Circe

On an island that exists just outside the edges of the regular world — in a fold of old magic that most maps cannot find — there lives a sorceress who has been very, very patient for a very, very long time.

Her name is Circe.

She is ancient in a way that goes beyond years — ancient the way a mountain range is ancient, the way the deep ocean floor is ancient. She is the daughter of Titans, and divine blood runs in her veins, and she has been alive and scheming and beautifully, dangerously clever since long before your grandmother's grandmother was born. She lives on the island of Aeaea, which smells of old fires and something sweet that is not quite flowers, and she moves through its halls in robes that shift color like oil on water.

Circe has one signature gift. She can transform people into animals.

Usually this is an expression of her disdain — she sees most humans as animals already, fumbling through their days with their small concerns and their small ambitions, and she simply makes visible what she believes is already true. But Circe is not clumsy. She does not transform everyone she meets. She is precise and strategic, a long-game thinker who has been plotting against the Amazons and their princess for millennia.

She hates Diana. Not personally — or not only personally — but philosophically. Diana represents everything Circe finds irritating: hope, sincerity, the stubborn belief that love is stronger than power. To Circe, these are not virtues. They are naivety. And Diana's continued success in a world that Circe knows to be indifferent and cruel is an ongoing affront.

So Circe schemes. And her schemes are magnificent — you have to admit that, if you are being fair. They blend ancient mystical arts with modern technology in ways that take Diana months to untangle. They span centuries of preparation. They involve beautiful illusions that can make Diana see things that are not there, summon creatures that should not exist, and make trusted allies do things they would never choose.

One autumn, Circe turned a congressional hearing room in Washington into a menagerie. Just — POOF — senators and advisors and assistants suddenly found themselves looking at each other with the surprised expressions of very well-dressed animals. Diana arrived at the Capitol building to find the building's lobby occupied by a very confused gathering of what had recently been legislators.

She did not laugh. Much.

The solution to Circe's transformations was always the same: Diana's Lasso of Truth. The golden rope, coiled at Diana's hip and glowing with the warmth of Hestia's blessing, cut through illusion the way sunlight cuts through fog. Wherever the Lasso touched, Circe's deceptions could not hold. The transformations reversed. The illusions cleared. The creatures Circe summoned from old mythology faded back into the old stories where they belonged.

Circe found this enormously frustrating.

Their battles moved across old geography — Aeaea's shadow corridors, the rooftops of modern cities, the threshold between the mortal world and the divine one. Diana's mental discipline was her armor against Circe's psychological attacks — the sorceress could project vivid, terrible images into a person's mind, but Diana had trained since childhood to recognize the difference between what she saw and what was true. Every Amazon learned this. The Amazons had survived Circe before.

"You and your truth," Circe said once, in the last moments of a confrontation on the rooftop of a Geneva skyscraper, her robes still shimmering, her voice still beautiful even in defeat. "Do you know how tiresome it is?"

Diana stood before her, lasso glowing, not unkind. "You could use your gifts differently," she said. "You have a mind that could change the world."

Circe looked at her for a long moment. Then she stepped backward into a fold of old magic and was gone, leaving only a whiff of that not-quite-flowers scent behind.

Diana stood on the rooftop and looked at the city below — the ordinary streets, the ordinary people, the ordinary light of a Geneva afternoon.

Circe would be back. Circe was always back. They had been in this dance for longer than most cities had existed, and they would likely be in it for a long time more.

But Diana did not despair. Because every time she held the Lasso of Truth up against Circe's darkness and the darkness retreated — every single time — it proved the same thing:

Truth is not naivety. Truth is the most powerful thing that exists. And Diana has had three thousand years to get very, very good at it.