For the past while, Saint Walker had been attaching himself to Barry at every available opportunity, delivering patient lectures on the Way of Hope. Barry, who was in the middle of planning a wedding on top of his police work and his crime-fighting, had approximately zero bandwidth for theological discussion. He eventually declined the invitation to join the Blue Lantern Corps with the kind of polite finality that only someone planning a wedding could truly achieve.
Saint Walker, without visible hard feelings, left Earth. He had a creature to find: Adara, the Blue Lantern entity—a three-faced phoenix whose form Thea had glimpsed briefly during her time wearing the White Lantern ring. That was his next goal.
Atrocitus departed with Dex-Starr—a large blue-grey cat—having first made sure several local animal abusers would not be troubling any cats in the near future, and headed back to Sector 666 with the rest of the Red Lanterns.
That left only the orange one.
She found Larfleeze in what appeared to be a self-assembled junkyard—broken refrigerators, cars in various states of decay, dented buckets, and a three-legged stool on which he was currently seated, laboring over some kind of writing project. His right arm was occupied with his lantern, forcing him to write left-handed; three alien claws gripped the pen like it owed him money.
"Hey. What are you doing?" She dropped down from above.
"Writing." He glanced up calmly and said so—perhaps because the White Lantern had washed away the killing aura around her.
Thea felt much calmer herself. She looked at his so-called "writing materials" and laughed in exasperation.
He had found a roll of toilet paper. On it, in large and uneven letters, he had written a list. A very, very long list—over thirty feet of it, still unrolling gently in the breeze. The ring's translation function had rendered everything into English: shampoo, flip-flops, trains, airplanes...
"Is this... your letter to Santa Claus?" she asked.
Larfleeze brightened like a lamp. "Yes! Exactly! The bald man said this Santa Claus can fulfill any wish. Your planet is extraordinary!"
Lex Luthor. Of course.
If Luthor was a level-nine intellect, this guy wasn't even level two—barely ahead of a husky because he could talk. And yet Thea had a feeling that if Lex kept at it, walking off with the orange ring was only a matter of time.
Larfleeze continued talking at some length. She stopped listening, opened a portal behind him, and pushed him through it.
Realizing her intimidation factor wasn't quite enough anymore, she pulled out Nekron's scythe and held it up toward the portal's exit side. "Go. Back to Okaara. Come back to Earth and I'll split you in two."
With the Lantern situation handled, she finally had time to breathe and think.
Nekron can be a reference point. Not a model.
The old saying applied perfectly: learn from me and live; imitate me and die. Their paths were fundamentally different. What she'd said before putting on the White Lantern ring still held: death was life's companion. Not an enemy. Not a curse. The way to understand death was from within life—to look through the window from the living side. That was her path, and it was nothing like his.
On the other side of the world.
Cairo, Egypt.
The ancient light of civilization had long since moved elsewhere. What remained was a city of ordinary people managing ordinary lives—streets that barely fit two cars, corners thick with uncollected garbage, everyone moving through their days with the weary practicality of people who'd stopped expecting improvement.
Today, though, the streets had something worth looking at.
A man and a woman walked through the midday crowds drawing stares from half a block away.
Modern Cairo was tolerant of short sleeves and jeans. Women needed only a headscarf to pass without comment. Even so, these two were different.
The man wore nothing above a strip of white cloth at his waist. He moved easily through the crowd, bare-chested, with the dense, functional muscle of someone who had been physically active for their entire life. He wasn't self-conscious about any of it.
The woman wore a bright floral robe and was looking around with the open curiosity of someone who had never seen any of this before—and found it fascinating rather than overwhelming. They were speaking quietly to each other in a language that nobody nearby recognized.
Younger people kept their distance and stared. A few older residents were visibly offended.
One elderly woman—short and solid, black robe reaching her feet, face set in the particular severity of someone who had appointed themselves guardian of public morality—planted herself in their path and began cursing them loudly, her finger jabbing repeatedly at the woman in the floral robe.
The man's eyes went flat and cold in an instant. His hand shot out, grabbed the old woman by her collar, and lifted her cleanly off the ground.
The woman in the robe said something low and quick. The man looked around: every eye in the vicinity had suddenly found somewhere else to be. He set the old woman down, took his companion by the arm, and walked on.
"Chay-Ara." His voice was heavy. "This place... it isn't our world anymore. Not the one I knew."
The woman beside him said nothing.
These two were, of course, Prince Khufu and Priestess Chay-Ara—the original Hawkman and Hawkgirl—revived by the waters suffused with white light, considerably luckier than probability suggested they had any right to be. During the Blackest Night, their minds had been clouded, but their will—tempered over millennia by the love-crystal of the Star Sapphires, the power of Horus, and the influence of N-Metal—had remained strong enough to resist. Strong enough that when Thea destroyed their Black Lantern forms, they'd pulled themselves back together across deep space and flown home.
The white light had brought them back clean.
But Earth had changed. Ancient Egypt was a museum exhibit. The two of them had arrived without clothing, flying around naked in the sky, attempted to claim the first person they encountered as a servant, and then got thoroughly beaten by the cops with every firearm available before they began to understand what kind of world this was. Without the N-Metal war hammer, they were marginally stronger than baseline humans—no more.
Four thousand five hundred years. And they were home again, approaching everything with careful attention, the wonder threaded through with a fear they were only beginning to name.
"Hold." Khufu's arm shot across in front of Chay-Ara. His eyes had caught movement in a doorway's shadow.
A tall figure in a dark cape stepped out into the street.
"Why are you following us?" Khufu's Arabic was halting but functional, mixed with fragments of English—the two languages he'd identified as most common in this city. Thousands of years of N-Metal influence had sharpened both his mind and body considerably.
Batman—who had suggested himself for this assignment—was only briefly surprised. He spoke Arabic. Communication was possible.
He'd wanted to verify Thea's account in person: not aliens, but ancient Earth humans, revived. He'd seen enough in the last few days that adding two people from pre-dynastic Egypt to the list required no particular adjustment.
He told them plainly: I'll be keeping an eye on you both. Don't cause problems. Then he turned to leave.
"Wait." Khufu held up his hands, sketching a shape in the air—a wide, flat, heavy thing, about this long, about this wide. "Have you seen our hammer? I believe it's somewhere on Earth."
Batman said nothing. For all he knew, they could be villains. He left.