Hey there everyone! Sorry for the extended absence from this story, but I'm finally back to updating it! I had to figure out where I want the story to go from here, so that was part of why this story has been dormant for as long as it has been.
I've had time to think about the pairings and here are some that I am leaning towards (they may change depending on input from readers):
Superboy x Khanna
Sarai x Static/Blue Beetle
Roy x Power Girl
Baron x Empress
Trunks x Wonder Girl
Tarro x Blackfire
Daikon x Pan
Goten x Hailfire
Bulla x Zero
Miss Martian x Zerick
Or
Superboy x Sarai
Roy x Wonder Girl
Baron x Miss Martian
Zerick x Empress
Zero x Power Girl
Daikon x Hailfire
Tarro x Blackfire
Goten x Bulla
Aqualad x Pan
Trunks x Khanna
And Super Girl x Odyn (this one can't change because it's the main pairing)
That's what I have for pairings so far, let me know if I should make any changes to that list. Without further ado, onto the story!
Opening:
Opening theme: Sing my Pleasure (Vivy Flourete Eye Song)
Visuals: Main Characters of this story meaning the main dark elves Awakening, the saiyans then briefly talking to beerus and the Kai, before transitioning to the Justice league. The chorus is Odyn and Supergirl fighting off Parademons with the other members of the team before the opening ends with a group of Odyn, Supergirl, Roy, and Powergirl flying towards Darkseid.
Chapter Four: Vengeance Against a Tyrant — The True Power of the Dark Elves
◆ I. ◆
Themyscira — Southern Shore
The sky broke first.
It always did, when they came — Boom Tubes tearing through cloud cover like infected wounds, hemorrhaging darkness into the clean air above the island. The sound arrived a half-second later: a tearing, dimensional groan, followed immediately by the shriek of Parademons in numbers that made individual counting meaningless.
The ocean below the cliffs went dark with their shadows.
Sarai Albanar stood at the tide line with her borrowed feet in the surf and her borrowed eyes turned skyward, and she counted. Not the individual creatures — there were too many for that to be useful — but the formation density, the approach vectors, the gaps between Boom Tube clusters that told her something about how Darkseid had deployed them and what he expected to encounter here.
He expects Amazons, she thought. He does not expect me.
The blade in her hand had been Aleka's when the morning started. It was something different now — the runes she had worked into its length during the minutes between awakening and this moment had changed its nature from a weapon of craft to a weapon of principle, the metal now threaded through with the same network of meaning that ran through all Arkynorean artifice: intention made material, purpose given edge.
The first wave hit the shoreline.
Sarai moved.
She moved the way water moves through stone — not against the resistance but through the gaps in it, her body finding the spaces between the Parademons' trajectories with the effortless precision of someone who has not merely trained in combat but who has had combat be, for centuries of accumulated memory, the fundamental language through which she understood the world. Two she took with the blade. A third she redirected with an open-palm strike that caught its momentum and sent it spinning into a fourth.
Then she stopped trying to do it individually.
She raised her free hand, palm upward, and felt the mana in her chest respond the way a held breath responds when you finally release it — with relief, with the particular satisfaction of something natural that has been delayed too long.
"Luminarc Cascade."
The air above her opened like a flower.
Light arrows — not metaphorical, not approximate, but genuinely and specifically arrows, each one a discrete projectile of concentrated luminescence — formed in a halo around her extended arm by the dozens, then the hundreds, their trailing edges catching the ocean wind as they oriented. The targeting was not conscious so much as instinctive: Arkynorean combat magic did not require that you think about where each projectile needed to go, only that your intention was clear. She wanted them gone. She wanted the sky clear.
The arrows found their targets.
Parademons fell burning into the surf and the sand. The sound they made on impact was unpleasant, and Sarai did not listen to it.
At the cliffs above the beach, the Amazons of Themyscira had arrayed themselves in the phalanx formation that had served their tradition since the age of bronze — shields locked, spears leveled, the collective discipline of warriors who had been practicing this exact response to invasion since before most civilizations had learned to write it down.
"Sisters!" Hippolyta's voice crossed the beach without effort, the voice of someone who had been giving commands in exactly this context for longer than could be conveniently measured. "We do not stand idle while our home burns! Move!"
They moved.
The phalanx broke into individual combat units as they came down from the cliffs, the Amazonian adaptation to uneven terrain as natural to them as breathing, and the battle on the shore became three-dimensional and chaotic and loud.
