Peaceful death.
She turned the concept over in her mind, walking across a planet stripped of everything that had ever lived on it. The atmosphere carried a kind of meditative stillness—remote, elevated, the idea of death refined to its purest philosophical abstraction.
Thea didn't like it.
It was technically impressive. Whatever consciousness had once shaped this world had pushed the concept of death toward an extreme—and it was still not what she was looking for. High-minded, philosophically refined, but it said nothing about what death truly felt like from the inside. It had missed the point entirely.
She had wandered across twelve planets on impulse, and not one had given her what she was looking for. The Red Lanterns operated somewhere in this region—a faction of lunatics you couldn't reason with—and she'd already made her decision. Time to go home.
She opened a portal.
An orange beam came at her from an angle she hadn't expected.
She slapped it aside. Then seven or eight more followed—fire, blades, noxious gas—all of them orange. She released a burst of divine presence and shattered the barrage, then turned to look.
On a hilltop crouched a gaunt alien: skin desiccated, body hunched like an oversized kobold, orange light bleeding from every surface. Two dim eyes stared at her without blinking. The skull was distinctly canine—an elongated jaw bristling with teeth, three curving fangs jutting from each corner of his mouth. He was clutching a lantern she recognized immediately.
"Orange Lantern." She tilted her head. "You're that one—what was it—Larfless?"
The alien shrieked. "It is Larfleeze. The greatest Larfleeze. Wealth—you carry tremendous wealth—all of it belongs to Larfleeze. It can only belong to Larfleeze."
He was looking at her the way a starving man looks at a meal. The greed in his eyes was so naked a child could have read it.
She didn't bother calculating whether he'd planned this ambush or just blundered into her. She rose into the air and looked down at him.
"Do you even know how to write the word 'death'?"
Larfleeze considered this. "I don't read. I can't write!"
She nearly choked. Lucky idiot. Some blundering fool who'd tripped over a ring and somehow kept it.
"Treasure—endless treasure—all mine, all Larfleeze's!" He descended into raving, the glazed urgency of a man muttering in his sleep. A full minute passed before he seemed to remember she existed. He raised his ring hand.
"Hand over your hoard!"
The ring erupted. Constructs poured from it—enemies Larfleeze had defeated over decades, their identities stolen and locked inside, reanimated as lantern-wraiths to fight in his name. He'd built himself an entire army from the people he'd consumed.
If Larfleeze weren't quite so dim, she reflected, the damage he could cause would rival the Black Lanterns.
"Now we're talking." She whistled—the sound condensed into a blade-thin edge and lashed around the first construct charging her: a bloated, multi-mouthed worm. The whistle became a white wire, cinching tight, then snapping outward in both directions. A clean bisection.
"Send more! Take my treasure!" Larfleeze didn't register the loss. His ring held enough for an army and he spent it with reckless abandon. Sky and ground vanished beneath wave after wave of orange constructs. No gaps. No breathing room. Nothing but that sickening glow in every direction.
She'd always known the Orange Lantern was a problem. She hadn't expected this.
If an ordinary ring operated at one hundred percent capacity, and a Blue Lantern's presence could push that to roughly one hundred fifty percent, then the orange ring's ceiling sat somewhere around one hundred thousand percent. Greed, by its nature, didn't share. Larfleeze had never made a second ring, never split his power with anyone. Every scrap of emotional energy in the spectrum funneled into a single point. Right now, Larfleeze alone was a standing army.
"Wretched thing. Every extra second you stay alive is an affront." She condensed a pair of silver fire scimitars—one in each hand—and hurled them into the mass of constructs.
The blades spun like twin bolts of lightning, burning incandescent. Each construct they struck either crumbled immediately or managed a beat of resistance before collapsing. Eleven kills—then the silver fire guttered out and both blades dissolved to nothing.
Larfleeze flinched. He scrambled behind a construct with a tentacled chin the size of a doorframe.
All that power and no idea what to do with it. This ring should be mine. She caught herself mid-thought and immediately froze. Wait. Something was wrong—a pull behind her eyes, a sharp wanting she didn't recognize as her own. She shook it off fast, her mental discipline snapping back into place. At her current divine level greed couldn't sink in deeply, but it had gotten in far enough to plant an actual thought.
While she was clearing her head, Larfleeze sent another wave.
The Guardians of Oa had long since decided the cost of fighting Larfleeze wasn't worth it. To keep the peace, they'd ceded the entire Vega System—including his home planet Okaara—in exchange for a non-aggression agreement. Criminals had poured in afterward, believing themselves safe. Every last one had ended up as another construct in the ring.
The enormous tentacle-chinned thing at Larfleeze's back—that was his crown jewel. Thea studied its divine signature. Unless she was badly mistaken, it was a God of Hunger: a genuine New God, pulled in from some distant universe entirely. The construct was intact but hollow. Its source was exhausted. Whatever Darkseid might have given to acquire it, all that remained was a body running on ring commands.
She drew the holy sword. She was going to purge every last one of these constructs from existence.
The anger she'd held at modest mastery for so long surged without warning, stoked by the greed saturating the air around her. It rose fast, clean, and total.
Murder filled her eyes. She wanted Larfleeze's head. Lucky individuals were supposed to know their place—to show deference, to know fear—not spend their days barking at beings who outclassed them by every conceivable measure.
Not-quite-sharp-enough Larfleeze was still sending more. In his mind, quantity could overwhelm anything: ten wasn't enough, send a hundred; a hundred wasn't enough, send a thousand. In fairness, that logic had worked for him for a very long time.
He had sole dominion over an entire star system and an endless supply of criminals to feed the ring. Unlike Hal Jordan, who valued precision and efficient energy management, Larfleeze had no need for either. A ring sitting at one hundred thousand percent capacity didn't require strategy. It just required someone willing to spend.