"That gear on them—that's the Nth Metal you mentioned?" Diana asked, dropping a Hawk guard with a single arrow and turning to Thea.
"Yeah. Has impressive effects on baseline humans. Speaking of which, your archery's slipped a little—what a waste of Antiope's training..." The fight in front of them was a snooze, and Thea was already wandering off-topic.
The warrior goddess flushed faintly. Her archery was actually quite solid; even toned down to human level, she could win an Olympic gold without breaking a sweat. She'd trained hard with Antiope as a girl. But that came down to whoever you were measuring against. With archery, when you didn't have the gift, you just didn't have the gift.
And the Queen family's archery talent was, as it happened, maxed out. The ability came from the bloodline itself. Thea practiced about as often as she felt like it—and her archery still ran a notch above Diana's.
"Fine, you win at archery. We... we'll do javelins." The warrior goddess wasn't ready to concede.
"You're on."
Bows put away, ignoring everyone around them, Diana produced two javelins.
She'd forged them in her downtime. The artifacts came home on their own after they were thrown. Beyond that gimmick, they had a few standard features—sharpness, magic-piercing, ridiculous range, double damage to beasts—but those were just trim. At their current tier none of it mattered.
Whup. Whup. Whup.
The air kept snapping open. Two goddesses, one enemy down per throw.
On pure technique, Diana had Thea beat. The League of Assassins didn't bother teaching this stuff—by the time Ra's al Ghul was a hot-blooded young man resisting the Crusades, the javelin was already out of fashion. In the modern world, forget about it: outside of competitive athletes, who picks up a javelin for fun?
But the Queen family's ranged-weapons mastery still counted for something, and a javelin wasn't a complicated implement. They tied.
One win, one tie. Thea's smug little look at Diana said it all: Well? Convinced yet?
Diana ground her teeth. Not convinced. She started picking through her collection, looking for one she could win cleanly.
Then her eyes locked onto something. She fished out two odd-looking lengths of cord and handed one to Thea.
"What is this?" Thea turned it over and couldn't tell what kind of weapon it was supposed to be. Wasn't a lasso—not the kind Diana usually carried—and definitely wasn't one of the unspeakable toys they used during their other "training sessions."
Diana sniffed. "It's one of the oldest weapons there is. Took me a good long while to learn it, actually."
She demonstrated then and there. Her hand passed over the cord, and an egg-sized stone appeared in the cradle. She swung it, brought it up overhead, picked her target, and snapped her wrist. The stone flew loose with the momentum.
Crack. One Hawk guard caught the stone square in the chest. He went down like he'd been hit by a truck, out cold on the spot.
"The sling. Care to try?" Diana looked at Thea, all challenge.
Thea's face fell. The sling? That thing had been off the battlefield since the era of the Three Hundred Spartans. Who in the modern world even knew how to use one?
She shot Diana a fine, you win look and lifted the sling, a little unsure. Following Diana's form, she picked a target, made three or four rotations, and let it fly.
This time the Queen family talent didn't help her. The instant the stone left the cradle, the trajectory drifted.
Thea watched it sail off course, further and further, until it whistled right over Supergirl's shoulder.
Supergirl turned and shot her a pouting glare. Thea gave back a Cheshire-cat sorry grin.
The result didn't need spelling out. The sling required practice—there was no faking it.
One win, one tie, one loss: a draw. Both goddesses had a lovely time, and Hawk World's battle wound up with the female heroes carrying the day.
The Empress's mask came off. After a lifetime under it, her features had begun to regress—small eyes, flat nose, skin gleaming with a faint metallic sheen.
Hawkman thought she looked familiar. Hawkgirl, however, recognized her on sight.
"You don't recognize her?" Hawkgirl said flatly. "She was the previous-generation Chay-Ara priestess..."
Catching Hawkman's slightly off-kilter expression, she pressed on. "Yes. My ever-respected mother."
The rest of the heroes had drifted into the role of audience, watching the mother-daughter reunion play out.
The Empress was still rattled, but with Thea's gentle "assistance" her mind settled fast.
As she spoke, the buried history of the human race finally pulled back its veil.
The Empress was Hawkgirl's biological mother. Their relationship was about as warm as strangers passing in the street.
Chay-Ara was a name reserved for their line of priestesses. Anyone who became the priestess automatically inherited it. Plenty of peoples and cultures around the world had the same tradition—meaning roughly that the bearer was the messenger of god, or eternal, or some variation on the theme.
By the old script, Hawkgirl should have followed the same path: served as priestess, then chosen one of her own daughters to take up the Chay-Ara name as her successor.
But history had taken a turn. An alien ship had landed on Earth.
The aliens didn't linger. Whether by accident or design, they'd taken the original Hawkman and Hawkgirl with them. The ship's guidance system seemed to have a soft spot for crashing into planets, though—and it had ultimately gone down on Zamaron, the present homeworld of the Star Sapphires.
Two ancient people with no frame of reference for outer space, dumped on a barren planet—there was no one to hear them cry. Nth Metal might be a marvel, but you couldn't eat it. They starved to death. After death, their love transformed them into the Violet Central Power Battery, and they waited there until the Blackest Night.
Back in Egypt, the Hawk Tribe had long been hiding among the country's rulers. They understood what the metal could do for them—the wings, the strength it lent the body—and it set them apart from ordinary people.
Pharaohs, generals, men of influence in every region—all of them turned an eye toward the tribe.
The Hawk Tribe wasn't about to give up power once it had a taste. But Earth's gravity was a problem: outside of a few leaders, the rest of the tribe couldn't actually fly with any freedom.
After cycling through oracles, blood rites, and a parade of other experiments, they took every scrap of metal and every tribe member and left Egypt. They went to Peru, and from there into this small world.
The Bear Tribe and the Wolf Tribe had traveled similar roads. The three peoples had agreed on it together: enter the small worlds, live the good life, and leave the "low-grade" Earth—with all its tantrums of earthquake, flood, and sandstorm—to the "lesser" beings.
Unfortunately, their promised land cracked under the population it carried. Their environment kept getting worse. The Bear Tribe died out with their world's collapse. The Wolf Tribe got out some of their people before their world finished dying—most of them ended up here in Hawk World, with a small remnant slipping into the increasingly comfortable Earth, leaving behind wolf-man legends in dozens of cultures.
Three great tribes, made by the metal and unmade by it.