As a major player in the multiverse herself, Thea wasn't about to be left out. She had no direct solution for the Anti-Life Equation, but the power of Death was her specialty. The Black Racer's modifications—an admixture of Osiris's divine power compounded by temporal distortion—held no mystery for her. Within the Death Domain she was absolute authority, and through Kanto she had left Darkseid instructions for neutralizing the death-energy signatures in his own palace chambers.
When trouble struck, everyone pitched in. The observers watching from the Sphere of the Gods provided their assistance to Darkseid—whose father had been smeared across the wall and who had no powerful patron to lean on—in whatever form they could: those with resources contributed resources, those with manpower contributed manpower.
The war's scale began to grow. Apokolips attracted the gaze of powerful beings from across the cosmos, and even a few lords of minor realms in the Outer Planes began arriving to take their shot at the spoils.
Thea watched as Darkseid—restored to more than half his original power—defeated the King of Tears outright.
The creature was something like a living fog, carrying a singular rule: look upon its true face and die. In the end, even that hadn't been enough. Darkseid beat it down, and it retreated in humiliation to its own realm.
The King of Tears was not weak. As the undisputed ruler of a minor realm in the Outer Planes, its true form was a mass of smoke-like resentment, growing stronger by feeding on negative emotion and the souls of living things. Over millions of years, that accumulated power had reached a genuinely terrifying magnitude.
For Thea, Darkseid, and the other New Gods, the path ahead remained unclear—whether to take the route Yuga Khan had walked, accumulating top-tier divine seats until reaching the pinnacle, or to forge an entirely different road, was still an open question. No clear path forward had presented itself. But their survival wasn't at serious risk. As long as none of them did something catastrophically stupid, they could persist until the day the greater world itself was destroyed. At the level of the multiverse, the New Gods occupied a comfortable middle tier—not at the top, but a long way from the bottom.
The King of Tears had no such luxury. Its power had accreted without any coherent method of evolution. The endpoint, if it stayed on that path, was losing all capacity for action—becoming a well-fed pig waiting for slaughter—or simply hiding inside its minor realm and never emerging, until it eventually burst the walls of that realm from the inside. The Anti-Life Equation represented an exit, a final gambit, and the pull of it was too great to ignore even knowing the danger. So it had left its world to take the prize.
Unfortunately for it, Darkseid—supported by his many "helpful" benefactors—had clawed back more than half his strength. He didn't much care where this creature had crawled out from. He beat it into the ground regardless.
On Apokolips itself the fighting was glorious chaos. Countless planets that had suffered under the Dark Tyrant's rule had sent their own forces to join the battle; even so, they were barely holding the line against Hell's onslaught. The archdemons all believed that one more hard push would crack Apokolips open—and then they could take the Anti-Life Equation for themselves and become lord of all Hell, reaching the apex of demonkind.
After about two weeks of this, Thea began to notice the demonic forces running low on momentum. So she started helping Hell's side.
The demons fought without any strategic coherence—just a loud, chaotic wave assault with nobody managing logistics or coordination. Thea dispatched Malcanthet to organize the relief effort. Hell was vast, and there were demons who hadn't yet heard the "good news" that Apokolips was in play. The Queen of Succubi worked one side of the problem—pulling in reinforcements to replenish battlefield losses—while on the other side she applied methodical thinking to force composition, putting the various types of demons to rational use according to their particular combat strengths.
"So dull…" Thea lay sprawled on her bed watching them fight, yawning and stretching her arms above her head. It had been entertaining at first, but days of this had worn thin.
God himself seemed to hear her complaint. In the next moment, there was a knock at the door.
Diana looked at her lying there with that expression of mild suffering and went to answer it herself.
She returned a moment later. "Barbara's here. Get up."
After ten years of friendship with Batgirl, they were well past formality—Thea threw on an outer layer and stepped out of the bedroom.
Barbara had been working on something for her in secret, following up on a commission Thea had given her some time ago. Today, she finally had an answer.
