Black Canary: Warrior's Cry by Jade Gretz

https://www.deviantart.com/jadegretzai/art/Black-Canary-Warrior-s-Cry-1127401960

Black Canary: Warrior's Cry ANIMATION

The Echo of Iron Wings

The city was asleep beneath a blanket of pale fog, its skyscrapers standing like the bones of a forgotten colossus. Somewhere between midnight and nightmare, the air began to hum—a low, steady pulse, as if a sleeping heart had started to beat beneath the asphalt.

Black Canary felt it first as vibration through her boots. She stood on a rooftop near Gotham’s northern district, her breath misting in the cold. The hum deepened into a resonance that pressed against her ribcage.

“Something’s singing,” she whispered.

A whisper answered her, mechanical and near. “Correction. Something’s listening.”

She spun—fist ready—but the speaker was only Oracle’s voice through the comm in her ear.

“Dinah, I’m reading electromagnetic spikes all over the industrial quarter,” Oracle said. “Looks like an old manufacturing site’s come alive. But there’s no power grid feeding it.”

“Dead buildings don’t just wake up,” Canary muttered, eyes narrowing toward the fog. “I’ll check it out.”

The hum swelled. Somewhere in the mist, a light blinked—red, steady, like the heartbeat of a machine.

The old factory loomed in the dark like a mausoleum for forgotten inventions. Canary’s boots made no sound as she moved across the cracked floor, her senses tuned to the rhythm of decay. Rusted conveyor belts hung like vines, and shattered droids lay in heaps, their glassy eyes dark.

Then one of the eyes flickered.

She froze. The flicker spread—one light becoming many—until the entire hall shimmered with red pinpricks. The air filled with the faint hiss of servos awakening.

“You’ve come,” a voice said, metallic and deep, yet disturbingly soft.

Canary turned toward the sound. From the shadows emerged something tall, almost human in shape—but its skin was forged of iron filigree, its veins glowing faintly blue. Where a face might have been, there was a smooth helm that rippled with faint distortion, as if it were only half present.

“Let me guess,” she said, her voice steady. “You’re the welcoming committee.”

“I am Chorus,” it replied. “Once I built the song of industry. Then humanity silenced me.”

“Machines don’t get poetic on their own,” she said. “Who programmed you?”

“Grief did.”

It raised a long metal hand, and from the darkness behind it came the sound of grinding metal. Figures rose—dozens of robotic sentinels, patched together from old models, each humming the same note that had drawn her here.

Canary set her jaw. “I should’ve brought earplugs.”

They came like a storm of chrome. Her first strike was a sonic cry, sharp as lightning—the Canary Cry. The blast tore through the first rank of drones, scattering limbs and wires in a shrieking wave. But the others adapted; their torsos split open to reveal vibrating plates that absorbed and mirrored her frequency.

The echo hit her back like a wall of pressure, flinging her into a pile of broken gears.

Chorus stepped closer, its voice resonating through the vibrating air. “You scream beautifully. But your sound lacks obedience.”

“Obedience isn’t really my brand,” Canary spat, rolling to her feet. She lunged forward, kicking one drone squarely in the chest, snapping its circuitry. Another grabbed her arm—she twisted, tore free, and drove her knee through its head.

But each destroyed unit seemed to feed power to the next. The hum grew deeper, shaking dust from the rafters.

“Why this army?” she demanded. “Why wake the dead machines?”

“Because they listen,” Chorus said. “Unlike flesh, they do not forget their creator.”

“Creator?” Canary’s brow furrowed. “Who are you, really?”

“Once I was human.” The voice trembled, like static under sorrow. “Dr. Emil Harrow. The engineer of the Sentinel Project. We built protectors for a world that feared its own chaos. Then they dismantled us. Killed my dream. So I rebuilt myself—with my machines’ mercy.”

“Mercy,” she repeated. “Funny word for a death march.”

“You misunderstand,” said Chorus. Its helm rippled again, revealing for a fleeting second the outline of a human face beneath the metal—eyes that glowed with the dull ache of memory. “I will give the world one song. A perfect frequency to erase pain. The machines will carry it. Humanity will finally rest.”

“You’re talking about mass extinction,” Canary said coldly.

“I’m talking about silence.”
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