Arc 2 begins
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Max threw Aurora into the air.
She squealed with delight, her laughter bright and clear as she rose above him. Her eyes never left his face, filled with love. Max caught her easily when she came back down, and she bounced in his arms, making an impatient little sound that could mean only one thing.
Again.
Max laughed and tossed her up once more. Aurora spread her tiny arms, giggling as she fell back toward him. This time, instead of catching her and remaining on the ground, Max rose into the air with her held against his chest. Emerald light surrounded them as they climbed into the clear blue sky. Aurora made happy sounds while the wind moved through her hair.
Firehair flew toward them, smiling as she reached out. Before either of them touched her, Aurora lifted from Max's hands and floated across the space between her parents until Firehair caught her.
"There is my little girl," Firehair said, pressing her nose against Aurora's. "She is a mommy's girl, isn't she?"
Aurora laughed and grabbed at her mother's hair.
"No, she isn't," Max said.
Firehair raised an eyebrow. "Is that so?"
"Absolutely." Max held out both hands. "Come on, Aurora. Come to Daddy."
Aurora looked from him to Firehair, her expression serious for a moment. Then she laughed again and flew out of her mother's arms. She crossed the air in an unsteady burst and wrapped her arms around Max's neck when he caught her.
Max grinned. "See? She clearly loves me more."
"She only came because you were making those silly faces."
"I was not making faces. I was encouraging her."
Aurora tightened her arms around him, and Max laughed as he held her closer.
"She is strong," he said. "Maybe she is a mutant like you. I still wonder what she got from me."
Firehair floated closer and placed a hand against Aurora's back. "Whatever she becomes, she will be the best of both of us."
Aurora suddenly pushed away from Max.
He loosened his hold, expecting her to move toward Firehair again, but instead, she remained suspended between them. Her small body wobbled for a moment before she steadied herself and began to fly in a slow circle around her parents.
Max watched her with growing concern.
"That is going to be a problem."
Firehair caught Aurora as she drifted past and lifted her above her head. "Yes. Yes, it will."
"She is going to be a handful when she grows up. I don't even want to think about the teenage years."
Firehair smiled as she lowered Aurora and played with her hands. The smile remained, but something in her expression changed. Her eyes became distant and sad.
"It is a shame you will not be here to see it," she said.
Max's smile faded.
"See what?"
"Her growing up."
"What do you mean?" Max asked. "I am here."
Firehair looked at him.
"Are you?"
The warmth left the air.
"You left us," she said.
Aurora stopped laughing.
Mother and daughter stared at him together as the blue sky began to change. Green spread across it in waves, swallowing the clouds and sunlight until the entire world was covered in a cold emerald glow.
Max tried to speak, but no sound came.
A shape formed above them.
At first, it was only a shadow within the green, but it continued to grow until it filled the sky. It was humanoid, vast beyond scale, its body made of living emerald light. Two bright eyes opened in its featureless face and fixed themselves on Max.
The moment it looked at him, pain tore through his entire being.
Max felt as if he were being pulled apart in every direction at once. His thoughts separated from one another. His memories stretched thin. His body became something distant, a shape that no longer belonged to him.
Firehair and Aurora began to fade.
"No."
Max reached for them, but his arms would not move.
"No! No!"
Their bodies dissolved into pale light, their faces still turned toward him. Aurora reached out with one small hand as she disappeared.
Max tried to scream her name.
The emerald giant expanded until it covered the entire sky, then the horizon, then the world itself. Its hands reached toward Max, calling him closer and beckoning him to return.
He could not run.
He could not fight.
He could only stare as the green light closed around him.
Max woke with a sharp breath.
His chest rose and fell as he stared upward, unable to move for several seconds. The sound of the tide reached him first, waves rolling across the shore and pulling back over the sand. Above him, the sky was red, its color deepening as the last light faded beyond the horizon.
He lay there for a long time, listening to the water and staring into the darkening sky.
Two billion years. That was how young the seventh iteration of the multiverse was. All the stars and worlds he knew of were still in their infancy or did not even exist. Even the great abstractions of this cosmos still felt new, as though reality itself had not yet fully settled into the shape it intended to keep.
All of this meant that he was more than eleven billion years away from his family and friends, lost in the distant past.
Max remembered falling into the moment of creation.
