Cammy White: Pursuit of Justice by Jade Gretz

https://www.deviantart.com/jadegretzai/art/Cammy-White-Pursuit-of-Justice-1271777979

Cammy White: Pursuit of Justice ANIMATION

The Stars Drink Memory

Cammy White hated the Yorkshire moors. The assignment briefing had called it “routine surveillance,” but nothing about this felt routine. The wind howled like a dying thing, snatching at her beret and whipping her cropped blonde hair against her cheeks. The safehouse was a crumbling farmstead at the end of a forgotten lane, its stones bleeding damp and history. Her contact, a dour archaeologist named Alistair Finch, had met her at the train station with a silence that felt heavier than the mist.

“It’s not a ruin we’re watching,” Finch said that first evening, his voice a dry rustle in the farmhouse’s low-beamed kitchen. He pointed a bony finger at a topographical map. “It’s a silence. A specific, curated silence in the landscape. The barrow at Wether Crag. Local records from the 1600s mention ‘the Shining Barrow,’ but after a series of… incidents… all references stop. As if it was deliberately forgotten.”

Cammy sipped her too-strong tea, her soldier’s instincts humming. “And Shadalow’s interest?”

Finch’s eyes, the colour of old slate, flickered. “The usual. Power from an anomalous source. They intercepted my research proposal to the university. I was bought, then threatened. You are my… insurance policy.”

A week passed in a monotony of damp wool and scanning grey horizons. Then, on the seventh night, the dreams began. Not dreams of violence or mission failure, but of a deep, resonant humming, and a sensation of being unspooled, her memories—the crisp details of a Delta Red op, the smell of rain in London, the face of her sister, Jun—drifting away like smoke. She’d wake gasping, her mind terrifyingly blank for a heartbeat before it all rushed back.

The change came with the new moon. The perpetual mist lifted, revealing a sky so crammed with stars it seemed to sag under their weight. But directly above Wether Crag was a perfect, velvety black circle, a hole in the cosmos.

“That’s impossible,” Cammy whispered on the ridge, binoculars trembling slightly in her hands.

“It is the first guardian,” Finch murmured beside her, his earlier dourness replaced by a feverish awe. “Not a thing, but an absence. A siphon. It doesn’t guard the barrow from us. It guards us from what’s in the barrow.”

“What is in the barrow, Finch?” Her voice was a blade in the cold air.

He didn’t answer. Instead, he led her down into the bracken-choked valley. The barrow was a low, grassy mound, unremarkable but for the strange, soap-smooth menhir beside it, etched with spirals that made her eyes water. As they approached, the starless hole above seemed to pulse.

The second guardian manifested from the stone itself. The air before the menhir shimmered, and a figure coalesced. It was her. Mirror-perfect, from the green leotard to the scar on her chin. But its eyes were pools of that same starless black.

“You are memory made flesh,” the double said, and its voice was Cammy’s own, yet layered with a chilling, cosmic static. “You are a feast waiting to be had. Turn back.”

Cammy dropped into a fighting stance, muscles coiling. “What are you?”

“We are the Keepers of the Empty One,” it said, stepping forward with her own fluid grace. “We guard the prison of That Which Hungers for Light and Finds Only Reflection. Your memories are light. Your identity is a beacon. It dreams of them.”

The double attacked, a perfect mimic of her Spiral Arrow. Cammy dodged, the energy screaming past her ear. She fought herself in the silent valley, a brutal, surreal ballet. Her double used her Cannon Strikes, her Hooligan Combinations, but its movements had a predictive edge, as if it knew her mind. Because it did. It was learning her, drinking her fighting style, her instincts.

“It’s using your own memories against you!” Finch shouted, cowering by the menhir.

A memory surfaced, unbidden—a failed maneuver from years ago. She’d vowed never to repeat it. Her double immediately attempted it, leaving a brief opening. Cammy exploded forward, not with a Spiral Arrow, but with a simple, devastating knee to its torso. The figure didn’t cry out. It shattered like black glass, dissolving into motes of shadow that were sucked towards the barrow.

Panting, she faced Finch. “Explain. Now.”

He was staring at the mound with terror and longing. “They buried something here, long before humanity named these hills. Something that fell from a place beyond stars. It
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