Themyscira Heritage

When the burdens of the modern world become very heavy, Diana comes home.

She flies low over the water, below the clouds, where the spray catches the underside of her boots and the salt air tastes like a memory. She knows exactly when she has crossed the veil — there is a change in the light, a softening, as if the world's ordinary haze has been gently set aside — and then the island appears.

Themyscira.

White marble steps cascading down a green hillside to a harbor of impossible blue. Temple columns bright in the afternoon light. Gardens of flowers that grow in colors that have no names in any language Diana has learned in the outside world. And everywhere, the sound of the island — the wind in the olive trees, the iron-ring of practice weapons, the conversations of three thousand years of women who built something extraordinary and intended to keep it.

Her mother is always on the steps.

Queen Hippolyta stands with the easy authority of someone who has never in her life needed to prove herself to anyone, her arms open, her face the particular warm expression that is reserved for Diana alone. They embrace on the steps the way people embrace after a long time apart — holding on for a moment beyond the polite hug, feeling the reality of it.

"Tell me everything," Hippolyta always says.

And Diana does. She sits beside her mother in the hall where the light comes through the columns in long afternoon bars, and she tells her about Metropolis and Washington and the arguments in the Justice League Watchtower and the person she met last week in a field in Central Europe who had been living in a war zone for three years and still laughed when her daughter made a joke. She tells the hard things and the beautiful things and the things she doesn't have words for in any language, and Hippolyta listens to all of it.

Antiope's training grounds are still there, though Antiope is not. Diana walks through them in the mornings, the cool air still smelling of iron and earth, the marks of old practice sessions still visible on the wooden posts. She runs the obstacle course Antiope designed — still the hardest course on the island, because Antiope believed in leaving room to grow. She runs it with the same focused intensity she used as a child, and she never gets entirely to the end without a moment that challenges her.

This is intentional. She has never changed the course.

The Amazons who live on Themyscira are three thousand years of varied lives: scholars who have written histories in seven languages, healers who know remedies that the modern world has not yet rediscovered, warriors who have trained their whole lives for battles that come only rarely on the protected island. They are her sisters and her elders and her teachers and her students, all at once. They ask her about the world beyond the veil with a curiosity that never dims — the world they chose to leave, and that they watch with care from their hidden shore.

Diana tells them what she has seen. She tells them about the parts that are frightening and the parts that are astonishing and the parts that remind her, most deeply, of Themyscira. She tells them about the people she has met who live with extraordinary dignity under extraordinary pressure and who ask for no recognition for it.

"Do they know," one of her sisters asks once, "that you carry them with you?"

Diana thinks about this. "I carry Themyscira with me," she says. "When they see me — when they see something of what I am — what they're seeing is all of you."

She walks the harbor on her last evening, where the fishing boats rock gently and the stars are coming out one by one. The reflection of the moon lies on the water, long and shimmering. In the distance, the veil shifts like a living curtain.

Tomorrow she will fly back through it. She will return to the meetings and the crises and the extraordinary noise of the human world that she has chosen to serve. She will put on her role as Diana of Themyscira — ambassador, warrior, friend — and she will carry all of this with her: the white marble, the olive trees, her mother's face in the afternoon light.

She takes one breath of the salt air and holds it for a moment.

Then she turns and walks back toward the temple, and the lamps are lit in the windows, and the sound of her people settles around her like a warm, living thing.

She is never more herself than here.

She is never more ready to leave.