Sarai registered all of this peripherally. She registered it the way experienced warriors register everything that isn't immediately trying to kill them — as background, context, the larger shape of the situation within which the immediate situation was occurring. The Amazons were extraordinary. She knew this without needing to watch them closely. Their discipline was evident in the sound of it.
Her attention was on the sky.
A squadron of Parademons had broken from the main assault pattern and was approaching from the high angle — coming in from above and behind where most defenders would have their attention fixed forward and down. It was a sound tactical decision, and she acknowledged this privately before addressing it.
She did not turn.
She felt the life-energy signatures behind her the way you feel heat on the back of your neck — not direction exactly, more presence, the ambient fact of living things moving through space. She felt their trajectories resolving toward her. She waited until the geometry was correct.
Then she snapped her fingers.
The mana compression was invisible to the eye until the moment it wasn't: a sphere of gravitational force that materialized around the lead Parademon at a radius slightly smaller than the creature's wingspan, and then contracted. The sound it produced was brief and definitive.
The creature did not hit the ground. There was not enough of it left to hit the ground.
The others in the squadron broke formation.
Sarai turned now, the blade moving in her right hand as her left traced the follow-up pattern, and the fight continued.
---
High above, where the air was thin and the sounds of the battle below were compressed into the general texture of noise, Darkseid observed.
His arms were crossed at his back. His face was the face he wore when he was processing something he had not anticipated and was determining, with the methodical patience of a genuinely intelligent being, what the most accurate interpretation of the data was.
That magic.
The signature was wrong for anything in his catalogued experience of Earth's defenders. It was older than anything he had encountered in this system, denser, carrying the particular quality of power that had been refined across centuries of civilization rather than decades of training.
The doubt that had seeded itself on the flight from Apokolips grew one root deeper.
Impossible, he told himself.
I watched the planet burn.
And yet.
The figure on the beach below moved with the fluid, economical grace of Arkynorean combat practice — the style that integrated physical and magical force so completely that distinguishing between them became philosophically meaningless. He had seen that style before. He had spent considerable resources ensuring he would never see it again.
His jaw tightened.
Apparently not enough resources.
He turned his gaze from Themyscira toward the distant skyline of Metropolis, where the golden light he had dismissed as anomalous was, he now realized, not anomalous at all.
He began to move.
◆ II. ◆
En Route to Themyscira
Donna found the silence between the three of them comfortable in a way she hadn't expected.
They were flying fast — the kind of speed that made conversation impractical under ordinary circumstances, the wind working at their faces and the ocean blurring below — but Donna and Baron had somehow arrived at a traveling distance close enough that speech was possible without shouting, and Empress had positioned herself at a tactful remove that was almost certainly deliberate.
"You speak of their magic as though it's a science," Empress had observed, earlier, and Donna had been thinking about it since.
"To us, it is both," Baron had said. "The Arkynoreans never made the distinction your scholars tend to make between the measurable and the ineffable. Mana has structure. It responds to intent, but it responds consistently to intent — which means it can be studied, modeled, predicted."
"Taught?" Donna asked.
"With the right student." He had looked at her sideways when he said this — not, she thought, to evaluate whether she qualified, but with the particular quality of attention that was becoming, she noticed, his default setting in proximity to her. Thorough. Unhurried.
She was not accustomed to being looked at that way. It was disconcerting in a manner that was not unpleasant, which was perhaps the most disconcerting thing about it.
"Tell me about Arkynor," she had said, because she wanted to understand, and because asking was the most direct path to understanding, and directness was something she had always considered one of her better qualities.
The pain that moved across his face at the question was not dramatic. It was the quiet kind — the kind that a person carries so constantly that they have learned to let it surface and recede without affecting their functional composure. His voice, when he spoke, was level.
"Luminara," he said. "The capital. The name means — approximately — 'the city that holds the light.' It was not metaphorical. The architecture was designed to gather and refract the ambient mana of the land, which had a visible quality in Arkynor's latitudes. At night, the city was its own light source." A pause. "Every building had living elements — materials that grew and adapted over centuries. A Luminaran building did not look the same at a hundred years as it did at founding. It learned what it was supposed to be."
"That sounds extraordinary."
"I was young enough that I thought it was ordinary," he said. "The specific tragedy of youth is that you don't recognize what you have until the moment when you no longer have it." Another pause. "I was in my first century. Barely past the age at which an Arkynorean is considered to have developed adult judgment."
"What were you doing, when it started?"
