The Last Chapter (Of This Story)

Happy Harbor, Rhode Island

July 18, 2010, 12:00 EDT

We didn't have time to celebrate Iskandar figuring out the name of the god we needed to make the portal home. M'gann quickly explained what was going on to Red Tornado and asked him to come help.

"If I intervene it will not be help," Red Tornado said.

"The guys won't thank you for it," I agreed. "What about Twister's powers? Any tips for dealing with that?"

"I find it strange that this Twister shares my elemental powers," Red Tornado mused, "and my immunity to telepathy."

"We could just try harder to make him explode," Sean suggested. "Magic and technology don't mix well."

M'gann tapped the heel of her hand to her forehead. "Hello, Megan. I know what to do."

M'gann sped up the Bio-Ship while she explained her plan.

Sean nodded. "We'll follow your lead."

M'gann smiled nervously and opened up a telepathic link between us and the rest of the team. 'Listen to me, all of you.'

'Woah,' Khonsu said. 'That's cool.'

'Shut up, Khonsu,' I said. 'M'gann is talking.'

'What did we tell you?' Superboy growled at M'gann.

'I know I messed up,' M'gann said, 'but I know what to do now. I need you to trust me.'

She quickly went over her plan again.

'We trust you,' Kaldur said. 'Be careful.'

'You too,' M'gann said.

'Careful?' Wally chucked. 'We don't know the meaning of the word.'

'I find that troubling,' a woman said.

'Shut up, Mut,' Sean said.

M'gann landed the camouflaged ship several meters from the battleground. "You're sure your magic will work from here?"

Sean nodded. "We just have to send Kid Flash in the right direction, it'll work."

After shapeshifting into a perfect copy of Red Tornado (I guess robots didn't fall under the category of boys), M'gann flew out of the ship and went to distract Mr. Twister. Sean and I jumped out and stood under the ship so that our magic wouldn't be disrupted by being surrounded with an organic space ship. Seconds later, Wally appeared beside us.

"You ready?" I asked.

Wally adjusted his goggles. "Born ready."

Sean and I summoned gusts of wind that we sent flying after Wally as he ran back towards M'gann. He used them to kick start the first tornado that M'gann appeared to create before running over a few feet and creating a second one.

Sean and I took control of the first tornado and sent it clashing with the tornado that Mr. Twister had created. It took both of us working together to fight on even footing with the robot. Wally's tornado came at Mr. Twister from the side and just missed catching him off guard.

"That's us done," I said when Mr. Twister punched the ground and sent M'gann tumbling head over heels. "We'd better start heading over."

Sean had his hands on his knees, panting. "Give me a minute," he gasped. "How are you not tired?"

'Because she's drawing on my power,' Khonsu grumbled.

'Sorry?' I said.

'Just give me some warning next time so I can put a cap on how much you use. It would be annoying if you burned up.'

'Thanks,' I said flatly.

We watched while M'gann and Superboy punted Mr. Twister into the bay, where Kaldur was waiting under the water to hit the robot with an electric shock. By the time M'gann had starting ripping off Mr. Twister's limbs, Sean had recovered enough for us to go join the rest of the team.

Mr. Twister's chest opened and what appeared to be a man came tumbling out. "Foul. I call foul," he stuttered.

M'gann telekinetically picked up a nearby bolder and dropped it on him.

"M'gann, no!" Kaldur shouted, too late. We stared in stunned silence. A small part of me worried that the robot that should have been inside Mr. Twister had been replaced with an actual person.

"Don't know how things are done on Mars, but on Earth we don't kill our captives!" Robin yelled.

M'gann smirked. "You said you trust me." She lifted the bolder to reveal the crushed electronic guts beneath it. "This is why I couldn't read his mind."

Wally picked up one of the robot's eyes. "Cool. Souvenir." The other guys complemented M'gann and she smiled.

I looked at Sean and then nodded towards the robot remains. We raised our wands. Maybe it was because the robots had been mostly destroyed, but only a pulse of magic was required to make the electronics send up sparks. The faint red glow in the remaining eye of the crushed robot died. T.O. Morrow and Brom Stikk were no longer spying on us, and hopefully any tracking devices in the robot parts had been fried too.

"Back to base," Wally asked, "or should we help with the clean up?"

"Sean and I can come back later and put some houses back together," I said. "Right now, we're out of power."

M'gann levitated all the dismembered parts of both robots. "We should take this back with us, right?"

"Correct." Kaldur nodded.

We made our way back to Mount Justice, Iskandar looking much less green than the first time around, and unloaded the robots for Red Tornado to look at.

"So, what are we going to do?" I whispered to Sean while the rest of the team was talking.

