Thea raised both hands and summoned an ice storm.
She had taken her time building it—and on Krypton, where magic was almost nonexistent, the spell's power dropped steeply. What would normally have stretched a hundred meters (328 feet) tall with a diameter of dozens of meters shrank to a miniature cyclone: thirty meters (98 feet) high, eight meters (26 feet) across.
Even so, by local standards it was a natural disaster. The ancient Rao shouted at both of them to stop.
Thea showed no sign of hearing him. She slapped both palms against the earth. A massive dragon of packed soil and stone erupted from the ground beneath her.
Then came several bursts of glacial force—the ice storm, the earth dragon—all of it crashing into Rao at once.
Away from Earth, with his life-sharing ability nullified by the vast distance across the river of time, the divine Rao's strength had been cut to a fraction. Every bit of power he spent was drawn from faith now—finite, depleting with each exchange.
From seemingly infinite reserves to something closer to mortal. Thea intended to finish this here.
She poured magic into the assault and locked down the surrounding space simultaneously. He was not getting out.
Rao did not retreat a single step. Within his divine power ran two hundred and fifty thousand years of conviction. He was certain he had done nothing wrong, and equally certain that Thea—who had interfered with him time and again—was an enemy of everything right.
"Is justice wrong?"
"Is helping ordinary people wrong?"
Faced with that righteous indignation, Thea was briefly at a loss. She felt like the villain. For goodness' sake—I'm the one on the right side here.
"Stop shouting! You are so infuriating!" She lost her temper and pulled out a sheet of golden dragon hide. Using it as her canvas and hellfire demon blood as her ink, she channeled the divine power of art—and in a handful of quick, confident strokes, painted a world onto the hide.
The image was of a barren, desolate place. No civilization. No life.
"Get in there." She drove the earth dragon forward, flung two black chains of death energy, and bundled Rao bodily into the painting.
His fractured divine power left him unable to detect anything wrong. He was still fighting to break free of the earth dragon, completely unaware anything had changed.
"Yes!" She could have thrown her head back and laughed. This was the fruit of her recent study of the Wanderer's Silver Coin and the Primal Shadow—still a hundred thousand miles short of creating a true parallel universe, but with the right premium materials, building a small two-dimensional world was well within reach.
Inside it, the real Rao became a line-drawn figure—a simple shape in a flat world—and she could alter that world at will. A brushstroke: a mountain range. A sweep of the pen: a river. She added thunderstorms and volcanoes on a whim, and the feeling of total control was genuinely intoxicating.
Unaware of what had happened, Rao fought his way clear of the earth dragon and barely had time to breathe before Thea added three new opponents: a cactus taller than any mountain, a colossal squid erupting from the river, an eagle diving from the far horizon. Between exchanges, she casually sketched a few meteors above his head, or dragged a hurricane across the landscape.
Watching Rao's bewildered expression, she nearly laughed out loud.
A two-dimensional world couldn't hold a true god indefinitely. But Rao was a special case—his strength was bleeding away with every second, and whether he'd ever find a way out was genuinely uncertain.
A true living being... Something caught her eye as she observed him. Her painted eagle and squid were entirely lifeless—but Rao was not. More than that, he was a living collective. As his divine power seeped into the two-dimensional world with each exchange, the little realm she had thrown together on impulse began to flicker with something that looked uncomfortably like vitality.
She had never devoted serious attention to life as a domain of power—not because it didn't matter, but as a question of sequence. She carried the White Lantern; life had always been something of an ally, something she could perceive with considerable clarity from her vantage point beside death.
And now Rao's essence was seeping into the two-dimensional world, threading through it with something half-real, half-illusory.
She had come here intending to eliminate Rao at the first clean opportunity. Now she changed her mind. She would watch a while longer.
She sent countless rare materials flowing into the canvas to shore up the world's foundations.
"Ow—" She was comfortably watching Rao battle her painted monsters when a vicious backlash of divine power detonated without warning, nearly making her cough up blood.
She forced it down and looked back into the canvas. Rao's form had shattered—like a glass figure dropping into fragments.
What just happened? There was no enemy near him. Then the realization hit her, and she turned.
The ancient Rao was lying on the ground. There was a small smile on his lips. He was not breathing.
No. Something lurched in her chest. He's dead.
"You—!" She turned on Batman, furious.
"Thea, he took his own life. He didn't want to become what the future holds for him... we couldn't stop him..." Kara explained, eyes red.
"He was an admirable man," Batman said, his voice subdued. "He shut down the life-siphoning device himself. His life had already reached its end—to help us, he gave up everything."
In their eyes, her distress was grief for the loss of a good person. They understood. They were frustrated with themselves for not watching more carefully, for letting this happen right in front of them. Both offered her a quiet word of comfort.
Thea felt something close to tears—just not for the reason they thought. If Rao had set his mind on death, there was nothing anyone could have done. The infuriating part was that he'd managed to die when he was supposed to live, after surviving when he should have died. She was becoming genuinely convinced the universe's will had a personal grudge against her.
"I already had the other Rao contained. This was completely unnecessary." She shook her head with a slow exhale.
His life force had simply run dry—she had the ability to restore that, given time. But the version inside the two-dimensional world was gone. That version was a temporal paradox. No resurrection technique in existence could reach a time error.
Maybe this was how it was supposed to go.
She glanced at the painting. An enormous wave of life essence had settled over the small world. And because the Rao inside had been a temporal anomaly, his death had brought something new into the world as well—time itself.
A happy accident, producing something she'd never planned for. She accepted it with a philosophical shrug, rolled the canvas up carefully, and set it aside for future study.
Following Rao's final directions, they located and destroyed the twelve white jade pillars that had been used to siphon life force. Then she took Batman and Kara by the arm, and they ran.
Escorted by a volley of primitive Kryptonian spears and stone-tipped arrows, they made it back to the twenty-first century.
Though Rao was dead, the battle on Earth had not ended. After Batman's departure, Nightwing had deployed the recovery agent—people on Earth had returned to normal, and governments worldwide exhaled—but the sheer number of alien true believers still aboard Rao's warships remained enormous.
Superman and Diana led every available hero in coordination with government forces. Thea, Batman, and Supergirl rejoined the fighting when they returned. It took three full days to drive away every last alien fanatic from Rao's church.
Thea slowly dialed down the acceleration field, restoring the world to its normal flow of time. The war that good intentions had launched finally came to a close.