"Necromancy?!"
Whatever the mage had expected, it wasn't this. For all his centuries and his ancient learning, there were distinctions between old magic and new—but you can't mistake a spell's essence. He'd read the invasive energy in an instant.
A necromancer. A young girl necromancer. And here he was: gaunt, black-robed, face hidden in shadow, the very picture of a master of death. He was the one who was supposed to look like this.
How does this make any sense? That was his last coherent thought. Then he lost consciousness.
"Hmph. Absorbing Darkseid was the hard job. You're manageable." Thea spread her fingers. A translucent, blue-tinted soul hovered in her palm.
The mage who called himself the Magister of the Dark had been soul-extracted. The process had been slightly more difficult than usual—their power gap wasn't enormous, and the clone could only approximate soul-energy through magical simulation rather than the genuine article. But the outcome was acceptable.
A grand mage who could have fought her for hours had been ended in a single move.
The forcibly extracted soul was dazed with confusion. Thea didn't bother with it. She tossed it aside without ceremony.
She wasn't concerned about it finding its way back to the body. As the Goddess of Souls, she killed what needed killing and moved on. Once a soul was extracted, reintegration was a one-way door. She genuinely doubted an ancient Atlantean mage had the wherewithal to reverse it.
"Hm." She noticed something.
The soul had started out murky—the natural haziness of fresh extraction—but as the surface impurities dissipated into the air, the underlying essence came through. The mage's soul was a steady, saturated blue, clear as deep water. It looked at her with vague, wondering eyes, as though puzzled by the difference between them.
Do souls have elemental alignments? Thea found herself genuinely stumped. She'd collected countless souls through the Siren, but they'd all been colorless and transparent. A tinted soul was a first.
"Worth studying." She found her best gemstone, sealed the soul inside, and tucked it away for her true body to study later.
She walked over to Booster Gold, still collapsed in a heap, like a dead fish, where the sea beast had dropped him. He'd talked at length about coming to help—got taken out in one hit, and he'd been unconscious ever since. Truly remarkable.
She kicked him. No response. She kicked him again.
Still nothing. She sighed. The beast's temporal aura was severe, and Booster Gold was a baseline human. He'd be out for a while.
She activated enhanced vision and looked over the mage's remains. Nothing on him but the tattered black robes—the man had died as broke as he'd lived. She incinerated the body with a fire spell.
The castle was rubble. Their fight had left nothing standing. She picked through the wreckage without any real expectation, found nothing of value, and snorted in contempt.
Destitute even in death.
Finally she pulled out the mage's staff.
It was covered in fracture lines throughout. Beyond repair by conventional means—to restore it fully would require the ability to rewrite reality. If she had that, she wouldn't need to be hunting Batman in the first place.
But the sea beast's temporal reserves were another matter. She could see the immense store of time-energy saturating the creature, and she wanted it. This thing had been floating in the timestream for no one knew how long. Through sheer resilience, it had completed the hardest step of temporal integration—synchronization, body and power becoming one continuous substance. Its divine seat was absent, so it had tried to process the thoughts and experiences of countless intelligent beings drifting through the timestream through sheer instinct and will. The result was a nearly braindead titan.
What to do?
Letting something valuable slip away went against her nature. But time as a concept was genuinely beyond her current reach.
Acquiring the time divine seat was another level of speculation entirely. The sea beast's lifespan predated Atlantis by eons. In human terms, or even by the standards of someone like Diana, it had existed forever. But measured against New Gods like Highfather and Darkseid, whose ages were counted in the hundreds of millions, it was a child. And none of those elder New Gods had claimed the time seat either. That kind of position wasn't something you earned by sheer time. It came from something else.
Something like an opportunity. And that opportunity might be right here, locked inside a braindead sea creature, completely inaccessible to her.
She sat on a fallen column, with her hands behind her head, and thought.
Her gaze drifted aimlessly across the terrain. And then something clicked.
I've been here before.
The buildings were different, but the geography—identical.
This is the Vanishing Point. The one the Legends of Tomorrow destroyed.
End of time. A small island drifting in the timestream. Everything pointed to the same answer: she was right.
The sea beast's temporal reserves. The mysterious backer behind Booster Gold. Rip Hunter. The Legends. The destroyed Vanishing Point. The floating island. The Eye of Orin. A hundred scattered details suddenly connected into a single coherent thread.
"Ha." Thea turned to Booster Gold, who was just beginning to stir. "The timestream washed you, and your memory came back. Everything you told me about the parallel universes—I was the one who told you that. And I'm the one who sealed your memory afterward. Right?"
Booster Gold offered a tired smile. "That's correct."
Thea murmured quietly to herself. "Which means the Time Masters Council—the one set up to repair the timeline damage Batman caused—is something I founded. Either in my future or in the next few days."
Booster Gold nodded.
She was quiet for a moment.
I blew up the Time Masters Council in my own past—and then turned around and built it in my present. The only explanation is that I acquire the time divine seat eventually. Batman and speedsters could get away with that—possible for a mortal, because the impact is contained. Not possible for a deity. Not without mastering time itself.
"Those old fossils on the Time Masters Council—I thought they were all completely useless when I met them," she said. "You picked every one of them, didn't you?"
Booster Gold's smile turned rueful. "My younger self saved a number of people who were supposed to die. But in my own timeline, those people were already gone. So..."