XCIX
The Architect of Death
The Lockheed Martin QSST jet carrying acting President Bruce Wayne had touched down near the border of Kahndaq with a full two hours of night to spare before the dawn. Now standing upon the dark, warm tarmac outside of the jet, Bruce beheld the impressive dome of illumination created by the headlights of the seventy M1A1 Abrams tanks that he had arranged to carry him to Kahndaq.
Thankful for an uneventful flight where he had worked out a hundred scenarios involving Trigon, Bruce walked towards the tanks only to be surprised when he saw the first of five Army officers lined in a perfect row - waiting for him and saluting.
He had not requested a welcoming committee. Worse yet, on the armored squadrons behind these five were hundreds of soldiers, also perfectly still and saluting. There was no need for so many to risk their lives for his suicide mission. This was supposed to be a remote mission for the Army…
As he approached the first officer, he was shocked to see how much this young man reminded him of Richard. The same age, the same hair, only thicker than Dick's athletic frame…
"At ease, soldier. My orders were for drone tanks, not manned vehicles."
"Sir, yes Sir!"
"Then why are all these tanks filled with treadheads, Captain?"
"My apologies, sir. All remote devices were damaged in transit."
"Damaged? How?"
"They were accidentally run over by tanks… Sir."
"I see… We're not fighting a conventional enemy, soldier. There was no need for these soldiers to fight against demons we know nothing about…What's your name, Captain?"
"Captain Thomas Bradley, Sir… And where goes my Commander-In-Chief, so goes the First Armored, Sir!... Even if its to Hell and back. You do not ride alone."
"… I suppose we'll be riding together then. If we encounter resistance from those ugly, tentacle things, feel free to shell them back to Hell. However…" Bruce raised his voice so that they could all hear… "No one, and I mean no one, is to fire upon Big Red without my direct order."
"Understood, Mr. President…"
"… And what's the tattoo on your arm, Captain?" Bruce couldn't help but notice the ink peaking below the sleeve on the Captain's large bicep.
"It says 'Rock n' Roll Never Dies' Sir!"
"Isn't rock music passé nowadays, Captain?"
"Not when you're driving 68 tons of American steel… Sir!" Bradley's smile was infectious. As Bruce approached the second Commanding Officer to greet her, he was impressed by her no-nonsense demeanor…
The sudden impact caused them to instinctively duck and cover. Years of training had worked its way into hardened muscle memory. Captain Bradley pushed in front of Bruce, using himself as a shield for the President until they realized exactly what had caused the crash. A man from the sky…
Wide smiles slowly spread across the mouths of the soldiers when they saw who had joined them. At the heart of the unexpected impact, his feet buried six inches into the tarmac, stood Big Blue, the legend of the Forces… Smiling and confident.
But Bruce alone knew it wasn't Big Blue. It was something much worse and a thousand years old…
"At ease, men. I can take the President from here." The new arrival's calm self-assurance put the soldiers at ease - even if Bruce's stomach silently slid beneath his feet. He suspected the consciousness that possessed the man of steel was still trying to master the Kryptonian's flight abilities. Clark would never had landed like that…
Still, there was nothing within a thousand of miles that could harm Ra's al Ghul in this new body, and the madman could easily tear those tanks apart if Bruce were to call his bluff. Heaven help what he would do to the soldiers if threatened…
Their lives were now in immediate danger, but only Bruce Wayne understood that. He could not jeopardize the lives of the men and women surrounding him who had sworn to protect their President. It was a battle they could not win, not against the second most powerful being on the planet. He had no choice but to continue this charade and accompany Ra's…
As the words formed in Bruce's mouth to instruct these soldiers to hold their positions, Big Blue suddenly stopped and stared. Quietly, all eyes followed his stare to Talia al Ghul as she exited the jet, her long hair a shimmering ribbon of darkness against the white of the fuselage. Father and daughter took the measure of one another for agonizing seconds. The steely, life-or-death stares of gun fighters facing off in days gone by… She knew him by his eyes…
And then, with speed almost beyond recognition, Big Blue snatched the President - accompanied only by the thundering crack of the sound barrier as he flew like a bullet fired into the night-time sky, his captive helpless to resist.
"NOOOO!" Talia's voice was the last thing Bruce heard before G-induced loss of consciousness blotted out all his awareness.
Bruce regained consciousness on a high rooftop in a dark city. Night… It was still night. But how much time had he lost?!… His eyes strained in the moon-lit dark to find the possessed man of steel staring over the edge of the rooftop into the streets below. Bruce rubbed the side of his head to get the blood flowing once more. Richard had once described the sensation of passing out from G-Force to him after a flight suit trial. It wasn't something Bruce needed to experience ever again…
"...How long was I out, Ra's?"
"Only moments, my friend. My little deception didn't fool you for an instant, did it?… Or perhaps you've been in contact with your remarkable wife…"
"We're not friends."
