Ares is not a man.
Diana crouches above Ludendorff's corpse, the God-Killer heavy in her hand. Around her, the war continues.
"Good guess," Isabel Maru says, one side of her face curled in a smile, the other frozen in a porcelain grimace. "But not quite right."
She is gone before Diana can even scream.
Steve dies in the sky. It looks like fireworks. The Germans cheer.
When Diana leaves, no one is alive to follow.
The war goes on, and she finds herself at the front line again, clearing a path for the troops to march on ahead and burying those who aren't as lucky. It's exhausting work, even for someone with the strength of a god, but she's grateful for it. It keeps her mind away from everything else.
Time and time again, she calls for peace, but she is rebuffed, first by German generals, who Allied spies report being in the company of a beautiful woman in a mask, and then by Allied ones, some who have grown tired of Germany's persistence and wish to crush it utterly beneath their heel and others who cannot stop bickering amongst themselves long enough to see clearly. She tries to hate them, but she can't. It isn't their fault that they are so hungry for war. It's Isabel's.
Sometimes, another wounded or dead man held carefully in her arms, she thinks she hears a voice above the shots and shouts of the battlefield. It hangs like a thread of sickly-sweet smoke in the air, and the first time she recognizes whose it is, she barely manages to set down the injured soldier she's carrying before she vomits.
Diana, she hears late one night, when the candlelight is not strong enough to keep the shadows or the nightmares at bay. Diana, Diana, Diana.
"Leave me alone," she demands, voice low so that she doesn't wake any of the other women who share her tent.
Listen to me, Diana. They do not deserve you.
Hippolyta's last words come rushing back to her, and she stuffs a knuckle in her mouth to keep from crying out. Her mother is the wisest woman she knows, and she said the same thing just before Diana left. What if Isabel is right?
"Maybe so. But they have me anyway."
Isabel leaves her alone for the rest of the night, and Diana slips out early the next morning to wash the tears from her face.
When Isabel starts speaking to her again, Diana is stitching up the side of a soldier after surgery. The voice steals all the air from the room, and she gasps for breath, nearly dropping the needle as the soldier looks on with concern. "Are you all right, miss?" he asks, but she barely hears him.
Diana, why do you waste your time on him? He will die soon enough, and if he doesn't, he deserves to.
"He doesn't deserve to," she says, ignoring the way he stares at her for having a conversation with the empty air.
Of course he does. He is a soldier. He killed people. These humans, they're all the same. They all delight in destruction.
"Only because you make them."
I merely give them the tools. Is the arms dealer a murderer?
"An arms dealer is far less complicit in evil than you," she snarls.
Oh, Diana. You still have so much to learn about the world. You will find that evil is nothing more than a way of looking at things. Some, for instance, would call a woman who killed a hundred people a murderer. Others would call her a hero. What will people say about you?
"That I fought for what is right," she says, the soldier beside her completely forgotten. "If only they could say the same for you."
Go, Diana. Heal your little friend and send him back to kill the families and friends of innocent civilians. Tell yourself that his sins are justified. Tell yourself that only the gods can judge him.
The soldier goes back into battle a few days later. He doesn't return. Diana cries.
Only rarely does Isabel appear corporeal before her, dark eyes flashing and half her face split open in wild laughter as Diana lunges for her, only to find that her fingers pass right through where cloth and flesh and bone should be. Most of the time, it's just her voice crooning words in Diana's ear.
She asks one of the nurses offhandedly if she can hear anything while Isabel is talking, and the woman just looks at her strangely and asks if she needs to go lie down for a little bit. Maybe she's going crazy. Maybe she already was. Either way, her doubt only encourages Isabel to speak more.
We could be great together, Diana. Come with me. I can teach you how to understand your power and wield it like a true god.
They take you for granted. They overlook you, ignore you, insult you. Aren't you worth more than that, Diana? Aren't you better?
This world is too damaged to save. Sometimes you have to rebreak a bone in order to set it properly. Only through fire can the world be cleansed.
Sometimes she screams. Sometimes she doesn't. Isabel's voice curls in her ears regardless.
Time passes, and humanity tries to destroy itself again and again. Sometimes she wonders if Isabel was right. Maybe there's no point in trying to fix what is determined to break. Maybe she should let time and human nature run their course.
Then she rescues a child from the crossfire and is embraced by a mother who babbles shaky gratitude in her ear, and she knows that, flawed or not, she can never give up on mankind. She loves them too much.
Sometimes she catches a glimpse of Isabel in the hollow eyes of a girl begging outside the camp, in the scarred face of a woman who didn't get her gas mask on in time, in the cold smile of a man who stares at her for just a little too long. Once, she almost kills a woman wearing surgical scrubs and a mask, and it's only when it registers that the woman is screaming in a voice too low to be Isabel's that she drops the sword.
