[Ellesmere Island, Canadian Arctic]
The ice shelf stretched from horizon to horizon under a sky the colour of iron, and the only sounds that had ever belonged here were wind, the slow grinding of glacier against glacier, and the particular silence that existed beneath both.
Twenty Kryptonian soldiers moved across the ice with the organised efficiency of people who had done this kind of thing before and found it routine.
Their technology carved through the ice shelf, thermal lances that reduced centuries of compacted freeze to vapour in seconds, excavation fields that displaced tonnes of material without so much as vibrating the surface above.
They communicated in terse, clipped Kryptonian and their scanners sweeping downward in steady arcs.
The readings had been consistent all the way from orbit. Something enormous was buried here. Something old, and Kryptonian, and exactly what General Zod had sent them to find.
The scout ship emerged from the ice, its hull still intact, its Kryptonian markings still legible beneath decades of frost. Several soldiers exchanged glances of quiet with satisfaction.
Then every single one of them stopped moving.
It wasn't a gradual thing. It was immediate and total, twenty bodies mid-motion, caught completely, held in place by a grip that had no source they could identify and no mechanism they could combat.
A voice reached them from across the ice. "Thanks for finding it for me."
Several of the soldiers' eyes moved, the only part of them that still could, searching the white expanse around them.
"I would have found it myself, obviously. But it would have taken some time, and I genuinely didn't want to miss more of the battle than I already have."
A brief, appreciative pause. "So truly. Thank you for your hard work. I'll take it from here."
The golden wave came before any of them could form a response.
A pulse of energy that moved through all twenty soldiers simultaneously with the clean, total finality of a sentence ending. They did not scatter but what remained of them was less than the ice around them.
The Arctic wind continued, it was undisturbed and indifferent to the scene.
Ethan Carter walked out of the space where nothing had been a moment before, his coat moving in the cold with an expression holding the mild satisfaction of a man who has completed a minor errand.
Behind him, her breath forming small clouds in the Arctic air, Elizabeth stepped forward and looked at the exposed hull of the scout ship with wide, quiet eyes.
He turned to look at her. "Since you want to end the war," he said, "and since I've had enough of watching from the sofa, it's time to close the curtain on this."
His gaze moved to the ship, then back to her. "But first, I need to pick up a few things."
He raised one hand and the scout ship rose.
It cleared the ice shelf in seconds, turning slowly in the air as Ethan guided it upward with the same casual ease one might use to move a book from one table to another.
He held it there for a moment, turned it once more, and then it was gone, folded into his inventory with a soft displacement of air that was the only evidence it had ever existed in this spot.
Elizabeth watched the empty space where it had been.
"Ready?" Ethan said before raising his other hand and drew a circle in the air. The motion left a trail of red light that widened as it turned, opening into a portal that showed, through its frame, the burning skyline of New Themyscira and the distant sound of everything that had been happening without them.
Elizabeth straightened her back, met his eyes, and stepped through beside him.
...
[New Themyscira]
What had once been a battle had become a triage.
The streets of New Themyscira, already reduced to rubble in the earlier fighting, had been reduced further still. Columns of smoke rose from foundations where buildings had stood.
Craters interrupted what remained of the roads. The scale of the destruction was the kind that stopped making sense if you looked at it too long — the brain simply refusing to process the arithmetic of it.
And the people. There were so few of them left.
Victor Stone moved through the eastern perimeter with the grim, methodical energy. His cannon arm had been discharged so many times the heat signature was registering as a warning on his internal display, and there was a deep fracture running across his chest plate that had been there since a Kryptonian soldier had decided to use him as a projectile forty minutes ago.
He was still standing and intended to keep standing.
Beside him, or near him, or approximately in the same theatre of battle, Captain Thunder fought. His lightning came in shorter bursts now — still devastating, but measured, conserved. His cape was gone but his eyes were still bright.
A little distance from there, Batman moved through the chaos. He was not winning but was enduring, and redirecting, and buying seconds wherever he could find them, which was a different thing from winning but was the only thing available to him.
The Kryptonians had not been kind to the human contingent.
On the northern edge of the field, Kara Zor-El was a streak of fury against six Kryptonian soldiers who had, to their credit, lasted far longer than the others by fighting together.
They were trained warriors, these six — not only soldiers by birth but also people who had spent their lives learning how to use fight, and fighting Kara in a coordinated formation was a different proposition than fighting her one at a time.
She was faster than any of them and hit harder than all of them combined, but they used each other to create angles, to force her to choose between threats, to split her attention in ways that bought them seconds.
