Widowmaker: Emissary of Oblivion by Jade Gretz

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Widowmaker: Emissary of Oblivion ANIMATION

The Violet Requiem

Amélie Lacroix—Widowmaker—stepped out of the storm and into the hushed stone maw of the Saint Hilaire Mortuary, a forgotten palace of the dead buried deep in New Orleans’ Ninth Ward. The building rose like a mausoleum dreamt up by an architect with a taste for the morbidly theatrical—columns carved like tapering bones, windows glazed with violet glass that swallowed the moonlight, and a roof slanted like a coffin lid half-open.

Her heels clicked on the marble floor, the sound ricocheting through the great hall like a metronome in a cathedral of silence. She took in the walls: ossuary murals, painted by hands long since stilled; brass sconces shaped like skeletal fingers gripping candles; and a curtain of mist that drifted from vents where no air should move.

Perfect, she thought. Talon hides its secrets in the most charming crypts.

Two stories below, interred in refrigerated vaults disguised as tomb drawers, lay the archive she had been assigned to protect—datacores containing long-buried Talon blueprints, including schematics for nanotech prototypes that had nearly destabilized three continents a decade ago. The prototypes had been decommissioned, the project shuttered, the scientists vanished—some literally. Talon wanted to keep it that way.

But earlier that evening, sensors detected motion inside the sealed vault.

Motion—and heat signatures.

Nothing stored down there should move. Or warm.

Widowmaker unslung her rifle, her breaths measured and soft. She walked deeper into the mortuary, guided by faint emergency lights that cast everything in a pressure-heavy purple glow. A jazz hymn—a recording crackling with age—whispered faintly from speakers in the rafters, a saxophone sighing like a grieving ghost.

“Bonsoir, Monsieur Hilaire,” she murmured, addressing the dead. “Forgive the intrusion.”

A cold breeze slid past her cheek, like a warning finger.

She smiled. “How courteous.”

The elevator to the sub-vault resisted her keycard—an electronic stutter, a hiss, and the door opened only partway before grinding to a stop, warped from within. Widowmaker forced the rest open with a grunt.

The lights inside flickered.

An imprint of a hand—no, a cluster of thin, branching hand-like streaks—skidded across the metal floor, scorched as if by microscopic lightning.

She crouched, touching one mark with a gloved fingertip.

Still warm.

“Do not play coy,” she said into the dim. “I prefer my monsters direct.”

A voice answered—not in words, but in the softest trembling hum, as though metal was remembering a heartbeat it hadn’t earned.

She slipped inside.

The vault corridor was lined with nameplates—false ones. “DUVERNE.” “MOREAUX.” “PICOT.” Families that hadn’t existed in New Orleans history. Code for Talon operatives. All empty.

Except one drawer was ajar.

Drawer 47B.

The mortuary’s stale chill hid a trace of… perfume? Roses. Metallic roses.

Then a figure moved inside the vault, a silhouette jerking with a herky-jerk mimicry of human grace.

Widowmaker lifted her rifle.

“Identify yourself,” she commanded.

The figure stepped into the sickly white light.

It had once been a man—judging by the jawline, the torso, the shattered watch still clinging to a wrist. But the skin shimmered with a crawling texture like mercury filmed with frost. Strands of nanobots rippled along its limbs, weaving new muscle, dissolving old. The eyes glowed a dim, eerie blue—the Talon nanotech’s signature hue.

The prototype had reanimated the corpse.

“Do you remember anything?” she asked it.

The creature tilted its head.

Then it grinned—an imitation grin, rehearsed poorly, stretched too wide.

“Hello, beautiful,” it rasped in a torn mechanical echo, as if trying on a voice it had stolen from a forgotten morgue worker.

Widowmaker raised a brow. “Flattery from a dead man. How novel.”

The creature lunged.

She fired—one round, precise.

The bullet struck its shoulder, blasting apart a spray of nanite-infused tissue.

The shrapnel reassembled mid-air.

“Oh,” she murmured, “you are inconvenient.”

The creature’s arms stretched like molten silver before snapping back, bracing for another charge.

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