Illusiveone - 115: Marvel's Green Lantern, Rebirth

Three months had passed since the cosmic court, and Max had spent nearly every hour of them working on the Battery and the rings.

He had pushed forward the reopening of the Academy and the other facilities that supported the Corps. The Oans had thrown themselves into the work with the same stubborn pride they had brought to the sky palace, and by the end of the third month, Max was satisfied that everything was ready for the rebirth of the Corps.

Twenty-five thousand rings were ready to go out.

Odin, Nur, and Agamotto had returned home nearly two months earlier, Odin to Asgard and the other two to Earth. Before he left, Agamotto had taken thirty Oans with him to Kamar-Taj to learn the mystic arts. Max liked the idea of Oa having a Sorcerer Supreme of its own one day, and he was willing to admit that he had grown a little paranoid about protection since his return. He did not intend to let anything like the Black Night happen again.

The only problem he had not been able to solve was the impurity.

It had taken him and Jade most of those three months to understand it, and when they finally did, Max had not been surprised by the answer.

It was Parallax.

When the Entity of Fear escaped the Source, he had passed through the breach that connected it to the Battery, and he had left a trace of himself behind. It was not enough to damage the Battery or stop it from working, and the rings functioned as well as they ever had. But the taint was there in every ring and every conduit, woven so deeply into the system that they could not separate it without tearing the entire structure apart.

The closest Max could come to describing its effect was that if Parallax ever raised a Corps of his own, its members would hold a slight edge over his Green Lanterns.

Max remembered something very similar from the comics. In those stories, the Green Lanterns had been helpless against anything yellow because the Guardians had imprisoned Parallax inside their Central Power Battery. It was nowhere near that severe here, but it was still a problem.

He and Jade had spent weeks searching for a way to purge it, and in the end, they had found only one. The taint was tied to Parallax himself, and it would only disappear if Parallax were weakened enough. Max would have to do to the Entity of Fear what he and the Butcher had done to Predator, reducing him to so little that what he had left behind could finally be wiped away.

Until that day came, Max meant to counter it any way he could.

The answer was Adara.

The Blue Light could weaken anything powered by yellow, so Max and Adara worked together to strengthen the Blue Battery and prepare it for a far larger Corps than the one Turgon now led. Max's plan was simple. Every sector of the universe would be guarded by five Green Lanterns, and once the Blue Lanterns had grown enough, each sector would also have a single Blue Lantern to support them.

Hope would strengthen Will, and Hope would weaken Fear.

Then there was the matter of finding Parallax and the Butcher, which would be the next step in the long game the Entities were now playing with one another beneath the Tribunal's watchful eye.

Max put the thought aside for now and looked up.

The rings floated above the Central Power Battery.

There had been a great ceremony the first time he had done this, hundreds of millions of years ago, with crowds, speeches, and music. This time, there was only Max standing on the summit of the Battery.

He raised his hand and waved it once.

Twenty-five thousand rings left Oa all at once. They rose in a vast emerald storm, turning the entire sky green as they climbed. Then they scattered across the heavens, racing toward every corner of the universe in search of the bearers who would become the reborn Green Lantern Corps.

===========

Att-Lass lay awake in his narrow bunk in the barracks outside Kree-Lar and stared up at the ceiling.

He had been dreaming again, the same dream he had been having for years. In it, he stood before the Supreme Intelligence in the black and blue armour of the Accusers with a Universal Weapon in his hands, and the whole Kree Empire looked upon him with respect. His uncle stood beside him in the dream. Kor-Varr had served as an Accuser for nearly two hundred years.

When Att-Lass was a child, his uncle had told him stories of the Accusers and the justice they brought to the Empire's enemies, and Att-Lass had decided before his tenth year that there was nothing else in the universe he wanted to become.

Then, three years ago, he had stood before the selection council for the first time.

He remembered every moment of it. He had trained harder than anyone in his class, and he had passed every physical and tactical trial they set before him. Then they had brought him into a chamber with a Skrull prisoner, a wounded and frightened young soldier who had been captured on the frontier, and told him to pass judgment.

Att-Lass had looked at the prisoner and asked what he had done.

The council had laughed at him. One of the examiners had told him that an Accuser did not ask what a prisoner had done because guilt had already been decided by the time the Accuser arrived. Att-Lass had hesitated for too long, and he had been rejected before he left the room.

He had heard what they said about him afterward. They said he had a soft heart, and that an Accuser with a soft heart was no Accuser at all. Some of his own classmates had repeated it to his face, and the worst of it was that his uncle had said nothing in his defence.

