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Her world ended, not with bombs hailing from the skies of ‘Eth Athe’ban. Not with her people’s bodies dropping like fireflies between firestorms and brimstones. Not with her death, suspended by waters of both holy and unholy origins—but with silence.
“I am sorry, Mistress al Ghul,” Healer Wen shook his head, wizened wrinkled eyes who knew kindness were dripping red with unshed tears, “the child is…”
“My child ,” Talia al Ghul whispered, correcting the healer, with her cold fingers resting on her unblemished abdomen. “Leave me,” she ordered, never in a loud voice. She never needed such accommodation when her words were law on her dominion, and yet for what felt like an eternity, she wanted to scream, to yell, to occupy the deafening single tone of the silence of the ultrasound connected to her body.
Her child is dead. And with that declaration came the news that Talia al Ghul was of child .
“How harsh, my child, the world is too harsh for you and I,” Talia removed the tube connecting to an IV drip and started to dress herself as if her world had not ended just a few seconds ago. Her thoughts remained on the corpse of a fetus inside her, not living, but already pronounced dead, and how her life had been cruelly delineated by the same thread of death, from the before and the after, like a gashing wound that would not stop bleeding.
“To finally feel that I have a heart only to know it never possesses a single heartbeat,” the bubbling of a chuckle came unbidden, the tears that followed were the same. Talia laughed, for what else should one do in the face of such a cruel joke?
It was one of the uncanny valleys, as if at once the life with her child came with vivid vision magnified by the existence of a baby in her womb. Then the next instance, it was ripped from her arms, leaving a void so deep that it dented in the crevices of her ribcage sucking every and any color of a future yet known and unknown.
“My heart, ya qalb, Habibi , forgive me. Forgive your foolish mother, I didn’t—I should have known you. We have—” No, there was no ‘we’, not anymore , “I have a name for you, do you know, little one? If a boy, you would be mine to name…Damianos, Damian. If a girl, then his—” Stop it, Talia, do not think of him, he is a stranger now, “Athanasia…” the name still left her lips. The child deserved to know their name.
You should call him. He has to know.
“Foolish, foolish girl. He does not have to know,” Talia vowed, hugging herself, with both arms intertwined on her belly that her hand gripped her side tightly, as if willing to feel the small bump of her child inside her. “Forgive your mother, Habibi. I am just…tired.”
With unhurried steps, she found herself dazedly in her quarters. Lithe fingers re-lit the incense burners, the scent of incense and papyrus, at her side table and laid on her bed. Gaze never left the ceiling, and she started to speak, “My darling child, do you know who I am, who you are?” caressing gently the skin above her navel. “You are the child of Talia al Ghul, princess and ‘Eth Athe’ban, Keeper of Keys of the Black Citadel, and Overseer of Nanda Parbat. The heir of the Demon Head, and acting Hand of the al Ghul…” she breathed in, the scent filling her senses with her memories of her childhood, “You are the child of a woman who does not know affection but recognizes love, and its face, behind the mask of a dark knight more formidable than your grandfather. A dark knight…” Talia chuckled while shaking her head, “As if I was a princess in some picture book, no?” then she sobered up.
A princess who has yearned for a knight to offer his heart on a silver platter…but the price due was too much for her to shoulder. A heart of the bat in exchange for the head of the demon.
“You don’t need a knight, my love,” she added somberly, giving that advice to both her and her child. “You would not be found wanting of anything, my child. You would have everything,” I will give you everything, “You would have the world,” I will offer you the world, “the moon and the stars,” I will pluck the moon and the stars for you. “Just don’t…” she sobbed, silent tears falling on her pillow , her throat felt raw from grief not mourned, “Do not leave me, dear. Do not leave me alone here, my heart. You have not yet been born, and I can no longer breathe without you, my baby. My baby. My darling baby. ”
When she awoke, it was with a soft caress on her cheek. The ruby and sapphire signet rings from the hand’s knuckles told her exactly who was rude enough to come barging into her quarters uninvited.
“Father.”
“Daughter,” Ra’s al Ghul stood on her bed, behind him was the line of courtiers and healers on his beck and call, “I have been informed of your condition.”
“ Condition? Is this what my child is reduced to?” And the blank stare of her father proved her fears, “You do not care for your grandchild,” she spat, not even deigning to prop herself properly on her bed.
“I cared about my child, Talia. Death is a trade we dealt with, and I will not let you succumb to yours for…” Ra's stopped himself, then fixed his coat, a tic he had whenever he was getting ahead of his emotions, “The fetus is killing you, Talia.”
“Does it truly matter, Father? Take the corpse inside my being, and I will still rot. It was not the child that is killing me, Father, but the knowledge…of it all.”
