Max flew down through the ruined God Quarry.
The path beneath him was no longer a path in any meaningful sense. The battle against Mephisto had torn the ancient graveyard apart, and although the Quarry had begun to pull itself back together, layers of dead gods shifted around him, grinding against one another with deep groans.
Max raised one hand, formed a drill construct, and began to bore deeper.
The deeper he went, the stranger the Quarry became.
The upper layers were dead gods, remnants of divine beings and cosmic powers crushed together over eons.
But farther down, things became stranger and stranger.
There were remains of beings Max could not even describe. Some of them felt alive, as though they were watching him.
He concentrated and continued the trek downward.
The drill broke through another layer.
Then another.
Finally, it shattered through the last barrier and dropped him into a cavern.
He landed hard on one knee, breathing through clenched teeth as pain flared across his body. The cracks in his skin glowed brighter in the dimness, casting emerald light across the cavern floor.
For a moment, he stayed there, one hand pressed against the ground, waiting for the world to stop spinning.
It did not.
He forced himself upright and continued walking.
The cavern was vast and silent. Its ceiling disappeared into darkness far above him, supported by pillars that resembled enormous bones.
There was only one true source of light here, and it came from ahead.
Max walked toward it slowly.
Every step hurt, but he ignored it. He kept walking, following the light as it grew brighter and brighter until the cavern floor ended ahead of him in a sheer cliff.
He stopped at the edge.
Below, he saw him.
Reed Richards.
He stood on a narrow stone ledge at the verge of an opening that seemed to be the source of the light. Inside, Max could see a dark void, and within it a single source of radiance surrounded by darkness.
It could only be the First Firmament, the first universe to ever exist.
"It's beautiful, is it not, Max?"
The Maker did not look away from the light.
Max slowly flew down toward him, the green glow around his body flickering as he descended.
For the first time, Max saw the true form of this Reed Richards, not the disguise he had worn when they first met.
He wore a dome-shaped gray helmet that covered the top of his head and forehead. It made the already cold lines of his face seem inhuman. He wore a sleek black suit marked with white dots.
His face still looked young in some ways, but there was nothing youthful in his expression. His eyes were too cold, too empty. One of them was scarred and colorless, making his stare even more unsettling when he finally turned.
If Max had seen this Reed like this when they first met, he would never have trusted him.
The man looked like a supervillain.
The Maker looked him over and smiled widely.
"You are literally falling apart," he said.
Max said nothing.
The Maker laughed, then lifted one hand in mock apology.
"Sorry. I know this is hardly the moment, but you look like shit."
Max stared at him.
The silence stretched.
Then he asked the only question that mattered.
"Why?"
The Maker shrugged.
It was such a small gesture. So casual. So utterly detached from all he had done.
This man had killed Agamotto's students, all of whom Max had known well. He had killed Khenmet, and he had taken Aurora. All of it seemed to be dismissed with a shrug.
"I saw an opportunity," he said, "and I took it."
Max's hands curled into fists.
The Maker noticed, but continued without concern.
"You are a fascinating creature, Max. One I would have loved to study under less urgent circumstances. A multiversal constant with no variants. A being connected to a spectrum of energy that predates most cosmic beings. An impossible anomaly wearing the shape of a man."
His gaze drifted back toward the breach.
"Beyond this lies the very moment of creation itself," the Maker said. "The foundation beneath foundations. The place so pure, untouched by all that came after."
"Do you know what I see when I look at this?" the Maker asked.
Max stayed silent.
"I see correction," the Maker said. "Not destruction. Not conquest. Those are crude ambitions."
He shook his head slightly, almost disappointed.
"Mephisto, Doom, the others, all of them were limited in their thinking. Mephisto wanted dominion over everything. The Nine also had their own plans, but their goals were primitive, emotional, and ultimately small."
The light of the First Firmament reflected in the Maker's eyes.
"I am not them."
Max laughed once, bitter and tired.
"No. You're worse."
The Maker glanced back at him.
"Am I?"
"Yes."
"Because I am honest?"
"Because you think you're above everyone else."
"I am above most people," the Maker said simply. "That is not arrogance. It is simply fact."
