She reached out and stroked the elk's ear. "She's a good child. She will accomplish great things in the future — she won't be mistreated if she follows you."
The elk gave a couple of low, approving calls. Though it had only caught a brief glimpse of the creature that had been yanked out of time, it recognized kin — distant, a little goofy, but kin nonetheless. Where it had once treated Thea with mild friendliness, it now regarded her with a quiet, grudging respect.
Thea hadn't known they were discussing her. She'd thought the fusion would go smoothly — until a hitch appeared: a trace of warlike divinity absorbed by the unicorn.
The age of the old gods had ended. Faith-made-deities had become legend; raw power now ruled. People like Jin Chao ranked by force rather than priesthood — he wasn't a god, but he could beat the gods. Thea found herself stranded between eras: the old gods dead, the new ones not yet born. Divine nature — the sum of a god's personality, creed, and manner — was normally beyond her reach.
But the unicorn had taken on a tiny sliver of that divine quality, and through the fusion it passed a fraction of that nature into Thea. Compounding that, Thea already carried a shard of Horus's ocular divinity — and the odd marriage of the two left her with a faint brush of godhood.
Had she absorbed more, Horus might even have used her as a conduit for rebirth. Fortune favored her this time: Horus wasn't a war god, and most of the warlike divinity had been taken by the Dragon Queen. After that and the unicorn's dilution, only a whisper of god-nature remained in Thea.
No amount of that whisper would let her crown herself War-Goddess tomorrow. But in time, if she nurtured it, that whisper could distinguish mortal from divine. For now, she wrestled to stabilize what she'd gained; full understanding would take ages.
She slid the slightly gaudy golden armor back on. The warlike trace had made the armor's filigree more intricate — a fitting, if awkward, embellishment.
"Hurry — we don't have long. Give me your hand." The goddess barked the reminder as Thea lingered over the plates.
"All right." Thea felt her magic draining at an alarming rate. In less than a heartbeat the full suit had shrunk to a half-plate, then mail, until at last only leather remained. Only the cloak held on stubbornly. It was small comfort. It felt like tilling a field for a harvest, only to have the crop snatched at the last second.
Gods, however, kept their bargains — or at least they didn't toy with mortals for amusement. Artemis did not simply leech Thea dry. Gradually, she began to stabilize a portion of Thea's vital energy, using techniques Thea half-understood but felt as a tasteful, ancient cadence.
"Enough." Artemis shoved Thea back gently and stepped aside. Even for a deity, converting such vast magic into godly force was not a trivial task.
Thea was left with nothing but rue. She had braced herself, but the sense of loss — of power stripped back to the true, personal core — was painful in a way words couldn't convey.
The elk, apparently well-practiced in comfort, padded up and nudged her hand with its broad forehead.
"You're comforting me too? Fine — I'm strong. Ow, don't butt me! Okay, I'm a little sad… my unstoppable magic!" Thea grumbled, trying to boast, but the elk saw through her act and exposed the fraud. Mortals have many tricks; gods and beasts see through most.
After a few moments of roughhousing, Thea checked herself. Artemis had not lied. The power she'd lost had been vast but diffuse; what remained felt like her own flesh and blood — immediate, responsive. Where before her power had been grand but unwieldy, now the energy fit like a limb. A few days of settling and it would be wholly hers.
Her attention drifted back to Artemis.
The goddess's shadowing form traced arcane sigils in the empty air. One by one images coalesced: a young dancer, an old huntress, a queen in her chariot — fragments of selves across epochs. Each stepped forward as if called, then poured a shard of their essence into a new composite: a hunter in a green robe, a silver bow at her back — the face blurred and unknowable.
Thea pulled away from the elk. She knew what came next: the elk's timeline would be severed and reshaped. She felt, viscerally, the terrifying weight of tampering with time. Artemis's summons drew her very core tight.
Artemis's method was not mystical trickery so much as temporal engineering: she gathered versions of herself from multiple eras, each lending a sliver of power that, when blended with Thea's time-grant, formed a living avatar — and Thea could feel the new figure's power towering above the earlier Horus manifestation. How much stronger? Hard to say.
The hunter raised her bow. Thea frowned — why the green robe? The image oddly reminded her of Oliver from Purgatory Isle. Had Green Arrow been the true devout? She let the thought hang; it was not the time for jokes.
Suddenly Artemis drew. The bowstring sang. A vast vortex tore open behind her. The spatial tremor this time was far stronger than when Thea had first surged her power, cracking the ground and warping the chamber.
Oh God — what am I seeing?
Thea's earlier underestimation of the task dissolved. Severing a time-thread was not a tidy clerical job. The goddess's projection had been only bait; it had called her full self across the ages. The vortex roared as energy poured through. This, Thea realized, was the Goddess Artemis's full-strength strike — a pinnacle force capable of breaching time itself in its prime.