The girl on the island grew up.
Korvos learned her name from Cronus, who learned it from a soul who arrived in Tartarus carrying it — a sailor Trapped by the women of Themyscira, for procreation purpose and killed after his use was over. The sailor's information was fragmentary. The name was not..
Diana.
He said it once, in the dark, and did not say it again for a long time.
He had been watching her — through Cronus's eyes, through the composite picture of the dead's deposited knowledge and the Titan's time-sense impressions — for years before he understood what the watching was doing to him. He had expected rage. He had expected the thing he felt about Hippolyta and Zeus, that cold, architectural fury that the Architect had learned to work with and the Boy to express. He had expected something simple.
What he felt was not simple.
Cronus reported on her development with the regularity of someone who understood that the reporting was not neutral. The girl was training. The girl was exceptional — that came through clearly in the impressions, the specific quality of a divine bloodline developing in the open, in sunlight, with teachers and peers and the full weight of Amazonian tradition behind it. The girl was loved. The island had done for her everything it had refused to do for him, and it had done it without hesitation, without a second council, without a room in the foundation.
The Boy's reaction was immediate and scorching. The Architect catalogued it without comment.
Somewhere underneath both of them was something neither of them had a clean word for. He had been alone his entire life. He had never had another person present. And there was a person — his blood, his father's eyes probably, his mother's heritage — growing up on the island above the room he had left years ago, growing up into the life that should have been possible for both of them.
He did not hate her.
He did not know how to hate her. She had not done anything. She was a child on an island. She did not know he existed.
But he watched her grow up through Cronus's secondhand picture and he felt something happen in him that he could not fully understand, a feeling that was close to love in its shape but had the specific pain of love that cannot be given anywhere, love that has nowhere to go and no one to receive it, love that becomes its own kind of injury the longer it goes unexpressed.
"She is exceptional in the sparring courts," Cronus reported, decades in. "The dead who carry recent knowledge describe her as far beyond her age. They compare her to the greatest Amazonian warriors of the last several generations."
Korvos was practicing with the chain. He stopped.
"She is happy?" he asked.
Cronus paused. The question had not been what he expected. "By every available indication, yes. She is well-regarded on the island, deeply trained, loved by her mother."
"Good," Korvos said.
He resumed the chain practice.
He did not examine the word. He simply meant it, and that was strange enough that he put it away and did not look at it again for several years.
* * *
Cronus, he came to understand over the centuries, was using Diana.
Not her directly — she was unreachable, and Cronus had no means of affecting the surface world beyond his residual impressions. He was using the information about Diana. Using it carefully, deliberately, deploying it the way you deploy a resource: at the right moment, in the right amount, to produce the right effect.
He understood this around the two-hundredth year.
He understood it because he had spent two centuries paying attention to how information was presented to him, and the pattern was clear enough once he was looking for it. When he was angry — burning, productive, focused angry — Cronus reported Diana's achievements in detail. When he was drifting into the abstraction that sometimes overtook him in long dark decades, Cronus reported something that would bring him back into contact with the wound. The sequencing was not random. It never had been.
He thought about this for some time.
Then he decided it did not matter.
Cronus wanted an instrument. He needed a teacher. Both things were true simultaneously and the truth of one did not cancel the truth of the other. The training was real. The knowledge was real. The fact that it was being given for a purpose did not diminish the knowledge — it only meant he needed to be clear about what his own purposes were and not mistake them for Cronus's.
He was not being made into Cronus's weapon. He was using Cronus's resources to build his own.
He let the manipulation continue. He had what Cronus could give him and he knew what Cronus was doing and the situation worked for both of them. He kept this understanding to himself. Cronus did not know he knew, and letting Cronus not know was its own kind of useful.
* * *
Diana left the island during a world war.
He was over fifteen hundred years into his imprisonment when Cronus felt the shift — the specific quality of a divine bloodline departing from the place it had been anchored, the feeling, as Cronus described it, of a light moving out of a fixed position and into open space. The souls arriving in Tartarus in the years following carried fragments: a woman of extraordinary capability fighting alongside men in a war that was consuming the civilized world. A conflict of a scale not seen in centuries. Weapons and armies and ideologies and the specific human capacity for industrialized destruction.
Diana was in it. Moving through it. Making herself visible in a way that changed the world's picture of what was possible.
"She found her way out," Korvos said.
"Yes," Cronus said.
He thought about the room. He thought about eighteen years of the food slot and the torch and the count. He thought about the door opening for the first time when he was eighteen and the guards flanking it and Hippolyta's face and the chain going on.
He thought about his sister, walking out of Themyscira into a war, at a time of her own choosing, with the full support of the island at her back.
"Good," he said again.
He meant it again. He was also aware, with the cold part of him, that the feeling underneath the word had become a structural element of his psychology — the specific love-shaped thing that had nowhere to go and nothing to be done with it, that had been accumulating for fifteen centuries and that he had stopped trying to classify and simply carried. He carried it the way he carried the chain. Not comfortably. But as his.
The war ended. Another began, on a different axis, with different weapons and a different scale of potential destruction. Diana moved through it. She gathered peers — not subjects, not followers, but genuine equals, people with different capabilities and the same orientation toward using them well.
Cronus reported this with the precision of someone making a point without stating it.
Korvos received it without comment.
He knew what Cronus was doing. He let him do it. The point was valid regardless of the intent behind it.
* * *
In 2008, by the surface world's calendar — which Korvos tracked through the dead's deposited timekeeping, through Cronus's time-sense impressions of major global events — a formal organization of extraordinary individuals was established. Six founding members. Superman. Batman. Wonder Woman. Green Lantern. The Flash. Aquaman. And the Manhunter from Mars. They came together in response to a planetary-level threat from a being called Darkseid, a tyrant from a realm outside the world's normal frame of reference. The threat was stopped. The organization held. They called themselves the Justice League.
Diana was at the center of it. Not in the sense of hierarchy — these were not people who organized themselves by hierarchy in the way he understood hierarchy from Themyscira. They organized themselves by capability and trust. Diana was at the center because she was one of the founding three, because she carried the longest active history, because the others oriented themselves around her the way voices in a room orient themselves around the voice they trust most.
The way voices in a council chamber had always oriented themselves around Hippolyta.
He noticed this parallel.
He was fifteen centuries and decades into his imprisonment. Cronus had been working on the suppression runes for over a century.
"How long," Korvos said.
"To complete the work?" Cronus said. "Five years. Perhaps less."
Korvos was still.
"The League has been active for five years," he said. "They have experience now. Doctrine. Public standing. Established relationships with governments, with each other."
"Yes," Cronus said.
"Which means when I come out, they will be fully operational. Not forming. Not finding their footing. Operational."
"Yes," Cronus said. "That is the situation."
Korvos wrapped the chain around his forearm and sat with this for a long time.
The Architect was not troubled. An established organization was a known organization. Known organizations had patterns. Patterns could be mapped. He had been mapping patterns his entire life. Five years of League activity meant five years of public record — movements, responses, the shape of how they operated under pressure. He would have all of it before he walked out.
The Boy was not capable of being satisfied by anything that stood between it and what it wanted. Five years was five years.
Between them, Korvos held both positions at once. Five years was nothing. Five years was everything. The Architect kept this as: acceptable. The Boy kept this as: noted. Their agreement on this was imperfect and sufficient.
"Continue," he said.
Cronus continued.