Fury

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Background

Powers and Abilities

Lyta is more or else back to her Infinity, Inc. level of superhuman strength, durability and swiftness.

She’s also now sane enough to resume accumulating life experience. For instance she’s become fluent in Greek, and developed an interest in the cultures and people of her mother’s homeland.

Having eaten the Golden Apple, Lyta is thought to be immortal. It seems that she’s not just unageing but also unnaturally difficult to kill. Another strange property — perhaps as a combination of her parentage and the Golden Apple of the Hesperides — is that Lyta is repeatedly stated to be an imago (more on that below).

The Mark of Dream she once bore has pretty much faded by that point. By the time she encounters Cronus it is still active within the Dreaming itself – but not on Earth.

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Imago and archetype

Lyta Hall has been called an “imago” (likely not in either the Jungian  or the entomological  sense !) and a “vessel”. What does it mean ? Well… we don’t quite know.

But sphinxes in Hades, Cronus, and the Kindly Ones do give us a few clues. The facts, and the hypotheses:

Source

This imago nature only appears in The Furies. Therefore, I would hypothesise that she acquired the “imago” quality during her vision quest to supplicate the Kindly Ones. Probably when she ate the Golden Apples and/or broke bread with the Gorgons.

It is possible that those properties are only relevant when she is on Greek soil. Or maybe soil where the Greek pantheon was historically worshipped, which *might* include Italy and parts of the Roman Empire. This would explain why her imago nature was not mentioned in stories not taking place in Greece.

Hellenic character

Lyta’s imago nature is tied to the Ancient Greek mythology. Certain Greek mythicals can manifest on Earth through her. The Good Ladies have both spiritually possessed Lyta (taking over and speaking through her, Voodoo-style) and manifested themselves by extruding their physical form from Lyta’s body.

Many creatures of Greek myth (Ares, Queen Hippolyta, Cronus, Hercules…) are fully able to walk the Earth if they want. But it would seem that some other creatures can only do so through either complex rituals – or simpler magics involving possessing Lyta and/or using her as a gateway.

Monsters

Cronus also found it easy to create monsters from Lyta’s body. But this is unknown whether it implies some special property on Lyta’s part.

Likewise it is unclear whether the ease with which she started becoming a Gorgon after she broke bread with the two surviving ones, and the interest of these two mythicals in having her become their ’new sister‘, was derived from her imago properties.

Blood ties

As a gateway, Lyta seems to be the “turf” of the Furies. A strong hypothesis is that she’s a blood relative of the Kindly Ones – see below.

That I had power to execute my apprehended wishes

There are numerous hints in Gaiman’s Sandman that Hippolyta Hall might tied by blood to the Furies of myth. Carey’s The Furies reinforces these hints without quite confirming them.

Johns’ Justice Society of America features Hall directly stating to a Lord of Order that she’s not mortal, but Fury. But Johns is not as authoritative.

There are too many hints to list. At one point Lyta hallucinates that there is three of her, and when she wonders which of the three she is one her her selves answers that it doesn’t matter.

As she goes mad she hears three voices talking to her in her head. One of them quotes Isabella in Webster’s The White Devil  when she wish she were one of the Erinyes to gain her just revenge (“O that I were a man, or that I had power to execute my apprehended wishes! I would whip some with scorpions.”).

When the Kindly Ones enter Dream’s palace, the shadow on the wall clearly shows three women clad for war. Yet for the entire time the locally omniscient Dream thought that it was Hippolyta Hall.

More clues

Lyta becomes physically part of the Kind Ladies – which is not how these things normally work. As such she clearly wields the whip of scorpions that is the symbol of the Avengers.

The Ladies state that they knew her mother, and when they do always call Lyta “grand-daughter” instead of rotating through forms of address as they normally do. And so on, and so forth.

In The Furies, among other hints, Cronus tries to trick Lyta into killing a monster created from her own body (and thus the blood of her blood). The goal of this plan is for the Kindly Ladies the destroy themselves, which only makes sense if Hall is a Fury.