Max's jaw tightened.
The Maker continued in the same calm voice, as if he were explaining a basic principle to a child.
"Most beings are accidents of biology and circumstance. They are born, they hunger, they fear, they love, they reproduce, they die. In the brief interval between those events, they convince themselves their impulses are meaningful."
He looked at Max with mild curiosity.
"It is all very inefficient."
Max's eyes glowed with power.
The Maker noticed and smiled faintly.
"Look at the multiverse, Max. Really look at it. Infinite realities, infinite suffering, infinite repetition. Every universe produces the same mistakes with minor variations. Tyrants rise. Heroes answer. Worlds burn. People die. Gods interfere. Demons scheme. Civilizations collapse. Then it happens again. And again. And again."
He gestured toward the breach.
"It is the same for the multiverse itself. When this one finally ends, another will take its place, as flawed as the last one, carrying the same structures, the same weaknesses, the same inevitable failures."
His voice did not rise. He remained calm and composed.
"The same tragedies, repeated across infinity, because no one with the power to stop it has ever had the discipline to redesign the system."
Max stared at him.
"And you do?"
"Yes."
The answer came without hesitation.
"What lies beyond this is authorship. The ability to reach beneath reality and alter the principles upon which it rests."
His expression sharpened.
"I can remove inefficiency from existence."
Max's eyes narrowed.
The Maker's voice became almost reverent as he looked into the light of the First Firmament.
"No more chance," he added quietly, his eyes never leaving the breach.
"You want to control everything."
"I want to perfect everything."
"Same thing."
"No," the Maker said. "Control is a method. Perfection is the objective."
Max shook his head slowly.
"You don't get to decide what perfect means."
"Someone must."
"No."
"That is the lie people tell themselves because they fear responsibility," Reed said, and for the first time there was a faint edge in his voice, something sharp beneath the calm. "They say no one should have that power. No one should make that choice. And so they leave the choice to entropy, violence, disease, stupidity, and monsters like Mephisto."
His eyes narrowed.
"That is not humility. It is cowardice dressed as virtue."
Max stepped forward again.
The Maker did not move.
"I have seen worlds die," Reed said. "I have seen humanity waste itself in every configuration imaginable. I have seen heroes save lives today only to preserve the conditions that will kill millions tomorrow."
He pointed toward the breach.
"I intend to make it all obsolete."
Max said nothing for a long moment.
Then, quietly, he asked, "And what happens to people who don't fit your perfect design?"
The Maker smiled.
"The design improves them."
"And if they don't want to be improved?"
"Want?" Reed repeated, almost amused.
Max's fist tightened harder.
"Imagine it, Max. A perfect existence."
The light beyond the breach pulsed faintly, as if the first creation itself had heard him speak and was listening.
"If I take this power, I will not rebuild reality for myself," the Maker said. "That is what creatures like Doom would do. I will not make a throne. I will not create worshippers. I will not write my name into the stars."
He turned his head slightly, enough to look at Max from the corner of one eye.
"I will make a universe that does not need to know I existed."
Max created an emerald blade in his hand, unstable and flickering, its edge lengthening and shrinking as his damaged body struggled to control the raw will pouring through him.
"A silent paradise," Reed continued. "Engineered at the foundation. Pain minimized. Conflict removed. Potential maximized. Every mind guided toward stability. Every species corrected before it can become monstrous. Every cosmic force placed in balance. Every variable accounted for."
He smiled.
Then Max said, "No more choice."
The Maker's smile faded slightly.
"Choice is overrated."
"You could help me," Reed said.
He continued, perfectly serious. "You are the key to something I do not fully understand. With your help, my plans would become far easier to realize...."
Max laughed softly, interrupting him.
"You really don't understand."
"I understand more than anyone alive."
"No," Max said.
Green light began gathering around him, brighter now, wild and flickering, spilling from the cracks in his body and curling around him like unstable flame.
"You think pain is just a flaw to be deleted. You think grief is inefficient. You think love is a variable. You think hope is a chemical response and will is just stubbornness with better branding. You would reduce rage to poor impulse control, fear to a survival error, compassion to social conditioning, greed to resource anxiety, and every ugly, beautiful, impossible thing people feel into something that needs correcting."
