The sudden message startled Kyle Rayner. He tried to follow up, but the mysterious warning offered no further response, as though the voice had been a hallucination.
As for communicating with Ion directly, Kyle's emotional attunement was strong enough to manage it. But Ion had been abducted by Krona and then borrowed by Diana for battle. The Entity had already fallen into a dormant phase and wasn't responding to anyone.
He asked several more times. No reply. Puzzled, he released the ring.
Was it just his imagination? Being the sensitive type, Kyle felt it wasn't that simple.
Seeing Saint Walker pick up his ring without a hint of concern, preparing to return the Entity to the Central Power Battery, Kyle stopped his friend.
"You didn't notice anything unusual when you touched the ring just now?"
Saint Walker stared at him blankly. Thinking the Entity might be damaged, he quickly inspected it. The Blue Lantern Entity Adara was sleeping soundly inside. Nothing wrong at all.
"What did you find, friend Rayner?"
Kyle didn't know how to explain. Somewhat awkwardly, he asked, "Could I touch your Entity?"
It was a presumptuous request, to put it mildly. If he'd asked Atrocitus the same thing, they'd have come to blows on the spot. Fortunately, Saint Walker's bond with Kyle ran deep enough that he handed over Adara's ring without hesitation.
The warning message appeared again. Kyle's expression hardened.
He stopped hesitating. He touched each of the remaining rings in turn. Without exception, every single one carried the same message: the Emotional Spectrum was nearing depletion, and the universe was on the verge of annihilation. It never occurred to Kyle that Thea might have planted the messages. He automatically assumed the Entities themselves were issuing a warning.
And the Entities were, in essence, collective embodiments of sentient emotion. Thea's messages were hidden so deeply within them that even after the Entities woke, they'd find no trace of tampering. They'd likely interpret it as some kind of revelation.
Kyle shared his discovery with Saint Walker. The Blue Lantern was only half-convinced, touching each ring in turn. He heard nothing.
If this had happened to Batman, the man would have demanded answers to seventeen questions before dropping the subject. But Saint Walker had always been the mystical type. His thinking still had that medieval quality to it. He placed great stock in revelations, prophecies, that sort of thing.
"We must report this to Her Divine Majesty at once!" Realizing the severity, he scrambled for his Lantern ring to make the call.
The result was predictable. Frantic Saint Walker was met with the equivalent of: "The number you have dialed is currently unavailable..." It landed like a critical hit.
What now? A serious problem loomed over them both.
Kyle contacted Earth. He placed calls across the cosmic network. The news wasn't encouraging. Every key combatant from the recent battle was offline.
Thea had gone into seclusion in another dimension. Diana had returned to Themyscira alone, and the island's barrier was up. Superman, having tanked multiple direct hits from Krona, was either soaking up solar energy inside the sun or holed up in the Fortress of Solitude.
None of the heavyweight heroes could be reached.
As for Batman? From Hal Jordan all the way down to the current female Green Lantern, Jessica Cruz, not a single member of the Green Lantern Corps had any warm feelings toward him. Add in the rumor that Batman was an unofficial affiliate of the Sinestro Corps, and that made it even worse.
Just as Kyle was at his wit's end, feeling the weight of the world on his shoulders, Saint Walker suddenly remembered something. There were two former Guardians right here on Odym.
In the original timeline, Sinestro had massacred the Guardians. Ganthet and Sayd survived because they were well-liked, fleeing into hiding for a simple, pastoral life together.
Here, the two had simply never left. No one had asked them to go. And why would they? Odym was reputed to be the most beautiful planet in the universe. They'd talked it over and decided to settle down right on the Blue Lantern homeworld.
That two founding Guardians could be so thoroughly forgotten was, admittedly, a little sad. Fortunately, Saint Walker remembered them at the last moment.
Their retreat was some distance away. Saint Walker and Kyle flew for a while before finding them.
No time for pleasantries. Saint Walker laid out the problem directly.
"The Emotional Spectrum reservoir?" Caught off guard by the term, Ganthet's mind went momentarily blank. He had a feeling he knew what it was, but the memory was ancient and tangled. Truth and fiction blurred together. He wasn't sure whether he actually knew or not.
"What about Her Divine Majesty? She should be able to handle this." No matter how badly the Guardians had bungled things, Thea could always clean it up. That had been the rhythm for a while now. I cause the mess, you fix it. Even Ganthet had grown accustomed to this dynamic, and his first instinct was to look for Thea.
At the mention of the goddess he revered, Saint Walker nearly broke down. "Her Majesty's injuries were too severe. She has fallen into a deep slumber..."
Ganthet was stunned. Dead? No, surely not.
Even Kyle was taken aback. That serious? When he'd contacted Earth earlier, the reports had been brief, but nothing suggested the kind of pyrrhic victory that would put Thea in a coma. Then again, considering how many frontline heroes had been seriously wounded, he wasn't in a position to argue. Heroes had bled for the safety of the universe. As a fellow hero, he wouldn't mock their sacrifice. And now, with the crisis resurfacing, he felt the growing conviction that it was his turn to step up.
"Who could possibly have wounded her? Was it Darkseid?" Ganthet knew Thea's power well enough. He truly couldn't imagine who could push her into a "deep slumber."
Saint Walker and Kyle exchanged a glance before Saint Walker answered, his expression complicated. "It was Krona..."
Ganthet thought he'd misheard. Krona had been dead for how many years? Only after Saint Walker briefly went over what had happened did the pieces fall into place. Damn it, he couldn't afford to retire after all. A former colleague had nearly blown up the universe, and he hadn't known a thing about it.
He felt none of the joy Kyle and the others might have had at being carried to a free win. All he felt was how narrowly he'd escaped extinction. He'd sensed something when Thea separated the worlds, but he'd never imagined the situation had been that dire.
Krona's power was something Ganthet understood intimately. Even back before they were Guardians, when they were still Maltusians, an ancient cosmic race, Krona had already towered above the rest. After their diminishment, the Guardians had managed to seal the First Lantern through sheer numbers, but even at the height of their own power, the best they could do was exile Krona.
The gap in ability within the same species was immense. The Guardians weren't all from the same generation either. Their lifespans were simply so vast that they'd long since stopped caring about seniority. Take Horu-Ba, whose memories Thea had read several times over: he'd been Krona's student. Sayd, in turn, had originally been Ganthet's student.
Ganthet was one of the few remaining Maltusians from Krona's own generation. Within the species, his talents were middling at best. Nothing special. Krona, on the other hand, had been hailed as a great scientist even in his youth, the kind of kid every parent held up as the gold standard. And later, he came to represent the absolute pinnacle of what the ancient Maltusians could achieve.