"Training," he said. "Odyn and I were training in the eastern fields. We heard it before we saw it — the Boom Tubes opening. They sound different when there are hundreds of them, rather than one or two. The frequency of the resonance changes. Like the difference between a single drumbeat and a war march."
Donna said nothing. She listened.
"We ran back toward the city," he said. "And the city was already — it was—" He stopped. "There is no description that does accurate justice to what Darkseid does to a civilization. Whatever language reaches for, the reality exceeds it. I have not found words for it yet, and I have had centuries."
Donna's hand moved.
She registered, at some point between the impulse and the execution, that she was reaching across the distance between them to touch his arm. She did not stop the motion. It felt true.
He looked at her hand.
"In my culture," he said, quietly, "physical contact was extended to family, to close friends, and to those one intended to know for the remainder of one's life."
There was a pause in which the wind did what wind does and the ocean continued its business and Empress, three body-lengths to their right, found something in the middle distance that required her complete attention.
"That's a significant distinction," Donna said.
"Yes."
"I'm from a culture that uses touch to communicate care," she said. "I didn't mean to impose—"
"You didn't." His hand closed over hers, feather-light and completely certain. "I am willing to learn new customs. This one seems worth learning."
The moment lasted until Themyscira appeared on the horizon, and then the sounds of battle reached them, and everything that was not immediately practical had to be set aside for now.
But not forgotten.
"Should I fly ahead and give you two a moment?" Empress said, with elaborate innocence.
Neither of them answered her, which she correctly interpreted as a form of answer.
◆ III. ◆
Metropolis — Airspace
The golden lights were everywhere.
Kara registered them at altitude — columns of luminescence rising from the streets below wherever a Dark Elf was awakening in a human host, the network of their revival patterning across the city's grid like a second infrastructure laid over the first one, visible only to those who knew what they were looking at.
She knew what she was looking at.
Beside her, Odyn scanned the same view with the focused efficiency of someone running calculations — locating each point of light, assessing proximity to civilian populations, determining the order in which the newly awakened would need to be oriented to the situation.
"Three in the financial district," he said, more to himself than her. "Two near the industrial waterfront. Seven more—" He paused. "The network is anchoring. They're connecting to each other without guidance."
"Is that normal?"
"It's faster than I expected." He turned to her, and there was something in his expression that she had not seen before — not quite surprise, but the thing that precedes surprise when you are someone who suppresses both. "We have been dormant for a very long time. I was not certain how coherent our network would be on revival."
"It seems coherent," Kara said.
"It does." His jaw set. "Good."
He was looking at something beyond her when Hyatan's voice reached them from behind.
"He's here," she said.
No one asked who she meant.
Darkseid descended from the north.
Odyn had been right about the approach angle. He came in from above the industrial district, using the height advantage to split the natural defensive response between the heroes already on the ground and those still engaging at altitude — a tactical architecture that assumed his opponents would scramble to cover multiple angles and therefore cover none of them adequately.
He was not accustomed to opponents who had studied him.
The blast that struck him between the shoulder blades was not from Superman, or Wonder Woman, or any of the League members converging from below. It was concentrated mana — a type of energy with a signature that made his stride falter mid-descent in a way no Kryptonian's power could have managed.
He turned.
Odyn hovered at his level, flanked by Hyatan on his left and Kara on his right. Power Girl and the others had taken positions at angles behind them, creating a geometry that — Darkseid noted, with the part of his mind that was always evaluating — was not ornamental. It was tactical.
"Remember us, tyrant?"
Hyatan's voice carried across the open air with the particular quality of someone who has been waiting a very long time to say something and has not spent that time deciding whether to say it, only when.
Darkseid's red eyes moved across the faces before him. They lingered on Odyn.
"Arkynoreans," he said. The word came out without inflection — neither surprised nor unsurprised, which was itself a kind of performance. "Some of you survived."
"Not survived," Odyn said. "Returned."
The distinction appeared to register, which Kara thought said something about Darkseid's intelligence that she would have preferred not to acknowledge. He was many things, and stupid was not among them.
"What you faced before," Odyn continued, "was a civilization defending its home. What you face now is a race that has spent centuries with nothing to do but remember what you took from them and determine exactly how to answer for it."
"Your hatred is understandable," Darkseid said, in the tone of someone making a clinical observation. "It does not make you a threat."
"No," Hyatan agreed. "What makes us a threat—"
She raised both hands.