“I have offered you before, I will do so again. I could help you forget of this poisoned knowledge, Talia.”
“You fashioned yourself the Serpent of the Gardens, then?” She could not stop laughing even if she wanted to, “This knowledge is not yours to take, Ra’s al Ghul , but it is mine to keep. I am the only one…only I remain to remember,” then Talia shut her eyes hard as if willing the images away behind her eyelids, but it persistently struck her with vividness.
The remembering was the most painful of it all. The universe was broken. It came from a rip in time and space that their star-scryers under Merlyn’s coven had prophesized; from their connections with the sentinels of the League of Darrk. They all had mentioned that the Source Wall required a sort of healing…which requires certain histories to be unraveled and unmade.
Those who are most affected have always been the villains of this world’s history.
This included Talia al Ghul .
“The one in Paris was lovely,” she whispered, tears welling in her eyes, “My beloved held my hand as we sipped brewed coffee on a May afternoon, in front of the wishing fountain of La Verdant Palacio.”
“You have never been the Paris with the Detective, Daughter,” Ra's replied. I know, and I don’t know at the same time , Talia wanted to answer, but the illusions were calling to her.
“He gifted me a necklace of gold and obsidian, incrested with diamonds…that would match the shine of my eyes …”
“There was no necklace, Daughter,” Ra’s intoned, patiently.
The familiar dance of words, a back-and-forth of Talia remembering and Ra’s negating her nostalgia, adding sting to a wound that festers with poison. Forever dripping venom from a writhing snake unto Sigyn’s bowl until the coming of Ragnarok. And yet, she continued dancing to its tune.
“I told him about our child…and do you know what he said, Father? That it was wonderful.”
“The Detective does not know,” Ra’s said with the same hushing tone. The row of servants and healers have long removed themselves from the room. And a shadow came from the door at the periphery of Talia’s vision.
“ The Detective does not have to know ,” Talia agreed, her muscles seemed to sag deeper in the confines of her silken bed. “What have you done, Father?” Talia asked, her grip to consciousness and the blanket tightening, now that she noticed how her incense burner had been tampered with.
“I will make things right, my Daughter,” Ra’s answered, moving close and resting a chaste kiss on Talia’s forehead. And behind him was the face of her long-lost sibling.
“Sister…N-Nyssa,” she gasped.
“Well met, my dear sister,” Nyssa said, clapping Ra’s shoulder with deep understanding in her eyes, “You have been compromised, Talia. We will make things right,” Nyssa smiled, snaking her hand to Talia’s weakening grip. “Family will take care of it, won’t we, Father?”
Ra’s nodded, sagely, but his eyes have been glazed with the pit. “I have gained an heir, whom, I have almost lost because of you, Talia,” Ra’s declared, taking the incense on the bedside table and snuffing out the fire. “Such slight from my sire, that I cannot forgive. But do not worry, not all hope has not been lost.”
“Don’t…don’t you dare!” Talia slapped the hand away and started to crawl away, only for her arms to give way from weakness.
“I have spoiled you, enough. This time, it shall be done through my own hands, under my own eyes. It has to be done!”
When darkness claimed Talia again, it was in the embrace of cold shadows.
Who are you, but the sum of your memories?
Talia was once asked this, by her tutors when she was young. Meditations and mind conditioning training were a norm in her childhood, to prepare her mind to take on the burden of decades, centuries, of memories as the daughter of the Demon Head of the League of Assassins.
“Who are you?”
It was a rehashing… of John Locke’s 17th-century philosophy on his memory theory:
- A person’s identity only reaches as far as their memory extends into the past. In other words, who one is critically depends upon what one remembers. Thus, as a person’s memory begins to disappear, so does his identity. —a paper from Stanford University
“I am Talia al Ghul,” she answered.
Then she started to forget who she was.
She felt like drowning.
She awoke in flashes of green abyss and white bursts, where the threads of life and death became entwined in an unending liquid graveyard.
“Please, no more.”
She felt the remnants of Lazarus kiss on her cheeks, wet with unshed tears from her cold funeral pyre no one deemed worthy to attend. The saint's requiem was never the miraculous mercy that it promised, but a siren’s pull, to the depths of twisted immortality frayed with insanity and death eternal.
“Just…don’t hurt me again…please don’t kill me again.”
Her flesh dissolved, and memories unwound. Splendid Dionysius called for a tragedy, an encore: her lips replied her name. Love and betrayal. Again. Passion and sorrow. Again. Reason and despair.
She started to forget.
“I’m begging you.”
To rise or to perish—it was never her choice.