In front of others, Thea carried herself well—poised, composed, projecting the particular grace that a woman of her stature seemed to make effortless. Diana beside her was mature and strong, and the two women made no secret of the warmth between them; even casual glances they exchanged carried an emotional charge that was obvious to anyone paying attention.
Barbara, despite being a woman herself, found it slightly dizzying. Fortunately her own preferences ran a firm course—she was still occasionally meeting up with Nightwing, keeping things casual—and the frankly improbable world she inhabited had never managed to recalibrate her.
She silently noted that the two goddesses were being openly lovey-dovey today, cleared her throat pointedly, and set a thick stack of materials on the table—handwritten notes, printed copies, photographs, rubbings.
"This is everything I could find in Gotham. See if any of it helps."
Thea bent over the pile and began reading. Diana picked up a handful of pages and started going through them carefully.
"Mythology? Since when do you care about this?" Diana flipped through the stack, most of which was legend and folklore—human prayers to divine beings, hopes for harvest, hopes for the continuation of a tribe. She understood why the records existed, but she was puzzled as to why Thea needed them. They were both goddesses now. Still, Thea always had her reasons.
"There's a truth hidden in here," Thea said, "about where the current human race actually came from." She pointed to one of the rubbings. "After the Atlanteans, before modern humanity—there were three tribes who lived in this world. The Hawk Tribe, the Wolf Tribe, and the Bear Tribe."
She paused. "But the record has been changed. It now shows four tribes. A Bat Tribe has been added."
The implication was not subtle. Diana understood immediately. "You mean Bruce?"
"Yes." This time it was Barbara who answered.
As a librarian at Gotham City Library—her actual day job was fighting monsters at night and sleeping in the library during the day—Barbara had access to the most comprehensive collection of historical records in the country. Following Thea's commission, she had spent a long time in those stacks, chasing the truth through layers of text and record.
"My investigation showed that originally there were three tribes. Then, as though overnight, a wave of new evidence appeared establishing a fourth—and my own memories on the subject aren't entirely clear." Barbara scratched the back of her head. The relevant memories had evidently been overwritten. The reason she sensed something was wrong was only because the change hadn't happened long ago—a small fragment of the original memory was still present, just enough to create a sense of discontinuity.
Diana thought it over. It didn't seem especially alarming on the face of it. Batman had been scattered through the timestream by Darkseid's Omega Beams, and his travels had caused some cosmic disruption—but wasn't that arc already resolved?
"What happened was something with far-reaching consequences," Thea said. "Bruce established a tribe in the deep past—and after he left that point in time, something occurred that wasn't supposed to happen." She laid another photograph on the table: an ancient cave painting showing a golden light splitting the sky and landing on the earth below.
"Bruce's situation started as an accident. But looking at it from our present vantage point, what was accidental has become inevitable. The history that was supposed to unfold has taken a turn here, and the course of human evolution has shifted slightly off its original path."
Barbara furrowed her brow and worked through this for half a minute. "But Bruce only just got back…"
"That's how time works," Diana said gently. "From our perspective, Bruce returned recently. But measured on the timeline, the Bat Tribe's existence is something that happened a very, very long time ago."
"Exactly. And it isn't just the Bat Tribe that's coming back." Thea held up another photograph. "I think the Hawk Tribe is about to return as well. We have a Hawk Tribe beacon here too." In the photo were a man and a woman, unmistakably—Prince Khufu and Priestess Chay-Ara.
"What are you planning to do?" Diana asked.
Thea already had her answer. "The world associated with the Bat Tribe is in chaos—I haven't been able to find the right approach for it yet. But the Hawk World is accessible. I want to send a scouting mission in, take stock of the situation, and see whether it poses any threat to Earth."
In her memory, that world—honestly it should be called a bird pen, not a Hawk World—was a fairly unremarkable place, home to two or three winged figures of no great power. But she wanted to study its structure. Her own pocket world currently had its stone golem destroyed, with life beginning to develop in various directions—a rough start toward a small world, but she had no clear sense of where it was going. Looking at Hawk World could give her useful reference material.
