Goddess: Descention

Part One: Asylum Prologue: Limbo

Disclaimer:

This story is based upon the world and characters created by the imaginative minds behind DC Comics, of which I claim no legal rights.

I also do not claim any legal rights to the poetry and/or song lyrics used to inspire each chapter.

The original characters in this work however were created by me and I do claim the rights to them. Any similarities in names or descriptions to people alive or dead is purely coincidental.

The references and descriptions of locales within New York City were colored with my own imagination and should not be considered accurate. All references to Gotham City however, are completely accurate... in my world.

Goddess

Book One: Descention

In the desert

I saw a creature, naked, bestial,

Who, squatting upon the ground,

Held his heart in his hands,

And ate of it.

I said, “Is it good, friend?”

“It is bitter-bitter,” he answered;

"But I like it

Because it is bitter,

And because it is my heart.”

Stephen Crane

Prologue:

Limbo

Gotham City

He watches from the shadows in the back of his cell. Grey walls quiver with the brightness of shuddering fluorescent lights. He focuses his attention on the buzzing overhead and imagines an angry insect trapped inside the long glass tube. He envisions the creature’s desperation; exposed to dazzling light it madly hurls it’s minute body against it’s prison’s smooth walls in a futile effort to escape, thus causing it’s prison to twitch and flicker. He knows it’s the stark illumination of it’s asylum that makes the insect insane. The bright scrutiny pushes it over the edge into madness for it knows the light will draw out it‘s very soul. It knows it will die unless it tastes freedom again. The watcher knows it’s pain.

Below he hears the skittering of cockroaches and rats in dark corners. They deftly avoid the light and are seen only by accident. They live in shadow and leave scant evidence of their passing but they exist nonetheless, crawling through the cracks and committing their vile, secret atrocities in their murky black holes… He envies them.

He watches and listens and ponders these things in his cell, his personal hell. This asylum. The word means sanctuary. It implies safety, a haven away from a world outside that would do harm, but he knows that is a fallacy. It is the world outside that is the asylum and to keep it safe they banish the darkness to places like this. They torture it with light, put it behind grey stone and try to forget that it’s still there, like the rats and the cockroaches. He is trapped here like a bug under glass, forced into a light that tries to blast away his darkness, his true self. But not for long, oh no, not for long.

Limbo: A barren place where he spends his days and nights filling the emptiness with meandering thoughts, trying to hold on to what he is. Trying to resist what they want him to be, like them, like this place; grey and dead.

This place, this asylum is limbo, a place in-between the world outside these walls and his world of blood and darkness. This place keeps the two worlds from meeting, but meet they will, it is inevitable.