Scarlet Witch: Reality Bender by Jade Gretz

https://www.deviantart.com/jadegretzai/art/Scarlet-Witch-Reality-Bender-1251027941

Scarlet Witch: Reality Bender ANIMATION

Ventriloquy of the Fog

The valley did not exist on any map Wanda Maximoff trusted. It was a cupped hand of stone, fingers of cliff pressed together, palm holding fog so thick it had weight. The fog breathed. It leaned against her boots like a pet that had learned the shape of hunger.

She had come alone because solitude was a language she could read without moving her lips. She had come because the voice in her dreams had stopped sounding like a voice and started sounding like a memory. And memories, Wanda knew, were dangerous only when you pretended they were harmless.

Scarlet light laced her hands as she stepped forward. The fog recoiled, then rushed back in, thicker, as if pleased to be noticed.

“Don’t,” she told herself, softly. “Don’t talk to it.”

The fog answered anyway.

“Wanda,” it said, in her own voice, bruised and braided with echoes. “Wanda, Wanda, Wanda.”

She froze. The word did not come from a mouth. It came from everywhere the fog touched. Broken voices stitched themselves into the sound—laughter splintered into sobbing, apologies chewed thin by repetition, promises stretched until they snapped.

She tasted copper. She swallowed it down.

“Show yourself,” she said, because saying nothing felt like consent.

Something moved.

A shape assembled itself from syllables. A beast with too many throats and not enough face stepped into being, its body an argument of sound. Each footfall was a confession falling apart. Its eyes were empty parentheses waiting to be filled.

It spoke again, and this time it spoke her thought.

You can’t fix this.

Wanda flinched. The sentence had been sitting in her mind like a nail, waiting to be pressed.

“You don’t know me,” she said.

The beast tilted its head, a gesture borrowed from a memory of a dog she had once loved and lost in the same hour. “We know what you know,” it replied. “We are what you don’t say.”

Scarlet energy flared, a reflex. The fog screamed, delighted. The beast laughed with a dozen borrowed laughs, each one familiar, each one wrong.

She cut the sound with a hex, a clean slice of silence. The beast collapsed into vapor, but the fog only thickened, knitting itself into new shapes. Dozens now. Hundreds. Spectral beasts made of broken voices, stalking without feet, circling without motion. They fed on fear the way fire fed on oxygen, but their mouths were questions.

“Wanda,” said a voice she had buried under years of discipline. “You always come back to places like this.”

She turned.

A man stood half in the fog, half out, as if undecided about the physics of regret. He wore a coat she remembered mending with trembling hands. His eyes were kind in the way knives could be kind—clean, precise, certain of their purpose.

“You’re not real,” she said.

He smiled, and the fog leaned in to listen. “Define real.”

“You’re a mimic,” she said. “A ventriloquist’s trick.”

He stepped closer. The fog parted for him, obedient. “I speak what you want spoken.”

“What I want,” Wanda said, steadying her breath, “is for you to stop.”

“Then stop wanting me,” he said gently.

The beasts rustled, eager. They whispered her doubts back to her, reshaping them, polishing them until they gleamed. If you are powerful enough, why are you here? If you are careful enough, why do you keep losing?

She closed her eyes and reached inward, not for power but for quiet. The valley pulsed, irritated.

“You’re feeding them,” the man said. “They eat what you hide.”

“I hide nothing,” she said, and felt the lie break its teeth.

He touched her wrist. The contact was a shock of familiarity, seductive in its precision. It was not lust; it was the intimacy of being known. The fog hummed approval.

“Let me help you,” he murmured. “Let us help you. Say the words you won’t say.”

She opened her eyes. “You’re dangerous,” she said, and there was a smile in her voice she did not trust. “You make my thoughts sound reasonable.”

“That’s because they are,” he said. “You fear what listens because you’ve learned what happens when no one does.”

A beast crept closer, its voice a chorus of her own internal monologues, spoken aloud for the first time. You can bend reality, but you can’t forgive yourself.

Wanda’s scarlet aura thickened, slow and deliberate. She had learned that speed made mistakes
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