Hermes also describes Helena Kosmatos’s daughter as “full of monsters”. And when Lyta says that she never knew her father, the Gorgons answer “probably a god”.

The Kindly Ones — who are beings utterly bound by rules — are almost eager to help Lyta. This is despite the fact that she completely blows her supplication and that her quest doesn’t fall under their remit.

They’re presumably the ones who hire the deadly Larissa (aka Thessaly) to be Hall’s bodyguard during her vision quest. The Kindly Ones nudge the rules a fair bit so they’ll get to operate along with Lyta.

A possible scenario

A possible scenario is that one of the Kindly Ones — presumably Tisiphone — took some sort of male form and impregnated Helena Kosmatos, possibly without her knowledge and/or consent. Kosmatos then abandoned the child. Perhaps she agreed to have Joan Dale raise her daughter since she assumed that a super-heroine could handle whichever supernatural trouble might follow.

If so, Lyta has three mothers :

1. Tisiphone the blood avenger.
2. Her biological mum Helena Kosmatos (the Fury).
3. Her adoptive mother Joan Dale (Miss America).

History

(Starting where the previous profile ended…)

Lyta returned to Los Angeles. After learning about the death of Carla, she led an aimless life without friends or family. She tried her hand at some jobs, went into bars to get picked up by random guys. Howbeit, those weak attempts at breaking her loneliness were often undone by her poor temper. She occasionally became violent when something reminded her of her painful past.

Thankfully the LAPD threaded lightly around her, having an unofficial “let sleeping dogs lie” policy about ex-superheroes like her. They also knew that they would have a major problem on their hands if she really lost her composure.

In therapy (almost)

One of the detectives who briefly arrested her after an outburst with a one-night stand suggested that she seeks professional help.

As she went through his list of therapists, a misfiled page about a Greek drama troupe caught Lyta’s attention. The Hall widow had filled some of her time teaching herself about her biological mother’s homeland, language and myths. Thus, Ancient Greek theatre was bound to interest her.

Due to the filing mistake, Lyta originally thought that the troupe did drama therapy. But they were actually performing Classical theatre and were to leave for Athens for a gig. The actors were desperate to recruit somebody who spoke Greek, and hired Lyta on the spot.

Clash with a Titan

The events had, obviously, been arranged. This time it was not the Endless, or the Crisis, or Odin’s model Ragnarok. It was Cronus , scion of Ouranous and Gaea, youngest of the Titans of Myth, overthrown by the three senior Olympians (Zeus, Poseidon and Pluto) so Zeus could succeed him as the new sky-father.

Cronus had famously castrated and slain Ouranos to overthrow him and rule the Titans. This made him a target for the fury of the Furies. Though slightly older than the Kind Ladies, Cronus was still subject to the ancient rules they enforced. He could thus be killed by the Wise Women.

The Titan had spent aeons hiding within the Furies themselves so they would not find him. He eventually set into motion a plan to destroy the Furies then replace them.

To Athens

Cronus had been the one who put Lyta in contact with the troupe. He also had arranged for them to come to Athens. Once they were in Greece, he murdered and impersonated the troupe’s leader. Later disguising himself as a Greek official, Cronus gave Lyta the same kind of apple that had been used to send Persephone  to Hades.

When the Titan shed his disguise the Furies, delighted to have found their ancient target at last, sprang from Lyta’s body. But Hall died from having eaten the magical apple, dispersing the Kindly Ones before they could shred Cronus.

Cast into Hades, Lyta had another vision quest. She originally thought that it was a new round of insanity-induced hallucination.

To Hell and back

In this new vision she encountered Hermes, a foe of Cronus who had also been sent to Hades by the Titan. She freed the messenger god, and he gave her some advice. Then Cronus fished Hall back from Hades, returning her to the land of the living.

Cronus wasn’t interested in killing Lyta. His plan was to destroy the Furies themselves, not their Earthly vessel.

Cronus then magically extruded a monster from Lyta’s body. His plan was to manipulate the American into killing the monster. For if the Furies’ vessel shed the blood of her own kin, the Furies would be forced to destroy themselves.

