Diana bowed her head and thought for a moment. Looking back at her own childhood from where she stood now—she found she was genuinely curious.
"If we just watch... will it disturb the timeline?"
Thea shrugged it off entirely. She'd appointed herself the Time Manager, and she figured a little sightseeing within her own authority wasn't exactly a crisis.
"So... can we go back together and actually see it?"
"Of course—and who knows, we might even spot a time anomaly while we're there!" Thea said this with a conviction she did not feel. They each split off a clone of themselves, and Thea led Diana to the Vanishing Point and slipped them into the timestream.
...
Themyscira looked exactly as it always had—or rather, exactly as it once had.
Thea had targeted a point seven years after Diana's birth. No earlier. She did not dare go further back. She was absolutely terrified of running into Zeus.
The two goddesses hid among the trees and watched a younger Hippolyta and Antiope talking quietly. Not far away, a small figure was hidden too, watching with enormous, solemn eyes. Catching the weight of her mother's unspoken expectations, she wrestled silently with something inside herself.
Then little Diana quietly retreated from the trees, returned to her room, and locked away every toy she owned. Reluctant and resigned, she picked up her little blade and little sword and began drilling alone.
"See?" Thea covered her mouth, trying not to laugh outright. "You weren't much better than Cassie at her age."
Diana's expression was complicated. Looking back at herself now, she had to concede that she hadn't exactly been a monument to discipline.
They moved through Themyscira like ghosts, invisible to the crowd.
The Amazons had only recently settled the island at this point in time—the tribe still keeping its old customs. None of the graceful, art-filled architecture that Diana knew had been built yet. By itself, the island was pleasant enough—Thea supposed.
But Diana could barely contain her excitement. The sea wind lifted their hair. Layered mountains stretched to the horizon. Walking hand in hand with the person she loved, on the soil that had made her—she looked like she might lift off the ground.
Watching young versions of so many tribeswomen running about, building their home from nothing, Diana felt a deep, genuine joy rise in her chest.
"Happy?" Thea asked, like someone showing off a very good present.
"Happy," Diana answered. Completely, simply, unarguably.
"Then come back to mine tonight?"
"But I promised Cassie I'd be back by—"
"Cassie is a grown woman. She won't die. Call her and say the League has a mission."
Diana knew it was entirely made up. She agreed anyway. Thea's argument was morally questionable but hard to dispute: an unpaid teacher who vanished for a few days would be properly appreciated once she returned—and Cassie would figure out how to survive without supervision.
They wandered the island at their own pace, Diana mostly talking, Thea mostly listening. Both kept careful discipline: no magic, no divine power brought to bear on the island. This was the past. They could watch—but they couldn't interfere.
Diana was mid-step when Thea pulled her arm.
Wonder Woman's reflexes were instinctive—her bright eyes swept the crowd. And found her immediately. A woman who shone like clear moonlight given form.
She can see us. That was the first thought all three women shared, simultaneously.
"Lady Artemis." Thea had already confirmed the identity. She offered a small, respectful bow—not required, given where she now stood relative to the Moon Goddess in the hierarchy of power, but old debts were old debts.
"Oh—hello!" Diana was considerably more awkward. Artemis was technically her sister—but the relationships among the Greek pantheon were, to put it diplomatically, complicated. She settled for a bow, remembering only that Artemis had blessed her birth.
Artemis, for her part, was startled. She'd come out for a solitary walk and stumbled upon two divine presences she had never encountered. Both were manifesting in cloned forms, but even a clone carried traces of its source—and what she felt from Diana reminded her of Apollo: composed, radiant, difficult to look at directly. Thea she simply could not read. There was something of Hades in her, but different in ways Artemis couldn't name.
She caught herself staring and bowed quickly.
The three goddesses stood in silence for a moment. Thea and Diana were simply caught off guard—they hadn't expected to run into anyone they knew, and neither had immediately thought of what to say.
Artemis spoke first. "You're not of the Greek pantheon, are you? Are you perhaps from the Mesopotamian tradition?"
They'd encountered Egyptian gods before, and a divine presence at Thea's level would have ranked among the highest of the Ennead—there was no reason not to know her. It didn't make sense.
Diana glanced sideways at Thea. The look was a wordless question: how do we explain this?
