Chapter 143 Only the Deaf Can Hear

Without warning, the sacred flame that had burned for thousands of years began to flicker violently. Its light brightened and dimmed like a dying beast drawing its last breaths.

Deep inside the temple on Themyscira.

Deathly silence shrouded the hall built from faith and truth.

Once, even the faintest breeze here carried echoes of the oracle, whispers from the source of the Lasso of Truth, the foundation of the Amazons' existence.

Now every sound was gone.

Cassandra, the blind high priestess, knelt before the great bronze cauldron. Eyes that could see no light now held a fear deeper than the sight of the apocalypse could have inspired.

She plunged all ten fingers deep into the warm ashes inside the cauldron, the medium through which generations of priestesses had heard the oracle.

In the past, a touch of her fingertips had been enough for the wisdom of Olympus to flow warmly into her mind.

Now the ashes were cold and lifeless, like a handful of forgotten dust.

She tried again and again. The coarse ash rubbed her fingertips raw until blood seeped out, yet all she sensed was emptiness.

The eternal whisper had stopped.

"It... is avoiding me." Cassandra's voice rasped like sandpaper. She withdrew her trembling hands and turned toward the women warriors holding their breath behind her. "The source of truth... has been tainted by dust. It has begun avoiding certain names, certain... concepts."

Her words struck like a boulder dropped into a still lake, raising enormous waves.

"Avoiding?" A tall warrior with a lion's hide over her shoulders strode forward. This was Iphicleia, Diana's close friend, renowned for her courage and fierce resolve.

Anger burned in her blue eyes. The sword at her waist rang as she drew it half a cun from its sheath, its sharp aura chilling the air around her.

"One fallen angel, one sinner who desecrated a sacred artifact, has brought such shame upon the source of our faith?" Iphicleia roared, her voice echoing through the hall. "Then use force! Nail him to the rocks of the North Sea with the Amazons' sharpest spear! Wash away this shame with his blood! Make him kneel before the sacred fire and use his soul as fuel to rekindle the oracle!"

Most of the warriors rallied to her proposal, tightening their grips on their weapons. In the Amazon creed, only blood could cleanse the desecration of the sacred.

Diana, however, remained silent.

She looked neither at her impassioned sisters nor at the despairing high priestess.

Her gaze passed through the temple's ornate window lattice toward the distant northern waters, where the storm still raged.

The darkened Lasso of Truth lay quietly on her weapon rack, like a golden snake drained of life.

She could still feel the violent shaking of her faith's very foundations when that memory, not her own, had flooded her mind.

"We do not need absolute justice... We need only obedient tools."

The words echoed in her head like the vilest curse.

"He let me hear something I should never have heard..." Diana finally spoke, so softly she could scarcely be heard, yet the entire hall immediately fell silent. "But... what if it was the truth? What if the truth we believe in rests on a lie that has been carefully filtered?"

Everyone was stunned.

Even the fiercely militant Iphicleia stared at her in disbelief, as though she no longer recognized the divine daughter who had once embodied Amazon glory and faith.

Question truth? That was the greatest blasphemy of all!

Meanwhile, in Gotham, among the shattered walls of the underwater monastery.

Gideon sat cross-legged, surrounded by deep-blue seawater, yet not a drop touched him.

Before him, the black feather formed from the first memory he had stripped away hovered in silence.

Its shape had solidified. It was no longer a simple feather, but something like a fossil woven from countless fine thorns, carrying an ancient desolation and pain.

He reached out and gently touched the black feather fossil with a fingertip.

A low hum sounded.

The fossil trembled slightly, releasing a minute wave of resonance that almost no technology or magic could detect.

This fluctuation was a cognitive echo he had deliberately left behind, a precisely targeted beacon whose other end was connected to Diana's heart as cracks began to form within it.

"Sir." Morris spoke through the encrypted bone-conduction earpiece. "We detected violent fluctuations of divine power around Themyscira, followed quickly by an abnormal silence. Analysis using the psychological model you provided indicates a serious internal division. Our latest intelligence... Diana Prince has requested a third mission."

A cold curve touched Gideon's lips.

"She is also carrying an enhanced Hephaestus Restraint Ring, personally blessed by Queen Hippolyta, along with the linking incantation that activates the Twin Altars. It appears they have abandoned persuasion and are preparing to enforce compliance." Concern tinged Morris's voice.

"She wants to try again?" Gideon slowly opened his eyes. There was no surprise in their black depths, only the indifference of someone in complete control. "Good... Very good."

He withdrew his finger and murmured to himself with a trace of cruel anticipation.

"This time, I will not merely let her hear."

"I will make her... see for herself."

Three days later, above the North Sea.

The sky was overcast, the water black as ink.

Alone in her moonlight chariot, Diana returned to the waters that had witnessed the collapse of her faith.

She had not brought the Lasso of Truth.

