All Capes are Bastards: The Painted Prophet

The city wasn’t just steel and asphalt, not to him. It breathed. It bled. Every building was a rib, every alleyway a severed vein. The streets were brushstrokes of history, painted over again and again, each new layer hiding the violence beneath.

But blood seeps through the paint.

And Elias had seen what lurked underneath—the original image.

The first wound.

Not lost. Only buried.

And now, something beneath the city had opened its eyes.

It had been waiting.

And it was hungry.

The painting had driven Elias Mercer somewhere beyond the reach of reason, past the brittle limits of sanity. The art pierced his brain in a place that made perfect, terrifying sense to him—a place where sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell are tangled together in a cosmos more primal, the red pigments bled to the bone.

I stepped closer to the display, my shadow stretching long across its surface in the dim glow of my cowl’s lens.

The suit wasn’t just armor against knives and brass rounds—it was a disguise against things older than steel.

You hear stories. The ones told in the hush of dying streetlights, in the static between radio stations. They only follow if they know your shape.

If they can pick you from the crowd, trace your silhouette in the dark. The lore says they need an invitation.

The scent of burnt charcoal filled my lungs, thick and cloying, as if the canvas itself still smoldered. Blackened hands stretched toward a distant heaven, their fingers frozen in agony. Above them, the fire raged—crimson and violent—swallowing a ruined city in its glow. The ground beneath me trembled, a small rupture breaking me from the trance.

My stomach lurched, twisted like a carnival mirror reflection. That’s our reward for building atop a fault line—foundations set in ruin, waiting for the earth to reclaim the ruins.

The suit clings to me like a second skin, a shadow with no face or name. In it, I move unseen through corridors where the walls whisper and the air carries the weight of those who never left. But the mask is the only thing keeping them at bay. The moment it comes off—the moment I step beyond the veil—that’s when the ghosts notice. That’s when they follow. And no lock, no light, no prayer will keep them out. The restless ghosts.

It wasn’t just a portrait. It’s an invitation. These kinds of patrons don’t buy art; they buy people.

Elias left breadcrumbs. Not words—he never trusted those. Just red crosses and frantic lines slashed across a map south of the Golden Gate Bridge.

A portrait of his own, scrawled in blood and fury. The lines weren’t mismatched like a child that marked up the walls unattended. They were wounds. Old scars left on the city, the kind that never set back in place in the right area.

The Hooves of Moloch. That’s what he called them. A machine built to grind hope into dust. A quiet, methodical slaughter dressed up as policy. The feds pulled the strings, but the hands were always different—bankers, cops, landlords, men in perfect suits signing off on slow, quiet death. Black people went first because they always do. Then came the next wave of immigrants, then the next. Each believed they’d make it, each learning too late that the game was fixed.

Elias didn’t just leave me a puzzle. He left me a curse. A whisper in the dark, daring me to look deeper, to see what he saw. The city was built on sacrifice, and blood would seep into the soil, steel, and sorrow. A ten-headed beast would rise in the form of brokers and bonds.

Two coins sat beside the painting. Not just currency—keys.

They fit into secret slots, the kind that didn’t just open doors but expanded tunnels, leading either to fortune or something far worse. Riches if you were lucky. Ruin if you weren’t.

That is if you believe ghost stories.

And yet, as I picked them up, I still held my breath. 

I mapped the red markings, tracing them to the places where I’d planted whispers of coin slots. I was chasing ghosts, and they laughed—just out of sight, just beyond the edge of reason. Insomnia had choked the oxygen from my pupils and left red fissures burning beneath the surface. The kind of exhaustion that doesn’t just steal your sleep—it steals your grip on what’s real.

I had a night of Roughing up enough pimps and blackmailing the right cops, the city starts to remember things it tried to forget. The coin grooves weren’t just legends. People had seen them and used them. A great stag, carved into the walls, its hollow eyes waiting. 

I fed the coins into the slots but there was No barker with his hand stretched out for a con, no flashing lights to induce a seizure.

I had missed the sideshow and walked straight into the freak show.

The lost souls in the alley watched me step through, their hollow eyes tracking my every move. The ones who had to be rolled onto their sides so they wouldn’t choke on their own breath, clutching at empty bottles like lifelines. They looked at me with something I hadn’t expected. 

A street preacher pressed a tract into my hand. The paper was worn, edges curled from too many fingers passing it along. The message was simple, printed in bold, uneven ink:

What is done in the dark will be brought to the light.

He warned about the sin, of Sodom and the steel of Babel. The West Bay would come crashing down. The disciple believed the city’s bones were rotten, its foundations cursed, and a mockery.

“The weight  the of cities transgressions would drag it into the wake.”

