The Return of Zarathustra:

CHAPTER FOUR: THE OPENING DEFENSE

Zarathustra stood tall beneath the Judge’s towering form, calm as a mountain amidst a storm. The chains that bound the courtroom began to groan, ancient metal straining under a pressure unseen but undeniable.

The Judge tried to speak—but no sound emerged. His faces, flickering faster now, bled into each other like melting wax.

Zarathustra’s voice rose, steady and cold: “You cannot answer. Because if you do… your throne crumbles.”

The shadows in the gallery began shifting uneasily, their murmurings dissolving into fearful whispers. Some seemed to shrink back into the walls; others vanished entirely. Zarathustra circled the courtroom, dragging the knives attached to his gloved fingers along the glass floor, leaving faint cracks where he walked.

“You accuse me of not just breaking the internet, but breaking humanity.” He gestured to the black sky above. “But it was you who first broke them. YOU, the one who gave them their Nightmare on Sesame Street.”

The Judge’s voice finally returned, low and menacing: “You speak in riddles.”

Zarathustra smirked.

“No. I speak in truths you have spent eternity avoiding.”

He turned now to the gallery, addressing the faceless masses: “Behold your Judge! He cannot answer a simple question! Because to admit that all men were born of women… would unravel the lie upon which his entire kingdom stands.”

The gallery trembled, voices clashing in a discordant storm of denial and dawning horror.

“Every scripture, every law, every empire born from his image rests on the fantasy of the father-god—the god who fathers creation alone, without womb, without woman.”

Zarathustra’s voice became a blade, slashing the air: “It is the first and oldest nightmare: the man who dreams he came before his mother. The Adam who opens his eyes before the womb. A story told by frightened boys who could not accept their own beginning.”

He turned once more to the Judge, now leaning forward on his throne, cracking under the weight of this logic.

“You invented gods who create with a word, kings who claim the right to rule by divine decree, empires that silence the voices of the mothers who bore them.”

The courtroom darkened.

“You forged a universe where the womb is erased—where man births worlds with imagination alone. But imagination is not reality. It never was.”

A bolt of lightning tore across the sky above, revealing for a brief instant the missing symbol at the courtroom’s center: an empty circle, where the womb should have been engraved. A hollow sun, stripped of its origin.

Zarathustra pointed directly at the Judge.

“You erased her. And from that erasure, you birthed horror. You invented Pandora’s box and thereby opened it by default, unleashing the evil of INFANTILE MALE FANTASY upon the world.”

The Judge rose to his feet now, towering and trembling, fury burning in his eyes. Yet beneath the Judge’s dishonest performance of “rage” was something deeper—fear.

Zarathustra calmly took another step forward:

“Before you judge me, Judge—you must admit to yourself and to this court: your dominion stands upon a lie.”

The gallery roared in panic, the chains binding the courtroom walls snapping one by one, the pillars cracking under the tremors of logic.

“And if it is a lie… then who, truly, stands on trial here?”

The god-Judge’s towering form began to flicker, his faces glitching violently, struggling to hold shape against the rising tide of Zarathustra’s reason.

The abyss itself was beginning to fracture.