"You look at everything that makes people alive and see bad math."
The Maker's eyes narrowed.
"And you look at preventable suffering and call it freedom."
"I call it life."
For a moment, neither of them spoke.
The cavern trembled faintly around them as the breach pulsed again.
The Maker turned toward it. Then he looked back at Max with a dark grin.
"Then life has had its chance."
He stepped toward the breach.
Max raised his ring.
"Reed."
The Maker stopped.
"You were always my least favorite of the four."
Then Max attacked.
The emerald sword in his hand stabilized for one instant as he launched himself forward, the blade arcing toward Reed's neck.
The Maker smiled.
Reed's torso bent backward, his spine folding impossibly as the blade passed over him, close enough to shave a line of black fabric from his suit. His neck elongated, his shoulders twisted, and his arms stretched outward, wrapping around Max before he could correct his swing.
Max tried to pull back.
But the Maker was already on him.
Reed's body expanded and folded around him, elastic flesh spreading like a suffocating net. His arms wrapped around Max's shoulders and chest. His torso stretched across Max's face, sealing over his mouth and nose. His legs coiled around Max's waist and locked tight, pinning his arms.
Max hit the ground hard with Reed wrapped around him.
"Brute force," the Maker said, his voice coming from everywhere at once as his body tightened around Max. "Predictable."
Max couldn't breathe.
Reed compressed harder and harder, like a python killing its prey.
Green spikes erupted from Max's body.
They burst from his shoulders, his back, his arms, his chest, dozens of emerald blades stabbing outward in every direction.
The Maker's body recoiled at once. Several spikes punched through the black suit and into elastic flesh, forcing Reed to peel himself away before the constructs could tear through him completely.
His body snapped backward across the ground, stretching and retracting until he landed several yards away in a crouch, one hand pressed against the punctures in his side.
Max rolled onto one knee, gasping for air.
The Maker looked down at the wounds closing across his body, then back at Max.
His smile returned.
"Good," he said. "You are not completely useless."
His hand slipped beneath the edge of his black suit and pulled free a small device no larger than a coin. It unfolded in his palm, and the device flashed once.
Max tried to move, but he could not.
A transparent field formed around him.
A containment lattice.
The more Max pushed, the more the structure redirected the force, folding his own momentum back toward him.
The Maker glanced at him only once.
Then he turned toward the breach.
Max slammed his fist against the field. The impact sent emerald cracks racing across its surface, but the lattice immediately repaired itself.
"Reed!"
"REED!"
The Maker ignored him.
He stepped to the edge of the opening and raised both hands toward the light beyond it.
The First Firmament shone through the breach. Reed's helmet began to hum as the mechanisms built into it awakened, the gray dome shifting in tiny sections as if adjusting to accommodate the impossible amount of information now flooding toward him.
The breach widened.
Only slightly, but it was enough.
Light poured out.
The Maker inhaled sharply as the first currents of power touched him. His body stiffened. His fingers curled.
For the first time since Max had met him, the cold composure slipped from his face, replaced by something almost ecstatic.
"Yes," he whispered.
Max drove both hands forward.
Green light exploded from his palms, wild and uncontrolled, hammering into the containment lattice.
The field held for three seconds.
Four.
Five.
Then Max screamed and pushed harder.
The lattice shattered.
Emerald shards flew outward and dissolved before they struck the ground.
Max launched himself toward the Maker, one arm extended, a blast already forming around his fist.
Reed did not turn.
Max fired.
The beam screamed across the cavern, but the Maker's body twisted as his spine bent sideways at an impossible angle, the blast passing through the space where his torso had been.
Max fired again.
Reed's neck elongated, his shoulders flattened, his entire upper body folding like liquid rubber around the line of fire.
Another blast.
Then another.
The Maker dodged all of them without stepping away from the breach, his body stretching and compressing with grotesque precision while his hands remained fixed toward the First Firmament's light.
Max closed the distance instead.
He hit Reed in the side with his shoulder, driving him away from the breach.
The Maker grunted as they crashed across the ledge and rolled over the cracked stone.