The generals demand that she leave the war zone after that, and she doesn't protest. She's too much of a liability like this. She needs to confront Isabel and destroy her once and for all. Only then can humanity start to heal from the hatred she had seeded in their hearts.
She finds an empty field far from any villages and stands in the center of it, the God-Killer held before her, the lasso of Hestia gleaming at her side. "Isabel!" she shouts. The wind swallows her voice, but she knows that Isabel hears it when the sun's light dims.
Yes, sister?
"I will kill you," she says, the words heavy with the weight of a promise. "I will kill you and mankind will finally be free of your influence. You say you want peace? Stand and fight me."
Wispy laughter echoes throughout the moors. You will have to find me first.
So she tries. She pieces together rumors about mysterious outbreaks of fighting in places supposedly untouched by the war and follows Isabel's trail of devastation across the world. Only once does she manage to catch a glimpse of Isabel across the room at a party held to celebrate the signing of the peace treaty and the end of the war, but Isabel just blows her a kiss and disappears before she can push her way through the crowd.
"Coward!" she shouts in the middle of the room. A glass shatters, and it takes her a moment to realize it was hers. She brushes the shards from her hand, mutters, "Excuse me," to the people now staring at her, and quickly storms out to the hall.
Alone, she says, "You told me to chase you, so I did. Now you, the god of war, flee from battle? Are you truly that afraid that I will defeat you?"
I leave for your own sake, Diana. My aim is not to destroy you or force you to join me but rather to persuade you to come willingly. Until you do, I will not allow you to confront me in battle.
"I will never join you!" she hisses.
Isabel's voice warms with amusement. Maybe not now, but someday. I will wait for you.
"It's too late. The war is over. You lost." Triumph flares in her chest, sparking in her eyes. If she stands here too long, she'll scorch the earth. Isabel wanted to set the world ablaze, but Diana already has.
Oh, Diana. How naive you still are. Do you really think this will be their final war?
"Yes," she says, firm, absolute. "I do."
Isabel's laughter wraps around her like a hand on her throat. I hope you are right, for your sake. But I will interfere no longer. Whatever the humans decide to do is entirely up to them. If they go to war again, I will have no hand in it.
"Then they will finally have peace."
For a time, Isabel agrees. But humans never change. They will forget the past and remember their grievances and the cycle will begin anew.
"You are wrong about them." She holds her head high, letting Antiope's headpiece gleam. Isabel has been isolated for thousands of years by her own lust for power. What does she know of forgiveness, of love? Diana almost pities her.
And if I'm not?
She doesn't have an answer for that.
Another war begins, barely twenty years after the other. She tries in vain to preach reason to both sides, but when neither will listen to her, she joins the battle once again.
It is long and bloody, far worse than the first war, and she grows numb. She no longer shudders like she should at Isabel's voice. Isabel watches her from a dying soldier's eyes, and Diana doesn't flinch away. She is numb.
But she is not numb enough.
Did you like the bombs better, Diana, or the camps? I had nothing to do with either of them. The ingenuity of humans is truly amazing, is it not?
A newspaper lies forgotten before her, its pages filled with atrocities far beyond anything she had ever dreamed. "How can they be so cruel?" she whispers.
They are only human. Cruelty is their specialty.
"You- you lied." She swipes furiously at her eyes, as if she can brush away the images of horrific suffering like she does her tears. "You said you wouldn't interfere!"
I am the god of truth, Diana. I cannot lie. I played no part in any of this. A pause. Perhaps our father was right. They do resemble the gods.
"It's all your fault." She chokes on the words, on the lie.
It would be simpler if it were. But you already know the truth in your heart. It is only a matter of time before you accept it.
She doesn't mean to respond, to give Isabel any bit of encouragement to continue, but she's spent the past several years being shouted over by men who bluster like they know more about war than her and she's tired of being silent. "And then?"
She can almost feel Isabel smile. And then we will fix them and they will worship us for it.
Her blood goes cold. "Fix them?"
Cull them, cleanse the earth, and recreate them in our image. We are different than our father, Diana. We are better. We will avoid his mistakes. Finally, humanity will be perfect.
"I don't want perfect." Machines are perfect, cold and sterile. There is no soul in a machine, no heart, nothing to love. Diana doesn't love people despite their flaws but rather because of them.
That's all right. I can be patient. You will see like me in the end.
And she feels her heart sink, because she knows that she will keep pushing the poisonous words away until she's too weak, too bitter, too tired of humanity to resist. It might take a thousand years or until the sun explodes, but someday Isabel will win.
After all, time is nothing to the gods.