Chapter 147 Do Not Burn the Books, I Will Give You True Scripture

The blazing furnace breathed orange-red light, casting enormous, twisted shadows on the cold walls.

Ariadne, a craft apprentice, crouched in a corner piled with discarded molds. She deliberately kept even her breathing soft, afraid the night patrol would discover her.

Before her lay a parchment rubbing she had secretly made in the archive room: an ancient plan for the case accompanying the Spear of Hephaestus, its intricate spells and mechanisms dizzying to look at.

With a small carving knife, she carefully reproduced every detail of the plan on a hard block of ironwood.

This was more than imitation. It was blasphemy.

Apprentices like her had been told that objects made by gods must not be probed, much less copied.

But ever since Brise's family had been branded cursed traitors, a seed called doubt had been growing wildly in Ariadne's heart.

If the gods were just, why had the guardian family met such a miserable fate?

If divine law was perfect, why did the truth have to be buried beneath so many layers?

As she concentrated, a barely perceptible sound of something cutting through the air came from the gap in the window.

Whoosh.

Ariadne went rigid and snapped her head up.

A feather blacker than the night itself had silently embedded itself in the pile of wood shavings before her.

Before she could react, the feather ignited without an external flame, sending up a cold black fire that gave off no heat at all.

The fire did not spread. Instead, it formed a clear line of text in the common tongue in midair:

"The true weapon lies not in what a god has made, but in the hands that dare to forge it anew."

The words lingered for three seconds, then dissolved into smoke as though they had never existed.

Ariadne's heart raced. She looked out the window in astonishment.

A familiar figure flashed through the shadows of the distant reefs—Brise!

She was pressing a roll of stonebark sealed with wax into the hands of a man disguised as a fisherman.

The man accepted the roll without a wasted word, quickly took to his oars, and vanished into the vast darkness.

He was... a messenger to the outside world!

Ariadne understood at once. Brise had not surrendered. She had chosen another path.

And that black feather, that maxim, had come from the legendary fallen angel who had thrown all of Themyscira into turmoil.

She drew a deep breath. Hesitating no longer, she tightened her grip on the carving knife.

At the same moment, at a cliffside altar ten thousand meters in the air beyond Themyscira, Gideon stood suspended in the sky. The sea wind stirred his black fallen feathers but could not dispel the ancient frost in his eyes.

He no longer stripped away those shattered echoes of memory.

Obtaining the truth was only the first step. Now he intended to write it.

A mass of highly compressed Silent Flame formed and spun in his palm, radiating a chill cold enough to freeze the soul.

He raised his hand, using the sky as paper and Silent Flame as his pen.

The fire danced and traced lines in the air. Words imbued with a burning sense of reality appeared from nothing, forming an unprecedented forbidden epic: Chronicle of the Judge's Reincarnations.

"The first Gideon was created to quell the war of divinities at the dawn of chaos. After the war, his soul returned to the sanctuary, and his achievements were erased."

"The second Gideon was forged to hunt fugitive Titans. When his task was complete, he perished in the demonic abyss, and his existence was forgotten."

"The fifth Gideon was ordered to suppress schismatics within Heaven. Tainted by heretical thought, he forsook the light and stained the divine throne with blood. His name became forbidden."

The flames continued writing, exposing deeper secrets.

How Hephaestus, god of the forge, had tearfully fashioned this Godslayer's Spear under Zeus's coercion. How Hippolyta, the first Amazon queen, had struck a bargain with the heavenly realm, exchanging eternal guardianship of a prison for her people's nearly everlasting life and youth...

Every word seemed to be a wronged soul crying out. Every sentence was a knife thrust at the splendid facade of Olympian divine rule.

Gideon regarded the history he had written with his own hands, his face expressionless, and waved a hand.

Three specially treated obsidian tablets, prepared in advance, appeared from the void.

As though drawn by a force, the fiery words filling the sky rushed down and burned themselves into the tablets, hissing faintly like living things.

When every word had been inscribed, he extended a finger and used the purest dark energy to carve the same sentence at the end of each tablet:

"What you have read is my erased life. You will write the chapters that follow."

The next morning, Themyscira erupted.

Three identical black tablets descended like divine punishment upon three conspicuous locations.

One stood embedded in the very center of the Amazon recruits' training ground. The young warrior who first discovered it was so startled by its burning words that she dropped her weapon.

One floated quietly above the sacred spring used for offerings, and low-ranking priestesses who had risen early to pray retrieved it in terror.

The last, and most brazen, was lodged directly in a great crack in the outer wall of the Olympian temple, as though mocking the building's precarious state.

Panic and unrest spread like a plague.

Inside the temple, the older elders and priestesses looked livid. They shouted themselves hoarse, demanding that divine fire immediately destroy these blasphemous lies.

Outside, however, more and more young warriors and apprentices gathered before the tablets, ignoring the ban and eagerly competing to read every word.

Those long-buried, bloody truths struck like a hammer, shattering the faith they had built since childhood.

Through the crowd hobbled Echo, the old servant who could only repeat the last words of the dead, leaning on her cane.

She stopped beside the tablet in front of the temple, her clouded eyes "looking" at the impassioned young faces.

Suddenly, her shriveled lips moved.

This time, she did not murmur, "Do not trust the feathers." Instead, with a clarity her voice had not possessed in decades, she said something entirely new:

"Books should be burned. But this fire... should not be theirs to light."

Instantly, everyone fell silent.

Every gaze focused on the forgotten old woman.

Even the elders clamoring to set the fire were stunned.

On the raised platform, Diana held the Lasso of Truth. Golden divine power surged around her, yet she did not bring it down.

She looked at the tablet's searing lines, then at the young faces below, angry, confused, or resolute.

Deep in the North Atlantic, in the underwater monastery.

Morris's hologram flickered. He could barely keep a trace of excitement out of his voice. "Sir, the plan was carried out perfectly. Seventeen forging apprentices and four low-ranking priestesses have already established preliminary contact through the Black Feather fishing boats. Ariadne, a craft apprentice, has just submitted a privately drawn design for an improved spear case. In one corner, she wrote a small note in ancient Amazonian: 'Protects against a stab in the back.'"

Gideon nodded calmly. He had anticipated this outcome.

Once planted, a virus of thought spread faster than any plague.

He walked to the porthole and slowly released the last blank obsidian tablet into the deep sea.

"Sir, what is this?" Morris asked, puzzled.

Gideon did not answer.

He extended his hand. A wisp of Silent Flame streamed from his fingertip, following the sinking tablet and racing over its surface.

As the fire gradually went out, a new title appeared clearly on the stone—

The New Law: Chapter One.

Gideon watched the tablet carrying the future sink into darkness. A cold smile touched his lips as he spoke softly:

"They think burning every book that records lies will let them preserve the truth?"

"Naive."

"True scripture has always been written in blood."

As though understanding him, the sea wind lifted a black feather from his shoulder. Riding the currents, it flew toward distant Themyscira's heartland.

It passed over the clamoring crowds and the silent temple, finally drifting down onto the wall where Selene, a girl who was now sleepwalking, drew each day.

As always, the wall bore a pattern of six surrounding wings.

This time, however, at the center where the feather landed, there was no longer a spear representing divine punishment and fate.

There was a blade... being hammered again and again in a forge, slowly taking shape.

Meanwhile, thousands of kilometers away, on another continent, in a city long forgotten by the world, sin and despair were performing a drama whose curtain never fell.

A pale shaft of moonlight passed through a vast hole in the dome of an abandoned opera house, falling obliquely across a worn stage covered in dust and cobwebs, as though waiting for a protagonist long overdue to return.