Instead, she solemnly held an ancient stone tablet, half a meter square, in both hands.

Carved from the sacred rock of Mount Olympus, the tablet was covered in dense golden runes. A slowly rotating energy core was set into its center.

This was the central fragment of the Twin Altars, an artifact of law older and more domineering than the Lasso of Truth.

It could not compel a person to speak truthfully. Instead, it forcibly projected images of the deepest, most indelible sins in a target's soul, exposing them for all to see.

Gideon slowly rose from the blue energy bridge below and hovered at eye level with her.

"Gideon." Diana's voice was much calmer now, but beneath that calm lay a deeper struggle and resolve. "This time, I have not come to judge, but to witness. I must see for myself whether the true color of your soul is the black of corruption... or the gray of injustice suffered."

Gideon studied the stubbornness in her eyes, the look of someone reaching for one last lifeline, and suddenly smiled.

There was no mockery in that smile. Instead, it held a trace of appreciation, like a teacher looking at a student who had finally begun to understand.

"You have finally learned to doubt, Diana."

He offered no resistance. Instead, he extended his right hand toward her, palm up, with a composure bordering on arrogance.

"Then look." His voice seemed to carry an enchantment. "But be warned. Once you have seen certain things, you can never wash them away."

Diana drew a deep breath and poured divine power into the tablet.

Golden light blazed. Every rune lit up, and a beam shot out to envelop Gideon.

In an instant, an enormous three-dimensional image unfolded in the air between them.

What appeared, however, made Diana's breath catch sharply.

It was neither the bloody scene she had imagined of Gideon slaughtering Gotham's criminals nor the conspiratorial blueprint of his underground empire.

The image showed the supreme brilliance of High Heaven.

Countless angels bathed in sacred light formed a majestic tribunal.

At its center, the young archangel of judgment, Gideon, was being stripped of his divine office. His sacred wings were forcibly torn away and burned, one after another.

Diana saw clearly that, in that moment, Gideon's eyes held neither anger nor resentment. Only an instant of... bewilderment and indescribable pain.

It was a look that could exist only when faith was utterly crushed by the very being that had created it.

Then the image suddenly changed.

The scene shifted to an earlier age. Gideon stood before a flaming throne piled high with white bones.

With his own hands, he used the Blade of Judgment to sever the head of the previous Gideon, who wore the same robes of an archangel of judgment.

His dying predecessor showed no fear, only a strange smile of release. His lips moved without making a sound, yet the words burned themselves directly into the depths of Diana's soul:

"You, too, will be killed by your successor."

Boom!

As though a chain reaction had begun, Diana suddenly clapped her hands over her ears. She seemed to hear millions, hundreds of millions of different voices in different dimensions of time and space, all repeating that accursed prophecy in different tones at the same instant.

"You, too, will be killed by your successor!"

It was an endless cycle. The judge was always the next to be judged!

"Aah!"

Diana screamed in pain and stumbled backward. The violent shock to her mind left her unable to sustain her divine power.

Crack... Bang!

The indestructible sacred stone tablet in her hands, forced to contain a paradox of law far beyond its comprehension, filled with cracks and finally exploded.

Countless fragments flew in all directions. The sharp edge of one sliced open her clenched right palm.

Blood dripped between her pale fingers.

Gideon watched without expression and slowly withdrew the projection of his soul.

From inside his robes, he took a second black crystal he had already prepared, compressed from this memory of the judges' cycle of reincarnation.

He casually pressed the new crystal into the base of the black feather fossil.

A powerful hum rang out!

As though a soul had been poured into it, the entire fossil instantly burst into silent black flames, deeper than before.

"Alert! Alert!" Beneath Gotham's waters, Morris's voice abruptly rose. "Sir! Large-scale, high-intensity psychic disturbances in the Themyscira region! Our remote psionic detectors have picked up at least seven Amazon priestesses entering deep nightmares at the same time. They are all reporting... dreams of a Faceless Judge!"

Gideon did not answer. He merely gazed in the direction Diana had fled, toward the endless ocean that isolated Themyscira.

He spoke softly, as though pronouncing judgment on those self-righteous gods:

"You block out voices and burn books, hoping to hide the truth with silence."

"But when silence itself becomes the loudest noise in the world..."

His gaze lowered slightly to the patch of sea stained red with Diana's blood.

"...the deaf are the ones who truly begin to hear."

The camera slowly moved closer.

The divine Amazon blood that had fallen into the vast black sea did not immediately disperse.

Unnoticed in the deep currents, it twisted and stretched unnaturally, slowly transforming into a tiny, almost invisible network of black feather-like veins. With the ceaseless currents, it traveled unerringly... toward the heart of the island that believed itself impregnable.

And in the forbidden sanctuary at the island's very center, beside the crystal pool guarding the Amazons' collective dreams, some ancient will that had slept for a thousand years seemed gently stirred by that distant ripple.