Rock Of Eternity

At the very center of time and space — not a place you can find on any map, not a set of coordinates that any GPS could locate — there is a rock.

It is enormous. It is ancient beyond any measurement. It is made of a stone that does not exist anywhere else in the universe, the color of clouds just before a storm, and it hums. Constantly, quietly, persistently — a low vibration like a note played by the largest instrument ever made, held without stopping since before most of the stars in the sky were born.

This is the Rock of Eternity.

And it belongs to Billy Batson.

He found this out gradually. The first time he returned to the Rock after becoming Shazam — standing in the vast stone chamber where the Wizard's throne waited empty, looking up at the ceiling that disappeared into dark — he had the feeling of being in a house that recognized him. Not a spooky feeling. A warm one. The stone walls breathed differently when he was there, as if the Rock was doing what a house does when the people who live there come home.

The walls had seven sections, and in each section, sealed behind barriers of ancient magic, was one of the Seven Deadly Sins.

Can you picture it? Seven enormous shapes, each one the embodiment of a different thing the Wizard had spent three thousand years keeping out of the world. Pride, who regarded himself constantly and had no eyes left for anything else. Envy, who could only ever look at what others had. Greed, who would reach for anything not nailed down. Anger, who sparked and blazed. Sloth, who slept so heavily the stone around him sagged. Gluttony, who consumed everything put near him. And Lust, the desire for things that were not yours to have.

They were contained. The magic was very old. But it required the Rock's guardian to maintain it — not with effort, exactly, but with presence. The champion had to be there, in a sense that was more than physical, had to be the ongoing proof that the opposite of each Sin was possible and real.

Goodness, in other words, was the lock.

Billy took this seriously.

The Library of Eternity was at the back of the main chamber — corridor after corridor lined with books that were not exactly books, more like crystallized knowledge, ancient magic made legible. Some of them were in languages that had not been spoken on Earth for ten thousand years. Some of them predated Earth entirely. Billy had asked the Wizard's spirit — which lingered in the Rock like warmth in a stone that was heated and then left to cool — to teach him the most important ones.

"All of them are important," the Wizard said.

"Where do I start?"

"With the ones that tell you why the Sins are locked away," the Wizard said. "Understanding what you are guarding is the beginning of being able to guard it."

So Billy studied. Not every day — he was still going to school, still living his life in Philadelphia, still making sure he ate dinner and did his homework. But on the evenings when he sat in the Rock of Eternity with one of the crystal books in his hands, feeling the hum of three thousand years around him, he felt something he had rarely felt: at home.

He had the Wizard's throne, which he never sat in. It felt too serious. He sat on the step below it and spread the books out on the stone floor and read with the library's ancient light warming his face.

The Sins occasionally made noise. Not terrible noise — more like the noise an old house makes in the wind. Occasionally one of them would press against its barrier and Billy would feel it as a sort of pressure, and he would straighten up and put his full presence into the Rock, and the pressure would ease.

Doctor Sivana had tried twice to breach the Rock and had found, both times, that the barriers were not mechanical and could not be circumvented mechanically. They were the accumulated will of every champion who had ever stood guard here. Billy had added his own will to them, thin and new as a layer of paint on an ancient wall — but present, and genuine, and with a kind of stubborn goodness that the Rock seemed to recognize as particularly effective against Pride's constant preening.

Black Adam had breached the outer approaches once. Billy had met him at the threshold — the place where the magic of the Rock met the non-magic of everywhere else — and had stood there in his red suit and said simply: "This belongs to all of us. Even you."

Black Adam had stood very still. Then he had turned and gone.

The Rock of Eternity was not a reward. It was not a trophy. It was a responsibility, enormous and permanent — the kind of thing that, if Billy had known the full weight of it in that subway station, might have given him pause.

But Billy Batson had always been the kind of person who walked toward strange lights rather than away from them.

He picked up the next crystal book. The Wizard's warmth hummed around him.

The Sins slept behind their walls.

And the most powerful child in the world sat on the step below an ancient throne and read late into the night, keeping his word.