152 - DC: Gotham Under Judgment (Patreon)

Chapter 152 - A Traitor's Heartbeat in the Temple

Moonlight spilled like mercury over Conch Village, a secret harbor on Themyscira's outskirts, coating it in a cold, still gleam.

The sea wind carried salt, fish, and dampness, yet could not drive away the sharper chill that had come from the distant north.

Brise stopped mending her fishing net. The slender fingers that had once held the sacred library's texts now threaded tough hemp through the mesh with the practiced ease of an ordinary fisherman's daughter.

But when a black feather drifted silently into the sea breeze and dissolved three cun from her palm into a barely visible mark of black flame, a ripple finally stirred in her otherwise impassive eyes.

"It's time," she murmured, almost as if speaking to the tide.

She rose, hung the net back on the wall, and walked steadily toward a workshop deep in the village, where a faint oil lamp burned.

Inside, a young woman named Ariadne sat frowning over an unfinished design for a spear case.

She was the most gifted craft apprentice of her generation, yet she had been told that her destiny was to copy and polish the same weapons, unchanged for thousands of years, to defend an "eternity" she had never truly understood.

"Sister Brise." Ariadne set down her tools when she saw her, affection and confusion mingling in her eyes.

Brise said little. She drew a smooth white shell from her clothing and handed it over.

Moonlight entered through the door and revealed hair-fine fragments of ancient Hebrew burned into the shell's inner surface by some unusual method.

"What is this?" Ariadne took it curiously. A strange warmth lingered in the lettering beneath her fingertips.

"This isn't betrayal," Brise said so softly that the wind might have broken her voice. "It's restitution. Returning the price that was always ours to know, the price they erased from the history books."

The girl's heart jolted. She gripped the shell and nodded hard.

That night, Ariadne locked herself in a corner of the workshop.

By the oil lamp's weak light, she compared the words on the shell, character by character and line by line, with rubbings of the temple's hidden texts.

The longer she checked, the paler she grew, and the faster she breathed.

Seven discrepancies!

Seven crucial records contradicted the fragment of The New Law etched on the shell.

The account of how the Amazons gained immortality chilled her most.

The sacred canon said Queen Hippolyta had received it as a divine blessing in answer to her devout prayers.

The shell recorded a bargain instead: they surrendered "the power to reproduce" and "the freedom of the soul to choose" in exchange for bodies that would never age, granted by the Olympian gods.

They had not been blessed. They had been kept!

Ariadne felt the room spin. She dared not speak, while terror and anger at the deception nearly tore her thoughts apart.

Shaking, she seized a charcoal pencil and wrote a crooked line on the back of the spear-case design she had studied countless times, pressing down with all her strength:

"If the gods won't tell the truth, we must forge it ourselves."

At the same time, thousands of kilometers away in Washington.

Ella Chen's apartment lay silent. Only her laptop screen lit her pale, conflicted face.

She had replayed the debate dozens of times, pausing each time at the instant Gideon spoke those words.

"You can't persuade me because I'm telling the truth."

Those abyssal eyes seemed to pierce the screen and look straight into the most hidden part of her soul.

Ella's fingers went cold. Without thinking, she brought up a backup of a video file she herself had encrypted and destroyed.

The image showed her mistress, Diana Prince, commanding the "information control department" to bury records of the "collateral damage" in a small country's coup: more than a hundred innocent civilians killed because of Amazon intervention.

She had always told herself that she was protecting the goddess's reputation and preserving the purity of the symbol called "hero."

Now Gideon's words cut through that comforting lie with a surgeon's precision.

She suddenly understood that she had not been protecting her mistress. She had been helping Diana evade the responsibility and guilt that were hers to bear.

At three in the morning, the city slept.

The last trace of doubt left Ella Chen's eyes.

She made a complete copy of the encrypted hard drive that held the truth, then drove to a cemetery outside the city.

Behind her mother's headstone, she pried open a discreet compartment and buried the little drive there, along with all her faith in the word "hero."

In the Court of Shadows' airborne fortress, streams of data refreshed before Morris like waterfalls.

Through the worldwide "black-feather fishing boats" network Gideon had established, Morris intercepted and decoded several encrypted messages from inside Themyscira.

