Diana didn't know what had provoked this sudden hostility, and she had no desire to fight. She suspected there was some misunderstanding.
"Why were you following us?" she asked again, in earnest.
Circe certainly wasn't going to admit the truth—that she'd been wandering aimlessly, drawn in by Thea's exquisitely pure dark aura, trailing them the whole way. She was the daughter of the sun god and the Queen of the Underworld. She had a reputation to maintain.
Her quick thinking produced a cover story. "I've heard that Themyscira holds an artifact of Apollo's. It should belong to me!"
Themyscira did have such things—but they'd long since been handed over to Hera. Diana had nothing to produce. She told Circe what she knew and offered to accompany her to Olympus to reclaim them personally, if she wished.
Circe had only needed a pretext. She had no real interest in Apollo's artifacts—his domain didn't conflict with hers, but it didn't suit her either. Apart from using them as an ostentatiously glowing nightlight when the electricity bill got steep, she couldn't think of a single practical application.
Still, Diana's refusal gave her a serviceable grievance.
"Don't try to deceive me!"
Dark mist began to coalesce. Circe's fingers moved in delicate, practiced patterns, and a great dragon of black flame rose from the haze—vivid, alive, wings spread wide. It drew a long breath and unleashed a torrent of fire directly at Diana.
In the original timeline, the Valkyrie would have had to dodge or take it on her shield.
Not anymore. Diana saw through it in an instant—a dragon conjured entirely from magical energy, forced to breathe more magical energy. Illusion built on illusion. Effective against ordinary humans, perhaps, but transparently insufficient before a deity.
Especially Diana, who had walked deep into the domain of truth—dispelling falsehood, piercing illusion. By Thea's assessment, she had the eyes to see through any deception. Having broken free of the Greek gods' "blessings," with Thea herself as both reference point and sparring partner, her path forward was unusually clear. Every day, the Valkyrie grew.
Faced with the dragon's fire, Diana grinned—brilliantly. Comparison makes the gap obvious. Spend enough time beside Thea, and your opponents either go by Darkseid or Nekron. Diana had quietly started doubting herself. But seeing Circe today? She felt the scales snap back into balance.
Oh. I'm actually quite formidable.
She raised her left hand like she was swatting a fly—a casual, effortless sweep—and scattered the flames that could have seared a crater in the earth. Then she held her palm up, front and back, and turned it over a few times. See? Not a scorch mark.
A fellow Greek, however lost—Diana still thought it worth trying.
"Give up dark magic. Your talent for sorcery is obvious—switching disciplines wouldn't be difficult. This path isn't right for you." She had never practiced dark magic herself, but she had watched it up close for years. She could gauge a mage's level at a glance.
"That's rich! You won't say a word to your own partner, but you'll lecture me? What's wrong with you?"
"Dark magic advances quickly, but all things carry their balance. The cost of wielding it is eternal damnation—no reincarnation, no release. Isn't that price enough to give you pause?"
"Ha!" Circe laughed, furious, and jabbed a finger at her. "And have you given your partner that same speech? What did she say? Those two down below earlier—they seem to come from the same line. Did you lecture them too?"
Diana opened her mouth. Then closed it. She decided against explaining that Thea was on her way to becoming ruler of the Underworld, at which point there would be no one left to oversee her—she would be the one doing the overseeing.
The situations were simply different. Thea was the master of darkness, using what was hers. Circe was a thief—and after death, she'd serve as somebody's indentured spirit.
As for Damian and the Raven, those were her people. Standards applied differently.
Diana looked at her with something approaching sympathy.
This infuriated Circe further. She read it as Diana running out of arguments and then compounding the insult by wearing the expression of someone feeling sorry for the intellectually impaired. What was that supposed to mean?
"Don't you dare look down at me! Behold the blessing of the goddess Hecate!"
Circe dropped the dragon. Her magical signature shifted—and an irresistible, primal force rolled outward like a tide. Within it churned countless wailing souls: ancient Greek warriors, modern civilians, all shrieking and clawing, desperate to drag the living down into the dark.
Diana suppressed a laugh. She knew Hecate—goddess of magic in Greek mythology, wielder of forces no mortal could resist. Undeniably powerful. No question there.
But souls? Death? She was more at home in that territory than almost anyone alive.
She almost wanted to ask: Do you have anything I'm not intimately familiar with?
A New God outranked an Old God by half a tier, the same way the Highfather stood above Zeus. Thea—a half-step death goddess—stood above Hecate herself, who had long since passed on. The gulf between a corpse and a living New God was unbridgeable.
To someone who had seen Nekron and Thea in action, Circe's soul-assault looked like a child's parlor trick.
Diana had grown somewhat bored. This opponent couldn't even draw out her full strength.
She drew her sword.
One cut.
The tangled mass of magical force split cleanly in two. Waves, screaming, darkness—all of it dissolved to nothing in the arc of the blade.
Is that all you have? Her eyes held the question. The sword point angled downward in quiet challenge.
Circe ground her teeth, a low curse escaping her. The gap between them was finally undeniable. Her eyes swept the area—and she turned and fled, heading for the camp in the distance.
Diana hadn't moved to stop her. No particular grudge between them. She hadn't thought much of it.
Then she saw where Circe was heading.
The refugees.
"Get back here!" She closed the distance faster than Circe could cover it—and flung her golden lasso. The rope blazed a brilliant arc through the air and caught Circe by the left ankle, dragging back hard.
Circe was ruthless. She spread her right hand wide toward the gathered civilians and let a cascade of color pour from her fingers—a wild, shimmering eruption of magic.
The men in the camp went still.
Within three seconds, the spell took hold. Some became rhinoceroses and charged at Diana. Others became antelopes. Several took wing as eagles.
The refugee camp erupted into pandemonium. Women screamed from all directions. The transformed men thrashed in confusion, fleeing every which way. Animals trampled through the crowds. Some of the women had already picked up guns, ready to fight back.
"Stay calm! I'm here to help!" Diana shouted, but the ordinary people below had long since lost the capacity to reason through their terror.
"That infuriating polymorph hex—"
She pulled her attention to rescue operations. A warrior-goddess wasn't the ideal tool for crowd management—but wearing the ring had given her options she wouldn't have had before.
She reached into her courage, and hundreds of Amazon warrior-constructs materialized out of the air, fully formed, mounted on warhorses, armed with spears and shields, moving to contain the chaos.