Max tried to pin him, but Reed's arm stretched around his back and struck him in the kidney.
Max snarled and slammed his elbow down.
Reed's head flattened against the stone before the blow could crush it, then snapped back up as his legs coiled around Max's waist and hurled him aside.
Max hit the ground, rolled, and came up swinging.
There were no massive constructs used in this fight, no high-tech gadgets.
Just two men at the edge of creation trying to tear each other apart.
Max punched Reed across the face hard enough to snap his head sideways.
The Maker answered by elongating his arm and wrapping it around Max's throat, dragging him forward into a knee.
Max caught the next strike, created a crude blade around his fist, and slashed through the elastic limb before Reed could tighten his grip.
The cut closed almost immediately.
But not as cleanly as before.
The Maker noticed it at the same moment Max did.
Reed's eyes flicked toward his hand.
His fingers trembled.
The power from the breach was changing him.
The Maker tried to step back toward the opening, but his movement was less fluid now. His body stretched, then hitched, as if his own cells could not decide what they were supposed to be.
The perfect elasticity that had made him so difficult to pin down began to fail in small, subtle ways.
Max staggered toward him.
He was weakening too.
Every motion sent fresh pain tearing through him. The green cracks across his body had widened until he could see light shining through the gaps whenever he moved.
His left hand looked less like flesh now and more like a fragile shell wrapped around emerald fire.
The Maker smiled despite the instability spreading through him.
"I am so close," he said, breathless. "It is responding to me..."
His body convulsed suddenly, and his smile faltered.
"No," he whispered.
The breach pulsed.
More light poured out and struck them both. The Maker screamed in pain, but Max did not. For an instant, Max felt something on the other side.
It felt familiar.
Very familiar.
The light from the breach flowed into Max, and unlike Reed, Max was able to channel it through his body. It was like being welcomed back home.
The Maker's eyes widened.
"What are you doing?"
Max did not answer as he moved toward the Maker.
Reed tried to step back, but Max crossed the distance before he could retreat. His hand shot out and closed around the Maker's throat.
The Maker tried to pull away.
His body stretched.
For a moment, it seemed as though he would simply slip free the way he had so many times before.
But he failed.
His arm stretched too far.
And tore.
The sound was horrible.
Panic finally broke through the Maker's face.
"Let go."
Max held on.
The power surged through him and into Reed.
The Maker screamed.
"URAHHHHHHH!"
It was an agonizing sound, raw and terrified, stripped of arrogance, stripped of the cold superiority he had worn like armor. The power he had wanted so badly poured into him, but it did not obey him.
The Maker's suit burned away first.
Then the helmet cracked.
His body stretched involuntarily, twisting in every direction as if trying to escape itself. His torso elongated, collapsed, then expanded again. His legs bent backward. His remaining arm split at the elbow and reformed incorrectly. His skin began to blister, then glow, then melt.
"ARAHHHHHHHHHHH!"
Max's grip tightened.
The green light around his hands brightened.
It was becoming too much for him. He could see that his hands were glowing green now, as was most of his body. He could not even feel the flesh anymore.
"In brightest day," Max whispered.
The words came out ragged.
The Maker clawed at him with a half-melted hand, his fingers bending and splitting as they struck Max's arm. His nails scraped uselessly across the emerald light pouring from Max's skin.
"In blackest night."
The cavern trembled. The breach behind them roared, its light spreading wider as the seal around it weakened.
"No evil shall escape my sight."
The Maker's eyes widened with horror, locked onto Max's.
There was no plan left for him to escape.
"Let those who worship evil's might..."
The Maker's face collapsed inward.
His features distorted as his body lost all structure. His scarred eye burst into light. His mouth opened in one final scream, though the sound barely resembled anything human now.
"Beware my power..."
The green fire around Max surged.
For a moment, the entire cavern was lit emerald.
Max drove the full force through him.
"GREEN LANTERN'S LIGHT."
The Maker came apart as he was unmade.
The last thing Max saw on Reed's face was not rage, not fear.
It was disbelief.
Max fell down, his body feeling as though it had gained a thousand pounds.
