The fortress sits impossibly high — so high the clouds roll beneath its windows. Time doesn’t flow here; it waits. Endures. Within the obsidian hall, four chairs surround a black stone table carved from a single slab pulled from beneath Lazarus itself. The chamber smells of cedar smoke, iron, and cold air dragged in from the mountain’s edge.

The flame pits lining the walls hiss and crack, casting shifting shadows. League assassins stand guard in silence, like statues lost in thought. But there’s an edge in the air tonight — something unspoken. Something missing.

And everyone here feels it.

⸻

The Four Who Sit

Bruce Wayne — armored but tense, cloaked in silence. He is not Batman here. Talia al Ghul — poised, painted in shadows and silk. There’s something behind her eyes tonight. Not guilt. Regret sharpened into strategy. Damian Wayne — no longer the boy assassin. Not quite the hero his father raised him to be. He sits rigid, eyes flicking between them. Ra’s al Ghul — the Demon’s Head, still and smiling. He has said little. He waits.**

He knows what’s coming. Because he sent for you.

⸻ Here’s the story.

“The Demon had two grandchildren. Not one.”

One born of flame — fierce and loud, the blade that would break, then choose his own name. The world knows him: Damian, the son.”

And the other? She was born quiet. Cold. Not still like death — but like a blade that waits. A child born beneath a blood moon, wrapped in lotus silk, eyes open before her first breath. She did not cry. She only watched.”

Talia hid her. Buried her in the East — in Guanxi, where old warlords still whisper about fox spirits and cursed children with eyes like smoke. The League there did not raise her. They forged her. In silence. In solitude. In the absence of love. In beatings and anger.

And yet she grew brilliant. Dangerous. Beautiful. Not like Talia. Not like Bruce. Nothing like Damian. But something else entirely.”

She was the secret the family could not afford. The twin who was not spared — but honed. Forgotten by choice.”

But children do not stay buried forever.”

⸻

The doors remain closed for now. The fire dims.

Bruce is the first to break the silence.

“You called us here for a reason, Ra’s. What is it?”

The Demon’s Head smiles, fingers steepled beneath his chin.

“I merely thought it time… for the family to be whole again.”

Then: A distant sound. Not footsteps. Not yet.

But something is coming. A reckoning wrapped in silk and steel. The daughter returns.