Across the city, every awakened Dark Elf — in the financial district, near the waterfront, in alleys and apartment buildings and rooftops where the revival had found them — paused in the middle of whatever they were doing and oriented. Not physically. The orientation was internal: a turning of attention, a tuning of magical frequency, the way individual instruments tune to a shared pitch before an orchestra begins.
Golden threads appeared between them.
Each one was individually fine, barely visible against the sky. Together, they formed a web that stretched across the entire visible city — a network of mana connections anchored at every Arkynorean node, resonating between them with the soft, persistent pulse of something that was simultaneously technology and organism.
The air tasted different.
Kara felt it even through the sensory insulation of her Kryptonian physiology — the ambient magical pressure of the network was substantial enough to register as a physical sensation, a gentle but unmistakable weight in the atmosphere.
"Unity," Odyn said simply. "Something a tyrant cannot replicate."
Darkseid's eyes narrowed.
Then the Omega Beams ignited.
◆ IV. ◆
Kara had faced Omega Beams before.
She had faced them at a distance, had seen what they did to material they contacted, and had developed the appropriate respect for what they represented. The beams did not merely destroy — they tracked, bending around obstacles, pursuing their targets with an intelligence that was not mechanical but felt like it, the relentless quality of something that had been told to arrive and was not interested in the obstacles between here and there.
What she had never seen was the beams failing to arrive.
Odyn did not raise a barrier in the conventional sense — did not throw up a wall of mana between himself and the oncoming energy. What he constructed, in the fraction of a second between the Omega Beams' ignition and their arrival, was more like a lens than a shield: a complex magical structure designed not to block but to receive, to take the incoming energy and subject it to a transformation so fundamental that what emerged from the other side shared nothing with what had entered except the quantity.
The beams struck the lens.
For a moment, the lens was very bright.
Then the brightness resolved — distributed outward through the web of golden threads connecting every awakened Dark Elf in the city, dispersing through the network the way current disperses through a conductor, each node momentarily blazing with absorbed Omega energy.
"The first principle of our magic," Odyn said, and his voice was the voice of someone explaining something they consider foundational, not performing — "is that mana and energy exist in a shared continuum. What one can become, the other can also become."
Darkseid's expression, which had begun the encounter in its resting state of contemptuous certainty, was making a controlled but perceptible journey toward something more considered.
"The second," Hyatan continued, her hands moving through patterns that tightened the connections in the network, "is that unified intent amplifies power exponentially. A single Elf can channel a given magnitude of force. Ten Elves sharing intent can channel not ten times that magnitude but a hundredfold."
"And the third," Odyn said, "is that energy transformed carries the memory of its origin. It does not forget what it was."
He looked at Darkseid.
"Return it," he said — and whether this was a command to the network or an address to the transformed energy itself was not entirely clear, and possibly irrelevant.
The threads pulled inward.
The Omega energy, transformed and redistributed, gathered at every node simultaneously and then converged — not as beams, not in any configuration Darkseid's experience had taught him to anticipate, but as thousands of golden lances arriving from every direction that contained an awakened Dark Elf. From above, from the sides, from below the elevated line of the financial district. From the waterfront. From the rooftops.
Darkseid crossed his arms.
He took the volley.
The impact drove him back three body-lengths through the air — three body-lengths that no force had compelled him to travel in this encounter until this moment. His armor smoked. Several of the lances had found the joints in his defense, the places where the Elven magic's particular affinity for biological tissue had allowed it to circumvent the brute-force protection his physical durability provided.
He looked at the wounds.
Then he looked at Odyn.
The decision that moved across his face was fast and ruthless, and it targeted Kara.
◆ V. ◆
She saw it coming.
She did not evade it.
This was not a failure of reflex — Kryptonian reflex at full solar charge was faster than most things that happened in atmospheric combat. It was a calculation: the trajectory of his strike was aimed to pass through her and continue toward Odyn, and if she moved, he would adjust, and the adjustment would be faster than any secondary response she could mount. The most effective countermeasure was to be in the path and survive it and have Odyn still standing when the exchange was over.
The fist connected.
The force of it was extraordinary. Not the ordinary extraordinary of combat with enhanced beings — she had sufficient frame of reference for that. This was the extraordinary of something that had crushed planets, that had broken things that were not supposed to be breakable, that operated in a tier of physical reality she visited but did not live in. The concussive wave preceded the contact itself, and then the contact arrived, and Kara went through the first building before she had registered that she was moving.
The second building arrived while she was still processing the first.
The third was marginally softer, which was not the comfort it might have been under other circumstances.
She stopped in the street.
Counted seconds.
Determined that she was functional.
Rose.
