Chapter 146 The One Who Killed Me in My Dream Was Your Mother

Her blue eyes had long since lost their former brightness. Only emptiness and numbness remained.

For three days, the man's cold words and that rusted badge had weighed on her soul like two mountains, making every breath feel suffocating.

The foundations of her faith were crumbling. The "glory" her family had guarded for a hundred generations had become a joke.

She did not know who she was, or where her future lay.

Just as her dazed mind was about to slip into sleep, a sharp agony exploded in her chest!

Brise shuddered and looked down in terror.

The nightmare had returned.

In endless darkness, a black feather carrying the cold presence of judgment over all things silently pierced her heart.

There was no gush of blood, only the emptiness of a soul being drawn out.

She could feel her life draining rapidly away. From the wound where the black feather had entered, a crystalline drop of blood slowly fell.

Where it landed, it did not splash. Instead, a white flower blossomed, so sacred that the sight made her heart tremble.

Its petals unfolded, layer upon layer. Within the golden center, a gentle, familiar face slowly appeared: her mother, the previous guardian of the divine vault, whom she had been told had "died of illness" thirty years earlier, exhausted in body and spirit after failing in her duty.

Her mother in the dream did not look at her. She only gazed sorrowfully at the black feather piercing her daughter's chest. Her lips moved, but no sound came.

"No..."

Brise jolted upright on the cold stone floor, her clothes soaked with cold sweat.

Her heart pounded as though trying to break out of the cage of her ribs.

Outside the ancestral hall, the night was deep and the sea wind mourned.

Through that deathly silence, an old, hoarse chanting voice drifted in, breaking off and starting again.

"...The first wing burned the sea of stars; its soul returned to the sanctuary... The second wing cut down chaos and perished in the demonic abyss... The fifth wing forsook the light and stained the divine throne with blood..."

The voice seemed to come from a distant age, every syllable carrying the dust of history.

Drawn by an impulse she could not explain, Brise stood and stumbled out of the ancestral hall, following it.

At the edge of the divine vault's ruins, Melantho—the blind historian her people called a "mad old woman"—sat alone by the cliff.

She held a withered branch, drawing strokes in the sand before her, one after another.

Beneath the moonlight, six deep feather marks lay side by side in the sand, each filled with sorrow and resolve.

"The sixth wing questioned the divine will... and from that moment, there was no road home."

Melantho drew the sixth feather mark and sighed deeply. Her withered hand stopped in midair. "For three hundred years, the forge has been cold. This seventh name still has not been written."

As though she had eyes in the back of her head, she slowly turned toward Brise. Her dull, gray-white eyes seemed able to see straight into a person's heart.

"Descendant of the guardians, are you still suffering over your family's 'curse'?" Her mouth opened in a mocking smile. "That is no curse, child. The temple's lies needed a watchdog. Nothing more. What you guard is not a divine artifact. It is their dignity."

"Silence, Melantho!"

A woman's sharp rebuke cracked like thunder. Golden divine light descended from the sky. With the Lasso of Truth in hand and frost on her face, Diana stepped in front of Brise and glared at the blind old woman.

"If so much as half a sentence of this leaves Themyscira, the divine fire of Olympus will burn you and your epic to ash!"

"Heh heh..." Melantho laughed, the dry sound grating in the night wind. "I have been blind for eighty years. I've lived in darkness for a long time. Your Highness, do you think... I am still afraid of fire?"

Meanwhile, a thousand miles away, in an underwater monastery deep in the North Atlantic.

Gideon hovered cross-legged at the center of a quiet chamber, his black fallen wings slowly folding behind him.

Before him floated a trace of energy drawn from the ley lines beneath Themyscira's divine vault, invisible to the naked eye.

It was the psychic echo left by the mingling of generations of guardians' bloodlines with the ley-line energy over hundreds of millions of years.

A faint thread of Silent Flame kindled at his fingertip and silently entered that trace of energy.

A ritual to strip memories from time had begun.

In an instant, Gideon's consciousness was drawn into a fragment of history made of light and shadow.

He "saw."

He saw the final moment of the sixth "Gideon," three hundred years earlier.

There had been no great rebellion. Nor had he died through a demon god's trickery.

Atop a magnificent temple, the sixth Gideon held a spear already half black and half gray. He pointed it not at an enemy, but at the divine throne high in the heavens.

"Judgment should serve truth, not order!" His challenge rang through the clouds.

No oracle answered him. Only a streak of golden light, impossibly fast.

Athena, goddess of wisdom and war, seized the other end of the spear herself. As the sixth Gideon stared in astonishment, she mercilessly drove it through his heart from behind.

"Foolish creation." Athena's voice was cold, without a trace of feeling.

In the final instant before the image shattered, Gideon clearly saw Athena turn to the Amazon queen, Hippolyta, at her side and whisper:

"Remember. Never let the seventh... awaken."

Gideon's eyes flew open. The last trace of history in his black gaze turned to pure coldness.

So that was it.

That night, Brise, curled in a corner of the ancestral hall, fell into another dream.

This time, there was no agony of a black feather piercing her heart.

She stood in emptiness, watching a single scene repeat before her: on the day her mother's life ended, she had not died peacefully of illness in her bed.

Two temple guards had pinned her down in a secret chamber of the temple.

There was no fear in her mother's eyes, only boundless sorrow and release.

Amid curses and struggling, a golden dagger symbolizing "cleansing" pierced her heart.

Just before flames consumed the body, Brise clearly saw her mother's hand clamped around a family badge, long since stained black with blood, bearing the design of an inverted cross.

At the end of the dream, Gideon's low, emotionless voice sounded deep in her soul.

"You say I am awakening a catastrophe? You're wrong."

"The ones who truly want to kill you to silence you are sleeping in the temple you revere day and night."

"Aah!"

Brise woke with a piercing scream, her entire body drenched in cold sweat.

Instinctively, she felt her palm. The cold badge was pressing against the bones of her hand.

Fear, betrayal, anger... Every emotion erupted at once!

She sprang up, rushed to the ancestral tablets in the hall, and tore down the scroll of guardianship vows handed down through her family, written in the blood of successive guardians.

Rrrip!

With a crisp tearing sound, a "mission" that had lasted thousands of years fell to pieces.

At Court of Shadows headquarters, Morris's hologram appeared before Gideon. His tone was grave. "Sir, Princess Diana has just submitted an emergency motion to the Olympian pantheon through Queen Hippolyta. She proposes that all records concerning the 'Spear of Hephaestus'—that is, Gideon's spear—be classified as the highest taboo and sealed away permanently."

A mocking smile curved Gideon's lips.

"Let her." He slowly rose and walked toward the enormous round porthole at the monastery's edge. "When a lie needs institutions and laws to keep it alive by force, it means... it is already close to death."

He raised his hand. A newly formed black feather, purer than the night, trembled faintly at his fingertips.

Beyond the porthole, on the distant sea, a Black Feather warship disguised as an ordinary fishing boat quietly raised a faint signal light.

It carried coordinates from Brise, sent by an ancient method of communication known only to the guardian family.

The camera slowly pulled back. In the darkness of the deep sea, a hidden path woven from black Silent Flame and crimson blood marks could be seen. Like a demon's veins, it had bypassed every sacred barrier around Themyscira and was silently spreading into the deepest foundations of the magnificent temple.

At the other end of Themyscira, deep inside the great forge that made weapons for the gods, the fire that never went out cast a young apprentice's silhouette into shifting light and shadow.