The sun had not yet cleared the ridge when Princess Diana stepped off the limestone slab and felt the ruin breathe beneath her boots.

A night wind still wandered between the broken columns, carrying the cold smell of cedar sap and something older—crushed myrrh, perhaps, spilled when the roof gave way a thousand years earlier. She closed her eyes for one slow count, letting the scent settle her pulse. Then she moved forward.

“Wait,” Yusuf called behind her. His voice cracked like a dry twig. “The men who hired me said sunrise, not before. The ground is cursed in the dark.”

Diana did not pause. “The dark has already left,” she answered, lifting her torch. “Look—someone else walked here after moon-set.”

She pointed to a raw scrape in the earth: a heel print, sharp-edged, filling now with powdered marble. The tread was wide, military—nothing like the soft sandals of the village boys who sometimes crept in to hunt for coins.

Yusuf muttered a prayer and stayed on the path. She went on alone.

Inside the inner court the air turned cooler, as if the stone itself remembered winter. Torchlight slid across fallen friezes: warriors with owl eyes, queens holding lightning. Diana’s gaze snagged on one figure chipped halfway from the wall—a woman in a star-spiral crown, feet planted wide, right hand raised against a broken wheel. The left hand was missing, sheared off by time or by purpose. The image felt like a mirror cracked just enough to keep the face hidden.

She knelt, brushed away the dust, and the bronze disk met her fingers warm as living skin. No bigger than her palm, it was etched with tiny stars that shifted even as she watched—Pleiades sliding toward Orion, Draco curling tighter. The metal pulsed once, a single heartbeat that traveled up her wrist and lodged behind her eyes.

Behind her Yusuf’s sandals scuffed stone. “Princess, leave it. My grandfather swore the star-wheel drinks memory.”

“Memory is what I came for,” she said, though her voice sounded distant to her own ears. She slipped the disk into a fold of linen and bound it twice. The pulse faded, but the warmth lingered like the ghost of a fever.

Yusuf spat sideways. “Then remember this: when the Frenchmen dug here in ’15, two vanished. The third ran naked to the village, babbling about a night without clocks.”

Diana rose. “Clocks lie,” she answered. “Men lie better. I need the truth.”

They camped under a fig tree whose roots strangled an old altar. While Yusuf brewed coffee, Diana sat apart, knees drawn up, the linen bundle on the ground between her boots. She unwrapped it only when the old man’s snores rose steady. Firelight licked across the bronze; the constellations rearranged themselves again—this time into a sky she had never seen from Themyscira. She traced the pattern with a fingertip and recognized, with a jolt, the heavens of 1918: the year she had once walked the trenches outside Reims, hunting a thief who stole time itself.

A sudden wind lifted the embers. The taste of cordite filled her mouth; she heard the far thump of artillery, saw the flash of a star-shell that was not there. The disk was bleeding minutes, leaking them across centuries. Someone had tried to wake it—recently, clumsily—and the tear was still open.

She wrapped it again, tighter, and pressed her forearm against her stomach until the nausea passed. Across the coals Yusuf slept on, hands folded like a child. Diana whispered, “I will close the tear. But first I must find the hand that opened it.”

At dawn she found the watch.

It lay half-buried beside her tent flap—a man’s wrist-watch, glass cracked, hands stopped at 11:11. The steel back was scuffed with boot-nail marks, the leather strap still smelling of petrol. Modern, twentieth century, impossible. She turned it over and read the engraving: PROPERTY OF Lt. M. W. — RETURN TO 42ND R. A. F.

Yusuf emerged rubbing his eyes. “Yours?” he asked.

“Not yet,” she said, and closed the watch in her fist. “But the owner and I will speak soon.”

She looked toward the ruin where the sun now struck the broken wheel, and the star-crowned woman seemed, for an instant, to lean forward in anticipation.

“Detective work begins at dawn,” Diana murmured. She buckled the stranger’s watch around her own wrist—tight, purposeful—and started back across the stones.

Wonder Woman,A New Mission — Chapter 3

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