The silence that followed was not the first real silence but it lasted longer that any one New Themyscira had known in hours.
Jean moved first. She drifted toward the centre of the field, her telekinetic grip drawing Arthur Curry's battered, barely-conscious body upward from the rubble and depositing him — with a firmness that communicated very clearly that his dignity in this matter was not her primary concern — onto his knees before her.
The magic chains that closed around his wrists were Jean's own construction, crimson and luminous, and they held with the absolute security of someone who did not expect to need a backup plan.
Anna arrived a moment later, and she was dragging Diana.
Diana's feet carved two parallel lines in the dirt as Anna walked forward with the unhurried, purposeful energy of someone completing a task they had started and were glad to be finishing.
Diana's armour was cracked in seven places. Her hair was loose and half-covering her face. She had stopped fighting — not because she had chosen to, but because there was genuinely nothing left in her that was capable of the motion required.
Anna released her and Diana settled onto her knees beside Arthur.
Two of the most powerful figures in this dying world — the King of Atlantis and the Queen of Themyscira — reduced to this. Kneeling in the ruins of the war they had started.
Jean's eyes glowed and when she spoke, it simply reached, threading through the noise of the remaining skirmishes with the authority of something that did not need to raise itself to be heard.
"Look at them," Jean said. Her gaze moved across the battlefield — across the faces of Atlanteans and Amazons who had been killing each other for hours, across the handful of surface-world soldiers still standing, across all of it. "Your leaders are defeated. Whatever victory either of you were fighting toward — it is gone. There is nothing left to win." A pause. "Stand down. All of you. This meaningless War ends now."
The silence stretched.
An Amazon warrior lowered her spear. An Atlantean soldier's grip loosened on his trident.
It was almost enough.
But Arthur Curry raised his head. His face was a map of damage — swollen, split, painted in his own blood — and his voice came out cracked and raw. But it came out loud, because Arthur had never once in his life confused being beaten with being finished.
"No. This war does not end," he said, and each word cost him something you could see him paying. "Not until one side is gone. Atlantis or the surface — there is no other outcome. There has never been another outcome." His eyes moved across his soldiers — what remained of them, ragged and exhausted — and something passed through his gaze that was equal parts command and plea. "Fight. Fight until you can't. That is the only worthy end."
Diana lifted her head beside him. Her expression, behind all the damage, was unreadable in the way that certainty tends to be unreadable — it had moved past emotion into something harder.
"He is right," she said quietly. Her voice had lost none of its conviction. "To fall in battle — to give everything and spend yourself completely in defence of what you believe — that is not tragedy. That is honour. Dying under men's rule, surrendering this world to those who would diminish it —" her jaw tightened, "— that is tragedy."
For exactly two seconds, nothing moved. Then everything moved again.
The remaining Atlanteans and Amazons surged back into each other with a renewed fury that had something desperate at its core — the last burning of a fire that knew it was going out.
Orm dove toward Arthur with Aqualad a step behind, both of them intent on freeing their king from Jean's hold.
But the heat vision that came from above from Kara caught Orm and Aqualad mid-motion and left nothing behind that required any further attention.
Jean looked down at her hands. Then at Anna who looked back at her. Neither of them said anything for a moment.
They had come here with a simple intention — give this world what peace could be given, hold back the worst of it, let the ending come gently. They had not accounted for how loudly the people in it would insist on choosing otherwise.
'Why,' Anna thought, watching two armies tear at each other with everything they had left, 'are people like this.'
Then the streaks appeared.
Two of them — one yellow, one red — moving at speeds that reduced them to nothing more than coloured lines drawn against the chaos, weaving between combatants, around buildings, across open ground, trading blows that couldn't be tracked with the naked eye and generated small shockwaves every time they made contact.
Barry Allen. And the man who had been haunting him... The Reverse-Flash.
Eobard Thawne came to a relative stop and looked at the tableau around him with the wide, delighted eyes of a man who had been proven right about something he loved being right about.
"Barry," he said warmly, "I want you to know — I love what you've done with the place."
