"Destiny?" Shiller voiced the question as he thought, a metallic rasp trailing his tone. The ripples in the air turned damp, spreading out like water waves that linger beneath Gotham's night rain.
Outside, the city was in the rain. As summer neared its end, this grand metropolis, stitched together from three cities, was inevitably plummeting toward Gotham. The stone walls were soaked into a heavy black, the sky a cutting leaden gray, even the sunset burned red like blood. The glass, drenched in mist, took on a gemstone's texture, refracting inexplicable light beneath the dim heavens.
"Destiny." Another low, slightly coarse voice rose up. The lush red hair surged out like the blood roaring through her body, her reddish-brown skin covered with fine scars. From forehead to bridge of nose there was no break, a straight slope down, then a high swell again; the shadow of the brow ridge swallowed the whole eye socket, yet the bright green in those eyes still tore through the layered darkness. Shiller had not expected that the woman codenamed "Starfire" carried such feral resolve, like a karst monolith standing on ancient land, etched away by time for tens of thousands of years.
"On the day I was born, the whole of Tamaran called my name." Starfire's voice fell like a meteor, bearing an ancient and desolate timbre. "'Coliantha' in Ancient Tamaran Language means 'treasure.' Everyone believed I would be the most exceptional, most dazzling Princess this planet had ever seen. I used to believe that too."
"But that happiness vanished in an instant. My home was destroyed, my kin slaughtered, the entire planet enslaved. I was sent into an Alien research facility, turned into the subject of countless excruciating experiments. When I was on the brink of Death, they threw me into a desolate prison, where no living soul remained."
"But to their disappointment, I did not die. They tried every method they could devise to go on enslaving me—whips, drugs, Mind Control. They thought they had conquered me, but no. I took back my Strength, reclaimed my Authority, and liberated Tamaran."
"It was my own Will and Strength that truly fulfilled the Tamaran people's blessing for me. From then on, there was no one who did not know the name Starfire. Destiny? It's nothing but a defeated foe beneath my hand."
Shiller gazed at the woman before him. Her face was not aged; one could even call it very young. She did indeed look to be of the same generation as Nightwing Dick Grayson, yet her bearing was more akin to Batman's: resolute, unyielding—more feral, even, than Batman.
How should one judge Starfire's tale? Put simply, if a film followed the comics line by line to depict her origin, it would be a magnificent female coming‑of‑age epic. But what makes it is also what breaks it; the Left-wing wave in Hollywood has long since ebbed away, and such a film will never be made again.
Coliantha was born on Tamaran Star as the youngest Princess of the Royal Family on that planet. Later, Tamaran Star was invaded by Aliens, and Starfire and her elder sister Black Fire were both sent into Alien laboratories to undergo inhuman Alien experiments. Their bodies were infused with all manner of Energy, used as living vessels for Energy conversion.
After enduring immense anguish, Starfire gradually learned to control the Energy coursing through her body. Using this ability to escape the lab, she even rescued her sister, only to be seized again by the colonizers and turned into a slave aboard an Alien starship.
Yet she still did not yield. While bearing the torment of a slave's life, she trained alongside her fellow slaves, tempering their bodies and fortifying their Will. In the end, she led the slaves in overthrowing their masters, seized command of the entire ship, and fought all the way back to Tamaran, ultimately freeing all of Tamaran.
Her feat made her renowned across the cosmos; no one failed to know the great name "Warrior Starfire." Even after liberating Tamaran, she did not stop. She continued to wage struggle across countless Star Systems and throughout the cosmos, fighting to free slaves and halt wars, until she came to Earth.
The reason she chose to be based on Earth is that she had long since discovered that the origin of countless crises in the cosmos lies on Earth. Here she indeed confronted powerful foes, including Sanguine Demon, and kept battling for the safety of the cosmos.
That Dick Grayson would fall in love with such a person is hardly surprising. A person's orientation does not necessarily shift with the role the other plays in their life; people are forever wading into the same river again and again.
Undeniably, as Batman's first Robin, Nightwing's bent has always been toward the brave Fighter who rebels against darkness. That is why he followed Batman, and that is why he fell for Starfire. Nightwing is a bird that pursues light, and a single streak of radiance in rich, brooding darkness always shines the brightest.
If the Bat Light burns a hole in the Gothic poem of Gotham, that City of Darkness, then Starfire is the prairie blaze kindled in the vast, silent tome of the cosmos. Whether in the roar of rain or on the crackle of radio waves, the Fighters' shouts are deep and wrathful, and the first to startle awake are always the birds in flight.
The woman before him was not what Shiller had assumed Starfire to be; she was, in fact, far beyond his expectations. He could not picture someone like her wanting such a traditional wedding, so he had no choice but to ask: "What do you think of your own wedding?"