"With what?" Sean asked.

I rolled my eyes. "Getting home, idiot."

"We figure out who Heh is and when he was born, then make the portal," Sean said.

"Because that's going to be as easy as you make it sound," I muttered. "Come on, we'd better rescue Iskandar before M'gann talks him to death."

M'gann, who had started asking Iskandar questions about the Egypt he had lived in as soon as the former sidekicks and Superboy left the room, volunteered to help us research Heh. She was the one who found some of his other names (Huh and Hah being two of them, which made me ask if he was the god of questions) and a list of numbers that used his hieroglyphic to represent one million.

"Water," Iskandar said eventually. "No...flood?"

Sean looked over at the book Iskandar was reading. "Sea," he said. "The Sea of Chaos. Our guy is really, really old."

"Hang on." I pointed at a picture of a god in the book I was looking at. "Is this him? He's got a—what do you call it?—shen ring thing on either side of him. Don't those mean eternity?"

Sean turned the book towards him and looked at the picture. "Yeah, they do. I saw this somewhere." He dove into the honeycomb shelves holding the few books we weren't looking through and came out with a huge scroll that he then rolled out on the table on top of all the other books and scrolls we had open until he reached an entry in the middle. "Heh, god of eternity, personification of infinity, probably existed before the creation of all the worlds."

I sighed. "We're not going to be able to figure out when he was born, are we?"

Sean shook his head. "Doesn't look like it."

We stared at the scroll in silence.

"Styx," I said.

At the same time, M'gann said, "Why don't we all get some sleep? It'll look better in the morning."

"Yeah, maybe I can have another ba dream and let my sister know that we are stuck on Earth-16," I muttered.

Sean's eyes lit up. He swept the giant scroll aside and began frantically searching through several smaller ones. "Ah hah!" He looked up from the half a dozen scrolls he was surrounded by. "The Duat connects everything, even different worlds. The portal that brought us here must have gone through a place where this world's Duat overlapped with our world's Duat."

"So we just have to go back to Cadmus and make a portal there?" I asked.

Sean shook his head. "No, that overlap will have moved by now. What we need is a way to go deep into the Duat and find an overlap that goes to our Earth."

Iskandar frowned. "Dangerous. You die."

That was definitely encouraging. Not.

"We would need something like the sun boat," I said. "Those kinds of things aren't just left lying around."

"Your ba dream," Sean asked, "what did you see?"

I shrugged. "The river Styx, lots of bones, dead girls, my sister." I thought for a moment. "A guy in white with a green...jewel...Oh my gods. I'm an idiot."

'Glad you've figured that out,' Khonsu said with a grin.

"Shut up, Khonsu. Sean, Iskandar, is there an Egyptian god of dreams?"

Sean and Iskandar looked at each other. Iskandar shrugged and shook his head. "Not that I know of," Sean said. "Why?"

"That's fine, that's fine," I muttered. "Actually, he probably wouldn't have responded anyway, he's not the old one."

"Do you know what she's talking about?" M'gann asked. Sean and Iskandar shook their heads.

I stood up and started pacing across the stone floor. "What's his name? What is his name? Come on, remember."

'Moses?' Khonsu suggested. 'James? Harry? David?'

I snapped my fingers. "Not David, Daniel! Daniel..."

'Carter?'

"Hall!" I exclaimed.

"Where are you going with this?" Sean asked.

"The Endless," I said. "The Endless exist everywhere, just like the Duat. They can go anywhere, that's why I could share a dream with Sapphire even though we're on different Earths."

Sean made a confused face. "How does that help us?"

"Hello, Megan." M'gann smiled. "You're going to ask them for help."

I nodded. "Well, not all of them. Dream is one of the less likely to kill us ones."

"Don't we have enough gods here?" Sean asked, pointing to his head.

"The Endless aren't gods," I explained. "They're older than gods. I wouldn't be surprised if one of them was Heh."

Sean and Iskandar weren't exactly excited to try to get help from beings older and more powerful than gods, but they came around when I told them that the Dream that existed now had been human pretty recently. M'gann wasn't worried at all, but that was probably because she didn't have much experience with gods.

"Do we need a summoning circle or something like that?" Sean asked. "I don't think there's enough room in here."

The room we were in was mostly taken up by the huge table Sean had insisted on when we were moving the books to Mount Justice. There was just enough room around the edge to move shoulder-to-shoulder with someone else without scraping up against the walls and not much else.

"That would be rude," I said. "Plus, the old Dream got trapped in a circle for decades so..."

"No circle," Sean agreed.

"I could make cookies," M'gann suggested.

I didn't think that would help.

"I've got an easier idea." I cleared my throat. "Dream? Daniel Hall? May we speak to you?"