"Sir, new fractures in belief have appeared within the target," Morris reported in his usual even voice, though a hint of excitement escaped it.

"Four young Amazon warriors secretly made rubbings of ancient temple tablets. They're trying to translate fragments of ancient Hebrew that they've been forbidden to interpret."

"Two senior priestesses publicly questioned the Lasso of Truth's infallibility for the first time at last night's closed meeting. Their exact words were: 'If the oracle itself is a lie, are the things we say still the truth?'"

Morris turned toward Gideon, who stood before the obsidian altar, and handed him a concise report titled Assessment of Fractures in Faith.

"Sir, the seed of doubt you planted has put down roots on its own."

Gideon did not turn. Silent black flame kindled again in his hand and traced fresh words above his fingertips.

This time, they formed The New Law: Chapter Three.

"Words can be forged. Memories can be erased. Only pain cannot lie."

Instead of branding the words into stone as he had before, he poured the thought that carried the law into a strand of monsoon wind blowing past the sea cliff.

Invisible among countless other currents, that strand followed the natural course of the air and drifted slowly west toward distant Themyscira.

Three days later, an Amazon girl meditating by the sea on Themyscira suddenly began to cry without warning.

She curled up on the ground, trembling violently, and murmured the law she had never heard before, each word unnervingly clear.

When she emerged from the strange state, she told everyone in terror that she had "heard a voice from another world."

The temple's leaders were furious. They promptly declared that an evil spirit had afflicted her and placed her in isolation.

What they could not explain was that, over the next two days, every child in the village saw the same vision and heard the same words in their dreams.

Panic spread like a plague beneath the foundations of "eternity."

Brise knew the moment had come.

Taking advantage of a delivery of ritual supplies, she risked slipping into the archive tower at the heart of the temple.

At an unnoticed ventilation shaft, she scattered dozens of tiny black feathers she had prepared and specially treated.

Each feather was as light as dust. The instant it landed, it burned away without a sound, leaving a pinch of ash that formed a sentence across the polished stone floor:

"What you've read is only what they wanted you to know."

Sentence after sentence, line after line, spread through every corner of the archive tower like accusations from the dead.

The next morning, the guards discovered the apparition in terror. Then, with a mechanical groan that made their teeth ache, the cabinet at the center of the tower—the one said to hold the oldest scrolls and to open only for the queen—slowly opened by itself.

Inside was no glittering holy relic. There was only The Lost Chronicle, a book whose cover had long since decayed and whose existence had never been entered in any catalog.

Gotham. The sea cliff.

Gideon gazed toward Themyscira. The sea wind stirred the hem of his black clothing, making him look like a statue absorbed into the night.

He sensed the slight but irreversible collapse beginning in the sacred island's power of faith.

A cold curve touched his lips as he said softly,

"I don't need to conquer a city. Once they begin to doubt, divine authority is dead."

At the other end of the world, satellites picked up both the strange sight of Gotham "purifying itself" and increasingly frequent fluctuations in Themyscira's magical barrier. An unprecedented storm of ideas was gathering across the globe.

Mainstream headlines no longer celebrated another city saved by superheroes. They raised a succession of pointed questions instead.

Countless people joined fierce online arguments that began with Gideon's challenge to Batman and widened into scrutiny of the entire Justice League's code of conduct.

As old authorities shook and the heroes' silence came to look like evasion, ordinary people everywhere felt a deep uncertainty and loss of safety.

In a leading television studio in New York, lighting technicians made their final adjustments.

A stark title slowly appeared on the enormous screen behind the set. Simple and forceful, it went straight to the heart of the age's turmoil.

Outside the studio, an award-winning producer took a breath over the finalized live broadcast agenda and told an assistant, "Tell every guest joining remotely: the feed goes out worldwide. We cannot be one second late. This will be... an hour that changes the world."

A woman's name and photograph lit up on the screen. Her expression was confident and sharp, as if she meant to tear away every disguise.

Behind the coming global forum, countless people waited for an answer.

When the old gods fell into dust and no new gods had yet been born, to whom were mortals on their knees supposed to pray?