He offered a prayer and laid a hand on my shoulder.

For a moment, the weight shifted. The dust in the graveyard I carried had settled.  The haunt loosened its grip, and the voices quieted.

The ghosts that followed me, the ones whose names I carried in the dark, the ones I could never save—faded into something softer.

Just for a moment.

 In the silence, there was a promise that boomeranged back to me. Not absolution. Not peace,  But the possibility of both

 I wasn’t the spectator, I the main attraction staring down the barrel of the cannon.

According to public records, there’s no hidden network of shelters beneath Gotham. No bunkers were built to outlast the fire when the world finally collapsed.

But trust me—you wouldn’t want to survive. When that last can of beans disappears and the air turns stale, you’ll wish you had slipped away in the first wave, nothing more than shadow and ash in your sleep.

The rules warped beneath the city. The past bleeds through the cracks.

As above, so below. 

This is where I left my soul to keep. My eyes traced the emblem of a great-pronged beast—its long nose and piercing red eyes locked with mine. The stag. You wouldn’t think of the Bay Area as home to such majestic creatures, but beyond the urban citadels lay miles of untamed woods, where the wild still called.

 I studied the painting: the stag surrounded by fire and fissures in the earth. The mixture on the canvas felt off, thick with a crimson hue blending into orange—an aroma like nickel hanging in the air. The paint pulsed with an force unnatural, an unsettling presence that seemed to stir behind the vibrant chaos. The stag, caught in the fiery maelstrom and the cracking earth, felt less like an image and more like a warning. 

The metallic scent of nickel clung to the canvas, as if it was a part of the very world it depicted—a world not bound by time or reason but by something darker, something ancient that still hungered. His hunger mirrored my obsession. The paints whispered of vices, each one marked by a handprint beneath it—an imprint as if the canvas itself had been touched by those who had succumbed to their sins.

My mind refused to dismiss the scent of nickel, as it gnawed at the edges of my thoughts, the literal meaning becoming unmistakable. I wasn’t just looking at a painting. I was involved—caught red-handed, as the brushstrokes bled into the very fabric of my soul. 

The harsh hum snapped me from my trance. The modern generator groaned, struggling to pierce through the ancient stillness of the old hollows. It was as if the very earth itself resisted the intrusion of technology, the clash of old and new vibrating in the air.

The contrast was sharp, like the pulse of a city trying to fight the weight of its forgotten past—an unsettling harmony of progress and decay. 

The sound would have been my last if the figure in front of me had adjusted its weight before launching the ambush. The blade sliced through the air, but my mind was already ahead of the move. With a twist of my hips and a weight shift,

I flowed into the attack, redirecting the strike like a taut wire snapping back into place. My arm snaked out, grabbing the wrist in a vice-like grip, using the assailant's own momentum to toss them aside with clinical precision. The move wasn’t just defensive—it was decisive, the kind of action that left no room for hesitation.

It was more than a technique; it was instinct in motion. There are concepts you saved for the judo mats and some you left when it's you and another man fighting for the last liferaft. I emerged from the cavern, slipping behind him like a shadow. 

My arm wrapped around his neck in a swift, seamless motion—a perfect judo choke, locking him in place. His body went stiff, fighting for air, but there was no escape for either of us. The device’s lights flashed, sending an unnatural glow across the scene.

Every instinct screamed to destroy it, to rip it apart,. It was a catalyst,   a threat that lingered beneath the surface.

The ringing in my ears subsided as if Christ told the waters to be still, just in time for a rush of footprints. I tossed a capsule from my satchel the smoke and ash flooded their senses as I crashed through the heavy doors. 

As I stood before the altar, I felt the weight of Revelation 13 in my bones. The master, like the beast rising from the earth, demanded more than allegiance—he sought worship and submission. Not for himself but for another a being of immense authority, fueled by conviction.

The stag, with its haunting gaze, embodied this twisted ruler, offering destruction to those who dared defy him. In the same way the beast controls, the master uses fear, sacrifice, and power to bend reality to his will. As if the world itself was waiting for me to bow before the altar, or be consumed by it.

I wouldn’t be throwing enough hands to get out of this one. I’d be carried out by six before I threw in the towel. 

“Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock.” The words of my Sunday school teacher echoed from his mouth, the book of Matthew didn’t pull punches, and I released the air from my knuckles, neither did I.

And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock.

The eyes of the discharged, ones who would not receive an anointment unsheathed their daggers as well.

“There are so many wonderful tools gifted to him by those society has deemed outliers.”

I moved in semi-circles around the throne. 

The stains of scarlet were slashed on the sharpened prongs. “These paintings reveal so much about who we are—and the paths we must take,” the acolyte’s voice slithered into my ears, his words sinking into me like cold steel.