"We come from the future," Thea said, perfectly at ease. "We came specifically to thank you, Lady Artemis."
The news visibly shook the Moon Goddess. Time was forbidden territory—not just for her, but for Zeus himself. Without a fixed anchor point, the probability of losing oneself permanently in the timestream was roughly eighty percent. The fact that these two had navigated it casually said a great deal.
"Do I still have a future?"
"You do."
"The Olympian prophecy—that Zeus's firstborn will kill one of his children before ascending to the throne. That matter..."
"False. Completely fabricated."
"What—!" Artemis forgot herself entirely for a moment. She'd lost sleep over this. And now she was being told it was invented?
"But Zeus gave the oracle himself. He said—" She hesitated, uncertain how much of her pantheon's secrets to share with strangers.
Thea's smile turned cold. Zeus was a masterful manipulator. He'd kept his children spinning in circles—convinced them to abandon their mortal worshippers and retreat into the divine realm to wait for a death that was never coming, while he himself seized every opportunity to push toward a higher plane of existence.
Whether it was mortals abandoning the gods or gods abandoning mortals—that was a question Thea didn't dare answer lightly. She already knew the answer, and it was history. Humanity had entered the age of science. The era of the old gods, of faith-sustained divinity, was ending regardless of what anyone chose.
"Lady Artemis," she said instead. "The path of mortal faith has limits. But as long as that moon hangs in the sky, no harm will come to you."
Artemis had always been quiet-natured, almost indifferent to competition. The reassurance extinguished whatever ember of interest she might have carried toward the war for divine supremacy.
What followed made a particular kind of sense. Working backward from the result to find its cause, Thea finally understood why the Moon Goddess had been so inexplicably kind to her from the start. She'd paid for it herself. Knowledge exchanged, in advance, for protection she hadn't yet needed when she gave it.
No special insight. No instant connection. Just a transaction, paid back across time.
A fair one, at that. She'd given Artemis something genuinely valuable—a warning to step back from a trap—and had added a new god's perspective for good measure.
It had to be said: the Greek pantheon invested extraordinary creativity into eating, drinking, and enjoying existence. On the subject of growing stronger, they were astonishingly, almost impressively oblivious.
For Artemis, there was really only one viable path: release the dependency on mortal faith and take the path of a nature god, as Zeus had. It was the only direction that would sustain her.
"You come from the future," Artemis said as they prepared to part. "Your understanding must exceed mine a hundredfold. What is the true nature of the world we inhabit? And where, in the order of things, do we gods stand?"
At the question, Diana's eyes lit up too. She didn't know the answer—but instinct told her Thea did, and had simply never said so.
She sent Thea a very clear signal: you are absolutely telling her today. Hands in pockets. Ready to listen.
Thea scratched the back of her head. She thought about it, and decided to share a small part of the picture.
"The universe is vast. There are parallel universes beyond counting. The world beneath our feet is one of them." She left out the specifics of fifty-two distinct universes—New Gods had their singularity, the old gods did not, and it wasn't worth the detour.
"Above the universe, a higher power divided existence into eight domains. They are called the Divine Realms."
"They correspond to one another in pairs: the Dreaming, the Heavenly Realm, New Genesis, and the Celestial Sphere are on one side. The Nightmare, the Inferno, Apokolips, and the Underworld are on the other."
"We come from New Genesis. Our enemy Darkseid is on Apokolips. Olympus and many other sacred territories are part of the Celestial Sphere. Hades' domain and Osiris's underworld are both part of the greater Underworld. Angels dwell in Heaven, demons in the Inferno. As for the Dreaming and the Nightmare—they are too mysterious even for me to speak of."
She laid it out plainly. Artemis visibly relaxed. She'd always suspected her position in the cosmos was worse than she wanted to admit. Hearing it broken down like this, she thought—wait. That's actually... not bad at all. The quiet anxiety that had sat beneath her composure faded.
"Thank you for these words," Artemis said as she took her leave, her tone carrying a faint double meaning. "I look forward to our next meeting."
After she was gone, Thea and Diana wandered Themyscira for the rest of the day. They slipped back to the present timeline, spent the night in a blur, and made plans to attend the weekend gathering.