Ares God Of War

Long before Diana was born, Ares decided that war was the natural state of the world.

Not as a strategy. Not as a tool. As a truth. He was the God of War — son of Zeus, ancient as storms, his armor the color of dried blood and his voice the sound of cannon fire — and he had spent millennia moving through human history like a hand in a stream, nudging the current, making the water run where he wanted it to run. Planting a rumor here. Feeding a fear there. Turning a misunderstanding into a grievance and a grievance into a weapon.

He was very good at it.

He had watched empires rise and fall, and he had helped, in his way, with both ends. He sat in the smoke above great battlefields and felt the trembling of the earth beneath armies, and he was — there is no other word for it — content. This was the world as it truly was. These were humans as they truly were. If anyone tried to show him otherwise, it was only because they hadn't looked clearly enough.

And then Diana appeared. And she kept looking at him with those clear, steady eyes and saying, "You're wrong."

Ares did not take this well.

Their conflict was centuries old by the time Diana arrived in the modern world, but it found new expression in every generation. He did not need to confront her directly — that was never how Ares worked. He moved in shadows and whispers, stoking the fires that already existed, giving shape to the anger that was already there. He targeted her allies, her friends, her mission. He tried to prove, by example, that humans chose violence when the choice was available, and that Diana's hope was wishful thinking dressed up as principle.

When they finally came face to face — and they always do, eventually — Ares appeared in full battle form: enormous, armored, crackling with the divine energy of a thousand years of conflict. He summoned weapons from the air itself — swords and spears and things with no name that had been used in wars whose names had been forgotten. He projected waves of mental anguish, the concentrated psychic weight of every battle ever fought, trying to press Diana down beneath the sheer accumulated sadness of human conflict.

Diana stood in it.

She was not happy. She was not untouched. The weight was real and heavy and she felt every bit of it. But she stood.

"Humans can do terrible things," she said to him, over the roar of his power. "That is true."

Ares raised his weapons. "Then why defend them?"

"Because they can also do extraordinary ones." Her bracelets crossed — KRAAAAANG — the shockwave of divine energy pushed back against his, and the air between them rang like a struck bell. "And they choose, Ares. They always choose. That's what you can never understand — that the capacity for violence and the capacity for love live in the same heart, and every single day, people choose which one wins."

She swept forward. The Lasso of Truth uncoiled at her hip, and wherever it touched the battlefield — wherever that golden rope lay across the ground — Ares's illusions vanished. The summoned armies he had projected faded. The manufactured hatreds dissolved. What was left was just the two of them, and the truth of the moment.

Ares was not destroyed. Gods do not work that way. But he was defeated — held, suspended, powerless in the warm glow of the Lasso, snarling with something that looked very much like the oldest frustration in the world.

"This isn't over," he said.

"No," Diana agreed. "It never is."

She released him. He disappeared into smoke and old memory.

Diana stood in the quiet afterward and looked at the world around her — ordinary and imperfect and full of people making their small, daily choices about who to be. She thought of Antiope's lesson: fight because you love, never because you hate. She thought of Steve Trevor's coffee going cold on his desk while he explained something about the world to her, patient and honest, never giving up.

She raised her face to the sky.

Somewhere out there, in a shadow she could not see, Ares was watching. Waiting. Planning.

But he had been waiting and planning for three thousand years, and the Amazons were still here. Diana was still here. And tomorrow — as it had been every day of her life — was another chance to tip the balance toward love.

She put her hand on the golden Lasso and felt it warm in her palm, alive with something that had no name, exactly, but felt something like hope.

She went back to work.