The next selection was in eleven days, and Att-Lass had not yet decided whether he would go.

He was afraid of it, and he was honest enough with himself to admit it. He was afraid of standing in that chamber again and being found wanting a second time. He was afraid of the laughter and of the look his uncle would give him, and most of all, he was afraid that they were right about him, that the thing that had made him hesitate was a weakness rather than something worth keeping.

He thought about it for a long time in the dark. Then he sat up slowly and placed his feet on the cold floor.

They were wrong. He did not know how he was certain of it, but he was. An Accuser was meant to bring justice, and justice meant knowing what someone had done before passing sentence on them. If the council could not see that, then he would stand before them again and again until they did. He would become an Accuser anyway, because there was nothing else he had ever wanted to be.

He would not let fear decide that for him.

Att-Lass went to the small window and looked out at the lights of Kree-Lar.

That was when he saw a light in the sky that did not belong there.

It was green, and it was moving toward him very fast. Att-Lass took a step back from the window, but before he could call out to anyone, the light passed straight through the glass without breaking it and stopped in the air before his face.

It was a ring, a small band of emerald light hovering level with his eyes.

"Att-Lass of Sector 616," the ring said. "You have the ability to overcome great fear. Welcome to the Green Lantern Corps."

Att-Lass stared at it.

He had never heard of a Green Lantern Corps.

The ring slid onto his finger. Green light flooded through him in a single rush, filling the entire room before lifting him from the floor and carrying him through the window. A moment later, he was soaring above the city, staring down at Kree-Lar in all its glory as the emerald light carried him away.

==========

The Skrull who called himself Revan had been living on Xandar for two years under the face of a Xandarian dockworker named Telo Brask.

He knew every one of Telo Brask's habits by now. He knew how the man drank his morning tea, which songs he hummed while he worked, and how he laughed at the jokes of the other dockworkers even when they were not funny. He knew all of this because he had spent three months studying the real Telo Brask before the man disappeared, and he had spent every day since then making sure that no one on Xandar could tell the difference.

His orders were simple. He was to watch the shipping that passed through the orbital docks of the capital and report every vessel carrying Shi'ar weapons to the Skrull agents waiting off-world.

He did his work well, and he did not let himself think too much about it.

The accident happened on an ordinary afternoon. A cargo crane on the upper loading platform failed, and a container the size of a house tore loose from its clamps and began to fall. Revan was working on the platform below when he heard the shouting. He looked up and saw a small Xandarian girl standing directly beneath it. She could not have been older than seven.

Revan did not think.

He knew that if he saved the girl, his cover would be blown. He would have to use his abilities, and two years of work would disappear in an instant. Yet when he saw the container falling toward her, all of his training and every order he had ever been given simply vanished from his mind.

His body stretched farther than any Xandarian's could have. His arm shot across the platform, wrapped around the girl's waist, and pulled her out of the way.

The impact shook the entire platform.

When the dust settled, the girl was safe in Revan's arms, crying into his shoulder, and every worker within fifty metres was staring at the green skin beginning to show where Telo Brask's face had slipped.

"Skrull," someone whispered.

Then someone else shouted it, and suddenly everyone was shouting.

Revan set the girl down carefully. Her father came running and snatched her away from him, backing away with his daughter clutched against his chest as he stared at Revan in horror. Security officers were already pushing through the crowd with their weapons raised.

Revan did not run.

He stood there with his true face showing and his hands slightly raised, and to his own surprise, he found that he did not regret what he had done at all.

Then a green light came down from the sky.

Revan stared at it.

What was this? Some kind of hallucination?

The light stopped in front of him, and he realized that it was a ring.

"Revan of Sector 616," it said. "You have the ability to overcome great fear. Welcome to the Green Lantern Corps."

=========

The Badoon had brought Carina to the mining world nine years ago, and she had spent every day since then underground.

She was Kylorian, and like all her people, she had pink skin and dark eyes, though the skin of her hands had long ago turned grey with dust from the mines. The Badoon had taken her from her home along with four hundred others when she was still young, and of those four hundred, fewer than eighty were still alive. The rest had died in the tunnels from collapses, exhaustion, sickness, or beneath the whips of the guards.

Three years ago, word had begun to reach the mines that the Badoon had lost a nearby system to an empire crusading against slavery. The guards had grown harsher since then, and more afraid, and many of the slaves had begun to whisper that it was only a matter of time before the Badoon killed them all rather than let them be freed.