With each revelation, he seemed to grow taller, looming over me like a shadow cast from the depths of a manufactured ancient. 

The blade edged across the red gown of a disciple, their skin marked by the faith that made him. Across his back, red bumps rose beneath hardened flesh—scarred constellations from old incisions, each one carved with purpose.

When he touched the underling, his fingers lingered too long—anointed, trembling.

He spoke in a tongue older than the whale bones and shipwrecked packed beneath the city itself.   His language pressed against the edges of the left side of the without ever breaking through the membrane.

I wanted to code-break the sirens call. If I ever did, the meaning would hollow me out—drive me to the same dim-lit wards where men muttered secrets into their own cupped hands.

 “Had our friend in City Hall seen what we’ve made, he would stand beside us now.”

The humming buzzed, like a needle digging into my skull. “Greed and amber built this city, but the earth... it will return it to the sea with these devices.”

It felt wrong, the words thick with an unsettling truth, gnawing at my core. Earthquake machines. I couldn't shake the sound of it, sinking deep into my bones.

I snapped my night-sticks and charged at the planner, if he wanted an anointing there would be a blessing in blood.

The best way to stop a stag in the thicket is to flood it with light.

I pulled the pin and let the flash bang roll. It clattered against the damp concrete, hissing like a serpent before it blew. A micro Big Bang, tearing open the night. Light and sound crashed through the alley, swallowing every shadow whole. Smoke and ash churned in its wake, turning red in the glow, bleeding through the seams of the city like an old wound torn fresh.

And then he walked through it.

An uncanny tulpa of Baphomet, slow and deliberate, like something that had already seen the end of the world and found it lacking. The hatchet in his right hand dripped with rain or something worse. On the left, a dagger with an antler hilt, polished smooth from years of desperate hands praying to something nameless.

"Let he who has ears receive the message, and eyes see the truth."

The street preachers could never match this kind of conviction. Their voices wavered. His was carved in stone.

He reached up and pulled away his mask.

The scars around his eyes glowed in the dim light, pale and raised like old scripture rewritten in flesh. He had burned his vision away to embrace the dark.

And the worst part was, I could tell—he saw me clearer than anyone ever had.

The acolytes closed in, their movements synchronized, ritualistic. They had shaped the pit with their own bodies, a manufactured arena meant for one thing—to make us clash.

Their antlers rattled as they rutted against one another, a grotesque mating dance, the sound of bone grinding against bone. Then came the shedding of clothes, bodies slick with sweat and fervor, while I wished I had on more layers.

No time to think.

The master lunged, his blade carving the air where my throat had been a half-second before. My legs moved on instinct, slipping just outside the arc of steel, but the pit was tight. No room to breathe, no space to run.

The batons in my hands spun fast, carving my own orbit, forcing them back. You train for years to die less often in a two-minute pit fight.

A blade kissed my ribs—just a graze, but enough to warn me.  Victory wasn’t the intention. An operation set up like this had ensured victory.

They were fighting to make me bleed just enough to slow, to fall, to feed the pit.

They wanted a sacrifice.

But this wasn’t where I died.

The ghosts weren’t done with me yet.

I fired the grapple line, the pneumatic hiss swallowed by the din of the pit. The claws shot upward at a sharp incline, catching purchase where the math in my head said they would. I’d never again wonder why teachers pushed angles and force diagrams—I had seconds to live, and geometry was the only thing keeping me upright.

The line went taut, jerking me up and out. The pit shrank below, the acolytes tilting their heads in unison, watching me ascend like some heretic lifted toward false salvation. But they didn’t chase. They didn’t have to.

The ground quivered. The ceiling shuddered. A low, sick groan rolled through the walls like something ancient waking up hungry.

Dammit. They’d activated it.

I’d failed.

I landed hard, boot skidding on the damp concrete of the stairwell. The door was still open—no one dared to cross it.

I grabbed the street preacher, yanking him into the fall as the building gave way. The port collapsed in a chorus of steel shrieking and stone folding in on itself. Concrete and dust swallowed the air, heavy and thick, a graveyard settling into place.

For a moment, I imagined the tides rushing in, the dark waters overtaking the ruins, the weeping and gnashing of teeth as the city swallowed its own secrets.

God laughs when we plan for the worst.

Only silence. And the weight of what I hadn’t stopped.

I left those notions in that pit, I wasn’t meant to live with one foot out of the casket any longer. Maybe it had been waiting for this moment—waiting for me to let go.

It didn’t follow me.

And I soaked up the sun.

It was time to shed the skin, to step forward without the weight of the ghost I no longer needed.