Ten minutes later, she abandoned that plan. Picking out the deepest, most evocative dreamscape wasn't impossible; it was insanely time-consuming.
Every sentient being's dreamscape was connected here. Sifting through them one by one would take a thousand years.
She didn't have that kind of time to waste. Fine. She'd honor The Endless tradition and follow her gut. It was all fate's arrangement anyway.
The Dreaming had no compass points. Phantasms materialized at random—land, sea, and sky spliced together in impossible configurations—and panes of colored glass in every conceivable hue filled the space above, below, and on every side.
Thea pointed in a random direction, walked briskly for half a minute, and stopped. She glanced around, cross-referenced the names on Destiny's List, and selected the dream-fragment that seemed the most alive.
Following the tug of Soul Guidance, she made out what appeared to be a man on the other side. No deliberation needed. You're it.
Without delay she traveled to 1916 Britain. The First World War was raging. British soldiers were dying on European battlefields. The prolonged war of attrition had crushed public morale; masses of young men had shipped out and social tensions were boiling over.
Discontent spawned movements of every stripe, and it was in this climate that the Order of Ancient Mysteries surfaced.
Its founder and organizer—the self-styled sorcery master Roderick Burgess—was making his preparations. His goal: capture Death, for Death carried matchless power and eternal life.
Thea watched their preparations with an amused smile. She hadn't used any concealment spell; she simply willed herself unseen, and at her current level, nothing in existence could perceive her. Death is invisible. Concealment was the most trivial of her abilities.
As Death, her timeline now ran unbroken from beginning to end. She was simultaneously Malcolm and Moira's daughter and the manifestation of Death who had witnessed creation itself and greeted the birth of the universe.
Independent of time, independent of space, independent of creation.
Just as cosmic life and emotion could fuse to become the Phoenix Force, if you viewed the entire DC world as a single entity, it too possessed its own timeline—and Thea now existed on that line.
This was why a bunch of second-rate British mages even knew she existed. On this world-timeline, ancient texts recorded countless instances of her past. After all, once every century she had to "die," and such events inevitably left traces.
Thea watched the flurry of activity, utterly at ease. The group was brimming with energy, as though limitless power and eternal life were within arm's reach.
The bustling mages had no idea their quarry was standing right beside them. Some drew ritual circles. Others memorized invocations. Their plan, as far as she could tell, was to sweet-talk Death into showing up, then smash a cup as the signal to rush in and dogpile her.
Half a minute of observation and she had their entire strategy mapped out. She was tempted to erase these idiots who didn't know their own limits, but the mission came first. She sat back and endured their clumsy, embarrassing performance.
Thirteen mages worked all afternoon. After sunset, they finally began the invocation.
It actually had some effect. Not through sound—on a deeper plane of consciousness, Thea heard the call.
To give them a little encouragement, she offered a small response.
Like a scene from a horror movie, the mages had covered the floor in candles. She blew them all out in a single breath.
The group was ecstatic. Next came the blood sacrifice.
After a noisy round of rituals, Thea judged the moment was ripe. With a light tap of her left index finger, she planted the soul imprint of her Sandman candidate into the center of the ritual circle.
"We got a response! Wonderful!" The mages waited, giddy with anticipation.
Thea settled in beside them to wait. Once Dream was summoned, she'd have a quick word about what to expect, fulfill her family obligation, and head home. The whole universe-creation business had been exhausting. All she wanted right now was a big bed and a long sleep.
But it was not that simple.
With a wet burst, the summoning was barely half-complete when a bloom of blood mist erupted from the inside out. Forget a living person—the surging magical energy hadn't left so much as a finger behind. The candidate was reduced to powder.
Thea stared, expression flat. She froze time and stepped forward to examine the scene.
Two things had gone wrong.
First, her chosen candidate was weak. He'd been asleep, his mental defenses unstable. The violent magical surge had simply detonated him.
Second, the mages' summoning circle was too aggressive. It couldn't so much as tug a single hair from Thea, but against a Dream candidate at this stage, it was overwhelming.
What now? Thea sighed. She'd known the job wouldn't be that easy.
It wasn't hard to guess that Destiny's selection process for her hadn't been smooth sailing, either. What fell within destiny could be managed; what fell outside it was a dice roll.
For her, this was a one-time task, but to Destiny, she was probably just the latest in a long line of candidates.
The difference between her and the rest was simple: she had made it to the finish line. They hadn't.
First candidate—failure. She reset the timeline and returned to The Dreaming.
Before long she had picked a new candidate—someone who looked tough and resilient—and returned to 1916.
The mages performed their routine like actors on a stage, repeating the whole process in front of her.
Turns out resilience and magical aptitude have nothing in common. Another bloom of blood mist.
Thea winced, frustration filling every corner of her being.
She reset the timeline again, then repeated the process like a third-rate director running take after take.
Candidates came in every flavor: joyful, grief-stricken, young, old, disabled, super-powered. The pool of people who had transcended destiny wasn't huge, but it wasn't small, either.
After the seventeenth failure, she changed tactics. She went back six months and quietly weakened the ritual circle during its design phase.
But she couldn't go too far. Too feeble and it wouldn't even reach The Dreaming, and the whole production would fall apart.
Three rounds of calibration later, she finally had a version that could barely complete the summoning while minimizing the strain on the subject.
And still: failure, failure, failure.
Watching the same group of mages throw themselves into their grand plan to "capture Death"—once they started, there was no stopping them—had been entertaining the first few times. But sixty-one viewings in, anyone would be sick of it.
Mercifully, just before her patience snapped for good, on what was either the seventy-sixth or seventy-seventh attempt, the summoning succeeded.
"This is supposed to be Death? How come it's a man? Looks kind of frail..." one of the background mages asked the brotherhood's leader.