"Are we not?.. I have done more for you than you shall ever know… Then let us say then that we are architects... Architects of death, Mr. Wayne. What I've struggled to accomplish for over a century, you mastered in only twenty years. I am truly in awe of your genius, Sir."
"I am not an architect of death, Ra's…"
"No? Then join me… stand here by this ledge, innocent man of Gotham. Step forward but a few yards and stare into the abyss itself to see if dead eyes stare back… Tell me then that you are not an architect of death, Bruce Wayne."
Dear God, the smell hit him then… The awful smell that dissolved all doubt under that terrible stench… that this was Shiruta, the capital city of Kahndaq, filled with the pungent reek of new decay. Bruce knew that over that ledge lay a Hell that would haunt his nightmares for eternity. But like a man hypnotized by the black, soulless eyes of Death, he stumbled to the edge of the building beside his captor to stare down into the Abyss, like Dante into the Inferno. Abandon all hope…
Dead eyes stared back.
Thousands of eyes; men, women, children, goats, dogs… they all stared at him through the darkness in silent judgment. They lined the streets, the alleyways, the archways. They clutched their throats, they embraced their children, silent prayers to Allah frozen upon their lips, in death never finished.
There were be no more good thoughts for Bruce Wayne… The terrifying appetizer that Trigon had allowed him to taste hours ago was now followed by the main course that Ra's had carefully served. This sudden horror overwhelmed him, the crush of his terrible accountability pushed him down so he could no longer stand. He was the architect… the engine of destruction. He could only beg forgiveness of the dead for these sins.
"Is it really so terrible? This is the fate of the entire world, Wayne. A small inkling of what today shall bring. Whether you appear before Trigon or not does not change the outcome... Seven billion people die today."
"WHY?!... Why did you do this, Ra's?! Are you MAD?!"
"Mad?... I was.. before. But madness exists for me no longer. Shall I tell you what happens the day after tomorrow? How I shall rebuild a tiny humanity to serve life on this planet, to pay for its sins?... Or would you rather hear the long, sad tale of Ra's al Ghul? We have an hour before the dawn…
But remember my brother, as the glassy, dead eyes of Kahndaq rest upon you in Hell, I will stand with you, Bruce Wayne. And it shall be Ra's al Ghul who condemns them… Wretched humanity may never judge us, Wayne. What is done here is right!
You are aware my consciousness is one thousand years old. I have died countless times. I have been men, I have been women, I have been children, I have saved thousands of lives only to hold the heads of souls beneath the Sea of Oblivion until all identity was rubbed from their history… And more than this, I am something more!… But let us start from the beginning…
I loved a woman, a woman who left me to build her Eden in the sky… leaving a husband and father scorned. You are fortunate to have never tasted fruit as this, its taste was bitter, its rotting core soon became my soul.
So the scorned man cried. He cursed the Fates. He took refuge in earthly delights, in the harems of sultans, and then in the madness of excess, and then in God. I prayed with Guigo the Angelic until I died. I chose another body and lived. Only to die once more. And then become another… I sought new places, new experiences. I crafted the wonders of the Ming Dynasty and later served Japanese Shoguns as their eternal samurai. After centuries, the taste faded and dulled, diluted by all I had been and done.
We are not constant things, Mr. Wayne… Even the spirit grows, only to grow old. With each new life I had taken, a small bit of me died and a tiny bit of them remained. After so many different lives and aspects, deeds and children, it was difficult to say where Ra's began and others ended. You see, even the soul may drift into the madness of schizophrenia. So to answer your question, yes, I was truly mad.
My madness peaked in 1835 when I became trapped in the body of an English poet in Northamptonshire. A man who had been nothing more than a poor agricultural laborer found he had become a poet as my madness manifested and I was unable to maintain the semblance of control. The strains on my consciousness wouldn't let me leave, you see, and so we created poems…
I am the self-consumer of my woes,
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shades in love and death's oblivion lost;
And yet I am! and live with shadows tost
They compared me to Wordsworth before they had me committed. There was nothing left to do but read, write, rave and grow old in a drafty asylum in the mind of a mad poet. But I had accepted death, I HAD TO! Having seen eight centuries of life... Truly, what man could say more? I was ready for what lay beyond, to drift into the Sea…
As the poet died, his spirit sought the earth it have loved and nourished. And upon his descent, I saw something new in the green fields he faded into. Can you imagine my wonder, Mr. Wayne?! After eight hundred years as a spirit, to discover that there was another entire world just beyond our own, a world we all lived in but did not share…
And it was Green.
An expanse beyond my wildest dreams, of purest sensation… I traveled tree roots to become the leaves in spring. I was the field of grass tasting of dew, the mighty oak, the clinging vine of need. I felt it all at once, the music of Existence… every plant across the Isles. I embraced the Green to bask in its symphony of being.
