Countless positive and negative emotions converged into a single vessel. Without a ring to serve as foundation, the First Lantern was driving the collected feelings of sentient life through nothing but his mortal frame.
His skull felt ready to split apart. Rage boiled up inside him until it became unbearable.
This was the clock's doing. He dismissed Thea entirely. Polychromatic light flared across his body, and the fabric of space began to tear. The First Lantern channeled every last scrap of strength he possessed and drove his fist straight into the grandfather clock.
The blow carried no physical force. It was pure emotion—his own greed, the Guardians' cast-off fears and hopes and courage and everything else they'd discarded, and above all, the oceans of feeling the Third Army had ripped from sentient beings across the entire cosmos.
"GONNNNG—!" The grandfather clock rang for the second time since its summoning.
Thea had already bolted back to the Underworld a full step before his fist connected.
The little blue Guardians had no idea what was coming. They'd been hovering at a safe distance, watching the show from a safe distance. The toll washed over them. No crushing force, no spectacular display. Aside from the bearded warden who'd already fainted earlier, all thirteen remaining Guardians simultaneously spat blood.
Sayd, worried about Ganthet, had thrown a shield up in front of him. But what good was a shield against fate? The barrier accomplished precisely nothing.
The toll swept through them like a gentle breeze—then the next instant pressed down like a mountain on their backs. It hijacked their own psychic energy, sending it surging and crashing in violent oscillation.
For creatures who'd lived since before stars formed, this was a first. A billion years of accumulated knowledge offered not one useful countermeasure. Without so much as a groan, they collapsed into unconsciousness as a group.
Thea had fled. The Guardians were down. And the First Lantern, standing at ground zero, fared worst of all. For everyone else, the damage was merely psychic trauma and unconsciousness. But as an aggregate being, he absorbed an impact hundreds—even thousands—of times beyond the normal threshold.
One-fifth of the emotional energy comprising his body was scattered in an instant. His massive frame visibly shrank. He fought desperately to rein in the uncontrollable psychic feedback, barely clawing his way back to lucidity—but that dispersed fifth was gone forever. Its fate had concluded.
Vanishingly few beings in existence could resist fate. The First Lantern's name was not among them.
Vast as his power was, he remained what he had always been: a mortal who had plotted for countless eons and traversed unimaginable spans of time to arrive here, harboring motives no one could fathom.
The Fate Clock, evidently, took offense at being punched. In all its existence, no one had ever swung at it before. Following instinct, it began to retaliate.
The golden hands on its face started to spin. The rotation wasn't particularly fast, yet the First Lantern felt his personal timeline beginning to merge with the local one.
"No! You can't do this! I don't belong here!" He'd spent all his effort tearing through time to get here. Now the bill was coming due.
You seemed to enjoy pulling at the fabric of time just a moment ago.
You wanted this era so badly? Then stay. Time didn't appreciate being toyed with. It appreciated being insulted even less. Those who tried to master it always paid a price in the end.
For the First Lantern, this era predated his birth by eons. If the clock pinned him here, the result would be erasure—pure and simple.
He fought back with everything he had. Moments ago he'd been scheming to force his way onto the timeline. Now that time was dragging him through the door, he balked. That was the perverse humor of fate.
The golden dial seemed to wield infinite force, hauling him inexorably toward the timeline's embrace.
He resisted with everything he had—and that was when Thea slipped back.
One look, and she was delighted. The Fate Clock was far stronger than she'd expected. If the First Lantern had nothing else up his sleeve, he was finished.
Nekron could sever all his emotional connections and then reap him with a single swing. She and Nekron walked different paths—she couldn't replicate that approach.
But she had methods of her own. Watching him momentarily pinned in place, she grinned wide.
She drew the blood-soaked Nightsword and drove it straight at his skull. Killing intent rolled off the blade like a physical thing. No need for feints, no need for stances—the First Lantern was a sitting target. He'd shrunk by a fifth, but that enormous head still towered over ten meters. She could have hit it with her eyes closed.
The thrust struck like a thunderbolt, crossing spatial distance, trailing a torrent of death power. She didn't care how many emotions he'd gathered or how many sentient minds he'd consumed. Her aim was the source—kill the host, and the rest would unravel on its own.
The First Lantern understood instantly: if he took that blow head-on, he would die. The Nightsword had been reforged from Nekron's scythe. Different recipe, but the flavor was the same. He knew with absolute clarity that he had to dodge.
He detonated every reserve he possessed, gathering a colossal mass of emotion within his own body. Positive and negative ceased their delicate balance. He let them collide freely—and then ignited the whole thing at once.
No sound. No fire. But the explosion's force ripped him free of the Fate Clock's pull and hurled him clear of Thea's attack range.
The cost was his body, blown clean in half. Uncountable threads of emotional energy dissolved into nothing, returning to the cosmos—but the greater portion was sucked into the Fate Clock along with his other half.
"No—!" The First Lantern wailed like a scorned lover, stretching a futile hand toward the clock. It was already over. He hadn't been anchored to this timeline, but with part of himself now gone, the timeline would no longer erase him either—yet he was a complete anomaly here, and just as much of one in his own era. He existed in neither.
Straddling two timelines at once, data slammed into his mind in a deluge. Memories that had been crystal clear began to blur. One moment he was certain he was a scientist from an incomprehensibly distant future. The next, he was merely a lucky mortal who'd stumbled upon a ring in the present day.
The First Lantern had never heard the parable of the philosopher who dreamed he was a butterfly and woke unsure which was real. But the meaning applied all the same—future and present tangled together, each vying for primacy. In one version, crowds cheered his name. In the other, billions of years in a prison cell. Which self was the real one?
Thea saw him standing there, lost in thought. Without hesitation, she channeled her divine power and thrust again.
Under the pressure of immediate violence, the First Lantern shelved his philosophical crisis. The lost portion was lost. His core remained intact, and his energy body was still functional. He re-formed into humanoid shape—but shrank by another half. He now stood barely eighty meters tall.
Faced with an attack that meant certain death, his decision came fast: he couldn't win, so he ran. He shot one hate-filled glance at the Fate Clock. It stood there, monolithic and unmoved, practically daring him to try again.
The First Lantern could only concede defeat. Deep down, he sensed that the missing part wasn't gone for good. Given time, he could reclaim it. Fate was fair to everyone—within its fixed decrees lay room for change. His loss was decreed, but it was not irreversible.
Unfortunately, time was the one thing he didn't have.