He lay on the cracked stone at the edge of the breach, completely spent, his body so broken he could barely feel it.
The Maker was dead.
Mephisto was gone.
His friends would be safe.
Aurora would be safe. Firehair would save her.
The thought was enough to make him try to smile.
Then the breach expanded.
Max turned his head.
The opening into the First Firmament was growing wider. The Maker's attempt to draw power from it had damaged whatever boundary had still been holding it back, and now the light beyond was pouring into the cavern in waves. The ledge cracked beneath him. The walls dissolved. The God Quarry, still rebuilding itself above, began to shake from its deepest center.
And then Max heard voices.
Something inside the breach was speaking, or trying to. The sound filled his head with shapes he could not understand. It was as if the First Firmament itself had noticed him. As if the first creation, the lonely primordial universe from before all other things, had turned its attention toward Max.
Its attention was almost unbearable.
Max winced and pushed himself onto one elbow.
"Fuck," he muttered, his voice barely audible.
He forced himself up.
It took longer than it should have. His arms shook. His legs almost gave out beneath him the moment he tried to stand, and he had to catch himself with a weak construct that formed beneath his palm like a broken crutch of green light.
He floated above the breach, staring down into the distant light suspended in the void below.
What do I do? Max thought.
He lifted his hand.
Fix it, his mind said, commanding the power within him.
Fix it.
For a moment, nothing happened.
Then a thin line of green light extended from his hand, trembling like thread. Max gritted his teeth and pushed more power into it. The line thickened, stretching toward the edge of the breach, then dividing into several strands that caught the torn boundary from the multiverse side.
The construct pulled.
The breach resisted.
The edges of the tear drew closer together by the smallest fraction, the opening shrinking just enough for him to understand that it could be closed.
Not from here.
Not fully.
He stared at it, then gave a humorless laugh.
"Of course."
The knowledge came to him.
It felt as if something higher, something watching from above even this place, had placed the answer directly inside his head.
The breach had to be closed from the other side.
Max looked into the light and understood.
Down there, he would not simply enter another realm. He would fall backward through space and time, into the very moment of creation.
Toward the beginning before beginnings.
And that explained it.
All of it.
He had deduced that he would time travel, considering all the evidence he had seen, and this was it.
This was the moment.
Max looked back once, though there was no one there to see.
He hoped they were safe.
Aurora.
Firehair.
His friends.
He was sure he would see them again.
"I guess," Max said, breathing hard, "I will need to take the long way home."
He let himself go and fell into the breach.
He fell through darkness deeper than space, through a void that existed before voids. The light of the First Firmament waited below him, while behind him the breach remained open like a wound in the dark.
Max reached back toward it, and green light stretched from his broken hands in long, trembling threads.
The tear began to close.
The multiverse was safe.
And Max kept falling.
It was all the same white and blue lights of the First Firmament's stars until something new appeared.
He saw the lights.
Green.
Red.
Orange.
Yellow.
Blue.
Indigo.
Violet.
They were small at first, nothing more than sparks in the void, flickering uncertainly in the primordial dark. But as Max fell closer to the First Firmament, the colors brightened. Parts of him broke away, changing colors and joining the sparks in the distance.
The sparks increased in intensity and grew larger and larger.
Max fell toward the green light.
Or it rose to meet him.
The last pieces of his body came apart as the seven lights circled him, spinning faster and faster in the primordial dark.
For one instant, they came together.
Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet folded inward around him. The seven became one, a single impossible radiance containing every feeling that would ever be felt.
It exploded into white.
Then the white split apart once more.
Seven lights burned in the newborn dark.
Red.
Orange.
Yellow.
Green.
Blue.
Indigo.
Violet.
And the green was the largest.
.
.
Aurora will be back....that is all i will say about the events of these chapters.
.
Chapter 80: Bereavement
Chapter 81: Long, Long Way From Home
Chapter 82: Return of The Green Lantern pt.1
Chapter 83: Return of The Green Lantern pt.2
Chapter 84: Return of The Green Lantern pt.3
Chapter 85: The Elders of The Universe pt.1
Chapter 86: The Elders of the Universe pt.2