Above her, she heard the sound of Odyn being driven into the earth — a different sound from most impacts because it didn't stop where the surface did, it continued, the ground yielding to the force in concentric rings from the point of contact. Darkseid's voice carried down from the air.
"Strength is dominion."
She was moving before she had finished computing the trajectory.
The sonic boom she generated on re-entry cracked every remaining window in the immediate block. She hit Darkseid from behind with both fists interlocked, putting everything she had behind it — every unit of stored solar energy, every ounce of the fury that had been accumulating since the moment she had seen the murals on the walls of the Fortress and understood what they were telling her.
He moved.
One step.
A god of Apokolips, who had broken armies, who had reduced civilizations to cautionary footnotes, who had fought Superman to a standstill more than once, moved one step from the force of her strike.
She filed this information away in the part of her mind that was always assessing, always computing.
Progress, that part of her said.
Then Darkseid turned and hit her, and the sound barrier broke around the impact, and she was spinning through the air above the elevated train line.
She stabilized.
Her side was wrong in a way it had not been wrong before this fight. Several things were moving that were not supposed to move independently of each other. She breathed through it — the Kryptonian body's capacity for rapid solar-assisted healing was buying her time she was not certain she had enough of.
Below her, Odyn had risen from the crater.
His aura was different now — not dimmer, but more compressed, pulled in tight against his body rather than radiating freely. The tattoos on his face were blazing in a way that had not been visible at this distance before, each line of them hot with the concentrated intent of someone who has made a decision and is committing to it completely.
He looked up at her.
"Kara."
She had been spoken to by a lot of people in the past year. She had been called by her name in urgency, in affection, in command and in comfort. The way Odyn said it was none of those things exactly and partook of all of them — the single syllable carrying information that did not fit inside words, a complete communication compressed into a name.
She understood.
She felt it in the structure of what he was building, even from this distance — the compression of his mana into a single concentrated point, the resonance building toward the frequency where magical and physical force could exist at the same moment in the same space, augmenting each other rather than interfering.
Harmony Strike, the memory offered her. The perfect alignment of both energies.
She had tried it, with his hands over hers in the quiet of the Hall of Justice. She had managed the first step — drawing the solar energy out of its instinctive distribution and directing it consciously. She had not yet tried to do this in the middle of a battle while damaged and furious and somewhat terrified.
Well, she thought, with the particular dark humor she had developed as a coping mechanism for situations that required more of her than she was certain she had.
Now seems like the time.
She reached inward.
The solar energy was there — always there, accumulated from days of yellow sun exposure, held in the lattice of her cells. Normally she accessed it the way you access a reflex: it was already happening before you consciously engaged with it. She was asking it, now, to do something different. To gather. To hold. To wait.
It responded.
The blue light that built around her hands was the same as it had been in the Hall of Justice, but brighter — or perhaps it only looked brighter because she was more frightened. She had read somewhere that fear made colors more vivid. She had found this observation eminently accurate.
Darkseid's beams came for her.
She did not move.
The beams were the last thing she fully registered in sequence before the world became a series of disjoint moments: the impact, the burning, the sound of her own voice doing something that was not quite a scream, the sensation of continuing to move forward through the resistance of energy that was trying to stop her, the moment when she was close enough to see the particular quality of surprise in Darkseid's expression — not fear, but the genuine, unperformed surprise of encountering something that the model did not predict.
She hit him with everything she had.
◆ VI. ◆
The strike detonated.
Not in the metaphorical sense that combat journalists used to describe a particularly effective blow. In the literal sense: the concentrated solar energy she had been building released in the moment of contact as a directed explosion, channeled through the physical force of the punch rather than dissipating in the surrounding air. The effect was a shockwave that expanded outward from the point of impact in a sphere rather than a cone.
Darkseid's head moved.
Not much.
But it moved.
Odyn arrived at the same moment she did — she felt him rather than saw him, felt the mana compression reach its release point, felt the Harmony Strike land in perfect synchrony with her own impact, felt the moment when both forces resonated at the same frequency and something that was more than the sum of either of them moved outward through the stone and concrete and steel of Metropolis and into the bedrock beneath.
The sound of it arrived several seconds later, because it was moving faster than sound.
The light of it reached orbit.
Darkseid went down.
Not falling — driven, the distinction being that falling implies gravity completing a process that began elsewhere, while driven means a directed force superseded gravity and carried him beyond it. He went through the street, through the foundation layer beneath, through the geological strata that the city's foundations rested on, and into something much older and quieter.
