Time had lost its meaning. They walked without knowing how long they had walked.
Their group slowly expanded—a Yellow Lantern joined them, then a Green Lantern, then an Indigo Tribe member. All of them had died after Hal and Sinestro, and all of them were still in possession of their minds.
From the new arrivals, Hal pieced together what had happened. The Third Army. The Guardians. The vanishing act. He also realized, with a cold clarity, that Black Hand's attack on him and Sinestro had been no accident—they'd been targeted. Unfortunately, he was already dead, and beyond cursing the Guardians to vent, there was absolutely nothing he could do about any of it.
Not every Lantern they passed had retained their coherence. Most of the souls around them moved with the same blank forward-moving trudge, joining the enormous column that flowed steadily along the dirt road ahead. What waited at the end of it, nobody in the group knew. None of them had done this before.
Clop. Clop.
Hoofbeats moved up alongside them from somewhere behind.
Hal told himself to keep his head down. He didn't.
The figure on horseback was armored, hollow-eyed, unmistakably dead in the way that everything here was—but the eyes still held light, and whoever this was had retained not just cognition but evident purpose. The horseman's gaze and Hal's met.
A moment of mutual surprise.
The horseman's reaction came a beat later—a spark of something like recognition. The left hand rose. The procession—vast, ageless, seemingly incapable of deviation—stopped in its entirety, with an almost mechanical obedience. The hand lowered. No fanfare. A small adjustment, like setting down a glass.
Sinestro's guard went up immediately. His eyes sharpened to something knife-like, scanning the horseman's every word and movement for a weak point.
The horseman reached behind and produced a roll of parchment. He held it up next to Hal's face and studied both with visible concentration.
"Is this you?"
The parchment looked like every wanted poster Hal had ever seen in his favorite pirate anime—yellowed, fraying at the edges, his face rendered in stark detail, a number at the bottom that presumably meant something significant to someone.
"...Yeah, that's me." He'd have liked to project confidence—belt it out with his full voice—but in soul form, that big voice of his had stayed back in his body. He'd forgotten to bring it. "What do you want?"
The horseman's expression—insofar as a skull-faced figure could be said to have one—shifted toward satisfaction. The jaw worked in obvious delight.
Then the second parchment came out.
Sinestro's face.
Hal looked at the poster, turned, and found Sinestro already attempting to ease himself sideways into the surrounding soul-traffic. The crowd here was dense in every direction—theoretically, one might simply become part of it. Except there was nowhere to actually go. Souls flowed shoulder to shoulder as far as the eye could reach.
Hal reached out, took hold of his old enemy's arm, and presented him to the horseman with the cheerful air of a man who had decided that if he was going to be uncomfortable, he wasn't going alone.
The horseman held both parchments up and compared them to both faces at considerable length. Eventually he shook his head. He genuinely couldn't tell. He hadn't been human when alive—the selection process after his own death had put him on this particular horse with these particular patrol duties—and in his defense, the distinction between living faces and dead ones was real, and he'd never been particularly strong on Earth species to begin with.
With a resigned tone: "Come with me. My superior will need to sort this out."
Fighting the horseman was pointless—no bodies, no rings, no leverage whatsoever. His manner hadn't suggested malice. Burning whatever goodwill existed here had no upside.
They waved goodbye to the small cluster of Lanterns they'd been walking with—a strange gesture, under the circumstances—and followed the horseman down a different path.
They walked for a while longer. Ahead, a massive temple materialized out of the gray landscape. They were directed to a side entrance. As they passed, Hal caught a glimpse through the main gate: an immense orderly queue of souls filing through the front doors in perfect silence.
Because they'd entered through the side door rather than the main gate, they never saw the large statue of a beautiful young woman standing at the front entrance. All the worrying Hal had been quietly doing about what this temple might mean for his immediate future turned out to have been entirely unnecessary.
The side door led down a long corridor, into a small waiting room. The horseman exchanged a few words with a robed skeleton at a desk, then departed—noticeably lighter in mood, the air of a man who'd finally completed an assignment he'd been anxious about. The robed skeleton produced its own copy of the parchments, studied them, offered no commentary, told them to wait, and left through another door.
The two of them sat.
No heartbeat. No footsteps. No ambient sound of any kind. The quality of the silence here was the kind that made you aware of your own absence.
They searched the room. Nothing useful. Leaving felt inadvisable. Eventually they settled for pressing themselves to the gap in the side door and listening.
In the stillness of what sounded like a large hall, one voice moved through a rapid ongoing series of judgments:
"Hami—record of service—return to the mortal realm."
"Budisha—nothing notable—take him through."
"Aliya—exemplary record—heaven or mortal realm, give her the choice."
The pace was brisk. A dozen cases passed in the time it took them to register the pattern: the vast majority had accomplished nothing notable in their lives—they were simply processed and moved on. A smaller portion were sent back to the mortal realm. And a very, very few were offered heaven or hell.
Sinestro stared at the door with the expression of a man encountering a conceptual framework his civilization had abandoned. The science-cities of Korugar had outgrown religion thousands of years ago. Heaven. Hell. Mortal realm. These were not categories he had any mental architecture for.
For all his recklessness, Hal was an Earth person—heaven and hell weren't exactly unfamiliar concepts. What puzzled him was the larger implication: was this really where all life in the entire universe came after death?
And they were being treated differently from everyone else in the procession. Was that a good sign or a bad one? The two greatest Green Lanterns exchanged a glance, and neither had an answer.
The wait stretched into something like infinity.
The Flash had once described his trial and sentencing to Hal—Barry had felt every second stretch into a year, and afterward, in prison, he'd been constantly checking the clock. The disorienting sensation specific to speedsters: doing what felt like a tremendous amount and finding only one second had passed. Today Hal understood completely. He'd mocked Barry for it at the time, blaming the superspeed. But looking at himself now—no ring, no body, nothing to do, and no ability to do anything about it—he wasn't doing much better. Same situation. Just sit and wait.
"Hold it together, Hal." Sinestro watched him squirming like a restless primate and felt second-hand embarrassment creep up on him. He delivered the rebuke in his coldest voice. "I don't think this is going to end badly."
Hal had exactly no rebuttal ready. The door swung open.
A voice came through—dry, edged with something that might have been amusement:
"You're right—it isn't. Green Lantern Hal Jordan. I've heard quite a lot about you."
A middle-aged man in a dark suit walked into the room. Hal had never met him in person. He didn't need to. That face—half of it destroyed—told him everything.
"Two-Face! What are you doing here?!"