Falling.
Falling.
Falling.
Bane could feel himself falling again. Slowly drifting downwards as the thunderous echoes of the massive catastrophe reverberated through his extremities.
A grand formless expanse stretched out to the inky black infinite. Cosmic spiraling pillars shone with bright undulating light as they rose, fell, and shifted like the ever-changing tides of a darkened sea.
Fragments of what looked like black glass rained down, spinning end over end, as the dazzling sparkle of the cosmos reflected off their glossy surfaces.
What is this? How many times have I...
Bane's mind slipped back again. Digging up buried moments, revisiting past mistakes, he relived the long ago as—The void tightened around him.
His consciousness ebbed, flowed, and faded as wave after wave of painful memories washed over his mind. Long-forgotten sufferings and the days he tried desperately to forget dominated his thoughts, as The void tightened around him.
Time seemed to have no sway here. One moment he was a child huddling by a fire on that cluttered street in the eastern district as the rain poured down, the next he was old and tired as he stood atop the tallest skyscraper in Light City.
Manufactured high rises, looming corporate offices, and neon-gilded apartments rose up from the dimly lit streets.
The sparkles of advertisements and the artificial glow of View Screens polluted the air, causing the raindrops to sparkle and shine with a symphony of synthetic light and color as they drenched the maze of alleyways below.
Peering over the edge Bane watched the denizens of the once-great city going about their daily lives.
Mothers and fathers shielded their children from the downpour as their own clothes soaked through, a delivery man, running behind schedule, dashed across the sidewalk in a desperate attempt to earn a few extra credits, an old man with an archaic cane struggled to cross the street as a tech-rat checked the latest news.
From this distance, the corruption, the smog, and the litter seemed almost manageable. As if the war was...
Bane’s eyes darted as something moved in the corner of his vision. Bending down he examined the small pool of rainwater that had collected at his feet.
A blurry face stared back at him in the reflection, distorted and twisted by the raindrops that agitated the water's surface. He could hardly recognize himself.
No, there was something not quite right about it…
Rubbing his eyes he took another look only to realize that it wasn’t his face shown in the reflection. It was an amalgamation of many different faces. A myriad of familiar faces—the same faces he’d seen each time he’d closed his eyes.
Tearing his eyes away he peered over the edge and saw them all. Down below thousands of men, women, and children were clinging to the side of the building.
Mouths agape with horrible screams as they dug their nails into the concrete pillars and clambered along the walls like tormented spiders. Hand over hand, they crawled their way toward him. The walls were alive with creeping limbs, twisted hands, and mangled arms that were reaching out to grab his legs and pull him down into the heart of the hoard.
[https://i.ibb.co/dMsdcSg/scary-scene-01.png]
“Help us!
HELP US!
HeLP Uš!”
He could hear their screams! He could feel them getting closer and closer—Ascending—Ascending until they were almost on top of him!
He closed his eyes as the void tightened around him.
Falling.
Falling.
Falling.
He felt the tattered remains of his armor flap at his side as he…
Fell.
Fell.
Fell.
Splash!
A stinging coldness wrapped around his body, bringing his aching pain into sharp focus. His limp arms stretched out in front of him as the waves folded in and the waters swallowed him whole.
Deeper and deeper he sank beneath the waves. His eyes grew dimmer and dimmer the further he descended allowing the ominous darkness to creep in from the corners of his vision.
Soon darkness was all he could see; save for a faint glow—a lone thin thread of shining light that streamed down refracting through the clear waters.
All he had to do was close his eyes, relax, and give in to the dying of the light.
Down.
Down.
Down.
He sank further and further until his scared back rested on the bottom of the lake.
He was finally at peace. But that peace lasted only for a moment.
“Do you choose to die?” a serene, almost synthetic voice called out from the void.
Bane responded by screwing his eyes shut, trying to block out what little remained of the light.
“Do you choose to die?” The voice insisted.
Irritated and resentful, Bane remained silent for a long time. But soon it became painfully clear that a response was his only path forward. The only way out of limbo.
Reaching out with his mind he sensed the cloudy edges of a presence. But it was like nothing he had experienced before.
“Isn’t death supposed to be peaceful? — restful even? Or did I screw that up too?” He thought, still refusing to speak.
There was a long silence. And for a moment he thought he was truly alone. Truly at peace. But then the voice called out again. Louder and closer this time.
“Death... peaceful?” It mocked, “Who ever told you death would be peaceful? Death is meaningless, pointless —dull. Death is the easy way out. A coward's shortcut. The path reserved for those too weak to fight.”
“Fight? I’ve been fighting all my life,” Bane countered, “If death is pointless what has my life been all these years?
If I can’t… What am I Doing? Why am I even talking to you? Whoever you are?”—Bane didn’t know what was happening—” would you just let me die in peace? Or are you planning on taking that from me also?”
Bane always knew his death would be an unusual experience. He’d been surrounded by death his entire life, molded by it. Death was part of who and what he was.
***
—12 September 2088.