She was running out of patience for the seconds they were buying.
...
At the centre of the field, close enough to the action to feel the heat of every explosion and the shockwave of every heavy impact, Barry Allen was not running. He was on the ground.
His hands had gone to the rebar at some point after Thawne had driven it through his thigh and had then been moved away by some deeper instinct that understood that pulling it out would make things worse and that touching it made things bad enough.
His uniform was dark with blood from the wound and from everything that had preceded it.
He had the face of a man who had absorbed too much physical damage, too many revelations and too much understanding of what he had made by doing what he had done.
He watched the battle around him with hollow eyes and watched the people dying in it and understood, in a way that was almost unbearable, that he was responsible for every single one of them.
Eobard Thawne crouched beside him. His fingers found the rebar with a delicate, exploratory touch, and he twisted it.
Barry screamed. It was a raw, involuntary sound, stripped of any pretence, and Thawne listened to it with the expression of a man at a concert he had been looking forward to for a very long time.
"Beautiful," Thawne said softly, "You know what I want you to really sit with, Barry? Not the pain and also not dying."
He let go of the rebar and stood, looking out across the battlefield with something that resembled pride. "This achievement, you did this."
His arms spread wide, encompassing the ruins and the dead and the smoke. "All of this. Every body, every broken building, every person who woke up this morning and will not wake up tomorrow. That's yours." He looked back down at Barry. "Congratulations. You're the villain of your own story. It's almost artistic."
Barry's jaw worked. His hands pressed against the ground but Thawne's smile only widened.
...
In the air above the western quarter, Anna Marie Carter was losing.
She was not losing in the conventional sense of being outmatched. She was losing in the very specific and deeply frustrating sense of fighting something that refused to stay dead.
The creature the Kryptonians had released was vast, and it was grey, and it wore its skeleton on the outside in the form of dense clusters of bone protrusions that jutted from every surface of its body like armour that had grown rather than been made.
She had hit it hard enough to shatter the stone beneath a building. She had driven her knee into its sternum with enough force to cave in a bunker. She had, on two separate occasions, hit it hard enough that it stopped moving entirely.
And then, after approximately three seconds, it had moved again. Stronger than before.
'Of course,' she thought, pulling herself out of the crater its last swing had created. 'Of course it gets stronger when it dies. Of course.'
She wiped the blood from the corner of her mouth and looked at it.
It was looking back at her and she changed her approach.
The frustration resolved itself into something more precise, not anger but calculation, the shift that happened when Anna stopped reacting and started thinking.
She had spent enough time around Ethan to know that every problem had a methodology. This problem's methodology was obvious in retrospect, you could not kill what lived on being killed. So you took something else from it instead.
She moved toward it rather than away from it.
The creature swung. She let the blow land — took the hit, absorbed the impact rather than deflecting it, and in the same motion she closed both hands around its wrists and held on.
Her mutant power activated with the familiar pull of a current reversing direction.
The thing's strength, its vitality, the dense and terrible engine that drove it — she felt it begin to flow. The creature's expression, such as it was, shifted. It tried to pull back, tried to tear free. Its muscles worked against her grip with power that should have broken the contact entirely.
Then she used a spell and the bands appeared — deep red, luminous, wrapping around the creature's limbs and torso with a rigidity that had nothing to do with physical strength. The thing went still but it strained against the bands with everything it had, and the effort was enormous and entirely insufficient.
'Its Magic resistance is low,' Anna noted with grim satisfaction. 'Noted for future reference.'
The drain continued and she felt the creature's memories beginning to surface along the current, rising like debris in a flood — flashes of something vast and dark and very old, impressions of a history she had no interest in carrying.
Her mind moved to the form a specific spell Ethan had created precisely for this situation, and the memories were redirected, sealed and stored in a space separate from her consciousness before they could take root.
'Later problem,' she decided. 'Much later problem.'
The creature's power level dropped through halfway and continued falling.
Its struggles weakened but Anna didn't let go.
...
Overhead, in the space where the sky had been before Parallax arrived and replaced it with something worse, Jean Grey was having a different kind of conversation.
Parallax did not speak in words. It communicated in the older language of the things it fed on — pressure, suggestion, the cold fingers of directed terror finding the gaps between thought and feeling. It was very good at this. It had been doing it since before the human civilisation that named it had existed, and the refinements it had made over that period were considerable.
It had identified Jean as a priority target.
What it had not yet identified was what Jean was.
The fear it pushed into her met something it had not encountered before — not a wall, not resistance in any conventional sense, but a presence. Alive in a way that had nothing to do with biology.