But spirits as we are not welcome into the Green. We are of the Red. I was summoned before the Masters of this emerald Paradise for my reckless transgressions, before magnificent things that had existed long before humanity…
The Parliament of Trees.
I had trespassed into their realm and was sentenced to feel as they feel… and to truly suffer! To become the consciousness of the ubiquitous Green.
I've felt things you people wouldn't believe, Mr. Wayne…
Fires in the Taiga forest of Siberia that darkened the skies of Japan…
I've felt Selene's beams dance upon leaves over the graves of men…
I felt all the sins of creatures washed away… to be made pure in the earth…
By rain, by crows, by worms, by insects, by roots…
A fertile Earth ripened by the blood of humanity.
This is the world of tomorrow I have built.
The few that remain will serve their new masters,
The yoke of the vine, the chains of the branch,
Willing slaves of the eternal Green.
The Parliament of Trees removed the taint of man from the soul of Ra's al Ghul. I serve the Green as something other than a man. Something far greater. After a generation of suffering, my sins were washed away by the cold rain of suffering. I was bestowed the honor of Protector of the Green, the spirit of plant who may reside in man.
And that is what I am, Mr. Wayne… the anointed Champion of Nature. I protect the branch, the leaf, the root, the seed… I protect them from the ravages of man by steering the course of human history to its final conclusion. I was given my life's mission.
To fulfill the directives of my new masters, I embarked upon my surgical destruction of humanity. I have pursued many avenues of attack and there have been successes along the way, all culminating now in these final hours. But you must hear of my deeds if you are to comprehend my madness! My century of toil…
Over 100 years before you were even born, I worked with Louis Pasteur to study disease. A necessary education, I assure you… but also where I made a terrible error in judgment. His breakthroughs in the study of vaccination I deeply regret, a stupid mistake I perpetrated. How many more lives would anthrax and smallpox have consumed were it not for I? On my first foray, I had failed. But as he was wont to say "In the field of observation, chance favors only the prepared mind."
And so I too prepared my mind. I knew the works of the English scholar Charles Darwin… His theory that life evolves. And Pasteur had shown that disease was a living thing. Surely it too must evolve? Pasteur's vaccinations defeated known enemies… but what of an unknown enemy determined to kill?
I selected another body and moved to America where I collected sick things… Chickens, pigs, but mostly people. Sickly, miserable, snot-filled things that I deposited into a moist, warm Hellhole where I had lined the walls with agar… the largest Petri dish the world had ever seen! A breeding pit of infection… Not a place you would like to visit.
My work focused upon influenza... Not as brilliant as your gift of poisoned technology to the masses to be sure, but these earliest efforts were only those of a vengeful child. Over twelve years and countless, insipid hosts in my putrid den of disease, I muddled my way to success. A strain of influenza powerful enough to kill men and women in their prime!
My virus perfected, I sold my infected hogs and chickens – quite capable of spreading their deadly illness to human hosts – to an anxious Fort Riley - a week before they began to ship their soldiers off to Europe for the first Great War… I will lay no claim to the beginning of World War I, Mr. Wayne, but rest assured, the Spanish Flu that followed and killed even more than that skirmish was mine indeed…
But disease is not an obedient servant... The tempestuous sea will rage for a time, but for a short time only. The Spanish Flu did give me two glorious years before it burnt itself out, destroying 5 percent of the world's population. I felt vindicated for my earlier work with the serendipitous Pasteur…
And the Great War had shown me something… It seemed that the art of death had also evolved beyond the swords and horses of my youth. Gas, guns, planes, bombs…
Like yourself, I am a connoisseur of Death… My education continued. The Great War had not only planted the seeds of my disease across a ravaged Europe, but also the seeds of man's hatred. A bitter taste rekindled. I had played with Petri dishes long enough. The horrors of war had beguiled me and I had been presented with all the tools I required for my next work.
In 1923, I took the body of a sallow young German who had studied agronomy in college and then joined a nascent Nazi party. Over the years, I showed my host Herr Himmler and his like-minded compatriot, Herr Hitler that the noble principles of agriculture could also be applied to human engineering…
Are you surprised, Wayne? As men have destroyed forests to plant fields for millennia, do you not think that turnabout is fair play? That nature should not plow the fields of man and select only the blonde-haired crop? That flowering weeds should not be left in the harsh sun? Why should it sound so strange?…
In the end however, the Green no longer wished for men's wars. Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Projecthad changed their position. This was no longer a tool The Green could exploit to their advantage… The cancer had spread to the stage where it could destroy the Earth in nuclear holocaust. No, I could ride the red horse of War no longer.