“You wouldn’t believe me if I said I was sorry, Talia,” she heard Nyssa say, one more time, as she plunged a familiar knife, dancing iridescent with neon greens and blues, into her chest.
To surrender or to yield—it was, perhaps, her atonement.
“Please, no.”
Her body chooses to rise once more. Her soul chooses to perish.
She felt herself slipping to the unknown, a stranger inhabiting her flesh, of bare bones and a puppet not truly theirs to command.
It must have taken an eternity.
If the world sees her as the villain, she is all but relinquished to this fate.
Because one truth remained unbroken, from the universe of old and new.
No one saved Talia al Ghul. No one. Not even, herself.
But her son… for him. She could still save her son.
When she awoke, she was jostled awake in the arms of Ubu. Her body felt frail and useless. Ubu, with her silent shadows, was running inside a cavern. When she looked up, it was her father’s silhouette that contrasted from the mouth of the cave, away from the sunlight…of freedom.
“W-what happened?” Talia asked, in League language. She was placed gently on a cot inside one of the healing bays in one of their League bases, the one in Ethiopia.
“The Dargas…they allied themselves to Nyssa. They will pay for what they have done to you, my daughter,” Ra’s announced, signing a death warrant for all those who carry the name of Dargas, the last of the witches’ tribe who had safeguarded the pits at the heart of the jungles of Amazon, long before the al Ghuls claimed those under the deserts of Sub-saharan.
“What happened?” she asked again, letting her trusted aide secure her weakened body.
Ra’s explained, in his usual clipped but cryptic tone, how the Black Citadel has been attacked. How her body had been taken and was used as bargaining for the ownership of the unclaimed pits on the known surface of the Earth. And how her son was waiting for her.
“I have a son,” she gasped, her throat tightening at the memory of a small bundle of baby in her arms. A boy. “You remembered, Father,” she whispered.
There was no baby.
“I am sorry, dear daughter. Your son, my grandson, is dying,” Ra’s sighed. He confessed how their healers had, in her drugged state, retrieved the fetus and tried to revive him in a manner that a family of their means could afford.
But Talia does not care.
There was no baby.
No, no, no, no. Please no, not again.
She stumbled to her feet, “Bring me to him, Father,” she asked.
And her father nodded. She was led to one of the lower levels of the base, its walls were still that of earth, but it was lined with the best of technology that would allow artificial gestation, and at the center was an artificial womb with regen agents, his small heartbeat was low…but for that instance, she heard it beating—a steady miraculous lovely rhythm.
Her world was no longer silent.
“…his body continued to break, his organs continued failing, dear daughter. His body existed, but his soul was too weak to latch to his being.”
“Save him.”
“He cannot be saved, Talia…unless.”
“Unless...?”
“A child may die…but a tool does not,” the implication was clear. Ra’s planned to use the essence of the Lazarus pit, a high concentration of Dionesium, to tie the babe as another tool for the salvation of Earth, as true inheritors of the garden of plenty. An offer from the warrior-king to his heir apparent, just as he condemned himself and his family to the same fate.
“Save him! I will do anything, anything!”
“I know, my daughter. We will save him. But know this, daughter of mine, there is a reason we are called al Ghuls, Demons,” Ra’s warning, the statement in League language, the same sentiment he asked when Talia was first offered the forbidden baptism.
Ours is a fate forever tied to the curse of Lazarus, his soul is already forfeit to damnation .
“His name is Damian,” and she gazed back at the glass, with her flesh and blood, fighting for his own life, even before he could be born, “You will be called, Damian,” Damianos, ‘to tame’. “You will live. And one day you will rule the world.”
When death was no longer an option, then living was the only answer. And so, Damian would live...and he would rule.
For the only world that would keep you safe was one under your feet.
For this world has no love for you, would not welcome you, would actively get rid of you, and your memories, and your story.
But your mother remembers…even if it be turned to a lie—
Who are you, but the sum of your memories?
The correct answer was morality. The concept that morals are essential to identity is aptly known as the essential-moral-self hypothesis :
- Moral identity, or moral self, is the degree to which being moral is important to a person's self-concept. It is hypothesized to be the `missing link' between moral judgment and moral action—a paper from Oxford Academy
Perception of identity was not wholly on memories but on your morality. When memory fades, when cognition declines…one could resonate with your moral traits, in finding your purpose in life.
Purpose, for one can find this virtue as a reason to die, one can also find the same as a reason to live.
“Who are you?”
It was the reason that her father, Ra’s al Ghul, despite his mortal flaws remained steadfast on the path of salvation for Earth’s deathly fate. As an immortal steward of the gifts from the twin Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge, whose sap he determined to have pooled in the bottom of the lowest pits of the Lazarus.
“I am Talia al Ghul,” she answered.