Kara hovered above the crater.
Odyn dropped to one knee at its edge, one hand on the broken asphalt, his breathing controlled but deliberate.
Around them, the battle had effectively stopped — not because either side had ended it, but because the impact radius of what had just happened was such that most of the combatants within several blocks were occupied with maintaining their physical orientation rather than fighting.
Silence.
In the silence, Kara registered, item by item, the state of her body: the burns across her shoulder and side where the Omega Beams had tracked her, the displaced things in her ribcage, the ringing in her left ear that was probably temporary. She catalogued all of it with the methodical attention she had been taught for post-engagement assessment and set the information aside to process later.
The ground trembled.
It did not tremble the way ground trembles during an earthquake — stochastic, multidirectional, the product of geological forces acting on geological timescales. It trembled with the specific directed energy of something very large moving with intent.
From the crater, a sound rose.
Not a roar. A declaration.
Darkseid emerged with the patient inevitability of a force of nature asserting itself after an interruption. His armor bore damage that Kara suspected no one in Metropolis had inflicted on it before today — stress fractures in the alloy, scorching at the joints, the particular evidence of energy having found its way through rather than around. Beneath the damage, his exposed skin ran with something that was not quite blood, a dark luminescent fluid that spoke to processes inside him that operated differently from any biology she was familiar with.
He was bleeding.
He was standing.
He looked at Odyn for a long time.
"You have grown," he said.
It was the voice he used when he was being precise, when the contempt was genuine rather than performed. The contempt of someone who respects the threat precisely because it is a threat.
"This is not over," Odyn said.
"No," Darkseid agreed. He had not looked away from the dark elf, and there was something in his attention that was different from the dismissive certainty of his arrival — a recalibration, the beginning of a more accurate model.
"This is not vengeance," Darkseid said.
The Boom Tube ignited at his back — that specific crimson-edged light that meant a door between here and somewhere much worse.
"This is merely the opening exchange."
He stepped backward into it.
His eyes, the last thing visible before the tube closed, stayed on Odyn until the moment the aperture sealed.
◆ VII. ◆
The city settled.
Not into silence — cities do not settle into silence, they settle into the quieter grade of noise that means the immediate emergency has passed and the secondary emergency of assessing damage and locating the missing and beginning to understand the scale of what just happened has begun. Emergency services. Voices. The sound of debris shifting as structural damage was discovered.
The mana network released.
Kara felt it — not as a loss, because it had not been hers, but as a change in the ambient pressure of the air, the way you feel a barometric shift before weather. The golden threads connecting the awakened Elves throughout the city dimmed from their combat intensity to something more like their resting state: still present, still connecting, but quieter.
Around the crater, the heroes who had been engaged across the broader battlespace converged in ones and twos. Superman, his cape torn at one corner, expression carrying the particular combination of relief and controlled concern that Kara had learned to read as his post-battle default. Wonder Woman, blood at her temple from something that had happened elsewhere, looking at the crater with an expression that was doing a great deal of work. The Flash, vibrating slightly — his tell for when the adrenaline had not yet finished metabolizing.
Martian Manhunter descended last, and his eyes went directly to Odyn, and then to Kara, in the sequence that meant he was reading both of them and determining, with his comprehensive perception, that they were functional.
Kara landed at the crater's edge.
Odyn was still on one knee. He was breathing slowly and deliberately — not the breathing of someone who needed to, but the breathing of someone who had decided that a particular kind of attention was called for right now and was applying it. His aura had contracted to a faint luminescence around the line of his tattoos, the gold dimmed by expenditure to something more amber, warmer.
She sat down next to him.
Not beside him exactly — slightly lower, her legs folded, her back to the crater, looking out at the city rather than into the damage. It was the sitting-down of someone who needed to be still for a moment and had chosen this specific place to be still in.
He looked at her.
"You flew through the Omega Beams," he said.
"Yes." She considered this. "Not recommended, as a general approach."
"I had not finished teaching you the defensive applications."
"We were short on time."
"We were," he agreed.
There was a pause that was different from the pauses that had been happening between them earlier — not the pauses of people who have not yet established the shape of their communication, but the pause of people who have been through something together and are taking the measure of it.
"How did it feel?" he asked. "The directed channeling."
Kara looked at her hands. The blue luminescence was gone — had been gone since the moment of impact, the stored energy fully expended — but her hands remembered the shape of it, the sensation of something that had always been instinctive becoming, for a fraction of a second, conscious. Deliberate. Chosen.
