She Let Go of the Lasso

The lasso's light flickered faintly, like a dying person's last breath, then went completely still.

Forged by Hephaestus himself, woven from Aphrodite's girdle, and charged with the Olympians' authority over "truth," the artifact lay in Diana's hand like a cold, dead snake.

Three days.

Three days ago, before the oracle's cage, she had tried to call divine punishment down upon the mortal reporter Ella Chen. When she found she could not summon even a trace of the cage's divine power, some invisible decay had begun.

Today she could not even awaken the Lasso of Truth.

Gideon...

The fallen angel's name was branded into her mind like a wound that would not close.

His voice cut deeper than the vilest curse and echoed in her thoughts day and night.

"Diana, you say you refuse to kill because you want to preserve that precious shred of humanity in mortal hearts. But have you ever wondered whether the 'mercy' you keep showing real monsters is why one Steve Trevor after another has to die in your place?"

Boom!

Diana squeezed her eyes shut, but the darkness behind them was more hideous than anything she saw with them open.

The vision cut through her mental defenses once again with a surgeon's precision.

A bright beach. Children laughing and playing at a nursery, in what should have been one of Themyscira's most peaceful corners.

Then a madman with a deathly pale face, a gaping red grin, and an automatic rifle burst in, laughing.

The Joker.

That human monster she had sent to Arkham countless times, only to see him escape again and again and leave slaughter in his wake.

"Catch me if you can, beautiful!"

The children's screams tore through the air.

She charged with a roar. Divine power surged through her; one punch could have reduced his head to dust.

But the rule against killing bound her hands and feet like invisible chains.

She would subdue him. She would send him back to that absurd court.

In the instant she hesitated, the Joker cackled and aimed his gun at the nearest blond girl.

Bang!

Diana lunged, but her hands closed on empty air.

Warm blood stained the white sand.

"No!"

She jolted out of the vision, gasping, cold sweat soaking her sacred armor.

She looked at her trembling hands. They seemed stained with blood that had flowed because she hesitated, blood she could never wash away.

At the same time, Brise's heart pounded harder than storm waves in a hidden room in an unremarkable fishing village on Themyscira's edge.

She crouched in a damp cave. A faintly glowing shell lay before her.

It was her only link to the "outside."

A cold male voice, stripped of all emotion and passed through layer after layer of encryption, spoke clearly from the shell. It belonged to Morris, the Court of Shadows' intelligence chief.

"The target is showing signs of a crisis of faith. Begin phase two. Release volume three, section seven of The Lost Chronicle."

Brise shook despite herself.

The Lost Chronicle was a document successive queens had placed under the strictest prohibition. It recorded every "unflattering truth" erased from the official sacred canon.

And volume three, section seven... that was forbidden even among forbidden things.

She drew a breath and took a scroll wrapped in godskin from a crevice in the stone wall.

As she opened it, the stale smell of ten thousand sealed years rushed out.

With shaking hands, she carefully made a rubbing of one passage, inscribed in ancient Amazonian, onto specially prepared parchment.

"After the war against the Gigantes, Hephaestus was forced to forge the Spear of Destiny for Queen Hippolyta. In exchange, the queen swore a blood oath. The Amazons would enjoy perpetual youth, at this price: never question the 'truth' given to them by the gods."

They had surrendered the right to seek truth in return for a false immortality.

The words burned Brise's fingertips like a red-hot branding iron.

She knew this was tantamount to apostasy.

If discovered, she would be thrown into Tartarus, never to rise again.

But Ariadne's stubborn eyes came to mind, along with the craft apprentice's words: "If the gods never told the truth in the first place, we'll have to forge it ourselves!"

Brise clenched her teeth. She would not hesitate again.

She rolled up the parchment rubbing, hid it inside a hollow dried fish, and passed it quickly to a contact outside disguised as a fisherman.

His unremarkable boat was about to deliver the day's fish oil to the temple workshop.

Late that night, every lamp in the craft temple's forge burned bright.

Ariadne, hailed as a craftswoman seen once in a century, contemplated the rubbing that had reached her by a circuitous route.

"Never question the truth..." she murmured. Her eyes fell on a damaged design for the Spear of Destiny's case beside her.

Suddenly her pupils tightened.

Beside the case's intricate central mechanism was a tiny annotation, almost rubbed away. It used a craftsman's cipher older than ancient Amazonian: "anti-backstab clasp."

Anti... backstab?

The sacred canon plainly called the Spear of Destiny a purely defensive artifact, a symbol of the queen's resolve to protect her people.

Why would the case for a defensive weapon need a mechanism to prevent someone from stabbing its bearer in the back?