The night was cold and the air damp with rain. The chaotic mazes Light City called streets were crowded for the holiday. And even with a million unblinking eyes watching sentinel over the city, not a soul was the wiser of a plot that had been brewing for months. Or at least, no one bothered to stop it.
Security at the rundown and overcrowded apartment complex 221-B had always been lax. The staff didn’t take their jobs seriously and even if they did, they weren’t paid enough to take a bullet.
Not that it would have mattered either way. On this particular night, a handful of credits, a handshake, and agreed silence had given the chronically underpaid guards a well-deserved night off.
“We all set?” One of the men asked as he kept lookout down the narrow hallway.
“Thirty seconds and we’re plat…”—The woman adjusted a dial before slowly lowering the metal cover onto the circular device. The red blinking let he know it was primed and ready.—“That should do it! Once we’re clear, it's fireworks!”
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The man rubbed his hands together and practically jumped for joy. “Nobody’s gonna wanna watch the parade once they get a load of this!”
“Go big or go home!”— She lit a digital cigarette and breathed deeply—“Those corps with think twice before building in Prarie Boy territory after this.”
Ten minutes later the first fires in the basement broke out. A few seconds later there was fire on floors ten, twenty and forty. It wasn’t until an explosion rocked the sixtieth floor that the alarms began to sound off.
“Evacuate! Evacuate!” The robotic voice shouted over the PA system. If management had sprung for the deluxe system a fire suppression system would have activated, dosing the flames in a few minutes. But why shell out all those credits when fire insurance is so lucrative?
The majority of the occupants escaped long before the flames reached them. But young Bane wasn’t so fortunate. He was doubled over in the corner of his room, wrapped in a Siclon blanket as he clutched his throbbing skull.
His powers gave him the unique ability to sense the emotions of others. At first, he felt nothing more than twinges, vague notions of what those around him were feeling.
But as he got older his abilities grew with him. When the fires began or more specifically when the panic set in, he was trapped under the unrelenting weight of a thousand sufferings, tormented by an unholy amalgamation of fear and terror that was projected into his mind by the mob of frenzied residents as they fled their flaming homes.
Several floors below him, an old man too weak and too slow to evacuate was consumed by the flames. No one heard his screams. But Bane, unable to control his abilities, reached out with his mind and felt every waking moment of the man’s suffering. The searing, the burning, the aching.
***
“I know a great deal about you.” The voice said, interrupting his thoughts.“I know who you are, I know what you’ve done, and, more importantly, I know what you seek.”
“And what is that?” Bane asked, entertaining what, at this point, he believed to be a hallucination of a dying man.
“Absolution, The chance to reverse your past wrongs, an opportunity to balance the scales. to be more than what your creators intended.”
“The past is dead. Buried,” Bane said, “I killed it. There is no absolution. No magic spell to rewrite my past. Even if there were, why would you help me?”
Bane stretched his mind further, attempting to get a better look at who or what had invaded his thoughts.
“Because men of your sort are needed...
It is true, I can neither change your past nor alter the ledger of your actions. However, I offer you an alternative…
A chance to change an uncertain future, an opportunity to toil no longer for faceless masters, but to instead fight for what you believe in.
“Oh! And what is that? What do I believe in?” Bane was eager to know. After all these years, he wasn’t sure what to believe in anymore.
“Deep down you believe in right and wrong, good and evil, heroes, monsters, and good men.”
“Heroes? monsters!?” Bane scoffed. “You’re living in a fantasy. The real world has never been so kind.
There is no such thing as good men! And heroes—they’re just monsters that hide their fangs, blades soaked a different shade of red!”
“If you truly believed that, how did you end up here?” the voice pressed.
Why did you choose to sacrifice your life for strangers who will never even know your name?”
Bane didn’t know what to say, so he said nothing at all.
Whether you believe yourself to be hero or demon, matters not to me. What is of true importance are your next actions.
As we speak, a thousand worlds teeter on the brink of total annihilation. Will you let them fall? Or will you lend me your strength and live long enough for your death to make a difference?”
“I’m dead already,” Bane interrupted, “I had my chance, did what I did, and look at what it got me.”
“You are not dead yet. Here, time dances at the end of my string. I have placed you in suspended animation. Frozen a moment before the detonation took your life.
By releasing my grip I could allow time to take its course—allow you to be consumed by the flames.
“Or?” Bane prodded.
“Or, I could extract you from this moment. Grant you a new life in a new world. One that may appreciate your gifts.”
“A new life?” Bane interjected. “That’s what you’re offering me! Why? What do you get out of all this? Why go through all of this? Why me!?”
“Because Men of your sort are needed.”
“This again!?” Bane interrupted, “Have you run out of dialogue lines? Is that all you know how to day!? What sort of man do you take me for—hmm?
A tin soldier you can wind up and send to your battlefield? A hired gun you can point and shoot? Or let me guess—a hero, a noble knight in shining armor who will slay your dragon out of the kindness of his heart!
I’m no white knight and I’ve never been a hero!”
“And that is precisely why you are perfect for this task.” the voice replied catching Bane off guard.
“Those who view themselves as heroes are often motivated by vanity, blinded by self-righteousness—shackled by the expectations of others.”