When Cronus and the monster struck, Hermes urged Lyta to run away rather than fight. He slyly fled with her to a dream of Greece that Lyta once had. Cronus caught up with them, not realising that they were now in the Dreaming and that he could not kill Lyta without the permission of Dream.

Dream came. After assessing the situation, declined to intervene (and possibly erased his mark, if it was still active), though he stayed to observe. Cronus had Lyta wake from her dream, casting everyone back to the real-world Greece despite Hermes’s protests.

The stand

As the Lyta-spawned monster moved in to fight Mrs. Hall, the young woman did the unexpected. Now on ancestral ground and refusing to be afraid anymore, she found in herself “a place that is hard and dry, like scales”. She physically turned into a snake-haired Fury of Myth.

Now a near-primal entity of vengeance, Hall cowed the terrible monster with but a gaze. Speaking as the Furies of Myth, she assaulted Cronus with whips of scorpion. She then vomited the seeds of the cursed apple into the Titan’s mouth, hurling him into Hades for good.

Lyta as a Fury of Myth then gazed at Dream. She stated that she saw that the burning had not been complete and that Daniel was still human. Still, Dream denied this.

Before he left, Lyta told him she loved him. Interestingly enough, she did so in what seems to be a regional form of Ancient Greek (“TE ΦIΛΩ,’tIE EPPΩΣΩ”).

Now at peace with the fate of her beloved son, Lyta continued to reclaim her life, her sanity, and to come back from her depression.

Her Fury senses told her that a fellow troupe member had killed her father. But it had been at his request, as the old man was in the terminal phase of a cancer. Instead of killing her, Hall counselled the thespian. Lyta helped her come to term with what she had done, keeping her Fury nature under control.

Hector returns

Some years after these events, Hector Hall came back yet again, as the new Doctor Fate. To insure that Hector would not been distracted from his mission, his master Nabu did something to Lyta. She ended up in a magical coma as a Jane Doe in Vancouver. Meanwhile her spirit was trapped along with Kent and Inza Nelson, Jared Stevens and Eric and Linda Strauss, in a prison dimension.

Hector eventually found his beloved through mystical means, and managed to wake her up. Kent Nelson and the others trapped Nabu in his own home, preventing him from further messing with the lives of the previous Doctor Fate vessels.

Fully healing (and, in fact, seeming more powerful than before) Lyta resumed wearing her old Fury costume from the Infinity, Inc. days. She fought alongside Hector to help the JSA against no less than Black Adam.

Reunited at last, Hector took Lyta to his Salem, MA fortress – which became their home. Having cast away the yoke of Nabu with the help of his predecessors as Dr. Fate, Hector decided to take time off the JSA to be with Lyta. He would also learn to cast by himself the spells Nabu would previously whisper to him.

Return to the dream dimension, part 1

When Degaton planned to attack the Halls in Salem, he had a vision of Dream. Dream told him to walk away, and clearly referred to the couple as “his parents”. In fact, Dream proved increasingly supportive of his parents – perhaps as he reflected upon the truth Lyta had told him about his humanity while she was channelling the Furies.

Daniel informed Lyta and Hector that missing JSA member Sand (Sandy Hawkins) was spiritually trapped within the Dreaming. Lyta and Hec temporarily joined the JSA and launched a rescue mission into the Dreaming along with the Flash (Jay Garrick), Brainwave II (Henry King, Jr.), Stargirl (Courtney Whitmore), Doctor Mid-Nite II (Dr. Pieter Cross) and Hawkgirl (Kendra Saunders).

Meanwhile, other JSA members, helped by Cave Carson and his team, worked to recover Sand’s physical body.

Return to the dream dimension, part 2

The Dreaming rescue party discovered that Sand lived in a sand castle separate from the rest of the dimension. He considered this his realm. Shockingly, Hawkins now called himself the Sandman and wore the same costume as Dr. Garrett Sanford and Hector Hall before him. Sand was seemingly allied with Brute and Glob, who had unimaginatively repeated their old scheme.