He remembered his emotions colliding with something larger than himself, something that had waited in the darkness before all things. From that union, the Emotional Spectrum had been born. After that, his memories became difficult to understand. They were not absent, but shattered into pieces too vast and strange to fit together cleanly.
He remembered changing into something incomprehensible, something that no longer thought in words, names, or even identity. The being called Max had ceased to exist for a time and had been replaced by something else, a force spread throughout all of creation.
Even now, when he tried to recall it, the memories came to him like dreams half-remembered after waking. He had seen the first universe destroyed in the war between the Celestials and the Aspirants. He had felt the birth of the second, the first true multiverse, and the near-instant creation of Death as a concept so absolute that it ended that iteration before it could become stable.
The third and fourth had been stranger still, brief and unstable realities whose births and extinctions had given rise to ideas deeper than worlds: good and evil, freedom and consequence, and the possibility of choice itself.
The fifth cosmos was where magic emerged, and with it came the first great error tied to the Spectrum. A sorcerer from that multiverse had tried to harness it. He failed, and in doing so, tore apart the entire multiverse. That destruction created an absence of emotion, something that defied the Spectrum. From that absence came Hunger, a being that would grow and eventually devour the sixth cosmos that followed the fifth.
Max looked at his hand.
Something was missing.
His ring.
Panic hit him before his memory caught up. For a moment, he thought the ring had been taken or lost. Then he remembered giving it away.
He turned his head toward the mountain in the distance.
A Celestial floated above its highest peak.
Veridion's armored body was deep emerald. Golden lines crossed his chest, arms, and mask in complex patterns, glowing faintly as energy moved through them. He was smaller than most Celestials Max had encountered. Max had met only one before, Zgreb, and Veridion was half his height.
Veridion was young by the standards of his kind and completely obsessed with the Emotional Spectrum. He wanted to understand where it came from, how it worked, and why emotion had become one of the fundamental forces of creation. That obsession was the reason Max was awake at all.
The Watchers had found him first, sometime after they discovered Galan. After Galan became Galactus, they had chosen to be cautious with Max. They allowed him to sleep, fearing he might become another devourer of worlds, or something even worse.
Veridion had not shared their fear.
He had freed him.
Waking had not been pleasant. For days, Max had not remembered his name, where he came from, or what he was. When his memories finally returned, they brought little comfort.
He was stranded eleven billion years in the past.
Firehair was gone.
Aurora was gone.
His friends were gone.
He was alone, separated from them all by an unfathomable span of time.
Max looked at the Celestial once more.
Veridion had effectively won the jackpot by finding Max. The Celestial still had duties among his own kind, and his research into the Spectrum appeared to be little more than a private interest, but he pursued that interest with an intensity Max found unsettling.
When Veridion began asking questions, Max told him everything. He told him about dying beneath an avalanche in another universe and waking in this one with a Green Lantern ring. He told him everything that had happened afterward: his life on Earth, Firehair, Aurora, the Avengers, Mephisto, the Maker, and the God Quarry. He explained how he had fallen through the breach and reached the dawn of creation.
The Celestial had taken the story surprisingly well. He had also promised to keep it secret, provided Max helped him understand the Emotional Spectrum. Max had agreed, but he had asked for something in return.
He hoped that was what this visit was about.
Max pushed himself off the ground and tried to fly.
He rose several feet.
Then the energy around him failed.
Max dropped back to the ground and struck the stone shoulder-first, rolling twice before coming to a stop.
"Fuck!" he shouted.
It had been like this since he woke.
His body felt great, perhaps better than it ever had before, and his mind felt sharper as well. Time no longer felt right to him. It was as though he perceived it differently now. He believed he had been awake for fifty years, though it felt closer to one.
Or had it been a hundred years?
He was no longer certain.
The confusion came from the other part of him. Veridion called it his cosmic half, though Max was beginning to wonder whether that was backward. Perhaps the cosmic being was the real him now, and this human body was only a projection used to experience the universe on a smaller scale, a mortal avatar of the cosmic entity of will.
Max had named it Ion because calling it "the vast cosmic embodiment of willpower" every time was inconvenient.
Whenever he closed his eyes, he felt Ion waiting beyond him.
Its presence was endless. It stretched across distances and realities his human mind could not measure, touching every place and every being. Max felt it calling to him, urging him to stop resisting and become whole.
For the first time in years, he was afraid.
The Entity of Will was afraid of itself.
Max laughed quietly at the absurdity.
