Destroying the God of Hunger had given her a splitting headache, but it had also given her something else: clarity.
She stood in the wreckage of the battlefield and took stock of herself. She looked at the dead planets stretching around her, the silent star sector, the wandering souls crying out without sound.
That's what it was.
Not Larfleeze's greed. Or not only his greed—that had just been the accelerant. The anger she'd been carrying since she set foot in this region of space had a different source. These dead worlds were full of souls that hadn't gone anywhere. They died in resentment, in fury, and they were still here, still screaming without voices, and she'd been walking through that invisible noise for hours. It had saturated her without her realizing it.
The anger had been theirs.
Fortunately, the surge and collapse had done something useful: her anger, which had remained at a modest level of control for so long, had now been tested hard enough to break past the threshold. It settled into her like something that finally fit.
She could work with that.
"You piece of garbage—where do you think you're crawling to?"
Larfleeze had stopped trying to stand. He was pulling himself forward with his hands, legs dragging uselessly behind him, muttering something no one could parse. His spirit force was nearly depleted; the constructs had faded, the orange glow across the landscape had died away, and the planet was just dark rock again.
Thea crouched, looked at him, and delivered a second soul pulse.
Larfleeze went flat. He didn't get up.
She straightened. She leveled the holy sword at his skull.
"You wanted my sword? Come and take it." She pointed at him with the flat of the blade. "Every last bit of wealth belongs to Larfleeze? That's what you said, wasn't it. You had the nerve to reach your dirty claws toward the Goddess of Wealth—and today would have been the last day of your miserable life."
She held the point steady. Then she paused.
A new message had arrived in her mind. She turned it over quickly, reading the shape of it—the timing, the chain of cause and effect. The Larfleeze ambush. The emergency gem. The interval between them.
A supreme being had arranged this. Deliberately. The orange-ring attack had been engineered to pull her away from Larfleeze at exactly the right moment—to force her hand into sparing him. She could see the whole mechanism now, the way you see a chess setup only after the game is over.
She laughed quietly through her teeth and pointed at Larfleeze one more time.
"Dog. Your tiny little view of the world never imagined that a supreme being would use this kind of method to save your worthless life. Count yourself lucky. Next time you show your face in front of me, I'll take that head." She turned her back on him without another look.
She was halfway through opening a portal home when the emergency gem flared.
The call could only come from a handful of people—her immediate family and closest circle. Someone was in serious trouble. She ran a quick divination and had the situation mapped out in seconds. It was clear enough; the other side hadn't tried to hide anything.
Raven.
Wiltshire, England. Stonehenge.
She arrived under a cloudless sky, the kind of afternoon that made the countryside look like a painting. A few young men were kicking a football at the edge of the field. Tourists moved in small clusters between the standing stones, snapping photos, checking guidebooks. An entirely ordinary day.
In the hidden fold of space layered over the monument, things were less ordinary.
Thea pushed through the boundary.
Raven was backing away in uneven steps, her dark robes trailing across the grass. Standing between her and any exit was a tall man in a blue coat with a broad-brimmed hat pulled low—and the way he moved had the particular confidence of someone who had never once doubted he would get what he came for.
Thea threw a divine barrier between them and stepped in.
"Raven. Get behind me."
She felt the barrier the moment it left her hands—something was wrong with the local magical framework; the energy flow here was unlike anything she'd worked with before. She abandoned arcane power immediately and switched to pure divine force. That held.
Raven saw her and exhaled, visibly. She crossed behind Thea's shoulder and fixed cold eyes on the man in the hat.
"Careful. He lured me here. There's something planned."
"The magical interference—it's connecting to Hell?" Thea scanned the area, uncertain.
"This is where he was originally summoned." Raven's voice carried something layered—grief, old anger. The he she meant wasn't the man in the hat.
Thea looked back at him. "So. Phantom Stranger. Unless I'm reading this wrong, you were trying to hand Raven over to her father. Since when do you run errands for Hell?"
The Phantom Stranger's expression didn't change. He stepped through the divine barrier as though it wasn't there.
Thea's eyes narrowed. That was a divine barrier. He'd walked through it like fog.
"New God," he said. "I have no connection to Hell. A Being of great power sent me to do this. Stand aside. Before such greatness, you are an ant."
An ant. She turned that over in her mind and found, to her own mild surprise, that she wasn't offended.
He was right. The Presence—if that was who stood behind this—had the Watchers of Marvel, Highfather, Darkseid, every cosmic entity she'd ever encountered, all of them, somewhere far below the same horizon. She had enough self-awareness to know exactly where she stood in comparison. Calling herself an ant was probably generous.
Even so.
She'd been thinking about the Larfleeze encounter on her way here. The timing. The orange ring attack right before the emergency call. The setup was too clean to be coincidence. Someone at an altitude she couldn't reach had arranged for her to be here at this exact moment—and that someone was, in all probability, watching.
That kind of power didn't micromanage. It set things in motion and enjoyed the unfolding. The Presence was the author of this story, not a character in it—and authors didn't usually stop the plot from complicating.
Which meant she had room to maneuver. A little.
She dropped the argument about great power entirely. No winning that one. Instead she tilted her head at the Phantom Stranger and shifted registers.
"You know I'm the Goddess of Wealth, right? I can see from your expression that you do." She paused. "Then you also know those thirty coins hanging around your neck fall inside my domain."
The Stranger's coat covered his chest, but she'd already felt it—a faint trail of divine resonance, small and old, saturating objects that had been in contact with something incomprehensibly large. The coins were trivial in weight and monetary value. As objects steeped in divine karma, they were anything but.
"The Spear of Longinus started as an ordinary Roman lance," she continued pleasantly. "It became a relic because of what it touched, and what it was used to do. Thirty silver coins used to purchase a life—the life of Jesus of Nazareth—carry the same category of weight. That kind of transaction sits squarely in the Wealth domain. They're holy relics whether anyone likes that framing or not." She glanced at the coins' outline beneath his coat. What a shame. "And they're yours, which means I can't simply take them. But." She tilted her head slightly. "For a man who sold Jesus for thirty silver coins—Judas, wasn't it? That was your name once—there's still quite a lot we could discuss."
She smiled.
"The local authority matters more than some distant emperor. I don't need to take anything. I just need to be relevant."
The Presence was the Buddha in this story. The Phantom Stranger was the pilgrim monk, traveling a road he believed was ordained. And she was the demon making trouble by the roadside. Pilgrims expected demons. The script practically wrote itself.
I just need to not go over the line.
"So," she said to the Stranger. "Let's talk about you."