Barry appeared across from him, breathing hard, every line of his face drawn tight. "Thawne. It's over. Look around you — Arthur and Diana are down. The war is collapsing. Surrender. Whatever leverage you thought you had—"
"Leverage?" Thawne tilted his head. "Barry. Barry." He took a slow step forward, hands clasped behind his back, with the affecting patience of someone about to deliver a lesson they have been looking forward to.
"You created this world. You — the Flash, the hero, the man who runs toward every disaster — you made this. And look at it." His arm swept outward across the burning ruins of New Themyscira. "Look at what the heroes did to it. The people who were supposed to protect it."
A smile that had no warmth anywhere in it appeared. "And you thought your little ceasefire was going to save—"
But suddenly huge shadows fell across all of them.
Every living person on that battlefield looked up at the same moment.
The ships descended through the smoke like wounds being opened in the sky.
They were not of Earth. They were not of Atlantis. They were not of any mythology or ancient pantheon.
They were engineered with the cold aesthetic of a civilisation that had been building weapons for longer than humanity had been building houses. Their hull markings were Kryptonian. Several of them touched down.
Nam-Ek, armoured and enormous, moved with the unhurried arrogance. Faora-Ul descended the ramp beside him, her expression the particular blank of a weapon that has been given a direction and does not require further instruction.
Behind them came soldiers — a dozen, two dozen, all of them armed.
Then General Zod stepped into the light.
He paused at the foot of the ramp and looked out across the battlefield the way a man looks at something he is already deciding how to reorganise.
"Find the scout ship," he said to his soldiers, "Secure it. Locate the Genesis Chamber." He stepped forward, surveying the wreckage around him with the detached assessment of a strategist already writing his next orders. "This territory will be secured. Whatever mass of energy approaches this system—" his lip curled slightly, "—our technology will address it. Krypton's legacy will not be interrupted by this world's failures."
His soldiers dispersed. They had moved perhaps fifteen metres before a blur of gold and red crossed the battlefield at a speed that made the air shriek, and Kara Zor-El's fist connected with General Zod's face with a force that inverted his trajectory completely and took both of them skyward and then over the skyline and out of sight.
Nam-Ek and Faora-Ul turned to see that Anna was already in front of them.
Nam-Ek charged but Anna caught his fist with one hand, looked at it briefly, and then redirected him into Faora so efficiently that both of them went through the facade of the nearest standing building before the sound of their impact had finished happening.
Nearby, Lois Lane had taken up a position behind the shelter of an overturned Atlantean transport, her shoulder braced against the frame and her rifle speaking in short, controlled bursts toward an advancing cluster of Amazons who had apparently decided that the arrival of alien soldiers was not sufficient reason to stop killing humans.
"Little help!" she called.
"Working on it," Deadshot replied from directly above her — he had somehow achieved a position on top of the transport, lying flat, picking targets with the mechanical precision of a man who did not experience adrenaline in any recognisable form. "Stop moving when you reload."
"Stop telling me—"
"Lane. Stop moving when you reload."
She stopped moving when she reloaded.
Behind them, Batman moved through the chaos with the controlled urgency of a man who had accepted that the world was ending and was determined to spend whatever time remained being useful. His eyes catalogued everything — the Kryptonian soldiers spreading out across the northern quarter, the remaining Atlanteans pressing the eastern line, Jean holding Arthur and Diana in check with a grip that hadn't wavered.
'It falls apart here,' he thought, ducking under a thrown piece of architecture and driving an elbow into the throat of the Atlantean who had thrown it.
'This is where the Flashpoint ends. There are too many people who won't stop until the very end.' He surfaced from the engagement and looked across the field toward the two streaks of yellow and red still weaving through the wreckage. 'Barry. You have to take that speed. You have to end this. Everything else is already gone — just end it already.'
Meanwhile, Thawne saw him looking and seemed to read the thought, because he laughed and landed a kick against Barry's ribs that staggered him.
