Sheena: Queen of Vines by Jade Gretz

https://www.deviantart.com/jadegretzai/art/Sheena-Queen-of-Vines-1293609511

Sheena: Queen of Vines ANIMATION

River of Hungry Teeth

Not every river forgives. Some remember, and memory in water is an appetite.

They called the place Onomo—an elbow of the great river where the mangroves bowed their knotted heads like old women at prayer and fishing canoes lay like sleepwalkers, painted in flaking blues and reds. In the mornings the river gave: fish silver as coins, tubers washed to shore, the slow, reliable life of trade and gossip. In the evenings it kept its counsel. And once, in a night that tasted of iron and jasmine, that counsel turned to a kind of hungry sermon.

Sheena came like a predator of other reckonings. She wore the jungle as a second skin: dark hair braided with vine, a leathered skirt that fluttered like shadowed leaves when she moved. Her eyes could read the patterns the river made; she could tell from a ripple how many fins skimmed beneath. To the villagers she was queen in the language of myth and muscle—beautiful, yes, but also a blade and a promise. She had saved Onomo once before, when fever cut through its children like a thin blade. She had been the cold remedy then; now the village looked to her and watched the far water like mourners waiting for an explained absence.

The first thing the villagers noticed was a silence: there were no gulls at dawn, only a thick, clinging fog that smelled faintly of iron and of something else—old blood, maybe, or our teeth. Men went fishing and came back with nets empty and hunched; women drew water and found it full of small, gnawed bones. Then the dogs began to whisper their fears in small stages: a fish splayed on the bank with a second row of teeth; a child’s paddle bitten clean in half, the wood chewed to splinters like cartilage.

At dusk a fisherman named Tano came staggering into the village with a patch of skin torn from his calf and an animal’s breath hissing at the back of his neck. He could only gasp two words.

“Crocodiles…wrong.”

Sheena met them by the lamps in the central square. The lamplight made her a dark, definite silhouette. She pressed her palm to the river’s bank; mud and riverweed clung to her hand as if recognizing an old kin. “Tell me everything,” she said. Her voice had the slow authority of someone naming things before the world could beat them down.

An elder woman, Amaka, whose hair was as white as the teeth the river spat, told what Tano could not. “They come with the moon like a second moon. Eyes like button-coals. They hum, Sheena. Those that go missing—sometimes we hear them speaking from the water afterward. Not our tongues. Something beneath.”

Sheena listened until she had the map of movement in her head: the places the animals avoided, the time of tide when the river went quiet like a mouth closing. She sent out boys to watch the banks, but there were no fires; the crocodiles moved without the clumsy clatter of teeth in the sand. They were streamlined wrong, scales glistening but a sick, oily black like a patch of engine grease. And there was a stench in their wake—a metallic scent that tasted of factories and other people’s hands.

That night the river offered a woman.

She appeared at the edge of the mangrove, a silhouette half in water and half in steam. She wore a dress that seemed cut from the river itself: thin, filmy, clinging. Her hair was long and slick as an eel. Her skin shone like damp stone under the moon.

“You are Sheena,” she said, voice like a bell under water. It was a phrase that was not a question but a recognition.

“Sheena,” repeated the villagers, naming the visitor like a thing that might be conjured or chased away. But Sheena stepped forward with the certainty of someone who understands trickery. “Who are you?” she asked.

The woman smiled, and in the curve of her lips something old and animal blinked. “Call me Liala,” she said. “Call me the river’s sister. Call me what you want. I come to offer a bargain.”

“Bargains from rivers come cheap and bite,” Sheena said. The villagers laughed nervously. Seduction arrived not with lust alone but with the promise of easy solutions. Liala’s eyes were the color of wet pebbles; they looked at Sheena with a warmth that might be kindness or might be the slow planning of a predator.

“What price?” Sheena asked.

“Only a memory. A night. The river wants someone to remember it wholly.” Liala’s voice smoothed the word as if it were a caress. “In exchange, I will gather the teeth and spit them from her mouth.
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