Carina had decided that she would not wait to find out.

It had taken her eight months to plan the escape. She had mapped the old tunnels nobody used anymore, learned the patrol rotations of the guards, and found the one shaft that led to the surface within reach of the transport pads. She had shared the plan with the others one at a time, and only with those she trusted completely.

Tonight, they had decided to do it.

Now she stood at the bottom of the old shaft and watched them climb.

They went up the rusted ladder one after another, children first, then the old and the sick, and Carina counted every one of them as they passed her. At the top, the strongest of the others were already waiting to haul them out into the open air.

It was going well, better than she had dared to hope.

Then she heard the sound she had been dreading: the heavy tread of Badoon boots coming down the tunnel behind her, accompanied by voices shouting in their harsh language.

There were still eleven people on the ladder.

"Keep climbing," she called up. "Don't stop. Whatever you hear, don't stop."

Someone at the top shouted her name. She did not answer. Instead, she turned back toward the tunnel, picked up a broken length of support beam from the floor, and walked toward the sound of the approaching boots.

There were six of them.

She struck the first guard across the face with the beam hard enough to knock him into the wall, then managed to wound the second before the others reached her. They dragged her to the ground, and the blows came down one after another until she could no longer count them. She heard them shouting about the shaft, and when one of them started toward it, she grabbed his ankle with the last of her strength and held on until another guard kicked her loose.

By then, the ladder was empty.

She lay on her side in the dirt with blood in her mouth and thought that it had been worth it.

The tunnel filled with green light.

The Badoon backed away from her and raised their weapons toward the shaft, where something small and bright was descending. It stopped in the air beside Carina's face.

"Carina of Sector 616," it said. "You have the ability to overcome great fear. Welcome to the Green Lantern Corps."

She did not understand what it was. She only understood that it had come for her, and she reached out a shaking, bloody hand toward it.

The ring slid onto her finger, and the pain in her body vanished beneath a rush of strength she had not felt in nine years.

Carina rose to her feet.

The Badoon opened fire, and a wall of green light appeared before her and swallowed every shot. She did not know how she had made it, only that she had wanted it there.

She thought of the chains they had kept her in, and green chains wrapped around all six guards at once and slammed them against the tunnel wall, where they hung struggling and roaring. She thought of the whips, and she thought of the people she had buried, and for a moment, she wanted to do something far worse to them than that.

She did not.

She left them where they were and walked to the bottom of the shaft. Then the strength drained out of her all at once, and her legs gave way.

The last thing she knew before the darkness took her was the green light gathering gently around her body and lifting her away.

========

Planet X was quiet, as it usually was.

The flora colossi of the world moved slowly through their great forests, as they had for longer than any of them could remember. On this particular afternoon, one young colossus sat in a clearing and watched a flower grow, which he had been doing for nine days. He was perhaps thirty metres tall, and he had recently become quite attached to the flower. It had opened a single petal that morning, and he was looking forward to the second.

He did not notice the green light approaching through the sky until it stopped directly in front of his face.

He looked at it, and it looked back at him.

"I am Groot?" he said.

The ring scanned him. "Translation matrix engaged. Translation: 'Hello, small glowing thing. Are you some kind of seed?'"

The colossus blinked slowly. Nobody from off-world had ever understood him before.

"I am Groot," he said.

"Translation: 'You understood me. No offworlder understands me. This is very exciting.'" The ring paused. "Bearer designation confirmed: Groot."

"I am Groot," the colossus said, a little more firmly.

"Translation: 'No, that is not what I am called.'"

Three other colossi had wandered into the clearing to see what was happening. The first of them leaned down to examine the ring more closely.

"I am Groot," it said thoughtfully.

"Translation: 'It appears to be a manufactured object of considerable power, though one must ask whether an object can truly be said to choose anyone, or whether choice itself is merely the story we tell ourselves when the wind carries a seed to soil that happens to be...'" The ring stopped. "Translation truncated for length."

"I am Groot," said the second colossus, who sounded alarmed.

"Translation: 'Is it going to eat the flower?'"

"I am Groot," said the third, who sounded as though he were offering a formal objection.

"Translation: 'I object to the suggestion that fear can be overcome. Fear can only be understood, and then one moves on with one's day.'"

The young colossus waved a hand at all three of them.

"I am Groot!"

"Translation: 'Everyone, please, this is my moment.'"

That seemed to settle the matter, because the other three stepped back.