Then she started to forget her morals...her values.
“You have your turn with your charity case. And you made that mad dog of yours let loose in Gotham. No more, Talia,” Ra’s answered.
“You talk about him as my pet,” Talia said, looking over the CCTV screen at the train station where her people have left Jason to his own devices. “I gave him a choice.”
The moments she spent with Jason and Damian, made her remember the old times, of her old self…and the lies.
It’s like looking back at a mirror and seeing a familiar stranger in its place.
“Do not delude yourself, anymore, daughter. You thought the Lazarus pits could save your son, and you extend the same belief to the Detective’s own ,” Ra’s laughed, mockingly. The decades after the healing from the pits had lost its effect. Her father had aged with each passing death, leading him to slip away from the League of Assassin’s morals, betraying the cause that her family believed in.
And she could see the madness entwining its claws to her family, even to herself. She needed to prepare.
While her father and brother remained engrossed in the pits, she was running the empire in the shadows. Dealing with Lex Corps., the League of Shadows from Lady Shiva, and the underground mercenaries, had made her hands full at the moment.
“They,” my sons, mine, mine, mine, “both do not need saving. They could save themselves. I have made sure of that, Father.”
They were trained by the best of teachers, equipped with the best of skills and knowledge to survive. Now, they just need to live. To both of them to live…was that too much for a mother to ask?
“Where is Damian?”
“I have given him a mission. It is time. It is his year , Talia.”
He is only nine years old! To allow her son to venture into the rite of passage, to take his year of the blood meant her father was beginning to be impatient. She wanted to scream, but held it in, “I see, Father,” alsabr, patience, she reminded herself.
Damian needed the League. And she made sure that the League and Ra’s needed Damian.
It was only the League of Assassins that had the assets and resources to allow her son to live. Bru…the Detective would never have allowed half the eugenics experiments she needed to make sure her son was perfect, nothing was too expensive, too inhumane, nothing took to chance for their heir apparent—a tool she was told to mold for her family’s end.
But without Damian…without Jason…without her sons—she could feel herself slipping away. They saved her, just as much as she saved them.
To rise or to perish—
To surrender or to yield—
And just like that, on one ordinary night, she fell asleep as Talia. And when she woke up, it was the pits that claimed her eyes once again.
“Who are you?”
I am Talia al Ghul
I am Talia al Ghul
I am…
“Talia.”
She knows that voice , only one man had called her name with the same passion and sorrow as one of her Beloved.
Are you here to save me, my love?
“…still carrying on your father’s work?” Batman asked, crushing her delusions as it was. Her beloved was never there.
It was a dreamless nightmare once again. She felt herself sinking.
“Ra’s al Ghul is dead. This is my very own little magnum opus,” Talia could hear herself declare, my little magnum opus, my darling masterpiece, mine, mine, mine. “Have you forgotten that night you and I shared under the desert moon under the Tropic of Cancer?”
It was our wedding night, a night of love, the ceremonial aphrodisiac, of wine and cake cut with a sword, atop the palace of Nanda Parbat, among the clouds…it was heaven.
“I remembered being drugged senseless…”
It was hell.
“We choose you,” I choose you, “the perfect man,” my darling perfect man, “to breed the perfect heir,” to have our beautiful son.
You said it was wonderful . Liar. Liar. Liar. Time seemed to flow and stop.
“Boy?”
Yes! We have a boy. A beautiful wonderful boy. He has my eyes and my love. He has your nose and your courage.
“He lacks discipline,” he would not be found wanting of anything, my child. “ and the guiding hand of a great man,” he would have the world, the moon, and the stars.
Lies. Lies. Lies.
When she awoke, for the last time, her boy was dead.
A single shed of tears pulled her away from the revelry. A moment of weakness, stretched to eternity.
“You killed Damian,” Talia heard herself voiced out, to the killer of her son, at her side, an imperfect copy of one who should serve her son, “You killed him before I gave you an order.”
Heretic said some justification, an excuse, but her ears were deaf to it, from the ringing silence that the world regressed into.
“I am the Red Queen,” and at once, Talia struck her sword, taking the head of her son’s murderer, “The mother of skeletons. I sow and reap who I choose. I warned you.”
Talia looked at her own sword, waiting for the hand to aim at her own neck. But the blow didn’t come. Her feet move forward.
But that doesn’t matter.
Wherever her son was, she would follow.
Wait for me, Habibi. Forgive your foolish mother, ya qalb, my heart. I will be there with you shortly.
And in the end...she did found Damian.
"Sleep now, ya azizi, my Habibi."
"Will you stay, umi?"
"Until the very end."
Bruce, for all his faults, still had the decency to bury the mother and son together.