Power Girl: Skyborne Justice by Jade Gretz

https://www.deviantart.com/jadegretzai/art/Power-Girl-Skyborne-Justice-1252714875#image-1

Power Girl: Skyborne Justice ANIMATION

Chorus of the Black Moon

Black snow drifted upward from the obsidian floor, defying gravity to dissolve into a ceiling entirely obscured by a writhing, unnatural twilight. The air inside the Justice Hall smelled of crushed orchids and the sharp, metallic tang of ancient ozone. It was a scent that did not belong in a fortress of glass and steel. It was the scent of a mausoleum breathing its first lungful of air in a thousand years.

Kara Zor-L stood at the threshold of the great assembly chamber, the golden clasp of her cape cold against her collarbone. She was a vision of radiant geometry, her pristine white uniform and crimson cape a stark, defiant contrast to the creeping shadows that had swallowed the world’s most secure sanctuary. Her blonde hair caught the faint emergency lights, framing a face of classical, statuesque beauty that currently held an expression of profound, chilling dread. Her super-hearing, usually flooded with the heartbeat of a planet, registered only a terrible, vast silence, broken by a sound that made her indestructible skin prickle. It was the sound of glass teeth grinding together.

She stepped forward, her boots making no sound on the frost-rimed floor. The ambient temperature was plummeting, far beyond the reach of normal thermodynamics. This was a supernatural cold, a psychic winter that sought out the warmth of a soul rather than the heat of a body. As her eyes adjusted to the violent purple gloom, the shapes in the center of the room resolved into horrifying clarity.

They were her friends. Earth’s greatest champions. The pantheon of the modern age, suspended in a horrific tableau of corrupted ecstasy.

The Amazon princess knelt on the dais, her golden lasso coiled around her own throat like a lover’s embrace, her eyes replaced by jagged, protruding shards of black diamond. Beside her, the Fleet-Footed Speedster vibrated at a frequency that blurred his form into a grotesque, multi-limbed insect, dark violet lightning bleeding from his ears and mouth. The Dark Detective hung suspended upside down from the vaulted ceiling, wrapped in a cocoon of animated shadows that stroked his cowl with sickening tenderness. They were all breathing in perfect, terrifying unison, their mouths stretched into wide, painless, joyless smiles.

"They are magnificent, are they not?"

The voice did not travel through the air. It bypassed Kara’s eardrums entirely, sliding down her spine like a drop of freezing rainwater. It was a purr of absolute malice, layered with a velvety, intoxicating cadence. It was a voice designed to bypass reason and speak directly to the oldest, darkest centers of the brain.

Kara did not flinch. She squared her shoulders, her cerulean eyes scanning the shifting shadows. "Eclipso."

"You say my name like a curse, beautiful Kryptonian," the voice murmured. The shadows behind the Amazon coalesced, pooling upward like spilled ink reversing its fall. The darkness knitted itself together, forming a tall, elegant silhouette. He wore the shape of a man, but the proportions were elegantly wrong—too long in the limbs, too graceful in the spine. His skin was the color of a bruised twilight, and half his face was obscured by a crystalline growth of absolute night. He held a faceted black diamond between his elongated fingers, turning it so it caught the nonexistent light. "I prefer to think of myself as an intervention."

"You’ve poisoned them," Kara said, her voice a steady, ringing bell in the suffocating gloom. She fought the urge to rush forward. Her fists were clenched so tightly the pressure would have turned coal into diamonds, but she knew brute force was useless here. Eclipso was not a physical threat; he was a metaphysical parasite. He fed on wrath, on hidden desires, on the shadows cast by the brightest lights.

"Poisoned? Oh, Kara. Sweet, displaced Kara." Eclipso glided forward. He did not walk; the floor simply moved to accommodate him. "I have not poisoned them. I have cured them. Look at them. For the first time in their glorious, burdened lives, they are at rest. They are no longer agonizing over the impossible weight of the world. They have surrendered to the exquisite relief of the dark."

"They are prisoners," Kara countered, stepping laterally to keep herself between Eclipso and the grand doors. She needed to assess the situation, needed to find the source of the possession. The Heart of Darkness. The black diamond. "You’ve trapped their minds and puppeted their bodies."

Eclipso laughed,
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