"Umm... Groot of Sector 616," the ring announced. "You have the ability to overcome great fear. Welcome to the Green Lantern Corps."

"I am Groot," he said doubtfully.

"Translation: 'I do not think this is going to fit.'"

The ring did not try to fit.

It flew straight toward the colossus and touched the bark at the centre of his chest, where it sank into him like a seed pressed into soil. For a moment, nothing happened. Then green light spread outward from the place where it had disappeared and ran through the grain of his wood like sap rising in spring, along his arms, down his legs, and up into the branches of his crown until his entire body glowed.

When the brightest light faded, the symbol of the Green Lantern Corps remained on his chest, shining emerald and set into the bark.

The young colossus looked down at it and touched it gently with one enormous finger.

"I am Groot," he whispered.

"Translation: 'Oh. Oh, that is beautiful.'"

"I AM GROOT!" he shouted down at them as he began to fly.

"Translation: 'WATER MY FLOWER WHILE I AM GONE!'"

The three remaining colossi stood in silence and stared up at the empty sky for a very long time.

"I am Groot," the first one said eventually.

The other two nodded slowly in agreement.

=========

"Holy shit," Max said. "Is that Groot?"

He was sitting in one of the upper chambers of the sky palace with his boots up on a table, and he leaned forward so quickly that he nearly knocked over his drink. On the wide screen across the room, the first wave of recruits was arriving at the Academy.

Emerald streaks descended through the Academy's atmosphere one after another, where instructors waited to greet them. Most of the new arrivals stood blinking at their surroundings in confusion.

"So it would seem. A flora colossus," Jade said.

Max laughed out loud and sat back in his chair. "I know who my next Alpha Lantern is going to be."

Jade did not answer. She was silent for a while.

"Jade? What's wrong? Is there a problem with the recruits?" Max glanced back at the screen, where the Kree and the Skrull were now standing several metres apart and pointedly ignoring one another. "Don't tell me the Kree and the Skrulls are fighting already. They've barely been here five minutes."

"No, Max. It isn't the recruits." Jade paused again. "I believe I have found a society influenced by Parallax."

Max went very still. "What?"

"It is embarrassing, Max," Jade said, and for once she sounded almost flustered. "Parallax did not even attempt to hide it. I have only just finished updating my records on Sector 616 now that the cordon has been lifted, and I should have seen it immediately, but the data was so incomplete that I..."

"Jade. Jade, stop rambling." Max was already on his feet. "Where is it? What is it?"

Jade did not answer him. Instead, the image of the Academy disappeared from the screen, and a flag took its place.

Max recognized its shape at once. He had seen that flag flying over warships and palaces long ago, and he remembered that it had once been gold and red.

It was not gold and red anymore.

Its colours had been changed to yellow and black, and at its centre, where the old imperial crest had once been, there was now a symbol that looked disturbingly similar to his own Lantern emblem.

"Oh, fuck," Max said quietly.

"The Shi'ar," Jade said. "That would explain why they have grown so rapidly over the last four centuries. I have finished comparing the old survey data with what the Puffs have gathered since you lifted the cordon. The Shi'ar Empire is ten times larger than it was when you last stood within its borders, Max, and it is still expanding. The data suggests..."

"Odin mentioned that the Shi'ar had changed," Max muttered. He was staring at the yellow symbol and barely heard her. "He said they'd gotten bigger and more aggressive, and I didn't think anything of it. I thought it was just the Shi'ar being the Shi'ar."

He looked away from the screen. "Who rules it now? Is it Xaria? Has Parallax got his claws into her?"

A worse thought occurred to him.

"Fuck. Has he made his own Corps? Did he figure it out?"

"Majestrix Xaria is dead," Jade said. "I have not yet determined how or when. I have the Puffs gathering more information as we speak, but I can tell you that the current ruler of the Shi'ar Empire is Majestor M'Turon." Jade paused. "I should have more data for you soon."

"No need," Max said. "I'll go there myself."

"Max..."

"I want you to focus on the recruits. Make sure they're comfortable and settled in." He walked toward the open balcony at the far end of the chamber. "And tell the Puffs to meet me near Myloth. I'll want everything they've found by the time I get there."

"I will," Jade said. "Be careful, Max."

"I'm always careful."

Max stepped out onto the balcony and rose into the sky. Emerald light gathered around him as he climbed, and Oa fell away beneath him, then its moons, and then the entire Oan system, until the stars stretched into lines.

.

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Next chapter Max meets an old friend/foe