"Your friend in the bat costume thinks you can still turn this around," Thawne said, landing in front of Barry as the two of them paused in the middle of a clear patch of ground surrounded by everything falling apart. "Isn't that beautiful? That kind of faith. I almost don't want to crush it."
He tilted his head. "Almost."
Barry straightened. His eyes were burning — not with speed force, but with the particular determined fury of a man who refuses to let what he knows is true become what he accepts. "You won't win this. You can't—"
"You're slow, Barry."
The punch to the gut came before the sentence had finished. Barry folded around Thawne's fist, air leaving him completely, and before he could recover Thawne had driven him to his knees on the broken ground.
Thawne crouched to meet his eye level while reaching into the rubble beside him and picked up a length of iron rebar, studying it for a moment.
"You're very slow, Barry Allen. And yet, you dared to claim you're the fastest man alive," he said softly.
The rebar drove through Barry's thigh. He screamed and the sound carried across the battlefield and turned several heads before the noise of war swallowed it again.
He collapsed sideways with both hands going to the wound, his body already trying to accelerate its healing but too exhausted to manage the speeds it would need.
Thawne stood over him. His expression wore something that wasn't quite satisfaction and wasn't quite contempt and was in some ways worse than either.
"You're looking at him," he said quietly. "The fastest man alive."
He paused, then added, "That's me, Flash. In case you needed that clarified."
...
Elsewhere...
The sofa was very good. Ethan Carter had always believed that if you were going to watch the end of something, you should do so from a position of physical comfort.
Sixteen screens were open before him, each fed by a different camera he had placed throughout the battlefield hours ago, and he watched all of them simultaneously with the focused, interested attention of a man who had prepared for this performance and was finding it instructive.
Beside him, Elizabeth Liones sat with her hands folded in her lap, and her face was doing the opposite of what his was doing.
She watched the screens in silence for a long moment. A building collapsed on one of them. A cluster of soldiers scattered. The red and yellow lines crossed and recrossed the battlefield in patterns that hurt to try to follow.
"Ethan-sama," she said quietly.
He glanced at her.
"Can't you help them?"
His attention returned to the screens. "Elizabeth—"
"If you wanted to," she said, and her voice was gentle but her conviction was not, "you could stop all of this. I know you could. You could end it right now."
"The people of this world are—"
"Suffering," she said simply. "They're suffering. And dying."
"They were always going to," Ethan said, "Elizabeth, this world and everyone in it, every soldier, king and civilians — they exist inside a timeline that Barry created by accident and will have to unmake to restore what should have been. When the Flashpoint resets, all of this goes. All of them. Whether they die now in battle or whether they're standing perfectly unharmed when the timeline corrects itself, the outcome is—"
"The same," Elizabeth said. "I know."
She turned and looked at him directly. Her eyes were very steady. "I know, Ethan-sama. I understand that. I'm not asking you to save them from that. I'm asking you to save them from this."
Her gaze moved back to the screens. "Those are ordinary people. They woke up this morning in a world that has been at war their entire lives, and they chose to fight in it — not because they're evil or stupid but because they don't know any other way, and they're afraid, and their leaders have failed them."
Her voice was quiet and very serious. "They're going to die today regardless. But what kind of death?" She looked at him again. "Ethan-sama, I'm sorry to say this — I know you have reasons for what you're doing — but can't they deserve a good ending? Even if it doesn't last? Even if no one remembers it?"
Ethan was quiet and looked at her for a long moment.
Elizabeth held his gaze. "Please," she said. "Ethan-sama. Please help them."
He exhaled and he turned his eyes upward.
Above the apartment. Above the city. Above the battle.
The clouds had been dark for hours. But this was new.
The darkness moving in from the west was not weather. It was not smoke. It was not anything that belonged to a sky that had ever been remotely normal.
It was yellow — a vast, churning mass of it, illuminated from within by a light that was the colour of old fear and new panic, pushing through the storm clouds like something enormous and very old that had been travelling a very long way and had arrived.
On the battlefield below, the fighting stuttered.