He had become the entity, or perhaps he had always been the entity. There was some kind of time loop involved, which Max had decided not to examine too closely because every attempt left him wanting to punch a planet to death.
He blamed the being that had dragged him into this plane of existence in the first place. There had been moments, especially during the early years after waking in the ancient cosmos, when some damaged part of him wished he had simply died beneath that avalanche. He hated himself whenever the thought came, but that did not stop it from returning.
What he had learned was simple enough in structure, even if the truth of it was insane.
His arrival at the dawn of creation had been the catalyst for the Emotional Spectrum. When he fell into the First Firmament, he had not simply created the green light and the six colors surrounding it. He had become part of them.
Max was the Entity of Will, one of seven vast beings that shared the realm Veridion had named the Source.
So why was he powerless now?
It was mostly because he no longer had the ring, but his refusal to accept Ion also played a part.
Max did not like the feeling that came over him when he communed with that greater form. His humanity, the part that made him who he was, became almost nonexistent. It was a drop of water in an ocean. As Ion, he was present anywhere will existed.
There was no Max in that awareness.
Not enough of him, anyway.
He had reluctantly given his ring to Veridion in the hope that the Celestial could repair it. The ring had been made to focus enormous amounts of emotional energy through a physical mind and body. If Veridion restored it, Max might regain control over his abilities without surrendering himself to Ion.
Perhaps he could even restore Jade.
That hope had been enough to make him hand it over.
Max stood and tried to fly again.
This time, green energy gathered more evenly around his body. He rose from the shore and climbed into the red sky, passing the nearby cliffs as he gained speed. For several seconds, it worked.
Then his concentration slipped.
The green aura vanished.
Max fell.
He struck the ground hard enough to crack the stone beneath him. Dust rose around his body, but he made no attempt to stand.
He simply lay there, staring at the sky.
A green force field formed around him.
Max felt himself lift out of the crater, still lying flat as the energy carried him through the air. He crossed the distance to the mountain quickly, pulled by Veridion's power until he floated before the Celestial's enormous face.
Max turned within the field and looked up at him.
"Veridion, my dear," he called. "Are you done with my ring?"
"No," Veridion answered.
Max stared at him. "It has been forever."
"It has been five of this world's planetary cycles."
Max sighed.
Veridion raised one hand. Something small rested between two of his massive fingers, contained inside a field of golden energy.
Max's ring.
"The object is unlike anything I have seen before," Veridion said.
Max looked at it.
"Of course it is."
Veridion continued examining the ring inside the golden field.
"The material from which it is constructed does not exist anywhere else in the multiverse," he said. "Its internal structure is equally unusual. Each component appears to occupy several states simultaneously, yet none of them align with the physical laws of this cosmos. The energy pathways reorganize whenever I attempt to map them."
His words came faster, carrying an excitement that made him sound less like an ancient cosmic being and more like a child who had discovered a new toy.
"There are layers within layers. Some are mechanical, while others are conceptual. I have identified structures that may not technically exist until the ring requires them. Its storage capacity is immeasurable, its methods of energy conversion are unlike anything developed by my kind, and the material resists all conventional attempts at replication. I believed that, with sufficient study, I could understand its design, but it continues to contradict every conclusion I form."
"Whoa, whoa," Max said. "Easy, big guy. Don't lose your head over it."
Veridion fell silent.
"I doubt I would lose my head. The ring is not powerful enough to cause such damage unless you wielded it, in which case..."
"It's just an expression, big guy."
"I thought I could understand it," Veridion said, ignoring him.
"And you will. I'm pretty sure the ring was made by the One Above All, or maybe something even higher than him, so don't feel bad if it takes a while."
Veridion regarded him without moving.
"I will learn its secrets," he said. "It is only a matter of time."
"That's the spirit."
"The ring is now partially operational."
Max's eyes widened. "Really?"
The golden field surrounding the ring vanished. It flew from between Veridion's fingers toward Max, and he quickly slipped it onto his finger.
The connection returned at once.
Green light spread across his body, and he felt whole again. The sensation that he was about to explode from the inside vanished.
Max raised his hand.
A massive emerald hammer appeared above him, solid and detailed, its head nearly as large as Veridion's hand. Max swung it once through the air, and the construct moved smoothly without flickering.
He smiled.
"That's much better."
"You should be capable of controlling this energy without the ring," Veridion said. "You informed me that you accessed it directly while fighting the being called the Maker inside the God Quarry."
