Dont worry, if you found yourself scratching your head at that reveal, youre most certainly not alone. Its been over a decade since weve seen anything like it.
Heres the Cliff Notes version of what it is, and where it comes from:
As part of the original Monitors plan to reconcile the multiverse that was being eaten away by anti-matter he placed these tuning forks across multiple Earths and sent heroes to go defend them from anti-matter shadow demons. The Monitors theory here was that these tuning forks would allow him to align the vibrational patterns of these disparate Earths and save them from the encroaching nothingness that threatened them.
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Much later, during Infinite Crisis, one of these tuning forks would make a reappearance, this time combined with another Crisis on Infinite Earths holdover, the corpse of the Anti-Monitor. In this event, Alexander Luthor, Jr. (a hero from Earth-3) planned on using the power of the tuning fork and the Anti-Monitor to resurrect some of the Earths that had been erased out of the Multiverse back in the original Crisis.
You might be recognizing a reoccurring theme here. Every time one of these golden pylons ends up in play, the stakes are almost immediately elevated to cosmic status.
And with cosmic stakes on the table, a Crisis-level event cant be too far away.
Of course, were left with some questions about just how Batman got his hands on the tuning fork in the first place, or where it may have came from whether its a relic from the Monitor or Alexander Luthor, or somehow, neither. But as Mr. Miracle advises, regardless of where the tuning for came from, its absolutely dangerous, and probably better left alone.
Which, of course, means Batman is going to continue to experiment with it.