"Different," she said. "More — mine. If that makes sense."
"It makes complete sense," he said, and the certainty in his voice was the kind that comes from knowing the experience from the inside. "You have been using your power as a function of your body. You have not yet learned to use it as an extension of your will."
"Is that what you're teaching me?"
"If you're willing to learn."
She looked at him. His profile against the smoke-filtered Metropolis light, the hard lines of his face, the tattoos that still carried their faint ember-glow. She thought about the murals on the walls of the Fortress, and the voice she had heard in his sleeping mind, and the way he had said together as though it were a commitment rather than a tactic.
"I'm willing," she said.
He nodded.
One of his hands moved — not reaching toward her, but settling open-palmed on the asphalt between them, a gesture she had come to understand, in the span of a single extraordinary day, as characteristic: not a demand, not an invitation, but an availability.
She put her hand over his.
Neither of them said anything.
Around them, Metropolis continued its process of understanding what had just happened to it. The heroes began the work that followed battles. Green Lantern coordinated emergency response from altitude. Superman spoke with the League members converging on the crater. The first news helicopters appeared on the horizon.
None of it required immediate attention from either of them.
For now, there was the city, and the smoke, and the settling quiet of something enormously consequential having happened and not being entirely finished.
And the fact that a god had bled today.
And had chosen, for the first time, to leave.
◆ VIII. ◆
Themyscira — After
The last Parademon left the island's airspace seventeen minutes after Baron's arrival.
Not because they had been driven out by any single decisive action, but because Parademons, without direction from above, defaulted to threat assessment, and the threat assessment of this particular island had shifted, in the course of the battle, from manageable opposition to catastrophic loss rate — the mechanical calculation of creatures that were individually not smart but collectively represented the application of a sophisticated military intelligence that knew when a position was untenable.
They retreated.
The Amazons watched them go with the particular expression of warriors who have just won something but are not yet certain what it cost.
Sarai cleaned her blade with the methodical care of someone for whom the maintenance of a weapon was not a practical afterthought but a practice — a way of returning to yourself after the state that combat requires. The runes along the blade's length dimmed as she worked, the active magic settling back into its latent configuration.
Hippolyta approached.
She came alone, without the formal escort that her position entitled her to, which Sarai read as a deliberate choice rather than an oversight. The Queen of the Amazons had the bearing of someone who had made a study of how to communicate respect without ceding authority, and she was applying it now.
"Your people fight with extraordinary ability," Hippolyta said.
"We had extraordinary motivation to develop it," Sarai replied. "For the same reason that your people became what they are."
Hippolyta acknowledged this with a slight inclination of her head.
"Aleka," she said. Not a question, exactly — more a subject being placed on the table for discussion.
"Sleeping," Sarai said. "She is unharmed. She is not even aware of what her body has been doing today, which I consider merciful." She looked at the queen directly. "I meant what I told you. I will return her. Our word is not a thing we give casually."
"I know," Hippolyta said. And then, which surprised Sarai: "I believe you."
Baron came to stand at Sarai's side — he had been approaching from across the beach for the past several minutes, moving at the measured pace of someone who was still spending most of his attention on the magical network and what it was telling him about the situation in Metropolis.
"The network is settling," he told Sarai. "Darkseid withdrew."
Sarai closed her eyes for a moment. Something moved through her expression — not relief, because relief implied an expectation of safety that she had not had for a very long time, but something adjacent to it. The acknowledgment that the immediate cost had not been the final cost.
"How many?" she asked.
"Three Elves lost consciousness from network overload. No deaths." He paused. "Odyn and the Kryptonian drove him to a Boom Tube."
Sarai opened her eyes. Something in her expression shifted — in the direction of what, on someone whose face was less controlled, might have been a smile.
"She flew through the Omega Beams," he added.
"Of course she did," Sarai said.
Donna had been listening from a respectful distance, and now she came forward because the battle was over and the distance was no longer serving any purpose. "Is it done, then? Is Darkseid—"
"No," Baron said simply. "Not done. Retreated. There's a meaningful difference." He looked toward the horizon — east, in the direction of Metropolis, in the direction of everything that would need to happen next. "He will regroup. He will develop countermeasures for what he saw today. We have demonstrated what we are capable of. Now he knows the terms."
"And what happens next?" Donna asked.
Baron and Sarai looked at each other in the way of two people who have known each other since childhood and have therefore developed the capacity for a complete exchange of information in a glance.
"We take the fight to him," Sarai said.