A chill rose along Ariadne's spine.

She ran to the archives in a frenzy and pulled out the casualty records of the queens who had ruled before.

The thick files celebrated their glorious deaths in battle.

But when she spread the autopsy reports of seven former queens who had supposedly "fallen" in battle—the diagrams of damaged armor that only a craftswoman would understand—side by side on the floor, she found a horrifying pattern.

Every fatal wound was in the back.

And the angle, depth, and shape of each wound matched the Spear of Destiny's point exactly.

They had not died in battle. Someone on their own side had killed them from behind with the artifact they trusted most.

Cold sweat soaked her back.

Their supposed heroic deaths had been lies told to hide one sordid political assassination after another.

This was how that vaunted immortality was "ended": remove one queen, install another, and make her guard the oath never to question.

Trust...

Ariadne staggered back against the cold wall.

She seized a charcoal pencil and wrote an angry, crooked line on the workshop wall with all her strength:

"Who gave you the right to demand our trust?"

The next morning, a distressed Diana toured the temple, seeking some peace in its familiar halls.

As she passed the workshop, she caught sight of the words on the wall.

They struck the wound in her crumbling faith like a poisoned knife.

She shuddered, and a nameless anger rose in her.

Blasphemy!

Instinctively, she stepped forward to erase the insolent sentence with divine power.

Her hand stopped a cun from the wall.

She could erase the writing, but not the question in her own heart.

At that moment, a youthful priestess stumbled to her knees, holding up a sheet of parchment in both hands—the very rubbing Ariadne had received.

"Your Highness... Princess..." Fear and excitement shook the priestess's voice. "The Lost Chronicle... it says... have we... have we been lied to all this time?"

"Insolence!"

"Heresy to corrupt the people! Seize this traitor bewitched by a demon!"

Several temple elders who had come at the disturbance were livid. They shouted and moved to seize the young priestess.

Diana slowly raised one hand and stopped them.

Her gaze went from the writing on the wall to the parchment in the priestess's hands, and finally to the lifeless golden lasso in her own palm.

Lies... assassinations... bargains...

The fragments joined in her mind to form a dark and brutal picture.

Themyscira's "perfection" had been built on an enormous lie from its very foundations.

And she, Diana Prince, Wonder Woman, had been that lie's most loyal and powerful defender.

The elders around her were still roaring that mortal corruption had shaken her divine nature.

Diana no longer heard them.

She stood for a long time, still as a statue turned to stone.

At last.

Slowly, she opened the hand that held the Lasso of Truth.

Clack.

For the first time, the golden cord that symbolized absolute truth and divine law was cast aside by its owner—not in battle, but by her own hand.

It slipped from Diana's palm onto the cold, hard marble steps with a sound at once sharp and heavy.

As if something had broken.

"Perhaps..."

Diana spoke at last. Her voice was quiet, but everyone present heard it.

"It shouldn't decide what I say anymore."

Far away, on Gotham's sea cliff, Gideon opened his eyes abruptly.

He had just felt an immense chain of belief connecting to Themyscira groan under the strain, then snap.

The shock wave of psychic energy was so vast that even the air around him rippled.

He had succeeded.

He had never set foot on the island, yet he had used ideas to bring down Olympus's strongest fortress from within.

Gideon drew out the last specially prepared obsidian tablet.

With silent black flame burning at his fingertip, he wrote the title The New Law: Preview of the Final Chapter, followed by a line that sounded like the last judgment:

"When gods fall silent, humanity hears its own voice."

He let the tablet fall into the bottomless sea below, where black waves swallowed it at once.

Days later, a team of deep-sea divers recovered it by chance from the depths of a trench.

To their astonishment, the stone was still warm after days in water ten thousand meters deep. It felt as though a heart beat inside it, as though it were still "growing."

From the airborne fortress, Morris reported over an encrypted line: "Sir, we've done it. Latest intelligence says twelve Amazon girls who have reached their coming-of-age ceremony have openly refused the Lasso of Truth's trial. Nothing like this has happened in three thousand years."

Gideon stood at the cliff's edge, his gaze crossing the rough sea toward the distant waters to the south.

"I didn't mean to overthrow a god..."

He murmured, a smile as cold as ice touching his mouth.

"I only... taught her how to doubt."

Wind came from Gotham carrying the fevered prayers of countless mortals newly awakened from numbness.

It smelled of the ashes of old beliefs and of soil where new fanaticism could take root.

The old gods demanded their worshipers' gold and blood.

The new order he was making would be built upon a different offering.

Gideon opened his palm. A wisp of black flame rose there, gathering into a gray-white speck like bone ash.

It was time for the lost sheep to receive their true "communion."