Dr. Pieter Cross
entered the warehouse near the hospital. The warehouse had been set up for a
very special patient. She was just one patient, but she was both a colleague
and needed the space.

“Hi, Pieter.” The
voice was feminine and as powerful as he had come to expect it to be.

Pieter turned his
head up to the voice. “Hello, Kendra. How are you?”

“Fine,” said
Hawkgirl. “Big, but fine.”

Pieter smiled. At
least Kendra was taking her condition in stride. “I could tell you’re still
big, just by your voice. Between placement, volume and timbre, it was evident.”

“I hear it in
reverse,” Kendra said. “Everyone sounds like chirping birds to me now, you
included. Kind of ironic, really.”

“I’m just glad
you’re doing better, health-wise,” Pieter said.

“If you can call
this better,” Kendra said. “I’m not coding or anything, and my vitals are
stable now –“

“I didn’t know you
knew so much medical parlance,” Pieter said.

“I learned it in
here, and quit trying to divert the conversation,” Kendra said.  “Since you’re Dr. Mid-Nite, you know I’m a
superheroine, not someone who likes to sit around. But right now, if I do much
of anything , I put my health at risk because of my size.”

“I know,” Pieter
said.

“So what’s going
on?” Kendra said. “Why haven’t the efforts to shrink me back down to normal
size worked?”

Pieter sighed.
“Kendra, the zeta beam accident that made you a giantess … well, it complicated
the situations of all the survivors.”

“Yeah, I know,”
Kendra said. “Alan lost an eye, and the one he’s got now isn’t his. Red Tornado
got demolished and part of him really screwed up poor Mal Duncan. And Mal’s
wife, Karen, and I got some weird kind of size transfer. She’s stuck the size
of her namesake, a bumblebee, and I’m 25-foot-2.”

Pieter chuckled.

“What’s so
funny?” Kendra asked.

“I don’t think
most people would worry about the two inches on your scale,” he said.

“Pieter! Stay on
the subject!”

“Ow!” said
Pieter. “Watch the volume!”

“Sorry.”

“It’s OK,” Pieter
said. “Look, Kendra, we haven’t been able to find anything to begin to restore
Karen, and … well, I’m not convinced your condition and hers are linked.”

Kendra tilted her
head at an angle. “What does that mean?”

“Karen lost,
maybe, 100 to 120 pounds of mass,” Pieter said. “You gained tons. That’s not
just a mass transfer. Whatever it is, I think it’s why the shrinking technology
we have available isn’t working on you. I can’t be sure without Ray Palmer, and
nobody knows where he is, but that’s my theory.”

 When Kendra’s brow furrowed, the gigantic
muscles and skin made a noise audible to Pieter’s sensitive ears. “Do you have
any theories on where the extra mass came from?” she asked.

“Two,” Pieter
said. “One is that it’s some sort of stored energy from the zeta beam. The
other is … well, your status as Hawkgirl is a link to ancient Egyptian magic.
It could be some sort of magical thing.”

Kendra nodded.
“Either of those could block the shrinking tech, I would guess. Is there a way
we can find out which it is?”

“That would be
me,” said a familiar voice from the doorway.

Kendra grinned as
she looked down at Alan Scott, wearing his uniform as the original Green
Lantern. “Alan! You’re looking good, all things considered.”

“I could say the
same for you,” Alan said. “You asked for Green Lantern, Pieter?”

Pieter nodded. “I
need a magical diagnosis,” he said. “Usually I’d have asked Dr. Fate, but there
is none right now. With your magical ring, I figure you’re our best bet.”

“What do you
need?” Green Lantern asked.

“Just a scan of
Kendra to see what magical … I don’t know, energies or whatever are in her,”
Pieter said. “I’m trying to figure out both why she’s so much bigger than she
should be after the zeta beam accident, even with a mass transfer, and why
we’re having trouble shrinking her. We can’t regrow Karen easily, but we understand
why that is. Kendra’s a mystery.”

Alan nodded. He
looked at Kendra, raising the fist that bore his power ring. “Are you ready?”
he asked.

“I’ve been ready
since I came to,” Kendra said. “Let’s do this.”

The scan
consisted of bathing Kendra in the ring’s green light for a couple of seconds.

When the scan
concluded, Alan frowned.

“What’s wrong?”
Kendra asked.

“What did you
find out, Alan?” Pieter asked. “Is this magical?”

Green Lantern
glanced back and forth between his two colleagues. “It’s magical, all right,”
he said. “It’s immensely powerful magic. In fact, it’s beyond magic. It’s
conscious.”

The room was
silent for at least 10 seconds. Finally, Kendra said in a surprisingly small
voice, “Conscious?”

GL nodded.
“Kendra, there’s always been a … connection between you and an ancient spirit,
ever since you became Hawkgirl. You’ve been a sort of two-in-one package:
Kendra, and the spirit we know as Hawkgirl. But now, there’s a third … presence
in there with you.”

Kendra’s brow furrowed
again. “What kind of  presence? Am I,
like, possessed?”

GL shook his
head. “You’re closer to being an avatar – not like the computer type or that
stupid movie with blue people.”

“You never have
liked James Cameron’s movies,” Pieter said.

GL shook his head
again. “As I was saying, the original meaning of the term ‘avatar’ was a person
who contained the embodiment of a god. You and Carter both are linked to an
ancient Egyptian god anyway. He seems to have … moved in.”

Kendra squinted
in disbelief. “Why?”

