Danny gets to choose his royal title, and he thinks very hard about it. He examines historical ghost kings, how their titles reflected their rule.
He decided he wanted to be a little bit silly with it.
Now, all across reality, occultists and demons and anyone who was in-the-know on the Infinite Realms was privy to the knowledge of the new king.
King Phantom, The Child Killer
Meaning: The Child who killed the last king, the child who can and will kill to defend his people- and his people was Everyone In Reality. He was the King of All. He will not allow anyone to come to harm, and he will not allow anyone to conduct that harm.
Danny knows very well what people will assume his title means.
Every so often a zealous megalomaniac decides they need the Ghost King to give them power, and what would the Child Killer want?
He would never be able to stop people from trying to summon him, but he could control what they tried to offer to him. He could guarantee that only those who summon him were scum.
Anyone who chose to offer a living breathing child to what they assumed was a malevolent god of destruction and murder clearly wasn’t worth the breath it would take to ask “what do you want from me?”
So whenever Danny arrives to his summonings, faced with one or more innocent terrified faces, he wordlessly wraps them safely in a blanket made of stars..
Covering their eyes as he smites everyone in the room, leaving behind scorched earth and shadows of men who really Didn’t Have Any Idea Who. They. Were. Fucking. With.
When the Justice League catches wind of a dangerous entity called The Child Killer who slaughters cultists and disappears with the child sacrifices, they decide they don’t need any more information. Digging would waste time, and time was everything when a child was missing.
What they didn’t know was that Danny was feeding the children, clothing them, healing them- of course he would like to bring them home, but they don’t have any.
Each child was trafficked out of foster care by the cultists, or was being abused by their parent who was a cultist.
Even if they had never been taken into the circle, they would have surely died.
And no “hero” would have ever known.
No. Danny would not be returning the children, not unless they asked for it. Not unless they could come up with a safe place for them to go.
Not unless the children wanted to leave.