Gray Tongue's Spark

Gotham's morning lay beneath a thin, cold fog that smelled of rust and despair.

The exit of the abandoned Central subway station on the East Side, once a forgotten corner, had become the hottest center of the city.

Gray Tongue crouched before the enormous painted wall and carefully lit a rough white candle.

Its yellow flame flickered across the entire text of The New Law, the words on the wall repeatedly darkened with red paint until they looked drawn in blood.

Yesterday's rubbish and filth were gone from the foot of the wall. Every sort of "offering" lay piled there.

Rusty blades stood for suppressed violence. Yellowing suicide notes carried grievances never put right. Several pairs of police handcuffs, wrenched apart by force, curled coldly in a corner like the remains of dead beetles.

For Gotham's poorest, the wall had become a sacred place to weep.

Gray Tongue drew a deep breath of cold air. Without turning, he preached to the words on the wall and the silent crowd behind him, his rough voice startlingly clear.

"You keep calling him a demon, a tyrant..." His thin fingers brushed the candle flame without burning. "Tell me, who decided a savior has to arrive clothed in blinding light? If the light offers only false mercy, then we'd rather embrace the darkness that brings final judgment!"

A hidden miniature camera captured the entire scene from a corner of the crowd.

Its feed went to no public network. After thirty-seven intricate encrypted hops, it flowed like a ghost signal directly into the Court of Shadows' private dark web.

Inside the airborne fortress, torrents of data refreshed before Morris on a screen of light.

"Sir," he said with his usual composure, though he could not conceal his surprise, "global searches for 'the Awakened Tyrant' have risen forty-eight hundred percent in the past six hours. Intelligence we intercepted shows that even the joint Star City patrol stationed in the rainforest along the Amazon border is circulating Gray Tongue's sayings privately over encrypted channels."

On Gotham's sea cliff, Gideon stood upon a natural altar. The gale around him could not stir a corner of his robe.

In his hand, silent black flame slowly drew a three-dimensional star chart.

Three points shone especially bright: Gotham, the origin of chaos; Themyscira, seat of the old divine order; and Metropolis, the pinnacle of human heroism.

At the center of the great triangle they formed, a faint but stubborn light flickered: the graffiti wall where Gray Tongue stood.

"It isn't the words I wrote that frighten them." Gideon's gaze seemed to cross the intervening distance and settle on the little candle flame. "They're frightened because I made the ordinary people they treat like insects dare to read, dare to think, dare to question the 'right' answers they've built over thousands of years."

He touched the air with a fingertip.

A black flame finer than a hair separated from it. Instead of falling into the sea, it flew against the wind, crossed Gotham in an instant, and silently wound itself around the cold iron chain at Gray Tongue's neck.

Hummm.

Gray Tongue's frail body jerked.

Deep in his pupils glimmered a faint light that did not belong to any mortal.

Broken images and whispers burst through his confused memories like a breached dam: the last voices of seven successive angels of judgment across seven epochs, each banished from heaven and stripped of divinity, their final words thick with grievance and curses.

For the first time, noon sunlight broke through Gotham's heavy clouds. It seemed unnaturally harsh.

Gray Tongue climbed the long steps outside Gotham's Supreme Court, abandoned for years. Hundreds of fervent citizens had gathered below of their own accord.

His voice was no longer rough. It carried an uncanny frequency that seemed to beat with the crowd's hearts, like an ancient bell.

"Will you put me on trial? Will you judge me for spreading the words of a 'tyrant'?" He opened his arms as if to embrace the world. "Then do it! But remember this: every judge in history was once a silent accomplice while a crime was being committed!"

"Raaah!"

The crowd answered with a roar. His challenge unlocked guilt and anger they had hidden even from themselves.

Among the reporters, Ella Chen gripped her phone so hard that sweat soaked her palm.

She replayed a segment of encrypted video she had taken from Diana's office the previous night. In it, Wonder Woman ordered her personal guard to destroy all evidence of a failed coup within the Amazons, in a tone that permitted no objection. Her stated reason: "to preserve Themyscira's perfect image."

That cold command struck an uncanny, bitter chord with Gray Tongue's words.

At last, Ella stopped hesitating. Her trembling finger pressed Send.

A copy went up through an untraceable anonymous channel. Its title was a single word: Perfection.

"Sir!"

For the first time, Morris looked hurried as he strode into the tower's core. "Emergency! Two inmates sentenced to life at Arkham Asylum set themselves on fire at the same time. They wrote their last words on their cell walls in their own blood: 'We deserve to die!'"

"And the United Nations Human Rights Council has issued an emergency summons to the Wayne Foundation. They want Bruce Wayne himself to explain why the sealed global surveillance project 'Mirror Eye' shows signs of restarting its data systems!"

Gideon slowly closed his eyes.

In an instant, furious obsessions rolled toward him from every corner of the city: criminals' dying remorse, the hatred victims' families had suppressed for years, ordinary citizens' anger as they woke from numbness, and the terror of hero worshipers whose faith was collapsing.

Those tangled, chaotic, intensely real forces wove a web of consciousness across the globe.

He opened his eyes. Stars seemed to rise and die within their dark depths.

He drew out another blank obsidian tablet and wrote three ancient divine characters with the silent flame at his fingertip:

"The Herald."

No publication. No proclamation.

He let the tablet fall into a crack in the rock below the cliff, where the churning sea swallowed it at once.

The true spark was no longer in his hand.

It had begun to spread like wildfire through millions of hearts.

Late that night, Gray Tongue returned alone to the space beneath the bridge where he slept.

He sank wearily to the ground and froze. A discarded charcoal pencil rose of its own accord and began racing across the rough wall as though guided by an invisible hand.

Large words took shape: "When gods refuse to judge, humanity becomes the court of last resort."

Gray Tongue stared and reached out, shaking, to touch the writing.

The instant his fingertips met the wall, a small, startlingly pure black flame seeped from them and merged with the letters.

He was no longer merely a mouthpiece.

Far out on the dark sea, Gideon stood on a solitary rock. Black fallen feathers stirred behind him without a breath of wind.

He watched the little light beneath the bridge from afar, a cold smile touching his lips.

"You call me a tyrant?"

"No..."

He whispered as though answering someone very far away.

"I only... lit a pile of kindling that was already bone-dry."

As he spoke, a black feather slipped from behind him. It did not fall into the sea. It became a streak of light too fast for the eye to follow and shot toward Washington.

The next wave was already seeping into the seat of power.

Yet while a storm of ideas overturned the mortal world, on the eve of another upheaval at the table of power, something was also beginning to loosen on the unchanging island beyond distant space and time.

Themyscira, in the innermost temple of the Olympian pantheon.

Diana Prince sat alone upon an empty sacred dais. In her immaculate palm lay the golden lasso that had once stood for absolute truth and divine law. The light coursing through it had never been so dim.