Enchantress: Sorcery in Green by Jade Gretz

https://www.deviantart.com/jadegretzai/art/Enchantress-Sorcery-in-Green-1294008690#image-1

Enchantress: Sorcery in Green ANIMATION

The Roots Remember

The roots remember. They remember the first scream, the first god to die, the first crack in the dark. They remember everything. And Amora, the Enchantress, pressed her back against one of those gargantuan, sky-wood tendrils, felt that ancient memory hum through her spine like a plucked harp string. It was an unpleasant sensation, like being a fly caught in the web of a very old, very patient spider.

“Charming,” she murmured, her breath pluming in the impossible cold. Here, beneath the World Tree, Yggdrasil, the air tasted of ozone and mildew and something else—something that bled. The roots, each one wider than the serpent that gnawed at them, pulsed with a faint, sickly light, illuminating a cavern so vast its ceiling was lost in a perpetual twilight.

She was not alone. She never was, for long.

A sound. Not a footfall, but a scrape. The noise of a nightmare learning to walk. From the spaces between two roots, where the darkness was absolute, they came. Phantom trolls. They were mockeries of the rock-trolls of Jotunheim, but wrong. Translucent, their forms shifting like smoke in water, you could see the grim, pulsing light of the roots through their bodies. Their eyes were the worst—two pits of absolute, hungry black. They were animated by the magic of the Dark Council, a cabal of sorcerers who hid in shadows and pulled strings to watch the puppets dance and break.

The first one lunged. Its massive, incorporeal hand swept through the air where Amora’s head had been a moment before. She moved like mercury, a flowing, controlled economy of grace that was its own kind of seduction. She didn’t run. An Enchantress of Asgard does not run from trolls, phantom or otherwise.

“Oh, you poor, sad things,” she cooed, her voice a silken ribbon in the gloom. “Stuffed with dark magic and sent to do a coward’s work. Who is it this time? Kaluu? The nightmare child himself?” She dodged another swing, the wind of its passing stirring her golden hair. “Or is it the one with the silly hat? I always forget his name. Balthakk? No, that’s a rock.”

The trolls said nothing. They couldn’t. They were just vectors for a will not their own, weapons of terror. And they were effective. The cold they radiated was more than physical; it was a spiritual frost, a despair that tried to creep into the heart. Amora felt its edge. It was the terror of being forgotten, of your story ending not with a bang, but with a whimper in the dark.

She could have obliterated them. A word of power, a gesture, and they’d be so much ectoplasmic slime. But that would be too simple, too direct. It would also alert the weaver holding their strings to her exact location and her mood. Better to play.

She began to move, not away from them, but between them. A dance. She would let a claw pass a hair's breadth from her cheek, then spin, her green cloak flaring, to tap the creature on the nose. “Boo.”

The troll froze. For a fraction of a second, its puppet-master’s concentration wavered. In that gap, Amora saw it—a filament of sickly green light connecting the troll’s chest to the darkness above, like a spider’s silk. The thread of control. She smiled. Now that was interesting.

She drew a small, ornate knife from her belt. Not for fighting, but for… precision.

“You know what your problem is?” she asked the frozen troll conversationally. “No imagination. You’re sent to frighten a goddess. Me. Amora. Who has shared a bath with a god of lies, talked the crown prince of Asgard out of a war over breakfast, and once made a mountain fall in love with a river. And you think a bit of spectral chill will work?”

She lunged, not at the troll, but past it. The knife, a blade of pure Uru silver, sliced through the air. It wasn’t the troll she was aiming for, but the ethereal tether behind it. The blade passed through it.

A shriek, not from the troll, but from the darkness itself. A psychic wound, far, far away. One of the Dark Council had just felt a very sharp pain in a place he couldn’t rub. The first troll collapsed into a puddle of shadow and was gone.

The other two trolls hesitated. Without the singular, unified will driving them, their own nascent, brutish confusion surfaced.

“See?” Amora said, twirling the knife. “The tether is the thing. The string. It’s so much more fun to slap the hand holding the marionette’s cross, don’t you think?” She advanced on them. “Now, who’s next? Shall
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