Age 2 Years
The physical world inside the sanctuary was supposed to be his classroom, but it felt much more like a puzzle designed to keep him blind.
By his second year, Ezra spent most of his waking hours sitting quietly in the corners of the inner courtyard.
To the high priests and the roaming zealots, he was just a quiet, uncoordinated toddler content to stare blankly at the stones, lost in the developmental fog of early childhood.
He let his head tilt, allowed a bit of drool to escape his lips, and kept his posture loose and fragile.
Beneath that mask, his mind was mapping everything.
The courtyard was an immense, cold amphitheater, but its design was entirely wrong for a communal gathering space.
The stone floor wasn’t flat; it was carved with deep, sweeping geometric troughs that formed five massive, concentric rings.
Ezra would trace them with his small leather shoes while pretending to stumble.
The lines didn’t follow the architecture of the walls.
They curved inward, twisting into jagged, sharp angles that pooled toward a central stone slab.
Even more confusing were the runes etched into the perimeter.
Ezra spent weeks memorizing their shapes.
They didn’t match the standard theological symbols the priests taught him during morning recitations.
These markings were harsh, jagged, and aggressive.
Whenever he stared at them too long, a subtle, cold pressure would build behind his eyes, making the minuscule purple ember in his chest stir with an uncomfortable, defensive warmth.
The security of the sanctuary was the final anomaly.
The adult guards didn’t patrol the living quarters or the outer perimeter with much intensity.
Instead, they stood like stone statues at seemingly useless, empty locations.
Two armored cultists constantly stood watch over a bare, damp limestone wall near the kitchens.
Another trio guarded a rusted iron grate in the floor that supposedly led to nothing but old drainage systems.
There was a hidden mathematics to their placement.
They weren’t protecting resources, and they weren’t watching for outside intruders.
They were guarding points where the strange geometric lines of the floor intersected and descended into the earth.
The entire fortress was a machine, a highly structured calculation built out of stone, and Ezra was sitting right in the center of the gear work.
To find out what that machine was calculating, he had to move.
The cold lessons his mother, Veronica, provided were empty, designed to monitor his growth rather than feed his intelligence.
If he wanted real data, he had to take it himself.
He began with the guards.
For three weeks, Ezra recorded their schedules.
He didn’t have a clock, so he used the steady, echoing clunk-shriek of the central hall’s iron pendulum to track the passage of time.
He discovered that every night at precisely 02:14 AM, the guards executed a structural rotation.
The transition was sloppy.
The night shift acolytes were exhausted, their wool robes dragging on the flagstones, while the morning relief was always slow to climb the subterranean stairs. New chapters come out on g.com first.
It left a narrow, unmonitored window of exactly three minutes and forty seconds.
Ezra practiced his movements in the dark of his bedroom.
He learned how to slide out of his wooden cot without letting the straw mattress rustle.
He learned how to distribute his small body weight across the soles of his feet, avoiding the specific floorboards that groaned under the mountain humidity.
On a rainy Tuesday night, the air thick with the smell of damp pine and wet masonry from the world above, Ezra made his move.
He slipped through the heavy oak door of his quarters like a drifting shadow.
His heart hammered against his ribs—not with a toddler’s panic, but with the focused tension of someone testing a trap.
He bypassed the main upper corridors, using a narrow, dust-choked ventilation seam he had discovered during his exploratory stumbles weeks prior.
He crawled flat on his stomach, his small hands pulling his frame forward over the cold stone dust.
He could hear the heavy, rhythmic breathing of the guards waiting at the end of the hall.
He timed his final drop perfectly, slipping into the shadow of the lower pavilion just as the armored boots of the morning shift began to echo from the opposite staircase.
The route was clear.
He pushed open the heavy, unlatched frame of the forbidden lower archives and slid inside.
The air inside the subterranean vault was completely stagnant.
It hit Ezra’s face like a heavy, physical weight, thick with the pungent, suffocating scent of decaying parchment, iron ink, and ancient tallow.
The darkness here was absolute, swallowed by the deep limestone foundations of the mountain.
