Suicide Risk #14

"Handmaiden"
written by Mike Carey
art by Filipe Andrade

Tracey:  "Who are you, really?  And how do you know that -- that other name for me?"

Diva:  "Your true name."

Tracey:  "My other name.  I know it's real because I -- sort of remember it.  But Tracey's real too.  One of them isn't any more true than the other."  (Suicide Risk #14: 13)

In the wake of Leo Winters' elimination through the pit trap and Dr. Maybe's systematic erasure of him in the minds of his family, Tracey Winters keeps dreaming about him.  And, more surprisingly, she also dreams of Diva.  And when the super-villain calls for her help, Tracey Winters (or Terza Nimari) answers.

Diva is changed.  Or perhaps just in a different, more honest guise.  She is family.  She is sister to Terza's mother Aisa, twins born and devoted to the Goddess, Kinuktai, avatars of good and harm.  And so we discover her preoccupation with Leo/Requiem, who (as she once thought) stole her sister from her, perverted her faith, and seduced her into sacrilege.  In that moment, in the battle with the new parents over the fate of their newborn girl, Diva and Aisa shifted avatars, and so she became the agent of vengeance and destruction that she released on Leo Winters' life.

Despite her extraordinary power, despite the fact that more than anyone else she seems to have a sensible and subtle understanding of both worlds, Tracey has always seemed vulnerable, not to force but to trickery.  And I fear, as Diva's Goddess has laid claim on her as a handmaiden, that by accepting the deity's boon, she may very well have accepted responsibilities and obligations that she will later regret.  Until then, it seems, she may be the only one who can rescue her father Leo from obliteration in the mind of Requiem.