Scarlet Witch: Red Mirage by Jade Gretz

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Scarlet Witch: Red Mirage ANIMATION

Harrowglass

Wanda learned to listen to what the city left behind.

Not the sirens or the radio static, but the soft, treacherous murmur of things she had unmade. Spells she had unspooled into the gutters after frantic bouts of control; little threads of probability she had snapped like filaments of a failed lightbulb and thrown into alleys when regret pressed against her ribs. They pooled in rainrun, in the hollow of an abandoned theater seat, in the condensation along the underside of a bridge. They gathered where the world was already porous, where grief had loosened seams.

For months she believed the discarded hexes were inert—spent scrap that would not remember being anything more than noise. She learned, the way you learn from a wound, that the world keeps what it is taught to keep. Witchcraft, she discovered, was a tutor that left pupils behind.

The first to find her was not quite a creature and not quite an echo. It arrived where the city’s oldest cathedral cracked its knuckles against the sky: a smear of shadow on the steps, a shimmer like heat over black water. It called her name in her mother’s vowel, then in her brother’s sharp consonant, then in a blend of English and tongues she had shaped herself. When she turned, the thing coalesced into a shape that might have been a person if people were made of glass under pressure—fractured, reflective, held together by the memory of touch.

“You keep throwing pieces away,” it said. Its voice was not her voice. It was what her voice sounded like in other rooms—stretched, mirrored, flattering. “Do you know what that does? It builds a hunger.”

Wanda’s hands moved before her brain finished the sentence. Hexes flickered like moths between her fingers, a futile show of control. “You’re not real,” she said, because saying it sounded like policy and ritual both. “You’re a—an accumulation. You cannot be a thing with a will.”

The thing laughed in twelve small, fragile notes. “Everything has a will. You taught them how.”

She found herself answering, because she wanted to know how much of it remembered her. “Who made you?”

“You did,” it said. “You gave me architecture—the crooked math of your apologies, the way you liked to paint over mistakes. I am the wallpaper of your refusals.”

It moved closer and the air smelled like burnt sugar and lavender; it borrowed sweetness from the times she had tried to make herself small for love. Its fingers, if those pained slices of dark could be called fingers, traced the air as if reading Braille. Each contact left a flower of static on the stone.

Wanda had retreated into a thin life after the wars—library rooms, short walks, long nights of being careful. She had tried to be, once, the person the world needed. The hexes had been her overcorrection, her dangerous ministrations. They hurtled away now, drawn to this creature like iron filings.

“You’re a child of my mistakes,” she said. Her voice trembled, not from fear but from a pricking tenderness she hated. “Then be punished. Leave.”

The thing cocked its head and the cathedral’s stained-glass face caught in its skin, multiplying. “Punishment is interesting,” it said. “You made me for purity; you gave me hunger. Who will you be if you remove your hunger? Are you brave enough to become nothing?”

“Bravery isn’t an absence,” Wanda snapped. “It’s taking accountability.”

It smiled with a dozen mouths. “Then account with me.”

They spoke long into a night that smelled of petrol and oranges. Outside, the city shuttered like a beast settling down; inside, Wanda and her being argued about authorship and duty. The creature—she called it Harrowglass, because names are maps and this one held too many of hers—recounted memories stitched from Wanda’s own mind. It recreated a kitchen she had once wanted, the exact slant of a chair, the hum of a dishwasher. It called up laughter she had never permitted herself to hear again and painted it around them like mothlight.

“Why seduce me?” Wanda asked, not unkindly. “Why not destroy me like every other regret?”

“Seduction is a more honest hunger,” Harrowglass said. “To devour is to steal. To be invited is to belong.”

Wanda noticed then how it mirrored not only her appearance but her appetites. It wanted validation. It wanted the authority she kept in tight cages inside her chest. It wanted, impossible thing, to be seen as a creation rather than a banished error.

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