The sea wind howled in from offshore. Bright moonlight spilled across the treeline. Diana was working through her forms with the disciplined precision of a true practitioner. The young miss had originally planned to watch from the sidelines—which earned her such a pointed look of displeasure from the warrior goddess that she gave up and picked up a sword to spar, half playful, half indulgent.
Thea hadn't kept up her martial practice for years. She was a pragmatist. If a skill was useful, she trained it. If not, she dropped it. She wasn't the type to keep drilling the techniques Malcolm had painstakingly taught her just for the sake of nostalgia—romanticizing her youth wasn't on her schedule.
Between her indifference and her wandering mind, she sparred full of openings. If not for her raw speed and her baseline physicality, Diana would have put her down ten different ways.
Diana worked the forms for a while longer, then trailed off, feeling a quiet deflation of her own. She knew, on some level, that martial skill was going to matter less and less as the years went on. She just couldn't let it go.
She'd spent millennia building her craft, and now, abruptly, she was realizing the thing she'd been proudest of had almost nothing left to do. That drift—the sense of losing an important pillar—settled onto her like a weight.
"Why do you look heavier in the head than I do?" Thea handed her a bottle of water, abruptly aware that she'd been so preoccupied with the Two-Dimensional World lately that she'd neglected the person right next to her.
"If you could choose again—would you pick eternity? Or would you live an ordinary lifetime like a normal person?" The two of them sat back-to-back on the beach, knees drawn up, and Diana only voiced the question after a long stretch of silence.
Then she laughed at herself. "You'd still take this path. No matter how hard it got. You'd still do it the same way…"
This was the old sickness of the long-lived. Thea, as a medical prodigy of sorts, felt as though she'd discovered a new pathology.
In plain terms: they were tired of being alive. Centuries, millennia of accumulated memory weighed on the soul, producing a constant low-grade alienation from the world around them.
Lady Styx, before she'd met Thea, had gone more than a thousand years without exercising her abilities at all. Atrocitus spent his days soaking in a pool of blood, using that visceral violence to prove to himself that he still existed. The little blue Guardians were the worst of them: the more they knew, the more childish their thinking became—at this point they were close to preschool-level cognition.
But those cases were about suffering from simple temporal duration. Diana's situation was fundamentally different.
Thea didn't respond. Her job here was to listen. In front of others, Diana had no room to be vulnerable. Behind closed doors, she needed a shoulder to lean on, an ear to put the words into. That was enough.
"Humans age too fast. Batman's gotten noticeably older since I first met him. He's not young anymore. His body's still strong, but I can see the exhaustion behind it."
"Barry forces himself to live at slow speeds. He suppresses his talking pace, his reflexes, just to prove he's still a normal person. But he's got fine lines at the corners of his eyes now. How much longer can he keep running at his top speed? Ten years? Twenty? Will there come a day when he runs and just—disappears into the universe?"
"Clark looks older to me. Kryptonians may live longer than humans, but I expect even he'll go eventually."
"Arthur will outlast a human, but only by a hundred-odd years."
"When our companions age, one by one—what do we do? Intervene and save their lives? Or let them walk to the end of their own?"
Diana was measured, deliberate. These were thoughts she'd clearly been sitting with for a long time. Getting them out into the air seemed to lift some of the pressure.
Thea thought about it quietly. Diana had come up surrounded by the women of Paradise Island—people who had never known sickness, aging, or death. When she'd finally entered human society a century ago, she'd sealed herself off, guarded against everyone. It took meeting Thea for her to really open up, step back into the world, and allow herself something like friendship.
When it came to life, aging, sickness, and death, no one in existence besides Nekron had more authority on the subject than the Goddess of Death. But this wasn't the moment to kill the mood with a lecture on metaphysical realms.
In countless mythologies, gods started out eager to befriend mortals—and inevitably, all of them ended up withdrawing, perched on some high throne, no longer speaking to humans at all. Different life cycles. Mortals die, and the gods have to carry the weight of that friendship for a thousand years, ten thousand years, sometimes longer.
Eventually the gulf became unbridgeable.
Diana looked mature, but her psychological age honestly wasn't that old. That she was up at night wrestling with this kind of thing struck Thea as faintly endearing.
Verbal comfort wouldn't help much here. This was the kind of thing you had to think your way through—find your own place to stand.
And besides, Diana was wrong on the facts. Batman was going to live a very long time. If he looked tired now, it was only because the Dark Multiverse hadn't fully come online yet. Once it did, Batman's lifespan would scale toward something effectively unlimited.
Whether Batman had actually aged at all was a question best put to Catwoman. The two of them were outsiders—no business poking at it.
As for Barry, Superman, and the others, they all had their own fates lined up, none of which were as bleak as Diana was describing. But explaining all that would take too long. The young miss's preferred method was simpler: change the subject.
"Do you know the secret of how the universe was born?"
Diana knew her well enough to mutter, "Changing the subject again… No, I don't. You do?"
"Actually, I don't either. But I do know this: we're all invaders here." It was a statement designed to land hard.
Diana sat up straighter. She was genuinely pulled in. Her lover knew an encyclopedic collection of cosmic secrets, and in her view, that was just a matter of level. The warrior goddess's interest was fully engaged. Batman was forgotten.
"Why do you say that?"
"The universe started out in darkness. There was no life. You've met Nekron. He's not exactly what I'd call the native inhabitant of this universe, but close enough. And the rest of us—you, me, every person and every god we know—we're the invaders."
The statement was genuinely disorienting, and Diana took it seriously. They weren't back-to-back anymore; they were sitting shoulder to shoulder, and the warrior goddess tilted her head, waiting for more.
The Fifth-Dimensional ability to casually edit reality wasn't something she could replicate. But after weeks of study, a simple illustrative sketch was well within reach.
No magic. No divine power. No expenditure of energy at all. Just a borrowed fragment of the underlying rules—using a finger's weight of leverage to nudge reality itself.
Of course, to nudge a mountain, you still needed a respectable amount of strength of your own. Otherwise the whole thing was just hand-waving.
With a deft motion she traced a flat diagram in the air: the universe in its primordial state, a mist of reality and unreality braided together. Whether it had actually been like that, she couldn't say—she hadn't been there. It was her best guess.
Diana hadn't reached the level where she could parse the subtle mechanics of what Thea was doing. She assumed it was just a visual aid.
Thea kept the ego out of it. "In the beginning, the world was dark. Then, from outside the world, a beam of light arrived. It pushed back the darkness, and it brought light—and life."
As she spoke, she simulated it: a shaft of light striking the roiling primordial universe. The darkness resisted, fiercely, through layer after layer—but in the end the light broke through. And where that light touched matter, life was born.