In a pure contest of mastery over death, nothing that existed—or had ever existed—could touch Nekron. He had been present before the first living thing drew its first breath.
Nekron's domain was the death that predated all life.
The role Thea was fighting for was categorically different: the death that came into being at the same moment as the universe itself. Nekron's power couldn't reach a stone, because a stone had no life. Death the Endless could. Even rocks died. The two existences occupied entirely different tiers, and the gap between them was immense.
Even so, Nekron had taken his understanding of death as far as his nature allowed. Thea, by comparison, had barely touched the surface.
Without the female requirement, that stele, that small house, that entire domain—none of it would have had anything to do with her.
Destiny, she had to admit, was deeply, methodically cunning. He hadn't judged candidates purely on strength or insight. He had layered in hidden conditions—quiet criteria, unstated rules that no one outside the family had ever been told.
The gender requirement alone had eliminated ninety percent of all death-adjacent entities.
Take Darkseid, for example. The man had spent hundreds of millions of years in devoted, sleepless, obsessive study of death's fundamental nature. He had eventually pushed himself to a desperate decision: allowing the Flash and the Black Racer to end him, enduring the agony of rebirth, abandoning all his accumulated power, and starting over from absolute zero. He went through the entire harrowing process, emerged on the other side, and learned absolutely nothing. Not a single breakthrough. Not a sliver of new comprehension.
He was the textbook example of someone broken by a rule he never knew existed.
How was anyone supposed to know the position had a gender requirement?
The second criterion—not harming family—had eliminated entire pantheons whose long histories were steeped in mutual violence. Hades had the raw power, but the sheer number of relatives he had killed worked heavily against him.
The third—a partner who must not be mortal—had cut another broad swath from the competition.
Under all these tangled, seemingly arbitrary conditions, Thea had broken into the top hundred. And if she claimed first place, succession was automatic.
Her current limitation was her level of comprehension. Claiming the New God aspect of Death would likely push her into the top twenty. After that, through continued study and application, perhaps higher still. She had no idea how she could climb any higher after that.
She let go of the ranking fixation. There was enough to focus on right in front of her.
The stele, apparently done with her for now, had returned to its ordinary thirty-foot (10-meter) height, standing quietly in the gray expanse. Thea approached the small house with measured caution and pushed open the door.
Inside were a vanity mirror and a bed. Nothing else. But when she crossed the threshold, a set of clothes materialized on the mattress.
She picked the garments up and examined them. Nothing divine about them—no aura, no resonance. Just cloth and leather. A sleeveless crop top, black ripped jeans, a wide leather belt, fingerless gloves, leather boots.
On the vanity table: a pendant in the shape of an Ankh cross. The ancient Egyptian symbol of life.
Death wearing the symbol of life. She turned it over in her fingers, then shrugged and clasped it around her neck.
She looked in the mirror. Midriff exposed, arms bare—a silhouette that landed firmly in punk territory, nothing remotely resembling her usual style. As she registered the mismatch, her golden hair shifted to black on its own. Her eyes stayed green, now edged in deep shadow. Her lips darkened to a burnished near-black.
...Interesting choice.
She blinked. Everything reverted to normal. The outfit worked like a skin—one thought to wear it, one to remove it. Only the Ankh stayed put regardless of how many times she reached for the clasp.
She searched the room thoroughly. No cultivation manuals, no inscriptions, nothing under the bed. Empty-handed, she walked out.
Her rank on the stele: seventy-seven.
The Ankh's previous wearers had accumulated resonance in it, and now all of that had defaulted to her. Easy enough to deduce.
Death wearing the symbol of life. The two concepts should oppose each other—and yet here they were, deliberately joined. The message was already in the pairing: seek death through the study of life. That was her direction forward, and it would be for a considerable time.
The understanding hadn't come through reasoning. It had simply arrived, settling cleanly into her mind as though it had always been there.
I think I can push one more.
She burned the last third of her faith energy. The prayers of countless living things blazed up, and her name on the stele climbed—barely, with enormous reluctance—one more position.
Seventy-six. And another fragment of understanding settled in, clean and weightless.
She smiled.
Faith energy worked. A path forward existed.
Her instinct told her: repeat this process another seventeen or eighteen times, and she wouldn't need to seek out a death-domain source herself. The source would come to her.
As for Nekron—no soul, entirely different developmental track from New God cultivation. Not a viable target for absorption.
She closed her fingers around the Ankh and turned her attention to its secondary functions. Two clarified themselves: unrestricted entry and exit through Death's domain at will, and the ability to teleport to any location where death had ever occurred. Given the full scope of history, that was effectively anywhere in existence.
Nothing left to find, she departed.
The fifty-two parallel Earths anchored the center of existence. Beyond them lay the divine territories—Hell, Apokolips, New Genesis. Further still: the realm of the Monitors. At the outermost edge: the home of the Endless.
Riding the timestream back toward her own era, she made a startling discovery. The Ankh allowed her true body to travel the timeline directly—not a projection, not a shadow. She could enter the timestream in the flesh. Its capabilities extended far beyond what she had initially estimated.
The journey home was a cascade: origin point to personal timeline, Monitor realm to divine territory, divine territory to the parallel worlds, down to Earth. Each transfer hit harder than the last. By the time she stepped onto solid ground, the world was swaying slightly.
"Are you all right?" Raven stood a step away, genuinely puzzled. From her perspective, the two of them had stepped through a portal together no more than a heartbeat ago. She had no idea that Thea had just completed an entire extraordinary journey in the space between one breath and the next.
"Fine. Let's go—I'm completely spent. I need a few real days of rest."
Between the Ruiji Swarm, the Orange Lanterns, the Phantom Stranger, Hell, and now the Endless, she had nothing left to give.
Raven made a quiet sound of acknowledgment and didn't press.
They stepped out of the portal into open air. Earth. Thea checked the time—barely a month had passed outside, while they'd fought through close to half a year in Hell.
A trip that had gone as well as it possibly could. Raven had avoided falling into the Ghost Father's hands. Thea had walked away with something extraordinary.
They said their goodbyes and went their separate ways.
Home, a long bath, and her own bed.
She'd meant to sleep. Her mind had other plans, circling back to the Death problem the moment her head touched the pillow.
Her most serious competition for the ranking, objectively, was Nekron. Her advantage was the objective criteria. His advantage was a depth of comprehension that made hers look faintly embarrassing.
Comprehension accumulated the way anything of substance did—through time. Thea was honest enough with herself to admit that she had no real confidence she could close that gap through sheer effort alone.