Only the Blind Can See

As her fingertips brushed the crack between the stone steps, something pricked her skin like the point of an unseen, icy needle.

Maya jerked her hand back in pain. A hair-thin dark trace was fading in the crack, as though it had never been there.

What was that? The afterimage of a feather?

The thought had barely formed when an indescribable chill raced from her fingertips through her whole body like a venomous snake.

The world before her twisted and drained of color.

The cellar's cold, bloody, sulfurous smell vanished. In its place stretched a boundless white space made of light and order.

A child—herself, no, another "herself"—knelt in the middle of an execution ground built from crystals of holy light.

Before her, a boy just as young, with a fall of golden hair and eyes colder than an ancient glacier, pressed the judgment button with his own hand.

A beam of purifying light descended and dissolved an angel guilty of rebellion into the most basic aether.

No pity. No hesitation. Only absolute, cold execution.

"Why... why didn't you let him repent?" the young "she" asked, shaking.

The boy did not turn. His childish voice carried unquestionable authority. "Repentance is how the weak comfort themselves. Judgment is the only respect we can show the crime itself."

The vision shattered.

Maya's pupils lost their focus. Her eyes rolled upward and filled entirely with an eerie milky white.

She opened her mouth, but the sound that emerged was not her voice. It was an ancient, rasping utterance, as if it came from time's beginning.

"When the six wings close their eyes, the blade is born from the heart."

As the words ended, her body went limp. She fell backward like a puppet with cut strings. Her bucket clattered away, and clean water spread through the blood on the floor.

Three days later, in the Court of Shadows' secret underground medical center.

Maya woke from her coma to a world of darkness.

"I... I can't see..." She reached blindly into the air, grasping at nothing, terror in her voice.

Her eyes had turned entirely lifeless and milky white.

Behind a one-way observation window, Morris reported gravely. "Sir, we've questioned her as thoroughly as possible, including psychic suggestion and memory reading. We found nothing. She knows nothing of that memory, as if she were a recording device playing something back. Yet since waking, she can describe every detail of the first 'divine punishment' you carried out at the sixth execution ground of the Highest Heaven—including your hair ornament and what you said about repentance. Those are secrets that may not even exist in heaven's archives."

Gideon stood silently in the shadows, staring through the glass at the helpless girl curled on the bed.

At last, he understood.

Every time he used his fallen feathers like a living nerve network to extend his will, he left imperceptible "cognitive residue" in the physical world.

It consisted of fragments of pure thought stripped from the essence of his divinity.

A mortal who touched it might as well expose ordinary flesh directly to nuclear radiation.

It contaminated and eroded them, carving memories that were not theirs into their minds until they became involuntary projections of his past.

His very existence was a source of contamination.

"Interesting, isn't it?"

An irreverent voice came from the corridor's far end. Constantine had appeared against the wall, smoking at his leisure as though this were his own back garden.

"Your feathers aren't just weapons anymore. They're living vessels for belief. Touch one, go mad. Hear one, believe. If Gotham fills up with lunatics telling strangers 'judgment above all,' I won't be surprised."

He flicked ash from his cigarette and came closer, lowering his voice. "But take my advice, mate. This isn't a curse. It's evolution. The forbidden books in Hell's library say that when the 'seed of judgment' nears awakening, it projects 'fragments of godhood' uncontrollably. You aren't merely influencing people. You're remaking them into the first 'saints' of your divine kingdom."

Constantine grinned through nicotine-stained teeth. "The question is, can you control it? Or are you one piece of a larger will's design, a piece that doesn't even know where it fits?"

Gideon ignored the taunt and entered his laboratory.

He took out the lead tube holding the altered feather, which still pulsed faintly.

If he could not control it, he would use it.

He closed his eyes and sank his awareness into the feather. This time, rather than scan a wide area, he tried deliberately releasing a very faint, tightly directed current of thought.

His target was a villa on Gotham's Upper East Side.

