Rebirth
I dream. The streets run with blood, condensing on the pavement like dew. These boulevards have long been drenched in the sorrows of Gotham; they hold in their seemingly impermeable surfaces tales of murder, violence, misery.
I will destroy you.
I fight. The flash of metal, glinting in the northern sun, weak and pallid but still sharp as the blade that caresses my neck.
"You must destroy yourself first to be reborn," He says. I wonder, not for the first time, if he can read my thoughts.
I burn. The fire is pure, cleansing—it burns at the sickness that has clung to me, buried deep under my nails, coated my skin in invisible but viscous poison.
And I know—
…it is the first time, but I see it, there can be no doubt—a glint in his eye that he would deny to his very dying breath, the sliver of fear that has nothing to do with the physical weapon I wield and everything to do with what the purified fire has now revealed inside me…
I have begun.