And if an opportunity arose to absorb Hawk World's source energy into her own world, all the better.
Barbara heard the plan this time and understood it clearly—this was a preemptive strike. Batgirl found that approach considerably more appealing than digging through old papers in a library. She was on board.
Thea thought it over. The mission wasn't large in scale and didn't look especially dangerous. She decided to bring the entire female wing of the Justice League—make it a group outing.
Three days later, a collection of heroines gathered in Central City.
Why Central City? Because Thea couldn't locate Hawk World on her own. There were quite a few minor realms like it—some formed naturally, some carved out by powerful individuals—and with no coordinates to work from, getting inside was beyond her reach.
The reason for Central City was that it was home to an absurdly powerful teleportation specialist: Vibe, Cisco Ramon.
Pure teleportation was straightforward—Thea could do it, Raven could, Diana could manage it with some effort. But sensing the destination before opening a path required Cisco's ability specifically.
Locate the target, open a portal—Vibe's power was exceptional, held back only by his own stamina, much of its potential still untapped.
Since the S.T.A.R. Labs facility had been blown up by Scarface, this modest apartment served as Team Flash's operational command. Cisco and Caitlin's bosses had all departed, leaving no one to pay their salaries. Iris was still in the thirtieth century having a baby—not that it would have mattered anyway, her job was gone. Wally West was unemployed with no income to speak of. As for Bart Allen, he was basically a walking child-labor violation; no one would dare put him on payroll.
All of them were surviving on Barry's salary from the Central City Police Department. By any reasonable measure, it was a grim situation.
Given that Hawk World would likely involve some combat, Felicity—who had no combat ability—was kept on Earth. Batwoman, who had announced her retirement, along with Aquaman's companions Yawara and Cassina, were likewise absent.
Every other heroine made the call.
Thea, Diana, Supergirl, Batgirl, Catwoman, Shado, Stargirl, Wonder Girl, Black Canary, Zatanna—and from the Justice League International, Fire and Ice, whose friendship was starting to look less than platonic—plus Caitlin Snow, a.k.a. Killer Frost, from Team Flash, Mera (Aquaman's wife), Lois Lane (Superman's wife), Cassandra Cain, Raven, and the newly joined Green Lantern Jessica Cruz.
Eighteen heroines in total, plus Pandora, who had been closely involved with the group and had personally witnessed more than a few ancient legends, and—as the guiding beacons for this mission—Hawkman Carter Hall and Hawkgirl Kendra Saunders.
"I, uh—I'm just going to step out… I think there's a fire on East Street." The Flash took one look at the assembled crowd and made his exit.
Cisco wanted to do the same. Then he registered the full situation: Pandora, Hawkgirl, and twenty women in total, all of them fully armed—swords, shields, weapons of various kinds—staring at him. He had spent years cultivating a degree of composure, and it evaporated instantly.
Hawkgirl produced her mace. It was smaller than the one she'd carried with the Star Sapphire Corps—that old weapon had crushed skulls like watermelons; now it barely looked fit for hammering nails—but she was still holding it in front of his face.
Cisco nearly jumped out of his chair. What exactly was this woman planning to do?
Caitlin and Thea held back their laughter while someone calmly explained the situation.
Ancient civilizations! The words lit up immediately in Cisco's mind. His curiosity was overwhelming. He desperately wanted to come along—but twenty women and one man did seem like an unusual arrangement…
"Come with us," Hawkman said, with complete sincerity. "There should be a great many ancient ruins out there." Cisco noticed, belatedly, that Hawkman had clearly identified him as a fellow male and was trying to bring him along for company. His intelligence was more than adequate to parse what wasn't being said aloud. He too, apparently, felt outnumbered.
Cisco weighed it internally. In the end, his curiosity about prehistoric civilization won out over social awkwardness. It'll be fine if I keep my head down, he told himself.
Thea gave a quick rundown of the mission objectives.
"Trace an extradimensional space through the metal?" Cisco confirmed, then closed his eyes and began searching.