Its owner was a prominent lawyer. The previous week, his brilliant legal work had secured an acquittal for a wealthy young man who had committed three serial torture-murders.

Under Gideon's will, a black thread finer than spider silk seeped from the feather in its lead tube. It passed silently through the wall, slipped into the city's underground pipes like a ghost, and finally entered the lawyer's house through a window crack.

Minutes later, a heart-rending scream tore through the quiet neighborhood.

Morris came over the encrypted line immediately, unable to hide his astonishment. "Sir... the target has broken down. He's on his knees, tearing at his hair and repeating the dying words of one of the victims. Surveillance shows he's called Gotham Police himself. He intends to confess to every charge of sheltering that killer and fabricating evidence!"

Gideon opened his eyes slowly. He could sense the feather in the lead tube withering before his eyes, its inner life draining away.

"I see," he murmured. "It doesn't create miracles from nothing. It lives by consuming my divinity."

Every judgment cost him a little of himself.

At midnight, a small figure in a black cloak appeared beneath a bridge on the banks of the Gotham River.

He looked fourteen or fifteen at most, but beneath his hood his face had no pupils, only two pools of pure darkness where his eyes should be.

"I've waited a long time for you." The boy's voice was clear as mountain water, in sharp contrast with his uncanny appearance.

He called himself the Raven Speaker, a born medium who could hear the dead whisper and the future echo.

"You belong neither to heaven nor to hell." The Raven Speaker watched Gideon calmly, as though he could see through the disguise of a fallen angel to what lay beneath. "You are an 'unfinished god,' a verdict nailed into a crack in time."

From beneath his cloak he offered a palm-sized tortoise shell, charred black. A sharp tool had carved an image into it: the very throne of lava Gideon had seen in his dreams.

"They erased your name and destroyed your records. But they forgot one thing..." The boy placed the shell on the ground and stepped back into shadow. "A true judge never needs to be named."

Then his body became a hundred black ravens. They scattered with a clamor of harsh cries and disappeared into Gotham's night.

Gideon returned to the sea-cliff tower and set the tortoise shell down.

The black flame of judgment at his fingertip did not touch it. It hovered above, tracing the shell's lines with silent energy.

With a sharp crack, the charred outer layers fell away. Inside lay a smooth white plate of bone.

The throne on the bone lit up and projected a flowing, three-dimensional memory.

Gideon himself stood beneath an immense starry sky, holding a great blade forged from fragments of stars.

Before him, seven colossal divine figures knelt in abjection.

One wore a crown of lightning and a commanding expression: Zeus, king of the Olympian gods, unimaginably younger than he was now.

"For the crime of blasphemy, I sentence you all to..."

The image cut off.

Gideon spun around. An immense resonance unlike anything he had felt before came from outside.

He went to the floor-to-ceiling window and looked down at the sea.

Dozens of fishing boats, large and small, had gathered there without his noticing.

Every light was off. In the silent night they had arranged themselves into an immense, elaborate pattern: the structure of the lost altar painted on the three-hundred-year-old mural.

In the small boat at the front, at the formation's center, a frail girl lifted her head to "look" toward the tower.

Maya.

Starlight reflected in her milky, sightless eyes.

Her lips moved without sound, as though she were speaking with someone far away—or answering the figure in the tower who had just glimpsed his astonishing past.

Already his power was unconsciously commanding mortals to build a rite to welcome his "true self" home.

Gideon tightened his fist. The fallen brand in his palm burned painfully, and uncontrolled wisps of black flame leaked between his fingers and leapt there.

"If I'm only an experiment..."

He surveyed the magnificent, dreadful pattern on the sea, his voice cold enough to freeze a soul.

"Then I'll destroy the whole laboratory."

He needed answers and power. More than either, he needed a disguise that would free him for a time from the invisible web.

An identity that would let him study human nature up close without drawing the attention of any supernatural being.

Gideon turned to a holographic map of Gotham. His gaze settled on a bright red cross.

It was time to see the world he had "contaminated" from another angle.