Alan shrugged. “I
don’t know. He didn’t tell me. But I got the impression he’s only planning to
be there for a short time, to deal with something – something specific.”

Elsewhere, a
shadow slipped into a jewelry vault, despite there being no person or object to
which it was attached. Once inside, it materialized as a man, one the Hawkgirl
part of Kendra Saunders might have recognized – the Shadow Thief.

The thief went to
a numbered drawer. Changing to a shadow again, he slipped his hand into the
drawer and grabbed its contents. Transforming the single gem into a shadow, he
removed it, then changed himself and the gem back to solid objects again.

He smiled as he
looked at the jewel. It was every bit as beautiful as he’d imagined. And, if it
worked as he hoped it would, it would do far more than simply sparkle.

The thief
withdrew a small, but very specialized, light he carried with him. He
positioned it so shine it through the jewel at himself. Its partially-blocked
lens made a mini-eclipse shine through the gem – a black diamond that had once
been used by the villain Eclipso.

The thief was
banking on two things: that the gem, used in this way, would grant him the
power of Eclipso; and that it would not transfer Eclipso’s consciousness from
the woman who was currently possessed by it, imprisoned as she was in space and
time after she murdered Sue Dibny of the Justice League.

But the thief was
only half right. Eclipso could be in more than one place at once, something the
Shadow Thief didn’t know. The thief gained the power he sought, but lost
himself. He was wiped out by Eclipso’s presence so fast he didn’t even realize
it had happened.

And Eclipso knew
that it had gained far more power than the Shadow Thief had sought. Now it
possessed the power of shadow, a power that could conquer the world.

With just a
thought, Eclipso spread its power over the entire Earth, casting the whole
planet into darkness. Light from the sun, moon and stars couldn’t reach the
planet. Light generated on the Earth grew rapidly dimmer.

In the
warehouse-hospital ward, Green Lantern stared in disbelief at his ring. Even
its light was dimming.

Kendra’s eyes
began to glow. In a voice of immense power, her body whispered, “It is time,”
but the whisper wasn’t in English. No one in the room knew the language, but it
was ancient Egyptian.

Without a thought
to the people in the room, Kendra’s body smashed through the roof. She launched
herself into the air, sprouting wings that looked like the ones she wore when
she was her old height, but scaled up to her new size.

With the last of
his ring’s light, GL shielded himself and Pieter from the debris. Then the ring
flickered into the same darkness as everything around him.

“Why did she do
that?” Pieter asked. “We could have been killed!”

“That wasn’t
Kendra, or Hawkgirl,” Alan said. “Whatever the Egyptian sky god moved into her
for, it’s happening now.”

As the avatar in
Hawkgirl’s body flew, its glowing eyes searched until they locked on the Shadow
Thief-Eclipso amalgam. Finding it, the giantess spread her wings majestically
in the air and blasted beams from her eyes.

Eclipso laughed
as the beams penetrated its shadowy body. It knew the beams couldn’t hurt it.

But the beams
weren’t seeking Eclipso’s body. They struck the gem, now in shadow form, with
the light of an uneclipsed sun replacing the artificial eclipse the Shadow
Thief had used to unwittingly release Eclipso. The gem flickered out of
existence, its shadow form simply erased.

Eclipso screeched
with sound like a piano’s strings being dragged behind a truck. With the gem
gone, so was Eclipso’s link to the Shadow Thief. Suddenly he was human again,
and collapsed in an unconscious heap on the ground.

The goddess
pivoted in the air and flew back to the hospital’s warehouse. As she landed,
her wings disappeared and her eyes stopped glowing. In Egyptian she said, “It
is done.”

Then Kendra
collapsed to the floor, and began to shrink.

Alan and Pieter
were over with her quickly. GL used his again-glowing ring to check her over.

“We’re back to
just Kendra and Hawkgirl in there,” Alan said. “The third presence is gone.”

Kendra rubbed her
head. “What happened?” she asked.

“We were going to
ask you,” Pieter said.

“I’m … not sure,”
Kendra said. “I remember it went dark, and then … I don’t know. I saw images –
the Shadow Thief, Eclipso, the sky, all tangled together. There was some sort
of battle between light and dark going on.”

“Part of that hit
here,” Alan said. “Apparently, light won.”

Pieter touched
Kendra’s shoulders. “Apparently, all the extra mass came from the sky god,” he
said. You’re back to your old size.”

“That’s good,”
said Kendra.

“Unfortunately,
it means there’s no mass to try to figure out how to transfer to Karen,” Pieter
said. “But, the main thing for now is that you’re back to normal.”

“Yeah,” said
Kendra quietly.

“What’s wrong?”
Alan asked.

“I saw something
else while I was in that gestalt,” Kendra said. “It was images of Black Adam
and Mary Marvel. Mary was dressed in an outfit like Black Adam’s and hers put
together.”

“What do you
think it meant?” Alan asked.

“I … got the
impression it was a plan,” Kendra said. “Eclipso’s plan, that leached through
as it lost this battle.”

“Maybe it was just
a dream,” Pieter said.

“Maybe,” said
Alan. “But, if it wasn’t, I’m sure Mary can thwart any plan like that Eclipso
would have in mind.”

Pieter patted
Kendra’s back. “We need to get you over to the hospital to run some quick tests
and be sure you’re ready to be checked out. Let’s go.”

“Yeah,” said
Kendra. “I can’t wait to fly again – with me flying this time.”