Faced with the barrage of blazing meteorites hurtling toward him, the First Lantern showed no fear. If anything, his eyes held a flicker of contempt. A casual wave of his left hand, and the raging fire elements were soothed into docility. The crushing weight of the earth elements was unraveled. The razor-sharp wind elements ceased their howling.
"All things possess emotion. These... things of yours are no exception." As a scientist from countless millennia in the future, the First Lantern had no concept of what "magic" was—but he understood energy composition. If he could manipulate the emotional state of the elements, magic held no secrets from him.
When fire lost its fury, earth lost its weight, and wind lost its speed, the legendary spell collapsed on its own.
Thea had to concede: magic was near-invincible at the mortal tier, but against beings of this caliber, it didn't amount to much.
In terms of his essential nature, the First Lantern wasn't a god. At best, he was an emotional-energy aggregate. But his energy reserves were staggering. By sheer volume, he'd already surpassed her, surpassed Darkseid—was arguably in the Spectre's ballpark. He simply had no idea how to use any of it.
The energy was vast and abundant, but none of it truly belonged to him. And as time passed, the First Lantern's power had already begun to wane.
Emotion wasn't a constant state. No one maintained white-hot passion forever. Calm was the baseline.
That was precisely what made the Lanterns special. If everyone on the street had courage and willpower to spare, why wouldn't the Green Lantern ring choose them? Because ordinary people lacked emotional staying power.
Having absorbed the emotions of hundreds of billions of sentient beings, the First Lantern's energy was nonetheless fluctuating, trending slightly downward overall.
At his mortal tier, wrestling with that much raw power without a ring to channel it, the First Lantern could only manage crude, brute-force applications. His earlier attempt to tear open the timeline had been devoid of finesse. And his method of neutralizing the spell—draining the emotional charge from the elements—was nothing more than cutting off the fuel at the source.
The universe contained an unfathomable diversity of intelligent life. Somewhere among them, fire elementals and water elementals almost certainly existed in sentient forms. They would have been assimilated by the Third Army alongside everything else—and their residual emotions had now been folded into the First Lantern's power pool.
Broadly speaking, elements weren't dead matter. Saying they possessed emotion wasn't entirely absurd.
The First Lantern swatted away Thea's attack without effort, and the ease of it only reinforced his conviction in his own supremacy. He even shot her a mocking smile, as if to say: You're not so impressive after all.
"You think you can look down on my magic? Here's a little present." She said little present, but there was nothing little about it.
With the Godhood of Death, her magical attainment had long since surpassed every mage who'd come before—and by a wide margin.
She might still lack refinement in the finer details, but her perspective and vantage point were in a class of their own. Every grand sorcerer in history, combined, still couldn't see as far or as deep.
If mortal-level spells were ranked by the Weave's tiers, they'd run from First through Ninth Circle.
Above Ninth was Legendary magic—the Weave offered almost no assistance at that level. Everything depended on the caster's personal capability.
Every legendary mage could cast tenth-circle spells. A select few among them could reach the Eleventh. And the absolute pinnacle—the handful whose names were etched into magical history—could manage the Twelfth.
Legendary mages routinely looked down on gods, because certain spells were simply beyond a god's reach. Take Ares. Take Diana. Their focus on physical power was so narrow that casting a basic Time Stop was a struggle.
Thea, on the other hand, was a mage-god. Eleventh and Twelfth Circle were effortless for her. And today, drawing on her superior realm of insight and deep magical foundation, channeling both the power of Death and the ambient magic of the cosmos, she was going to cast a Thirteenth Circle spell—something no one in history had ever achieved.
Even with preparation, the spell took time. The Meteor Swarm had been an excellent smokescreen, buying her a full five seconds while the First Lantern was busy preening.
Her hands flew. Arcane symbols were inscribed at blinding speed. Massive spell arrays linked together, layer upon layer upon layer. The total magical energy she poured in was equivalent to at least ten mages of Merlin's caliber.
A grandfather clock, hundreds of meters tall, materialized in the void.
It seemed immune to its surroundings—as though it had existed in this exact stretch of space since before time began. Ancient. Weathered. Bearing the weight of infinite ages.
Its case was deepest black, adorned with celestial reliefs carved in bas-relief—suns, moons, stars. The dial was burnished gold, fashioned from fragments of time shattered by the Anti-Monitor, reforged and polished anew. The hands were ghostly, half-visible, half-not, imbued with Thea's own understanding of time.
A single clear, melodious chime rang out across the universe. Every intelligent being felt a wave of helplessness wash through them, as though confronted by their natural predator. Lost. Adrift. Facing the end of all things, some wept; others laughed.
One note. That was all it took to silence the cosmos. The tolling of fate itself.
The physical clock still belonged to Destiny of the Endless. Thea visited the Endless family often enough; she'd seen it plenty of times. Destiny didn't care. Look all you want. Smash it if you feel like it. I really don't mind.
She wasn't reckless enough to smash fate's clock for the entire world. But she could replicate a fraction of its function. Even with an ocean of magical power behind her and having studied the original firsthand, the best she could manage—at great personal cost—was one-tenth of its capability.
The clock's physical form was forged from raw magic, but she'd used Death's power to draw in the projection of Destiny's actual clock.
The First Lantern stared at it for a long moment, unable to fathom why she'd summoned a giant clock. In his era, a mechanical timepiece this primitive could only be found in fossils.
He snorted. "Boring parlor trick." He called it boring, but his gut screamed danger. As an aggregate of all living emotion, he had astronomical resistance to anomalous effects—but against root-level forces like Death and Fate, his defenses were paper-thin. Damage from those sources wasn't merely unresisted; it was amplified a hundredfold.
In the original timeline, the First Lantern had been one-shotted by Nekron. The core problem was identical: as an aggregate, he had raw power but no tier to anchor it.
The clock seemed to mock him. The golden dial glowed, and in its depths he saw his own childhood, his imprisonment by the Guardians—and a vision of his death, arriving today.
Impossible. You're joking.
The First Lantern hesitated no longer. His body swelled further. Whatever this wretched clock was, he was confident he could shatter it.
He'd crossed countless millennia to reach this moment. He was here to become a god, to be worshipped by every living thing—not to serve as some primitive's stepping stone.
Fury. Greed. Fear. Courage. Hope. Compassion. Love. The seven Lantern Corps couldn't begin to represent all emotion. There was more—so much more. Hatred. Agony. Numbness. Regret. Elation. Joy. These were the wellsprings of his power.