Every living person stopped, slowly looked up and went still.
Anna, in the middle of driving Nam-Ek and Faora-Ul through their third consecutive wall, paused mid-punch and looked skyward. Her expression moved through several stages before settling on one that was largely unprintable. "Are you fucking kidding me."
Jean Grey, maintaining her grip on Arthur and Diana both, narrowed her eyes at the sky with the particular focus of someone reading something written in a language she knows but would very much prefer not to.
What came from the yellow mass was immense beyond the scale that the word immense is typically asked to cover. Its body — if body was even the right word for a thing that seemed to be made of condensed terror given a loosely biological shape — was that of some enormous, insectoid cosmic predator, scaled to a size that made the buildings below it look like furniture.
Clawed appendages like the legs of something that had evolved beyond needing the ground spread outward from its mass. Its face — long, skeletal, structured around a jaw that opened to a depth that suggested it had never been designed for anything except consumption — was oriented downward, toward the city, toward the people in it.
The yellow light that poured from it was not illumination. It was extraction. It moved in visible currents — streams of cold gold that reached outward from the creature toward the people below, and where it touched, something left. Something was taken.
Fear had a colour now. It was yellow, and it was flowing into Parallax's mouth in rivers.
The screaming started, and then stopped, and then what replaced it was worse — a silence that wasn't silence at all but rather the sound of thousands of people too afraid to make any noise.
Zod, who had just been retrieved from his latest encounter with Kara via three of his soldiers catching him mid-trajectory, looked up at Parallax and recalibrated everything he had thought he knew about this planet's problems.
"Release it," he said.
The order was directed toward the largest of his ships — the one that had remained in the upper atmosphere, its cargo hold still sealed. A soldier aboard received the command, looked at the readout confirming what was below them, and pressed the sequence.
The hold opened and Something grey poured out of it and hit the ground with an impact that shook the earth for two kilometres in every direction, and the crater it made was deep enough that anyone standing at the edge could not see the bottom.
Then it stood.
It was enormous. It was hunched under its own mass in the way that mountains are hunched — not out of deference to anything but simply because that was the geometry of something that had been built without any consideration for elegance. Its body was grey-white, the colour of bone left in the sun too long, and across every surface — every plane of its back, shoulders, arms, knuckles, the ridges above its eyes — there were protrusions.
Bone-like structures, sharp-ended, growing from under the skin in dense clusters as though the skeleton had declared the body insufficient and begun pushing outward. Its face, if it had one in any meaningful sense, was a concavity of blackened, sunken eyes above a jaw that opened far too wide when it breathed.
It breathed and oriented toward the noise and the motion and the fear radiating from what was left of New Themyscira, and the sound that came from it was not a roar in any conventional sense.
The handful of survivors — Atlanteans, Amazons, surface-world soldiers — looked at it.
Thawne, standing over a wounded Barry Allen, looked at it, Kryptonian soldiers looked at it.
Captain Thunder and Kara, floating in the air above the field while fighting the kryptonians looked at it.
And above the city, Parallax continued its quiet, terrible harvest of everything anyone present had ever been afraid of.
Anna looked from the creature on the ground, to the entity in the sky, to Jean.
Jean looked back at her and released a deep sigh before floating towards it.
...
Back in the rooftop, Ethan watched both screens simultaneously.
Parallax on one. The grey creature on another. Barry Allen bleeding in the rubble on a third.
He felt Elizabeth's hand close very gently over his forearm.
He looked at her. Her expression was not dramatic. It was not a plea designed to manipulate or a performance of emotion intended to move him.
It was simply Elizabeth Liones, watching him with eyes that had spent years learning how to look at people clearly, and saying with those eyes what she had already said with her words.
They deserve a good ending.
Ethan looked at the screens for a long moment.
Then he set down the cup he had been holding, and put his hand over hers. "Alright, Elizabeth," he said quietly.
He looked up at the ceiling. Beyond it. At the sky above this dying, stubborn, impossible world. "Let's give them their ending."