"Welcome to Hell, New God." The Phantom Stranger's tone made it clear this was not a welcome.
Thea didn't need the introduction. She'd already run the assessment. Hell occupied the same cosmic tier as New Genesis and Apokolips—categorically above the parallel universes she usually operated in. She'd felt the shift the moment they arrived. The rules here were different in ways that went deeper than technique.
She turned to Raven, who was trembling.
"I'll find a way out. Trust me on that."
Raven tried to hold herself steady. The smell of this place, the weight of it—she'd been to the edges of Hell before, but being dropped into it without warning was something else entirely.
"First things first." Thea caught her by the wrist. "Your magical signature is broadcasting. If your father's people sense that, we're done before we start. Hold still—this is going to be uncomfortable."
She worked quickly, tracing four separate rune formations across Raven's limbs—each one keyed to the specific frequency of Trigon's demonic essence that ran through Raven's bloodline. The malevolent power that made Raven his daughter went quiet. From a casual magical scan, she'd read as an ordinary girl with some arcane training.
Not perfect. The blood-resonance, the deeper hereditary connection—that she couldn't mask. They'd need distance between them and wherever Trigon's main body was anchored.
"That'll hold for now," Thea said, stepping back and studying her work. "Just don't push your powers hard. The runes will slip."
"And you?" The Phantom Stranger's voice came from behind her. "Your divine light might as well be a bonfire. This realm is not hospitable to beings of your nature."
She gave him a look.
Obviously. She'd already checked. Her Mother Box: blocked. Teleportation: incompatible with Hell's dimensional laws. The lantern ring: worthless here. Every exit she'd built into herself over years of careful preparation was sealed. The Presence hadn't just dropped her here and left the door open. He'd made absolutely sure that if she was going to find her way out, she'd have to earn it.
She reached into her wealth-space and rummaged until she found it.
A gray-white robe, frayed at the edges, the kind of garment that looked like it had been dragged through a century of neglect. It had come from Hades's vaults—not a front-shelf item, not something she'd paid much attention to when she first acquired it, but the enchantment was useful: it drew wandering souls. They were attracted to it.
She threw it over her shoulders.
The effect was immediate. A dozen nearby wraiths turned toward her, confused and hungry, and then began drifting in. Then more followed. The dead didn't care about divine light—they responded to soul-signatures, and the robe advertised a feast. Within thirty seconds she was wrapped in a trailing shroud of restless dead that would have made any observer assume she was a necromancer in her professional prime.
The Phantom Stranger stared.
She wiggled her fingers at him. "Surprised? I plan ahead."
Her soul-attribute divine seat did the rest of the work. Any wraith that actually got too close simply ceased to exist on contact with her passive emanation. She was a predator wearing prey's clothing. From the outside, she looked perfectly dangerous in the acceptable kind of way—the kind of dangerous that Hell's inhabitants respected rather than attacked.
Raven needed no disguise. Her aura already matched Hell's native resonance; she belonged here in a way that wouldn't raise flags.
Raven glanced around at the blasted landscape and dropped her voice. "Can we follow the old route? The path we opened when we sealed the fragment—through Nanda Parbat. Would that work?"
"You know this terrain?" Thea turned to her with some interest. If an existing route was accessible, that would make things considerably simpler.
Raven looked around carefully for several seconds. Then she shook her head. She didn't recognize any of this.
"Then we find our own way." Thea pointed at the Stranger. "You—follow us. And try not to be dramatic about it."
She turned without waiting. I'll fight to the end before I sit around waiting for someone to hand me a way out.
He fell into step behind them.
The outer reaches of Hell were a disaster unfolding in slow motion. Wandering souls accumulated here—beings who'd lived with enough malice in life to miss the path to the spirit realms entirely, ending up in this wasteland instead. Without direction or memory, they cycled through the same blind hunger until something in the environment tipped the balance. They absorbed enough of Hell's ambient energy, fought and consumed each other long enough, and eventually something crystallized. A minor demon. Given enough time and enough violence, a minor demon could become a major one, carve out territory, start something that looked almost like civilization. This was the iron law of Hell's natural history, forged over billions of years.
It also meant the outer reaches were occupied, and the occupants were watching.
Several demons passed them at a distance. Every one of them took one look at the wraith-trailing gray robe and chose a different direction. She didn't have Diana's brilliant divine presence—her own divine seat leaned toward neutrality, commerce, exchange. But a necromancer walking Hell's outskirts with dead souls clinging to her like a cloak was its own kind of statement.
The Phantom Stranger was not so fortunate.
He was, by any reasonable cosmic accounting, the greatest sinner who had ever lived. Whatever divine record kept these things noted had that distinction next to his name. The wandering dead in this sector could smell it. She watched three of them lock onto him simultaneously and drift his way with the focused attention of things that had been hungry for a very long time.
He threw up a defensive barrier. More came.
"Can you make less noise?" she said without turning around.
"I am not doing this intentionally."
"Then think about it harder."
She sighed, pulled a thin thread of soul-attribute divine power out of herself, and passed it back toward him—not enough to disguise him, but enough to broadcast a basic deterrent. This one is off the menu. The wraiths slowed, reconsidered, drifted away.
"Don't make me regret that," she said.
They walked. The landscape didn't change much—dark sky, red earth, rock formations that looked like they'd been melted and re-solidified multiple times. The sulfur smell faded to background noise after the first hour, which was its own kind of terrible. Three hours into the march, the faint outline of a settlement appeared at the edge of visibility: low structures, dim lights.
Thea ran the numbers in her head.
Hell's cosmological neighbors were Apokolips and the Nightmare realm—Dreamscape gone wrong. Either would be substantially worse than where they were standing. But Hell itself had something useful: human beings had been finding their way here and building routes out of it for as long as civilization had existed. Summoning circles. Bargain-portals. One-way gates installed by demon lords who'd once had reasons to want traffic flowing outward. The Presence had sealed her methods. He hadn't sealed Hell.
She just needed to find a local who'd rent her a door.
A demon came down the road toward them on a hell-horse—a dark beast with eyes that burned like embers, its hooves ringing against the red stone with each step. The rider wore half-armor, scavenged and battered, and had the air of someone who'd recently acquired it from a previous owner. He was moving quickly.
Thea stepped into the road.
"You. Stop."
All I need is one demon with a working portal and a price I can meet.
She smiled pleasantly at the demon, who had stopped his horse and was now calculating his odds with visible discomfort.
This was exactly the kind of negotiation she could do all day.