Once certain of her direction, Thea didn't hesitate. She stepped forward into the gray.
The hall disappeared.
In its place: a void with no ceiling and no floor, thick mist pressing in from every direction. Beneath her feet was a floating chunk of stone no larger than a mattress. In every direction she could see—above, below, left, right, front and back—were hundreds upon thousands of similar fragments. The fog swallowed her view beyond a certain distance, but she could sense it: out there in the unseen reaches, these stones went on without number.
This was a path marked by Death itself. Choose wrong, and she would die.
As a New God, she understood the logic well enough. This was a test of comprehension. The deeper your understanding of death, the more clearly the correct path revealed itself. There was only one right answer—a direct line to the truth.
Oh, come on, she thought, fighting down a surge of frustration. I'm just a candidate. Does this really need to be this elaborate?
She took stock of her situation. Fortunately, she had never confined herself exclusively to the heroic side of the spectrum. Years of studying souls—grey arts, forbidden knowledge, the spaces between life and death—had given her a relationship with mortality that far outstripped most New Gods. Without that background, she'd have been completely lost before the first step.
The road ahead was murky. But it wasn't hopeless.
She still had the Phantom Stranger's silver coin, which could reset the entire scenario. But using it here felt profoundly wasteful—a nuclear option for a puzzle. And if everything reset, would her family still be where she'd left them? Would Diana? Waking up at the very beginning of things, completely alone, was not a version of victory she could accept under any framing.
She stared at the debris field filling her vision. Somewhere among these countless fragments was the single path that led forward. The odds were genuinely poor.
Worse still: of the dozen or so stones within immediate reach, only three or four had any real potential for her. The rest were traps or dead ends she could sense without touching them.
She narrowed it to three. Her best guess was that her correct path ran through one of them—but three was still three.
Can I project an avatar to scout? She tried. Nothing. Death treated all beings as equals—New Gods no differently from ordinary humans. Her powers were effectively sealed. Physical capability sat fractionally above human baseline. Attempting to fly would simply drop her into the void below.
She sat cross-legged on the stone, chin propped on one hand, and thought through everything she had ever read or absorbed about the Endless—beings who transcended the world itself, each carrying power on par with the Monitors, with Destiny and Death standing above even that tier.
Everything ends...
She reached a decision with the quiet certainty of someone who has exhausted every other option.
A small, colorless sphere of energy materialized in her palm.
Her faith energy, drawn from her Scales of Order. Once before, at a critical juncture, it had guided her toward a vital source. Now, at another crossroads, it was the only compass she trusted.
I've helped enough people. Now it's their turn. She believed that completely, without qualification.
Faith energy and the Endless shared a common root, in a roundabout way—both born from the collective weight of living things. There had to be some resonance here.
"Which way?" she asked silently.
The energy burned, then pointed.
She nearly threw her fist in the air. The fragment it indicated was one of the three she had already been watching.
She leaped.
From there, Thea moved steadily forward. The beginning had been the hardest—too many choices at once, each requiring careful thought before she spent even a trace of faith energy to confirm it. As she continued, patterns began to emerge. She analyzed each decision herself first, burned a small amount of energy only to verify her final choice from her narrowed selection.
Slow. But her odds of reaching the end were somewhere around sixty to seventy percent.
The only genuine threat was running dry before the finish line came into view.
Whether by the universe's goodwill or by Destiny quietly nudging the scales, when her faith energy hit the one-third mark, the void gave way and solid ground appeared beneath her feet.
Thea let herself fall flat on her back, arms and legs spread wide, and murmured a few quiet words of thanks to God.
It took a long while before she felt like standing.
She got up and took stock of the space.
It wasn't large. A massive stone stele stood alone at the center. Beside it stood a single small building, no bigger than a studio apartment.
She approached the stele first. It radiated a presence old beyond measurement, as though it had existed here before the universe's first breath. Black stone of unknown material, marked with scattered characters.
When her eyes found the text, something shifted.
Either she had shrunk, or the stele had grown.
What had been roughly thirty feet tall (10 meters) was now a pillar rising tens of thousands of feet (over 10,000 meters) into the void above her. Thea flew to the summit and read downward.
First place: blank.
Second, third, fourth—she kept going, her expression growing incrementally less dignified. At number seventy-eight, she found her name. Silver-bright, glowing clearly, while every other entry sat dark as charcoal.
A small, genuine thrill ran through her despite herself. Still, seventy-eighth was hardly a rank to celebrate.
Before she could fully commit to an appropriately deflated expression, information flowed from the stele directly into her understanding.
The selection criteria.
The fact that these rules existed nowhere outside this room—no public announcement, no explanation offered to anyone—made complete sense to Thea. Because she benefited from them. Substantially.
More than ten thousand names were carved into that stone. She had landed at seventy-eighth. Her name was the only one that glowed. The advantage was not subtle.
For reference: Hades—her and Diana's longtime acquaintance—sat at rank 4,119. Hypnos, the sleep-god of death, was somewhere past eight thousand. Nekron, the Black Death Emperor, held rank 105. Darkseid sat at 319. Some entity whose direct gaze caused immediate death ranked somewhere in the thousands. Doomsday ranked comparably.
None of this reflected mastery. Nekron could have left Thea entirely behind on that front. Their lower rankings came from one source: none of them had ever known the hidden criteria.
The first criterion—and in Thea's estimation, the decisive one:
From the very beginning of his design, Destiny had decreed that Death would be his sister. The position required a female candidate. Female. Female. The important things bear repeating.
That single requirement had eliminated Darkseid and Nekron before they had taken a single step—regardless of how deep their understanding of death had become, it made no difference whatsoever...