THE LAST TEMPLAR
++all credit for Batman goes to DC++
“The storm clawed at the old stone walls of the monastery, black rain sliding down the faces of gargoyles that had seen a thousand sins. Beneath them, a man knelt in broken armor, blackened steel over chainmail, the bat sigil carved deep into the breastplate like a wound. His name was whispered through crusades and across continents. The Dark Knight of Jerusalem.
They called him Brother Bruce of the Order of the Bat, a Templar who hunted not heretics, but monsters. Men who fed on the blood of others. Demons that hid behind crowns and crosses alike.
He rose from his prayer, knuckles bloodied from the stone floor. Around him hung the bodies of fallen brethren…Templars crucified by their own corruption. The Order had rotted from within, poisoned by greed and the whisper of ancient tongues…Bruce …he had seen it coming. He always did.
“Justice is not mercy,” he murmured, drawing his blackened sword. It was forged from iron smelted in secret beneath Solomon’s Temple, a blade said to cut through both spirit and flesh……“It is penance.”
When the Grand Master appeared, draped in white and gold, his eyes glowed with something not of God. He laughed, voice hollow as a tomb. “You think yourself holy, Brother Bruce? You think your war is righteous?”
Bruce stepped forward, face shadowed beneath his cowl. “No,” he said, voice low and cold. “I think it’s necessary.”
The clash was brutal, iron against sorcery, faith against corruption. The Grand Master fell screaming, his holy crown split in two. As the fire spread, Bruce carved a sigil into the temple wall…a bat’s wings, spread wide across the cross.
When dawn came, the Templars were gone, erased by fire and papal decree. Yet, in the ashes of their order, a lone rider vanished into the fog. Cloaked in black, bearing no banner, no name.
The peasants said he still rode at night, across plague-ridden Europe and into the ages.
A knight who took no oath but one:
To hunt the darkness in men.
Forever.”