"I want a Catholicism traditional wedding." Starfire's tone was very flat, with no hint of yearning. Shiller could even faintly hear a trace of anger.
"May I ask why?" Shiller pressed. If he were to choose a metaphor for the woman before him, Shiller would liken her to a live volcano. She was like Earth in its most tumultuous geological era—her torso the volcano, her hair the Magma, her skin and scars the ash. And those things surging beneath the flesh, those heaving emotions, were like molten fire ready to erupt at any moment.
"Is that a problem?" Starfire did not answer directly, but responded with a question of her own.
"No." Shiller answered truthfully. "Whatever kind of wedding you want, we can make it happen. You can just take this as my personal curiosity. I don't think someone like you would have any special fascination with religion."
Starfire suddenly laughed, a laugh like magma splashing up from a volcanic crater—scorching and molten, but very quickly turning cold and rigid, even carrying a chill of mockery.
"I don't believe in God. When my home was plundered, God didn't step out to help me. When I was locked in a laboratory, God never looked my way. When I was sent onto a slave ship, it wasn't God who helped me defeat them."
"You're an atheist?" Shiller asked.
"No." Starfire's voice suddenly sank. She lowered her head slightly, then rolled her eyes upward to look at Shiller from under her brow. The expression was highly aggressive, like a Hunter in the middle of stalking its prey, sharp and dangerous.
Shiller's gaze didn't waver in the slightest. He kept looking straight at Starfire, watching those green eyes gradually surface out of the shadows, like a giant Beast lying on the ocean floor that suddenly breaks the surface, exposing a jagged ridge of spine, scales glinting with the light of murder.
"No matter what I say, you'll just think I'm raving nonsense." Starfire didn't withdraw her gaze either. She stared into Shiller's eyes and said, "You'll want to know whether some Alien antenna picked up a scrambled signal, or if I've simply been tortured into madness."
Shiller realized that while he could bluntly lay out Starfire's concerns and then tell her she need not worry, that nothing she said would be considered crazy to him, frankness isn't always the most effective route. Sometimes he still needed a little groundwork.
So he was the first to look away, though not in avoidance; it was more like something had just occurred to him, as he said, "When I talk about my past with my friends, they always assume it was the torment I suffered during the time I was locked in a lab that shaped who I am now."
Starfire was still staring at him, while Shiller looked toward the window, as if recalling something. "Our experiences overlap in some ways, except the pain I went through may not be as much as yours. But that still doesn't stop people, guided by their ordinary assumptions, from deciding it's those hardships that turned me into someone far too suspicious, seeing ghosts everywhere."
"Longing is the farthest thing from understanding, and so is sympathy. If you've had a rough enough past, people will be more unwilling than you are to let it go. Everyone has tears they need to shed somewhere—for themselves, for being too fragile; for the world, for being too bleak; and to scoop up a handful on someone else's behalf is the safest way to cry, whether that person needs it or not."
"I'm not your friend, and I don't need to put on that performance. Even if you say something insane, I won't spend half an hour talking to you about childhood trauma, expressing sympathy, then advising you to go out more and take a walk."
Starfire stared at Shiller for a while longer before finally pulling her gaze back. She rested her body against the back of the chair and said, "Fate."
"Fate?" They returned to that topic again, only in reversed order this time. Earlier, when Shiller had brought up fate, Starfire said she didn't believe in it. Now that she was the one to raise it, it showed that she wasn't rejecting it blindly, but had been thinking it over.
"I don't know if you've noticed, but a lot of things keep happening over and over again," Starfire said. "Batman, Robin, the Teen Titans, even those Madmen in Arkham Asylum—they're trapped. By fate. By God."
Shiller's movement froze. After a brief pause, he reached up and took off his glasses, pretended to rub his eyes out of tiredness, and then used those Gray irises to look at Starfire, like firing a shot straight into a pool of emerald water.
"Whenever they want to do something, God toys with them," Starfire went on. "No matter how thorough their preparations, how many different plans they come up with, they never succeed."
"On Tamaran there is a legend, about an evil man who killed his own brothers and sisters and was trapped inside a cave. He tried to climb upward and find the exit, but God, to punish him, reversed the path beneath his feet. Step by step, he walked his way into the realm of Death."
"As I see it, many people are walking that kind of road. They think they're moving forward, but the path beneath them has long since been reversed. No matter how fast they run, how hard they push, all they're really doing is sprinting headlong toward Death."
Starfire turned her gaze away too, looking out at the rain beyond the window. "But I know them. They're not evil men. They're heroes, Fighters… If it isn't them who are wrong, then the only one left to blame is God."