The Phoenix Force existed at the intersection of life and death and the fire that passed between them, and fear, as Parallax understood it, had no purchase in that space.
Parallax pressed harder and suddenly Jean's eyes opened.
Red bled into the green of her irises, and she looked up at the vast, terrible shape above her.
She had come here to contain this. To push it away, to limit the damage, to give this dying world the gentlest ending she could arrange.
Parallax had responded to that by actively trying to kill her. By extension, it was trying to kill everyone on this planet.
Jean thought, briefly, of something Ethan had told her once. 'A good enemy is a dead enemy. If they are beyond redemption, the kindest thing you can do to yourself is be thorough.'
She had not fully agreed with him when he said it. She was not entirely sure she agreed with him now.
But she understood it and the Phoenix Force rose.
It erupted from Jean like a second atmosphere igniting, a column of crimson fire that expanded outward from her body and became, in the space of a breath, something that filled the upper sky.
The cry that accompanied it was heard on the ground below.
Jean pointed and the fire moved.
What followed was not a sustained fight. It was more like the conclusion of a proof that had already been written. Parallax was ancient and enormous and had survived everything the universe had put in front of it across a history too long to measure.
But the Phoenix Force was older.
The yellow mass burned. The light of it was extraordinary — a crimson illumination that turned the smoke above New Themyscira into something briefly, terribly beautiful.
Then there was ash which later dispersed on winds that had been waiting for the sky to be returned to them, and the sky was dark again.
Jean lowered her hand. Below her, she could see Anna floating, both hands still locked around the creature's wrists, the Crimson Bands still holding.
She watched Anna drain the last of what the creature had, watched its enormous body go slack, watched Anna straighten and release it and send it tumbling end over end through the air to land somewhere distant with an impact that rattled the remaining windows in the remaining buildings.
Jean caught Anna's eye and Anna caught Jean's.
They exchanged a look that covered quite a lot of ground without requiring any words, and then both of them turned their attention toward what needed doing next.
Below, Arthur Curry was kneeling in Jean's magic chains.
He had been kneeling in those chains for some time, and in that time, very slowly, his fingers had been working their way toward the small, flat panel set into his belt armour. It had taken him the better part of twenty minutes. His wrists were bound. His fingers were the only things that moved freely, and they moved barely freely at that.
But they moved. He found the button and pressed it.
Immediately light came from the ocean.
It was white and rose from the water like a tide running in reverse — not spreading outward from the shore but upward from the depths, a column of pure destructive energy that began to expand the moment it broke the surface. The sound of it was sub-audible, felt in the chest rather than heard with the ears, and the effect it had on the ruins around it was immediate.
The rubble nearest the waterline began to disintegrate.
Arthur's laughter had the character of a man who had been holding onto this moment through everything and had arrived at it regardless of everything else.
"Surface dwellers," he said, "will end. Even if everything ends with them." His head rolled back and his teeth showed in something that was not really a smile. "Better nothing than them."
Diana, beside him, did not open her eyes. Her chin was lowered, and her expression was the expression of someone who had made their peace and was waiting.
"This is what men do," she said quietly. "They tear the earth apart rather than share it. Gaea weeps." Her hands were still in their chains. She did not struggle. "Let it end."
But Jean and Anna were already moving.
They came together above the field as the white light continued to expand from the ocean, and the spell they reached for was one they had built together with Ethan over late evenings and shared effort — a containment working of Ethan's design.
The magic circles appeared between them, red and luminous and rotating in opposite directions, stacked three deep with runes that moved along their edges like text being written in real time.
The white light pushed against the containment. It was not small, this force Arthur had released — it had been designed to end things, But the circle held.
The white light bent inward and compressed. Folded around itself under the pressure of the spell until it was no longer a wave but a sphere, and the sphere contracted further until it rested in the air between Jean's outstretched hands and Anna's, a glowing white orb no larger than a basketball, surrounded by its red magic circles still turning and writing their containment in the air around it.
Both of them exhaled.
Anna looked at the orb. Then at Jean. Then back at the orb.
"Did he really think that was going to work," she said.
Jean considered Arthur's kneeling figure below. Her eyes were still carrying the last embers of the Phoenix, red fading slowly back to green.
Then Anna was gone from beside her, descending with a speed that didn't leave time for Arthur to do anything except register that something was coming.
She landed in front of him and looked down at him and began hitting him.
It was thorough, efficient, and it continued until there was no ambiguity whatsoever about Arthur's capacity to continue being a problem.
When she stepped back, he was not moving.