As Thea's blows hammered the blast door faster and faster, Vandal grew visibly agitated.
His eyes went hard and feral. In a blur of motion, knives flashed—"thud, thud"—and every staffer in the room dropped where they stood. He spared only the woman at his side.
"Father, what are you doing?" the woman asked, stunned, staring at the man she had worshiped all her life.
Vandal stepped forward and pulled her into a tender embrace. He whispered at her ear, voice low and soft, "I'm sorry, my daughter." The warmth in his gaze snapped cold. A dagger etched with strange grooves drove into her abdomen, twisting twice.
"Y—you… why…?" Confusion clouded her eyes as she crumpled, blood pooling out beneath her.
"I never wanted this… but it is your fate." Vandal turned away, eyes shut, shoulders lifting once—then his expression settled back into iron.
He hauled a young man out from a side chamber—unconscious, limp.
If the Legends had been here, they would have recognized him instantly: Hawkman—Kendra's lover—now in his 207th reincarnation.
For the Legends, only months had passed since his last death. For Vandal, it had been a solid century. He'd spent thirty of those years finding this young man.
With the pounding at the door growing louder, Vandal stopped hesitating. He dipped a finger into his daughter's blood and began sketching an intricate array across the floor—line upon meticulous line.
Minutes bled away. His daughter's breathing halted entirely; the bright red draining from her body turned a dull, clotted maroon.
At last, just before the blood thickened too far to move, the array was finished. Vandal was gasping—this work had devoured his focus. Even with four thousand years of experience, his hand had trembled. But it was done.
"The blood of my kin…" he intoned, beginning the first movements of the rite. As his voice flowed into the sigils, the blood-drawn pattern came alive—threads of light flickering through its channels.
"Hm?!" Outside, Thea felt the shift immediately. Something was wrong—terribly wrong. The air itself bristled; birds exploded from the surrounding trees, fleeing all at once into the night.
Keep digging or stand off and watch? She flicked a glance toward Rip Hunter. Rip couldn't sense a thing, but they still came to the same conclusion: a wise man doesn't stand beneath a crumbling wall. Fall back and observe. If the enemy's about to pull a mutually-assured-destruction trick, better to be somewhere else. Worst case, they time-jump again. Not a big deal.
Vandal had no attention to spare for retreating foes. The rite had entered its second phase.
"The blood of my kin… the life of my sworn enemy—balanced on the scales!" he cried. "I, Vandal Savage, High Priest of Horus, beg my lord's gaze!"
Ten minutes dragged by. Just as Vandal felt the rite begin to drink down his "immortal" life-force, something answered—somewhere far beyond the multiverse, a presence turned its attention toward him. A gaze, thin as a thread and barely there—perched on the knife-edge between existence and absence—brushed the world.
Praise. Permission. Encouragement—all mixed together.
Vandal was nearly spent. Life had poured out of him in torrents; any normal man would have died thrice over. Rage flashed hot: Four thousand years without calling you once, and this is how hard it is? Are you even capable?
But the arrow was already nocked. Hands shaking, he took the final step.
He lifted a hand toward his left eye. Even now, hesitation pricked him. One does not trifle with gods. If he offered it up, that eye would never grow back—not even after reincarnation. His delay sparked irritation in that distant gaze—pressure built, impatient, displeased.
Teeth gritted, he plunged the blade in. "Aaaah—!" Agony detonated behind his brow. He swayed but did not fall, flinging the bloody eye into the array.
"I offer my eye," he roared through raw throat, "and beseech the Pharaoh's guardian, the symbol of kingship—the Eye that spans the heavens—Horus, descend! Smite these fugitives from time, these breakers of the world's order!"
The last words came out as a ragged bellow. He was spent. The forty-year-old face he had worn for millennia crumpled into an eighty-year-old's. Four thousand years unchanged—gutted in a single ritual. A daughter dead, an eye sacrificed, life-force drained—he had paid dearly.
Thea knew none of that. Even if she had, she wouldn't have cared.
Because at that moment, even she was taken aback.
An ancient cadence rippled through sky and earth. A thin, elusive hawk's cry spiraled down—not to her ears but into her mind—circling and circling.
Even Rip Hunter, high priest of the Church of Science, saw the wrongness swelling and couldn't pretend otherwise. He didn't know what it meant, so he glanced at the one person who might: Thea.
If it had been anything else, she might've shrugged. Her fusion had gifted her shards of unicorn lore—narrow and lopsided. But this she recognized. The unicorns might not mingle with gods, yet they heard the stories.
She bit down on her molars, voice tight. "That's a sign a god is descending."
Somewhere inside Rip, a plate-glass window shattered. A god. In the year 2166. With orbital weapons in service.
What—had primary school been a lie?
No one heard his silent scream. Thea kept her eyes locked on the sky.
Above, the clouds had thickened into a dome of dense energy. Air scraped against itself with a sound like grinding steel, birthing jagged arcs of lightning.
When the gathered power finally crested, talons—razor-sharp—punched through from the other side. Slow, straining, rending at something unseen, they tore a ragged mouth into the energy shell.
"Miss Queen, should we—?" Rip's earpiece crackled with Gideon's update: Atom had downed the giant mech at terrible cost; the Waverider was burning toward them for a tactical withdrawal.
Thea wasn't in a rush. Measured against her now, if this was all the deity could manage, she wasn't sure she needed to be afraid at all. "God" was a title that dressed up a simple truth: a life-form on a far higher rung than humans.
On that ladder, Thea stood half-human, half-celestial—below, yes. But not cowed.