Scarlet Witch: Mystic Ember by Jade Gretz

https://www.deviantart.com/jadegretzai/art/Scarlet-Witch-Mystic-Ember-1251027847

Scarlet Witch: Mystic Ember ANIMATION

Lunar Lacuna

Moonlight cut the pines with hard silver. Wanda Maximoff, beautiful in a quiet, unflashy way, walked between the trunks as if threading a needle—intent, spare, attentive. She had come because the convoy vanished into these woods; she had come because people returned hollow-eyed, smiling like borrowed faces. It was rumor that called her—rumor wrapped in grief—and Wanda answered.

People said the predator took more than flesh. They called it the Hollow: a translucent mouth that fed on wants, a hunger that left its victims polite and empty. Lovers were left with their hands in their pockets; children waved at sunsets and remembered nothing. The village elders told this with the gravity of people who have been taught their defeats. Wanda listened and did not open the door to memory.

Tomas, one of the convoy scouts, met her beneath a broken birch. "You shouldn't have come," he said. His voice was small, tired, like a damp ember. He was wrapped in a blanket and looked as though warmth had been borrowed and never returned.

"I couldn't not," Wanda said. "Tell me what happened."

He said, "It asked me what I wanted most. When I answered, it ate the wanting. I remember facts now—the way my father's coat smelled—but not why it mattered. It's like they've been rearranged inside me."

Wanda flattened her hands against her coat as if to stop the memory of a child's laugh rising and dissolving into salt. Her magic needed feeling; it breathed on grief and turned it to force. To be without feeling would be to wrestle with empty air. She turned her face toward the woods and walked deeper.

The Hollow moved like a rumor—there, then not, a cold absence that made the world hush. It spoke in voices borrowed from the living. "You who conjure storms of the heart," it sang, a sound so honeyed that temptation could have been made of it. "Would you like to sleep without wanting?"

Its seduction was smooth as silk backing away from a blade. The promise of no ache, of a life sanitized of longing, glittered like an invitation. Wanda felt the scent of the lure: safety in numbness. For a heartbeat she tasted the possibility of not feeling the yawning loss of those she had loved. The temptation was surgical.

She answered with a name. "I am Wanda Maximoff," she said. Naming was a spell. The Hollow paused; it had learned names were useful to pin people like butterflies.

"I am hunger," it said. Its form was a gap in the moonlight stitched with faces that smiled without reaching. "I want what you want."

"Then you are a thief." Wanda's voice did not shake. She could feel the tremor of emotion trying to be threaded into her palms like a live wire; she folded it instead into focus. "I will not let you learn me."

The Hollow tasted her memory as if she had offered it a cup—then repulsed by the lack of ache. "Feed me what you hold dear," it breathed. "Hand me your loss and be freed."

Wanda let the memory of a child's small hand slip into a glass cage and displayed it without heat; she offered the shape of a laugh and with the laugh, withheld the ache. The Hollow lapped at the edges, confused. Hunger was taught by want; it had never been instructed in restraint.

"It starves on surfaces," Tomas whispered. "You can't starve a hunger, can you?"

Wanda did not intend to starve; she intended to teach. Her magic was usually a tide, unfastened by emotion, but tonight she became a surgeon. She built a lattice of thought around her heart—runes precise as bone—commanding sensation to function like a tool rather than an ocean. "Feelings are signals," she told herself aloud. "Not weather."

She began a different offering: facts bound to consequences. She described small things—an old bakery's bell, a late apology, a mother's hand—and then layered them with the reasons those things had mattered: the sacrifice behind the apology, the ache that made the bell toll like a promise. She offered the geometry of desire rather than its heat.

The Hollow drank and paused. Its voice lost the honey and became thin with confusion. "Why give me the wiring and not the flame?"

"Because that is not hunger's place," Wanda said. "You devour wants. You cannot hold reasons. Teach yourself to take less."

It tried other tricks. It called out with voices from Wanda's past, a lover's tender word she had sometimes kept as a charm; it lured at the edges of her sorrow with curated images. "It'l
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