"You may."

I spun around. Chairs scraped against the floor as everyone else shot out of their seats.

M'gann gasped. "Lord L'Zoril!"

The man in white from my ba travel dream looked over my shoulder and nodded to her. "Young Martian. Please, stand."

I heard scrambling as, I assume, M'gann stood back up after dropping to her knees.

"Dream?" I asked.

The man in white looked at me. The green jewel around his neck and his black eye sockets glinted. "Amber Sara Banks," he said slowly. Every syllable of my name rang with something that I could feel in my chest, like the bass in loud music.

I bowed my head. "My lord."

"Why have you called me?"

I was pretty sure that he already knew why we had called him, but in the interest of not getting smote (which is the past tense of "smite", apparently) I babbled a summary of the conversation leading up to having Dream of the Endless standing in Mount Justice.

"So, we were, I was hoping that you might be able to help me and Sean get home," I finished.

Dream hadn't taken his eyes off of me since I started speaking. A star shone in each of them, looking like the mischievous glint I had once seen in Hermes's eyes. "But why do you wish to leave? Isn't this world everything you've ever dreamed of?"

I swallowed. "I have dreamed of it, my lord," I admitted, "but I've always woken up. My family isn't here, or my friends. My sister is getting married. I still have to graduate high school. Sean's going to become an awesome water elemantalist. Our lives aren't here."

It was probably my imagination, but I saw a smile flicker over Dream's face before he looked over my head and said something in Alexandrian Greek. I looked at Iskandar, who was shaking his head. He said many words in Alexandrian Greek and then one word in English, "Home."

Dream definitely smiled then. He spoke with Sean in a language I assume was Irish Gaelic before turning back to me. "I will send you home, and say your goodbyes. As Toto has become attached to Superboy, they would prefer to stay here."

Toto had flown at Superboy when we got back and hadn't been more than a foot away from him since.

"Do you mean right now?" I asked. Dream nodded.

I turned around and gave M'gann a hug. "Good luck with the superhero thing. You're gonna do great."

M'gann smiled. "Thanks. Good luck with the magician thing."

I found myself giving Iskandar a hug too. He would do well on Earth-16 with the Justice League. There were already so many people there who were from a different planet or Earth or time that once he didn't have to help us anymore there would be plenty of people to help him adjust to the modern era.

"I am your friend," Iskandar said slowly. "Always."

I smiled at him. "Thank you."

I looked at Sean and then turned back to Dream. "We're ready."

"Not yet. Mut, Khonsu, you must leave first."

'Aw man,' Khonsu complained. 'You know I like you, right?'

'And I don't entirely hate you,' I told him.

I saw Khonsu smiling in my mind. 'Good to hear that. Hey, maybe I'll go find a kid who wants to be a superhero and get them to be my host. Then we could come back here. What do you think?'

I mentally rolled my eyes. 'Just don't burn them up.'

'Cool.'

I felt Khonsu leaving my body. It was a drain that ended with a kick in the gut. I stumbled and grabbed the edge of the table. I wasn't aware of closing my eyes, but when I opened them I saw that Sean had a look on his face like he was trying not to cry.

"I guess now we're ready," I said softly.

Dream nodded.

With a snap of his fingers, the world turned inside out and upside down. It was so much worse than a portal or shadow travel. I didn't even notice when it stopped because I was too busy trying to stop my head from spinning off of my neck.

"Amber!"

A bulldozer named Sapphire Banks collided with me and tried to break all of my ribs.

"Saph, air," I gasped.

Sapphire released me from her hug and allowed me to breath. I looked around. There were three bunk beds against the wall to my left, though only two of the bunks appeared to be in use, and behind Sapphire there was a fireplace filled with black flames. Actually, pretty much everything in the room was black. I assumed that we were in the Hades cabin at Camp Half-Blood.

"How did you get here?" Sapphire asked. "Did the portal work? Is there a really big time difference between here and the world you were in?"

I held up a hand to stop her from babbling. "Let's make sure Sean got back to Brooklyn House safely first. Then I've got a story to tell you."

The End

A/n: And that's the end of this one. I will be posting the prologue of Sisters by the Styx Book 4 as soon as I have a title for it. As I've mentioned before, it's a crossover with the Virals series by Kathy and Brendan Reichs. You probably recognized Kathy Reichs from her Temperance Brennan/Bones series. The main character of the Virals books is Tory Brennan, Temperance's great-niece, but Sisters by the Styx Book 4 will have a focus on her friend Shelton Devers, whose cousins happen to include a certain daughter of Hades and a former host of Khonsu. You know who I'm talking about.

Yours in demigodishness,

Cynder2013