The item was like the thirty silver coins before it—proof of Judas's betrayal.
If anything, calling this a contract was generous. It was closer to a receipt. When the Roman governor's men were dispatched to bribe Judas, they ran the thirty silver coins through public funds. Public funds meant paperwork. Paperwork meant records. And so the yellowed, crumbling scrap of sheepskin now in Thea's hands had, from a purely legal standpoint, sealed the fate of Jesus Christ—a ledger entry bearing witness to a saint's journey from birth to death.
It was like how in Journey to the West, any old belt or fan belonging to the Grand Supreme Elder could become a divine treasure the moment it left his hands. In this world, anything with a genuine connection to God carried value beyond measure.
Thea pocketed it without ceremony. She'd study it properly later. This thing had determined the death of Jesus himself.
Diana had heard the Raven's explanation too. Her relationship with the concept of Jesus began and ended at he existed. In her reckoning, he was younger than her, and whatever deals Judas made were none of her business.
"We should head back and help the others."
Thea had no interest in explaining the finer points of divine theology—not when the implications for Diana's worldview would be seismic. She nodded, and the two goddesses took to the sky.
By the time they returned to the Sahara, the Teen Titans had already secured all the prisoners. A quick handoff, and the young heroes were off to the next oasis.
Thea sent her agents to haul the cultists away. Between the Blackest Night and Rao—that singular outlier of a White Light event—Earth was desperate for labor everywhere. Five hundred people dropped into that workforce wouldn't make a ripple.
The human problem was solved. That left the land.
Building a large-scale magical array anchored to the existing environment was technically feasible—at her level, it would cost her some effort but nothing insurmountable. But it wasn't worth it. Costly to build, trivially easy to destroy. Some idiot a generation down the line could plant a single bomb and collapse the entire magical architecture.
Conventional technology wasn't much better. The major deserts sat squarely in the planet's highest solar-radiation zones. Unless she shoved the sun off-course or rewrote Earth's orbital mechanics, no heat-resistant planting program could hold back the desert's return for more than a decade.
In the end, Thea went to Luthor.
Baldy Luthor had spent his years behind bars developing a high-efficiency solar energy conversion device. Deployed above the major desert regions, it would artificially intercept sunlight, reducing the burden on plants and soil—while redirecting the captured energy to where it was actually needed.
The two negotiated quickly. Lex had always styled himself humanity's savior. Rescuing one or two people was beneath his attention, but saving this many? He found it genuinely gratifying. He named his conditions and agreed.
Through the Red House research lab, Thea also cultivated several drought-resistant plant varieties and rolled out a simple incentive scheme—plant a seedling, earn a reward—calling on all refugees to participate.
Ra's al Ghul's junior fellow disciple, little-known agronomist, spectacularly misdirected genius, Damien Darhk was transferred from Nevada to the Sahara to do what he did best. Back to the corn fields.
"I'll head back first. Watch yourself." Thea's glance over her shoulder carried meaning. Global tensions were escalating fast, and the major powers were buckling under enormous pressure. Superman had taken a direct nuclear hit in the Bering Strait. Heads of state were being targeted for assassination left and right. She needed to get back to protect her mother.
Leaving Diana to manage operations on this end, Thea stepped forward and vanished into the oasis.
Silence settled over the desert. Diana seemed to wait until Thea was well out of range. After a long pause, she spoke to the empty air behind her, almost casually.
"Come out. We noticed you a while ago."
"Oh? Impressive perception. Your lover seems to have gone far deeper down the path of darkness than even I have." The air rippled in overlapping waves, and a woman stepped through—breathtakingly beautiful, yet radiating something deeply wrong. Her features were flawless, almost sculptural. Auburn hair. A violet gown that swept the sand.
"A creature with power and nothing else. You're nowhere near worthy of glimpsing her depths."
Diana's words were blunt. She had no intention of being rattled by a few pointed remarks—she'd go to war with the world for love, and a bit of needling wasn't going to move her.
The woman let out a displeased huff.
"Who are you?" Diana made no move toward her weapons. Instead, she stood composed and unhurried, applying quiet pressure. "That aura marks you as part of the Greek pantheon—but I've never seen you before."
Thea had already signaled that someone was tailing them. Diana had no intention of ganging up on her precisely because she carried the unmistakable scent of the Greek gods.
"I am Circe. Daughter of Apollo and Persephone."
Diana nearly choked on a laugh.
Apollo and Persephone were her contemporaries—both children of Zeus, perfectly ordinary. But Persephone carried another title: Queen of the Underworld. Wife of Hades. The thought that Hades had, apparently, been made to wear the horns—by Apollo, of all people—filled Diana with a particular, unholy satisfaction. She had never liked Hades.
She caught herself. She'd been spending too much time with Thea. She was getting irreverent. She wrestled the smile back under control.
To Circe, that barely suppressed laugh was a profound insult. "Something funny?! You clay-born imitation!"
With her pride wounded, Circe abandoned whatever original purpose had brought her here. Dark energy coiled around her, and for a moment the sun itself lost its edge. A massive wave of darkness detonated outward in all directions.
As the daughter of Apollo and Persephone, Circe embodied a perfect fusion of polar extremes—light and dark in one. Though technically a generation below the elder Olympians, her innate attributes exceeded most Greek gods and demigods, including the earlier Diana.
Without divine bonds, without Ragnarök—Circe had devoted herself to mastering sorcery. Peak demigod attributes combined with master-sorcerer caliber. In the original continuity, Diana would have been no match for her.
But that was then.
Diana had witnessed Thea's dark magic more times than she could count. Circe's display registered as adequate. Peak demigod meant nothing in front of a New God. She raised her left hand, and a barrier materialized between them—and the wave of darkness that could have swallowed the sky dissolved into nothing.
"Why were you following us?"
Diana had initially considered counseling Circe toward the light, urging her to abandon dark magic—then reconsidered, given that her own partner walked far deeper down that same road, and she really had no standing to lecture anyone.
Circe didn't answer. She had been living in seclusion nearby. It was Damian and the Raven cutting through the area below who had first drawn her attention. After that, Thea's sheer density of dark magical energy had intrigued her enough to follow. But Diana's serene, unaffected demeanor was getting under her skin by the second.
No particular reason she could name. Pure instinctive antipathy. Some people are simply born to clash.