The only illumination came from a single high, narrow window grate that let in a thin, fractured ribbon of gray moonlight.
Ezra moved through the gloom, his eyes adjusting slowly to the massive shapes of towering cedar shelves that stretched upward toward the vaulted ceiling.
Thousands of books and scrolls sat in silent rows, rotting in the cold Appalachian humidity.
He didn’t waste time browsing the upper shelves; he was too small to reach them anyway.
Instead, he dropped to his knees beneath a massive, scarred oak reading table, his hands searching the base of a heavy stone pedestal that supported a tattered bronze bust.
During his previous reconnaissance, he had noticed a discrepancy in the dust patterns around the pedestal’s base.
Someone had moved it recently.
Someone important.
Ezra pressed his small fingers against a rough, seemingly accidental ridge in the carved limestone.
There was a faint, metallic click, and a hidden compartment within the hollow base slid forward with a muted scrape.
Inside rested a small, velvet-lined cedar box.
It was entirely unmonitored, left unprotected because the cult leadership assumed no one within the sanctuary would ever dare to breach Veronica’s private repository.
With cool, steady breaths, Ezra pried open the lid.
Inside lay three distinct texts, their black leather bindings cracked and warped by time.
He pulled the first book onto his lap, unfolding the brittle vellum pages beneath the thin line of gray moonlight.
Ezra stared at the page.
For several seconds, his adult brain simply refused to process the visual data it was receiving.
The first text was a hand-drawn grimoire, its charcoal illustrations detailed with an obsessive, manic precision.
It depicted a massive, towering colossus with six burning, demonic eyes and a countenance of absolute, primordial malevolence.
The text beneath the illustration read: TRIGON. You are reading on g.com, the official source.
The book slipped slightly from his small fingers, the dry parchment scraping against his skin.
His heartbeat accelerated instantly, a sudden, cold sweat breaking out across his forehead.
Trigon.
Not a local myth.
Not a generic tribal demon invented by isolated mountain zealots.
Trigon.
The interdimensional conqueror.
The multi-dimensional entity capable of consuming entire planetary matrices to feed its own baseline existence.
Frantically, Ezra pulled the second book closer, his nimble fingers tearing slightly at the edge of the blackened hide binding.
This text detailed a highly specific, generational prophecy, tracking bloodlines and spiritual networks across centuries.
It spoke of a half-demon child born to serve as a physical bridge, a living anchor to drag the entity into the mortal plane.
A child named RAVEN.
The third text mapped the migratory patterns and spiritual anchors of the Sons of Trigon—entities hidden within the baseline architecture of human societies, manipulating historical events from behind dense psychological cloaks to prepare the world for the descent.
The realization struck Ezra’s mind like a physical concussion, leaving him gasping for breath under the heavy oak table.
Suddenly, every strange clue he had gathered over the past two years snapped into place.
The vague whispers he had overheard from traveling acolytes, the modern scraps of paper mentioning a “flying red cape” , a “masked vigilante”, a “lightning streak”
they weren’t fiction.
They weren’t abstract myths.
They were real.
They were current events occurring just beyond the boundaries of this forgotten Appalachian valley.
This wasn’t a generic fantasy world of magic, local cults, and unnamed demons.
He had been dropped into the absolute meat grinder of the DC Universe—a chaotic reality where cosmic resets happened on a whim, where entire civilizations were devoured for sport, and where the line between a living mortal and a dead man was razor-thin.
The knowledge was an immense tactical advantage, but as Ezra sat alone in the dark, clutching his tiny chest, it was entirely terrifying.
In a world populated by literal gods, speedsters, and multi-dimensional conquerors, his current level of power didn’t even register.
He was a bug sitting on a cosmic windshield, a microscopic anomaly trapped inside a fortress of fanatics who were actively trying to summon a force that broke entire worlds.
There would be no rescue.
The heroes of this world didn’t even know this valley existed.
Batman.
Superman.
He was in DC.
He crawled back into the shadows, his thoughts racing.
The world had just become much larger.
And much more dangerous.