Undaunted, I climbed the horse of the Stars and gazed into the Darkness… Zara's studies of mysticism had shown me the true terrors beyond our world. In 1980 I possessed the life of a scholar of those same dark arts, as it so happened in your home city of Gotham, Mr. Wayne. From there, I searched the world for tombs long forgotten by mortal men… slowly gathered a cult of the young for the turn of the millennium… and the Great Summoning.
You see it now, don't you, Detective?... It was I who first summoned Trigon twenty-one years ago. It was I who fed young Angela Roth to the Great Beast if only to give him a taste of human flesh… If it were not for Ra's al Ghul, your lovely wife would not exist. And yet you would not name me friend…
But now I require your honesty, sir. What is it the Great Beast seeks in his daughter? I have sired countless daughters over a thousand years, and they are not the key to my existence. Nor could she be to his. So why does the Consumer of Worlds patiently wait for her?... What secret does Raven hold for her father?..."
"No man has ever been so lost to his own kind as you, Ra's al Ghul…"
"Evolution, Mr. Wayne. I have been found. There are no secrets between us now... So tell to me, what does Trigon need of Raven?"
"A daughter… a follower… He wants her to join him… That is all I know…. I must face him, Ra's."
"It will not matter… the world of green begins today… Is it a father's vanity that I wish you to bear testament to these great works?... Lucius Fox was convenient, Wayne. Nothing more. An easy addition for the League… I understand now that is was you who were the true prize. I would have gladly given you my daughter…"
Bruce stood motionless as he watched as two figures suddenly materialize on their rooftop… His first thoughts were of Raven as hope exploded in his chest, but this was not the smoke of her arrival… this was something different.
Ra's also bore witness to the arrival… perplexed as he watched two alien suits of red and blue suddenly appear before him. The beings inside were not revealed to his senses and the markings of the travelers were ones he did not recognize… and he recognized many things. Machines perhaps?
The President and the Protector of the Green stood and stared as the larger of the two strangers stepped forward towards the man of steel and lifted his strange visor… to reveal the white hair and blue eyes of an old man as he placed a gloved hand upon the shoulder of the Kryptonian…
"My son… We can wait no longer. You have done all you can for these humans but the time has come for us to depart this world… The trap we have set for the Great Ravager will destroy this entire system… but the Great Evil must be destroyed before other worlds fall before his corruption. You have done all that you could do and your compassion is a tribute to your greatness which we celebrate on our home world. But come, let us depart…"
"Tell me more of this trap… father."
"My son, have you forgotten?! You aided in its design… Within moments, the yellow sun that favors this world will collapse upon itself to become a black hole. A sacrifice to be sure, but the Great Devourer must not be allowed to proceed…"
"Yes Father.." Ra's smiled wickedly as he stared into the pale eyes of the old man "… This must not be allowed to proceed…"
Footnotes
Because you don't get to be one thousand years old without footnotes…
A Carthusian monk of the 12th century, Guigo II (Surnamed "angelic"), is considered the first writer in the western tradition to consider stages of prayer as a ladder which leads to a closer mystic communion with God.
Although all characters appearing in this FanFic are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental, the English poet sounds a lot like John Clare; the Northamptonshire Peasant Poet. Ra's quote is from Clare's poem, "A Vision":
A Vision
I lost the love of heaven above,
I spurned the lust of earth below,
I felt the sweets of fancied love
And hell itself my only foe.
I lost earth's joys but felt the glow
Of heaven's flame abound in me
Till loveliness and I did grow
The bard of immortality.
I loved but woman fell away
I hid me from her faded fame,
I snatched the sun's eternal ray
And wrote till earth was but a name
In every language upon earth,
On every shore, o'er every sea,
I give my name immortal birth
And kept my spirit with the free.
Readers of DC's "Swamp Thing" over the past 20 years will be familiar with The Green… an elemental force which connects all forms of plant life on earth, experienced by elementals as an ethereal realm inhabited by the collective minds of the Parliament of Trees.
Ra's speech about his experience in the Green is an homage to Roy Batty's (Rutger Hauer) "Tears in the Rain" soliloquy from Blade Runner. Selene's beams are a reference to moonlight as Selene is the Goddess of the Moon.
"I've... seen things you people wouldn't believe... [laughs]
Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.
I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate.
All those... moments... will be lost in time, like [coughs] tears... in... rain.
Time... to die..."
Again, that sounds suspiciously like Louis Pasteur's assistant, Charles Chamberland whose oversight in the lab led to the discovery of vaccinations.
The Spanish Influenza Pandemic infected 500 million people worldwide between 1918 and 1920. It killed between 50 and 100 million of those affected people, one of the deadliest natural disasters in human history.
The sallow young German bears similarities to Heinrich Himmler, the Reichsführer of the SS and the person most directly responsible for the Holocaust. Many consider him more fundamentally evil than even Hitler. Himmler committed suicide by a cyanide capsule hidden in his mouth shortly after capture.
Next Chapter: The Origin of Trigon Revealed!