Donna nodded, slowly. "Apokolips."
"When we are ready," Baron said. "Not before."
He turned to Donna with the full quality of his attention — the thorough, unhurried version that she had been noticing all day — and said: "We will need time to prepare. And we will need people who understand this world and its heroes to stand with us." A pause. "I would ask you to be among them."
Hippolyta, who had been listening to all of this with the attention of a queen processing strategic information, spoke: "If Donna goes, Themyscira's full resources stand with her."
Donna looked at her mother — at the pride and the concern living in the same expression, doing the same work they had always done. She felt the weight of both.
"I'll go," she said. "We'll all go, when it's time."
Baron held her gaze for a moment that carried, in its compression, the remainder of the conversation they had not quite finished in the air above the ocean.
"Allies," he said.
And now, with the battle settled around them and the choice made, the word felt both too small and precisely right.
"Allies," she agreed.
◆ IX. ◆
Hall of Justice — Evening
The debrief lasted two hours.
After the debrief, people scattered — to medical, to communications, to the various forms of aftermath that battles generate in their wake, each person carrying their portion of the day's events toward whatever processing their particular nature required.
Kara found Odyn in one of the smaller rooms off the main hall — not meditating this time, or at least not in the formal sense, but sitting with his back to the wall and his eyes open, watching the city lights begin to emerge in the early evening through the window opposite him. The room was lit only by the ambient glow from outside, which made the tattoos on his face faintly visible in the dimness.
She sat across from him.
"Your mother is remarkable," she said.
"Yes."
"She terrifies me slightly."
Something in his expression moved. "Good. She has that effect intentionally. She finds it efficient." A pause. "She likes you, for what it is worth. My mother is not a person whose approval is easily earned."
"I didn't do anything particularly impressive. I just—"
"You defended what you believed was right when defending it cost you something," Odyn said. "To my mother, that is precisely the definition of impressive."
Kara was quiet for a moment.
"What did your father say to her?" she asked. "At the end. In the old language. Efrai naleth macaah—"
"Torii kazahaneth," he finished, and the way he said the words — not reciting them but carrying them — told her everything about what they had cost him to carry. He was quiet for a moment.
"It means, approximately: across whatever distance separates us, I am still yours." A pause. "It is what our people say to each other when they cannot promise return. When the promise they can make is smaller and more specific than the promise they wish they could make."
Kara absorbed this.
"He knew," she said.
"He had always known there was a version of events in which he would not survive," Odyn said. "He had made peace with it long before the day arrived. That was who he was — a person who understood what was required of him and did it without requiring that the cost be survivable."
His hands were resting on his knees, and the amber-gold light of his aura was very faint now — resting, like the rest of him.
"I have been carrying that for a very long time," he said. "Not the grief, exactly. The specific shape of that last moment. The fact that he faced it without anyone beside him."
Kara thought about Krypton, and about cryo-sleep, and about waking up to a universe that had moved on without her, and about the particular loneliness of being the only one left from a specific version of a world.
"You don't have to carry it alone anymore," she said.
He looked at her.
Not with the evaluative attention he directed at most things — that was still there, but beneath it now was something that the armor of necessity had kept covered, something that the day's extremity had, perhaps, made too costly to keep covering.
"No," he said, quietly. "I'm beginning to understand that."
Outside, Metropolis put its lights on, one by one and then all at once, the way cities do when the night arrives — finding its way back to itself after what had happened to it, because cities are made of people and people are, in the final accounting, remarkably good at continuing.
Somewhere in the network that connected the awakened Dark Elves across the world, Kara was fairly certain she felt something warm.
She left her hand where it was, and neither of them moved to end the quiet, and the city kept its lights burning below them.
— End of Chapter Four —
Next Chapter: "To Defeat a God — The Birth of Odyn the Godslayer" The League and the Dark Elves prepare for a war on Apokolips. Old wounds resurface. New bonds are tested before they have been fully formed.
— Author's Note —
Thanks for your patience with the extended update gap — happy to be back.
A note on the pairings: several of the connections introduced in this chapter will develop at their own pace. Baron and Donna's dynamic is intentionally built on cultural contrast — an Arkynorean sensibility around physical contact and personal connection meeting an Amazonian directness. That tension has room to grow.
Sarai's situation on Themyscira is temporary in the specific sense that's been established. What Aleka's experience of carrying an Elven soul does to her afterward is something the story will return to.
Darkseid's withdrawal is not a defeat. It is a recalibration. The difference will matter.
See you next time.