A collage of scenes depicting mighty men and women fighting the forces of evil across a thousand battlefields appeared before Bane’s eyes.
“Time and time again those I sent have failed in their mission. Not because they lacked the power, but because they refused to use it. Preferring instead to watch worlds burn in order to keep their hands clean.”
Burning buildings, defeated armies, and captive people mourning the sight of blood-soaked banners that bore the names of long-forgotten heroes surrounded him. Bane recognized some of these men and women from the history books.
“This is why men of your sort are needed. You see, there can be no good without evil, no happiness without sadness, no light of the sun can shine without the protective hand of shadow to guide it.“
“Enough poetry!” Bane snapped, “I’m already dead. Are you planning to bore me to death too? Just tell me what you want!”
“I want you to live. I want you to use the knowledge and skills you gained in service to the brotherhood of darkness to forge a brighter path forward!
With my guidance and your abilities, we can usher in a new era, and create a better world! A world where monsters live in fear of those they would seek to terrify.
A world where no little boy will be orphaned, weaponized, and twisted into the monster you believe yourself to be.
I cannot promise that your new life, if you so choose it, will always be pleasant. But I can promise it will be a life of purpose.
Dying is easy, Life is a choice. But that choice is yours.
Remain here to die and your legacy will be one of darkness, decay, and bloodshed. Or choose to live. Live a life worth remembering. Live long enough to build a legacy— live long enough to die a hero.
So tell me, Wrath Bane, will you lend me your strength or—do you choose to die?”
Bane didn’t know what to think. He didn’t even know what he was feeling.
Throughout his life, he had witnessed the darkest side of humanity. He had seen decay and degradation unfathomable to ordinary people and tragedy he tried hard to forget.
It was all he knew. It was all he had ever known...
So what would a new life mean for a man like him? Could this strange voice be trusted? Was any of this even real? Or was it just the dying delusions of a condemned man?
No
No
NO
His mind shouted! Even if there was only a spark of life left within him, he couldn’t give up! He didn't have permission to die. Not yet. Not until he’d truly been made to suffer, not until he’d truly been made to pay!
His eyes opened with fierce purpose, as he thrust out his hand and grabbed hold of that lone string of light.
Hand over hand.
Hand over hand.
Hand over hand.
He swam towards the surface. Stroke by stroke, kick by kick he fought his way closer and closer to the ever-brightening light! with every twitch of his muscles, the light grew brighter, he swam faster and faster until his hand smashed through the water's surface and he gasped for air!
Handfuls of mud and rock filled his grip as he pulled himself out of the twisted mire! Arms shaking, he pulled himself forward, planted a quivering foot in the mud, slalomed through the bog, and staggered to dry land.
He was alive!
Exhausted and battered but alive. His body folded forward as he collapsed into a heap by the water's edge.
He was alive! And for the first time in his life, that was a good thing.
Catching his breath, he rolled onto his back and stared up at the wide-open sky. All around him he saw an odd leafy substance he had only seen a handful of times in his life.
What was it called again… Turf? Moss? his mind searched for the right word.
“Grass!” He reminded himself as he ran a hand through the dew-covered lochs of overgrown grass.
Looking to his right he was amazed to see a lush, vibrant forest filled with foliage and greenery he had only seen replications of in Holoscopes.
But those holographic projections didn’t compare in the slightest to what he experienced in that moment.
The novelty of it all, made his pain fade into the backdrop, replaced by a myriad of new exciting sensations:
The crisp coldness of the dew that balanced on his fingertips, the warm glow of the rising sun that kissed his cheek, and the perfume of flowers mixed with the scent of fresh air, were like nothing he’d ever known before.
He could have laid there for hours, staring appreciatively at the rolling green hills stretched as far as the eye could see. Taking in the splendor of dense forestry that decorated the landscape and gave shape to the untouched terrain.
Where on earth was he? He wondered. Was this even earth?
But all good things must come to an end. Just when he thought the pleasantries would go on forever. A hoard of negative emotions suddenly overcame him: Fear, sorrow, anxiety, loss, anguish, disdain, A cocktail of misery spun around him.
For several surreal moments, he lay helf-paralyzed on the ground, trapped in the cocktail of emotion. But, focusing his mind, he snapped to his senses and realized that these were not his thoughts. Not his emotions. These were the feelings and sympathies of a large group of people.
Bane’s mental defenses had been shattered by his near-death experience, leaving him weak and vulnerable.
Bane recognized these as the classic symptoms of a psychic seizure, another empathic panic attack. The torrent of emotions and endorphins that flooded his system caused his whole body to convulse.
He barely had enough strength to reach a trembling hand into his breast pocket and retrieve a small white pill. After swallowing it he immediately began to feel its soothing effects.
The terror began to fade, his thoughts became more his own, and his heartbeat slowed to a constant rhythm.
But he had acted too late, he had left himself open and vulnerable for too long. The damage was done.
The voice called out to him as his consciousness faded again.
“Good choice. When the time comes, I will return to guide you. Until then, stay alive and beware those with half-crimson eyes.”
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