Rose: Destiny Mage by Jade Gretz

https://www.deviantart.com/jadegretzai/art/Rose-Destiny-Mage-1313257892?file=1

Rose: Destiny Mage ANIMATION

Psycho Lullaby

A single drop of water fell from a rusted fire escape, and Rose counted it as the last honest sound in the world. The alley behind the old opera house had always been a place of forgotten things—broken crates, faded posters, the ghost of a tenor’s final note. But tonight, it breathed with something else. A rhythm without a heart. A pulse that had learned to beat in the dark between seconds.

Rose stepped into the narrow passage, her crimson scarf trailing like a wounded bird’s wing. She had not chosen this place. It had chosen her, the way a fever chooses a sleeping child. The bricks wept a greasy moisture. The single bulb above a dented dumpster flickered in a pattern that spelled, in Morse code she never learned, run. She did not run. She had not run since she first felt him stirring in her dreams like a tumor with teeth.

“You are early,” said the voice from the far end of the alley. It did not echo. The walls swallowed the sound and asked for more.

M. Bison stood where the shadows were thickest, but he was not standing. He was occupying. The air around him bent inward, as if space itself had developed a scoliosis. He wore his dictator’s cloak of midnight blue, but the alley’s grime had painted it in oilslicks. His eyes were two punctures in reality—not red, not yellow, but the color of a scream you cannot remember.

Rose loosened her scarf. The silk caught the sickly light and held it like a captive star. “And you are late for your own destruction, Bison. I have been weaving this moment for seven years.”

“Weaving.” He chuckled, a sound like a coffin lid sliding shut. “You and your threads. Your soul power, your tarot dreams, your little fortune-teller’s parlor. Did you truly believe patience was a weapon?”

She walked forward. Each step placed her heel exactly on a crack in the asphalt, a pattern from a forgotten geometry. “I believe that even a spider’s silk, given enough time, can bind a god.”

The alley stretched. Not metaphorically—the distances between the dumpster and the fire escape elongated, the walls breathing outward like a ribcage expanding for a final gasp. Rose felt the familiar vertigo of Bison’s psycho power. It was not magic. It was the negation of magic. A black hole wearing a man’s face.

“You came alone,” he said. No question. A statement of fact, delivered with something almost like tenderness. “No champions. No students. Just the woman who shares my soul’s rotten half.”

There it was. The mystery she had chased since childhood—the dreams of a throne of skulls, the phantom pain in a hand that was not hers, the lullaby she hummed without knowing the words. She and Bison were two notes of the same dissonant chord. He was the wound. She was the scar.

“I am not your half,” Rose said, and her voice held steady as a glacier. “I am what refused to die when you made yourself a monster.”

Bison raised a hand. The air between them crystallized into a thousand tiny mirrors, each one reflecting a different Rose—Rose as a child, reaching for a mother’s hand that vanished; Rose as a young woman, burning her tarot cards after a vision of blood; Rose as she might have been, had she never resisted his pull. The mirrors whispered. Join. Fall. Cease.

She closed her eyes. The whispers became screams. She opened them again.

“Pretty tricks,” she said. “The devil’s kaleidoscope. But I have seen the face behind the mirrors, Bison. It is a child. A frightened little boy who learned that the only way to stop fearing the dark was to become the dark.”

His smile did not waver. That was the terror of him—not the rage, but the patience. The absolute certainty that all things, including her defiance, were merely kindling for his fire.

“And what do you see now, Rose? Do you see the boy?” He took a step forward. The concrete beneath his boot turned to dust. “Or do you see the man who has destroyed nations, who has made generals weep and presidents kneel, who has rewritten the laws of causality because he found them boring?”

She stopped ten feet from him. Close enough to smell the ozone and old copper that clung to his uniform. Close enough to count the micro-expressions flickering behind his eyes—hunger, curiosity, and something else. Something she had not expected.

Loneliness.

“I see a tyrant who collects followers like a child collects stones,” she said softly. “Shiny, cold, and utterly interchangeable. You destroy because you cannot create. You conquer because you cannot love. And deep in the hollow where your heart
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