Starting to remember about the whole “dream dimension” nightmare, Fury and Doctor Fate engaged Brute and Glob in combat. Fury soundly beat up the two renegades, cracking Brute’s skull and shredding Glob in two to prevent him from choking her husband to death.

Fate then cast the renegades into the innocent dreams of children, where they would be powerless. The JSA helped Sand regain his mind. They had his spirit reunited with his body, which the rest of the JSA had just recovered.

The Dreaming

Lyta and Hec returned to Fate Tower, living happily for a time. After an interruption when Hec’s father (Hawkman) was thought dead, they resumed their semi-retirement. But they were attacked by the Spectre, now controlled by the demented Jean Loring.

She took them out by surprise and threw them into Hell for all eternity, to prevent them from potentially foil her plans.

Hounded by demons on a frigid mountain, Hector (missing any magical power) dragged and defended the unconscious Lyta. But he was eventually fatally wounded. Lyta woke up at that point — Dream had appeared to her in her sleep, and offered to take their souls to the Dreaming to rescue them.

However their bodies would stay, dead, in Hell, preventing them from ever leaving the Dreaming and Dream’s sphere of influence. Seeing her husband dying, Lyta agreed to her son’s offer. Daniel came to open a gate into the Dreaming for them.

Lyta has not been seen since. We can assume they are now leaving as spirits in the Dreaming – a fate reminiscent of the pre-Crisis Wonder Woman, Lyta’s original mother, leaving with Steve for Olympus with no way back.

Personality

After her encounter with the new Dream, Lyta is still lost to some extent. But she is sane and no longer severely depressed. She’s just… aimless, doing things half-heartedly and indulging in pointless random sex when she feels too lonely. Nobody will ever replace Hector in her heart, of course.

She still has temper issues. This is, in fact, her tragic flaw (in the ancient Greek sense) and a core part of her personality, as well as what allowed her to be manipulated into killing Morpheus.

After she comes back from Greece, Lyta is wholly sane, stronger than ever and determined never to be afraid and never to run again. She’s back to being the strong, assertive woman she was back in the Infinity, Inc. days, but without many of the flaws. It would even seem that she has her temper under better control than ever before.

The magical coma inflicted by Nabu did not deter her. If anything she emerged stronger and more confident from that ordeal.

Whilst channelling the Furies

The law of the Furies is eternal and inflexible. Whereas Lyta knows compassion and understanding, and is more interested in saving than in destroying, the Furies rigidly and almost cruelly apply their death sentence. Originally Lyta was unable to steer them, even when she was a part of the Furies gestalt.

However, when she fights Cronus, she employs his own murder tool against the Titan (a magical apple’s seed). This action is uncharacteristic of the Kindly Ones and denoting an human sense of irony.

She later stayed the Furies’s hand when it came to a patricide – humanely pardoning, which the ancient rules never had room for. This made it clear that Lyta, not the Kindly Ones, was in charge of her imago nature.

Quotes

As a Fury of Myth

“You slew your father as he slept. You will pay. That is all.”

“His life. His sacred blood. There is no fouler crime. You will be scourged, woman. You will know suffering, and then madness, then death. And no harbour will shelter you.”

“He is dealing with *us*. Is it not so, patricide ? Do we not have business left unfinished since before there was a time to count it in ?”

After her coma

“Like my mother, I channel the strength of the ancients. I trained under my namesake, the Queen of the Amazons. I have suffered endless trips between sanity and insanity and survived. I am not just a mortal, Nabu. I AM A FURY !”

“Have you ever been afraid of something ? Something you can’t understand ? And you let that fear consume you ? Me too. But I will never do it again.”

“But you keep breaking free, Hector. You have been intertwined with the curse that has plagued your father. Your life, and lives, will never be easy. But together… together we can face anything. We don’t have to worry. We don’t have to run.”

By Sébastien Andrivet.

Source of Character: Sandman Presents : the Furies and Justice Society books (DC Universe).

Helper(s): Yo!Master (Greek translation and comments).