The forest had no beginning.At least, not one Gotham could understand. Where once stood rusting cars and graffiti-laced buildings, now grew impossible flora, leaves made of memory, bark that pulsed like breathing flesh, and roots that hummed lullabies in languages never spoken.
Yoggy stood beside Nyra, feline yet not, paws pressing softly into the mossy ground that stretched out in spirals of dreaming logic. Here, the concept of 'soil' was more metaphor than matter.
"This place is you," Nyra said, arms folded as shadows danced behind her eyes. "And also not you. It's your echo. Your possibility."
Yoggy didn't speak. Instead, he breathed not air, but understanding. The forest grew not from seeds, but from conceptual recursion. Every tree was a thought. Every bloom a half-formed memory of another universe.
Then, like a petal detaching from a withering flower, she appeared.
Poison Ivy.
Pamela Isley stepped into the clearing like a question unfolding. Her eyes wide, wary, but not afraid. No, fear would've been too mundane. She was curious, drawn to the impossible scent of the place, to the fact that while the world ignored this forest, she could see it.
Nyra smiled, lazy and hungry. "Wondering why we decided to let you see us?."
Ivy's lips curled. "Why?"
"Because curiosity is the root of all gardens," Nyra purred. "And because Yoggy thought you'd be fun."
Yoggy blinked, unbothered. "You belong here, Pamela. Not as a guest. As a gardener."
There was a silence.
Ivy tilted her head. "You're not joking, are you?"
"I never joke about cosmic purpose," Nyra said with a smirk. "About being a gardener, yes. Purpose, never."
Ivy looked down at her hands. Vines were already growing from her fingertips into the soil, binding her to this dreaming realm as though she had always been meant to anchor it. A smile ghosted her lips.
"Fine," she said. "But I'm not calling you 'Master.'"
"You'll call me Nyra," the goddess replied. "Or Mistress, if you're feeling polite."
Yoggy sat down, tail curling in satisfaction.
Thus, the Forest of Dreams grew its first root-bound soul.
Elsewhere in the city, forgotten dreams collected like dust in a basement.
They clung to abandoned corners. Broken swings in empty playgrounds. Unfinished lullabies in the mouths of the dying.
Nyra, bored and brilliant, decided they should visit one of these places.
"Why here?" Yoggy asked.
"Because forgotten dreams make excellent compost," she replied.
They walked. Well trespassed into an abandoned district where even Gotham's ghosts refused to linger.
Yoggy stopped.He felt something stir beneath the ground.
"Here," he whispered.
Reality peeled like wet wallpaper, revealing a deeper truth beneath the street. Yoggy placed a paw to the earth, and dream-entropy surged outward like a tidal bloom. Trees of thought erupted from the cracks, coiling upward into starless skies.
It was not a forest.
It was the forest.
His.
And the Dreaming noticed.
Dream, the Endless, Morpheus himself, blinked in a realm not built for blinking.
He felt it, a weight pressing on the dream-veil, yet not hostile. It was curiosity distilled into physical form. He stepped into the new boundary where realities whispered to one another.
Yoggy stood waiting.
"Hello," Dream said.
"Hello," Yoggy echoed.
Nyra bowed exaggeratedly. "Morpheus! Care for a cup of existential dissonance?"
Dream ignored her.
"This forest," he said. "It grows without permission."
Yoggy nodded. "Because it doesn't need it."
The air thickened. No threat. Only presence.
Dream studied Yoggy. "You're not mortal. But you wear mortality like perfume."
"I chose to remember death," Yoggy replied. "So I could better understand life."
Dream's eyes narrowed. "Do you seek dominion over dreams?"
Yoggy shook his feline head. "No. I build sanctuaries. Not kingdoms."
A long silence passed. Then, the Endless nodded once.
"Then may your forest stand," he said. "For now."
He stepped backward into unreality and was gone.
Nyra sighed. "Always so dramatic. You'd think he invented shadow."
Yoggy smiled, softly.
The forest pulsed, alive and dreaming.
And far away, in the sleeping minds of Gotham's forgotten, hope began to bloom.
The Forest of Dreams had no roots in the physical world, yet its presence rewrote the geometry of Gotham's soul.
Gotham was a city of memory and mourning. A place where shadows were thicker, hungrier. It had adapted to the madness of clowns and the order of vigilantes. But this—this was different. The forest did not invade. It emerged. Like a repressed truth suddenly recalled.
And Gotham. Gotham remembered.
Deep within the city's subconscious, something ancient stirred. Something forgotten by time, but not by fear. Beneath stone and blood and prayer, in the basement of nightmares where whispers festered.
Barbatos awoke.
He was evil. He was believed into being. A bat god of silence, of dark vibrations, of inevitability.
And the forest threatened his dominion.
He opened his eyes, as if they could be even called that. More like pits of unyielding void and saw it: the impossible glade growing within his influence. Dreams without despair. A sanctuary. An affront.
Barbatos growled, a sound like broken bells.
He would devour it.
Yoggy felt it before the trees did. A sickness. A pulse of entropy not born from cosmic inevitability, but from resentment. He stood atop a branch that stretched across the sky like a question and stared at the rippling veil between the waking world and Gotham's forgotten dungeons.
"Something's coming," he said.
Nyra nodded, already amused. "Something old thinks it still matters."
Ivy blinked, head tilting, connected as she was to the forest. "It's trying to kill the forest. Like roots trying to strangle a flower."
Yoggy jumped down, his feline form flowing like ink.
"No," he said. "It's trying to consume it."
He padded forward. Each pawstep folding the space between dreams and death.
"Stay here," he told the others.
Nyra smirked. "Try not to kill reality again."
He descended into Gotham's subconscious.
Not physically, but conceptually—through cracks in the memory of alleys, into the places where the city wept in silence. Barbatos waited, cloaked in his church of decay, a skeletal silhouette folded in on itself like a collapsed cathedral.
"You've forgotten your place," Barbatos rumbled.
Yoggy didn't flinch. "You were never part of this world. You leeched onto it. Like mold on a tombstone."
Barbatos roared, shadows warping. "I am Gotham's soul."
"No," Yoggy replied softly. "You were its scar. And scars fade."
With that, the Outer Shard stepped forward and with each step, unreality cracked. He wasn't attacking. He was remembering himself into this deeper space. Past avatars. Past guardians.
Straight to the source.
To Barbatos himself.
The god-bat staggered.
"You… you shouldn't be able—"
"I am Yog'Raxil," he said. "Not your fear. Not your echo. I am not bound by your story."
He raised a paw. Reality peeled away like old paint.
Barbatos howled.
And in the center of the howl, silence bloomed.
Gotham forgot Barbatos.
But not in the way history forgets. In the way wounds heal.
Where the absence of the bat god remained, something new grew—hope. Hope not born from safety, but from sovereignty. Gotham would still be dark. Still be wounded. But now it would choose to fight. Not because it had to. Because it could.
Far above, the people stirred in their sleep.
And the Forest of Dreams pulsed with a new kind of heartbeat.
Hope took root, and Batman, standing atop his tower, looked into the darkness.And for the first time in decades, saw the outline of a dawn.