An unstable timeline was a dead end. She could feel it with bone-deep certainty—a timeline riddled with speedsters punching in and out of it like it was a revolving door would never yield a divine domain over time. And a divine domain over time was exactly what she was building toward.
To get something, you first had to give something. That was an unbreakable law.
Thea had her avatar relay instructions to Booster Gold: Hold tight. The true body would handle this.
To keep Savitar from stealing the box again—and to send a clear message to every speedster who thought the timeline was their personal shortcut—she needed enforcers in the time stream.
Booster Gold's rescued retirees weren't up to the task. They could patch timeline anomalies, sure, but Thea needed something tireless, something fast, something purpose-built. She needed time wraiths from the original timeline.
The true self lay sprawled across a bed in the White House—the sensation of having one foot planted in the timeline and one foot outside it was overwhelming in the most peculiar way—Only a divine being of the soul-magic variety could sustain that kind of mental strain without collapsing entirely.
Savitar could wait for now. His arc was predictable: in the future, he would murder Iris West; a grief-stricken Barry would create a swarm of time remnants to overwhelm him; those remnants would succeed in sealing him in the Speed Force. What Barry hadn't counted on was that one of those remnants—carrying all of Barry's memories and abilities—would get creative. That remnant traveled back in time, became Savitar, and created the very fate it was meant to prevent. Cause had become effect; effect had become cause. A perfect closed loop.
Thea was fairly sure she herself had explained this exact theory at a Justice League meeting at some point, which meant Barry's remnant had that memory too, and had used it as a blueprint. He'd become Savitar, killed Iris, Barry created remnants, the loop closed. Repeat forever.
Honestly? Aside from the Iris problem, the man wasn't hurting anyone. He wasn't robbing banks. He wasn't toppling governments. If he hadn't taken her box, Thea wouldn't have given him a second thought.
Creating time wraiths would require soul magic—and who else in the universe occupied a divine domain over souls while also having a foot in the domain of time? The answer was obvious. The challenge was that she had essentially zero experience creating new life forms. The succubus had been an accident she still didn't fully understand.
On top of that, she had burned through all the Speed Force she'd absorbed from Reverse-Flash. She needed a new supply.
The cleanest option was Barry—a conversation, a quick absorption, done. Except Barry and Savitar shared memories. That made things complicated.
If it comes to it, I'll knock him out and extract it at the cellular level. She filed the idea away as a last resort and reached out to Caitlin to get a read on Team Flash's current situation.
"So Savitar's already made his move?" Thea couldn't help but be impressed when Caitlin finished the briefing. The man was operating on schedule—he'd already planted the enchanted box as bait and was methodically steering Barry toward a predetermined fate.
Thea took note of the situation and stayed out of sight.
Savitar's people were circulating the box openly, using it to manufacture metahumans—and one of the lucky, or perhaps unlucky, recipients was Iris's brother, Wally West.
The kid had no idea he was being set up as Savitar's contingency plan, his designated placeholder in the Speed Force. Right now he'd just gotten superpowers, and he was absolutely glowing with excitement—barely able to keep the grin off his face while everyone around him wore expressions of quiet dread.
From her concealed vantage point, Thea watched him perform his painfully transparent impression of "concern" and rolled her eyes.
The sequence played out predictably from there. Wally decided to challenge Savitar, got effortlessly outplayed, and was absorbed into the Speed Force to serve as the sacrificial placeholder.
Savitar—or rather, Barry Allen's time remnant—was free. Step one was stealing the enchanted box from the end of time. Step two was breaking out of the future Speed Force prison. Step three was killing Iris in this timeline to complete the loop and become truly Savitar, rather than just a remnant playing the role.
Thea watched Wally get pulled into the Speed Force with cold detachment. Wally's smug self-congratulation had been on full display not ten minutes ago. She wasn't inclined to intervene.
Not only did she not intervene—she quietly absorbed a substantial amount of the Speed Force energy that had spilled out during the transition.
Wally's Speed Force signature and Savitar's were identical in origin, which suited Thea perfectly. She sealed the collected energy in a new box and made a mental note to hand it off to Booster Gold.
Speed Force problem: solved. Time wraith problem: still open. She had a feeling the answer would present itself within a day or two, right here in Central City.
She was right.
Barry, devastated by his brother-in-law's capture and convinced it was his own weakness that had caused it, was spiraling. Thea observed from a distance—and then felt Siren call to her.
She left a message for Caitlin to keep her updated and headed to the Soul Exchange.
"What is it?" she asked. For a half-divine succubus to flag something, it had to be significant.
"My lady, a woman with an extraordinarily deep fixation has entered the shop."
The succubus's expression was unusually serious. That alone sharpened Thea's curiosity. She gestured for them to go together.
Both cloaked in invisibility, they arrived at a small town in North Carolina. Outside of the Hollywood flagship, the Soul Exchange operated primarily out of smaller cities.
The woman waiting inside appeared to be in her early thirties—white, wearing sunglasses and a hat, clearly trying to avoid being recognized. From what little of her face was visible, she wasn't unattractive.
"Our most esteemed guest," a succubus attendant said, her voice dripping with theatrical flair. "We have wealth and knowledge beyond measure—and yet none of it seems to interest you. I must say, that is a rare and unfortunate thing."
The young woman was visibly unsettled—anyone would be, walking into a place like this for the first time. But she had spent considerable effort tracking this location down, and she wasn't going to back down now.
"I've already stated what I want," she said, her voice climbing as she spoke, the calm veneer cracking. "Whatever the price, I'll pay it. I'm exhausted. I'm done. I just want people to take me seriously—to take my work seriously. Mercury Labs wouldn't give me that. Queen Consolidated wouldn't give me that. This is the only place that has what I need!"
Thea blinked from where she stood watching in the shadows.
Wait. This woman works for me?