Alfred looked at her with that earnest, expectant gaze. Thea rubbed the back of her neck.
She had a theory. Just a theory — she wasn't certain enough in her own conclusions to say them aloud yet.
Bruce Wayne had money, a house, and no living parents — a middle-aged man, handsome, with the minor complication of an adopted son. By most measures, he was about as complete as a person could be.
The universe's cosmic alarm bell had no business ringing for him. He simply wasn't qualified for that level of attention, and that was the truth. A standard baseline Batman could die a thousand deaths — struck by a car, choked on food, crushed by a falling flowerpot — and the cosmic will would not so much as blink. Thea was completely sure of this.
But he'd gone and tangled himself up with the Omega Effect and the Eye of Obliteration. The moment that happened, his life and death stopped being a personal matter and became a question of universal law. The stakes had just escalated a trillion-fold. Handle this wrong, and the consequences would be cosmic.
She saw Alfred open his mouth.
"This is very, very complicated," Thea cut him off. "I need to find someone who actually understands it. I can't explain in any short amount of time. When Superman and Diana arrive, tell them to wait — I'll be back the moment I have answers."
She stepped through to New Genesis.
Highfather didn't need much of a greeting. She'd barely opened her mouth before he raised a hand and looked pointedly at the guards standing nearby.
"What you're about to ask is too large and too extraordinary to discuss here. Come — outside."
The two of them walked out of New Genesis territory together in a single stride.
They moved across abandoned terrain. Here and there, the landscape still bore the scars of Highfather and Darkseid's battle from several months ago — energies so old and so pure that time couldn't erode them, completely unmoved by the turning of ages. Power left by beings of that tier landed and stayed, permanent as geology. By that measure, Thea still had a long way to go. Her Soul Sea had a shelf life — it wouldn't outlast ten thousand years before it dried up completely. Just a matter of time.
"You can sense shifts in the multiverse — that's reassuring to hear." Highfather walked for a long while before he spoke, his tone carrying a note of something like relief, and something like caution. "But I need to ask you one more thing. Are you certain you want to know what lies behind this? The meaning it carries — the truth at the center of it?"
How big can it possibly be? Thea thought, privately. She doubted Highfather was aware of what Earth cultists had gotten up to lately — summoning Trigon. What they'd intended, before mixing up their target, was to go straight to Lucifer. And then there was the South American cult that had summoned an ancient primordial beast — and actually pulled it off. A crowd of heroes had been flattened before God himself stepped in to clean up the mess.
Earth humans being reckless is practically a superpower in itself, Thea thought. She could feel the trait in herself.
She met Highfather's gaze with steady, unblinking calm, and gave a single nod. Go ahead.
"Only Darkseid and I know this. Your standing is above that of the gods — barely enough to be told. But you must promise me: do not share this with the deities. Not even with Goddess Diana. Can you do that?"
"You have my word." She meant it.
Highfather composed his thoughts.
"Goddess Thea. Do you know how the multiverse we inhabit came to exist?"
She probably did know, in an abstract sense — but her actual position in the cosmological hierarchy said she shouldn't. Better not to show off. She delivered a gentle, respectful answer: "Wasn't it you and Darkseid who built it?"
Highfather laughed — a full, open laugh, genuinely pleased. The compliment landed in exactly the right spot.
The laughter faded. He shook his head, and his expression shifted to something more careful. There were layers of authority above even him, and he navigated them with care. Some praise was meant to be enjoyed privately, not taken at face value.
"You give me far too much credit, ha! Not even close." He steadied himself. "Darkseid and I represent justice and evil — we are their emblems. We did not create the multiverse. The true architects call themselves the Monitors. Their power exceeds mine by a measure I cannot estimate, wielding forces that Darkseid and I cannot begin to fathom."
"As a pinnacle among the New Gods, we only use divine power — we operate within divine authority. The Monitors have transcended every rule that governs us. Their tier is entirely above ours. They are omnipotent and omniscient."
His voice carried a particular heaviness. For all the ground he'd climbed to reach his current standing, knowing that higher peaks still existed above him wasn't a comfortable feeling for anyone.
Thea privately reserved judgment on the "omniscient" part. In her read, the Monitors were roughly equivalent to the Beyonders in the neighboring Marvel cosmology — power without limit, reality itself as their playground — but all-knowing was still one step beyond what she'd seen evidence of. Darkseid's obsessive scheming to outmaneuver the Anti-Monitor, for one thing, pointed to knowledge gaps they weren't aware of.
"Then your implication is — what happened to the multiverse just now involves them?"
"Both related and unrelated." Highfather settled into the look of someone prepared to talk for a long time. Thea made sure she looked like she was ready to listen.
"The Monitors created the multiverse. They observe and record everything that occurs within it. The Anti-Monitor destroys universes — keeping the total count within a controlled range. In my understanding, this is a form of balance. Both forces are forces of order."
Thea nodded. In her view, whatever had been done to reduce the Anti-Monitor's role later, the original model was still a creation of God's design — the antimatter universe, for all its apparent chaos, still operated on rules. Underlying order, even in darkness.
"Beyond the multiverse, there is a third force. Call them the Third. The Monitors and Anti-Monitor have always guarded against this faction — but a crack opened in the multiverse just now, and the Third found a way through. A dark multiverse has been born."
Highfather's expression was grim. One Darkseid was already enough on his plate. A whole new wave of adversaries was not what any of them needed.
Dark Multiverse. A Third Force. Barbatos. Thea cross-referenced what Highfather had just said with what she already knew, and layered in the chain of events around Batman. The picture snapped into focus.
Until this incident, Bruce Wayne had been entirely ordinary — physically, spiritually, in every way that mattered. But the moment the Omega Effect and the Eye of Obliteration combined and pulled him into their current, the moment the Third used his passage to lay the foundation for the dark multiverse — he stopped being ordinary. He had become the bridge between the prime multiverse and the dark one.
His body was the same. His soul was the same. But in a very real sense, the version of him now moving through the timestream was nearly indestructible — and he didn't even know it.
Because of him, the entire cosmological structure had automatically scaled upward by one tier. What had been a parallel universe model, then a multiverse, had now evolved into a compound universe. Given enough time, it might become an omniverse.