from grief. What is your sword forged from?"

"From choices," Kara said. "From the fact that even when the universe breaks us — we still choose."

He stepped forward then, and the greenhouse folded its heart toward him. "And would you choose to watch your — your people — be honored with ashes? To let them rot in memory so that others may sleep in the
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