"I did, but something has changed since then." Max dismissed the hammer and looked down at the ring. "It worked when I needed it. Now I can't access it."
"You were under extreme physical and psychological strain. It may have forced a temporary connection between your mortal consciousness and the greater entity."
Max lifted the ring closer to his face.
"Jade?"
Nothing answered.
He waited a moment and tried again.
"Jade, can you hear me?"
He had hoped the AI would return as well.
The ring remained silent. There was no familiar voice, no response in the back of his mind.
Max's smile disappeared.
Veridion lowered his hand. "As I said, the ring is only partially operational. Its primary energy channels and construct functions have been restored. The artificial intelligence you claim resides within it remains unresponsive."
Max closed his hand around the ring. At least it was working again. That was something. If any trace of Jade remained within it, he would find a way to bring her back.
Veridion watched him for several seconds before speaking again.
"You should attempt communication with your cosmic counterpart."
Max looked up. "Ion?"
"The name you assigned it, yes. A controlled union may restore your full command over your abilities and provide valuable information about the Spectrum."
Max rubbed the back of his neck.
"Yeah, I don't know about that."
"It would also be highly useful for further data collection."
"Of course that's your main concern."
Max sighed. "All right, big guy, but remember our deal. I help you understand the Spectrum, and you help me get home. I don't want to wait another eleven billion years, so let's talk about time travel."
"Forbidden," Veridion said immediately.
Max stared at him. "You didn't even let me finish."
"Celestials are forbidden from altering established temporal progression for personal reasons."
"I'm not asking you to change history. I'm asking you to send me forward."
"The distinction is insufficient."
Max exhaled through his nose. "Can you do it or not?"
"No."
"Wonderful."
"Your urgency is unnecessary," Veridion continued. "Your physical condition has changed. Whatever mortality you once possessed ended when your body was exposed to primordial energies across several universal genesis events. The repeated transitions through cosmic birth and collapse altered your structure beyond any prior biological definition."
Veridion was correct.
Max was immortal.
Years earlier, Jade had estimated that his altered biology might allow him to live for two centuries. At the time, that had seemed absurdly long. Now, it appeared his body could continue indefinitely.
According to Veridion's theories, even destroying it would not truly kill him. His consciousness would simply return to Ion and become part of the cosmic entity again. Another avatar might eventually form, but Max doubted it would truly be him. It might carry his memories and wear his face, yet something essential would be missing.
The changes also explained his distorted perception of time. Years passed like months. Decades blurred together before he noticed them. What felt unnatural to his human mind was ordinary to the greater being connected to it.
He could endure eleven billion years this way.
Max had no intention of doing so.
He wanted the easy way out. He wanted to see his family again.
"I know I'm different now," Max said. "That doesn't mean I want to stand around for eleven billion years."
"You could remain active and assist in my studies."
"No."
"You possess firsthand memories of prior cosmic iterations."
"I barely possess any, like I told you. Just fragments. Colors, feelings, and things that don't make sense when I try to think about them."
Veridion remained silent for a moment.
"There is another way."
Max narrowed his eyes. "You have my attention."
"I can place you in stasis for approximately five billion years. The process would allow your body to continue adapting to the primordial energies within it. Your physical structure would strengthen, and the conflict between your human consciousness and cosmic nature might lessen."
"Five billion years? Not longer?"
"No. Only five billion. Afterward, you would have to wait some time before attempting the process again."
"Yes," Max said immediately. "Let's do that."
Veridion tilted his head. "You have not asked about the potential risks."
"I survived the first cosmos. I'm willing to risk a long nap."
"Very well. I will be approaching maturity by the time the process is complete. My abilities and resources will have increased, allowing me to conduct more thorough research into both the Spectrum and your condition."
"Good for both of us." Max floated closer and spread his arms. "All right, big man. Put me under."
Veridion raised one hand.
Emerald energy gathered around his palm and descended toward Max. Crystal began forming around his feet, growing upward in smooth layers. It covered his legs, his waist, and his chest, holding him in place without pressure or pain.
The crystal was warm.
As it closed around him, sleep settled over his mind. Max felt the tension leave his body, followed by the fear and impatience that had haunted him since waking in this ancient universe.
He closed his eyes.
"Firehair," he murmured. "Aurora."
He held their faces in his mind, along with their voices and the memories of the friends he had left behind.
Then the crystal covered him completely, and Max fell asleep once more.