Location: Unknown
Timestamp: Concurrent
In the beginning there was light.
Not metaphorically, not poetically, literally, in the most precise physical sense of the word, the Emotional Spectrum began as light, as the fundamental radiative energy produced by the first sentient minds in the first universe to produce them, billions of years before the concept of a universe had been named by anything capable of naming things.
Will.
Fear.
Hope.
Rage.
Compassion.
Love.
Avarice.
Seven frequencies.
Seven colors.
Seven expressions of the interior life of all conscious beings, each one as real and as measurable as any other form of electromagnetic radiation, each one capable of being gathered, focused, and directed by the right kind of mind through the right kind of instrument.
The Guardians of the Universe discovered this approximately three and a half billion years ago.
They had looked at the Emotional Spectrum and understood immediately what it represented, not just a power source, not just a military application, but the fundamental architecture of consciousness itself.
The proof that what beings felt was as real as what they could touch.
That emotion was not a secondary phenomenon generated by biology but a primary force woven into the fabric of existence at a level below matter and energy.
They built the Central Batteries to contain and focus each frequency.
They built the rings to distribute that focus to bearers capable of wielding it.
They built the Corps to organize the bearers and give the Spectrum a structure that could persist across the inevitable chaos of a universe that did not particularly care about anyone’s plans for it.
And for billions of years the system worked.
Imperfectly.
Violently.
With the messiness of any institution built by beings who were intelligent enough to know what they were doing and fallible enough to keep doing it wrong anyway.
But it worked.
The Green Lantern Corps held sectors of space.
The other Corps did what their colors demanded of them.
The Spectrum pulsed through the universe the way blood pulsed through a body, constant and necessary and mostly invisible to the beings whose existence depended on it.
None of this had anything to do with the Marvel universe.
The two realities existed in parallel, separated by the kind of dimensional boundary that required something of genuinely catastrophic power to breach, the kind of power that came along once in a geological epoch if it came along at all.
The boundary between them was not a wall exactly, more a condition, the natural consequence of two universes having developed their own distinct physical laws and having no particular reason to intersect.
The Tesseract changed that.
The Space Stone, to use its more precise designation, was not a power source in any conventional sense.
It was a key.
Specifically, it was a key to the fundamental architecture of space itself, not just the space between two points in the same universe but the space between dimension, the dimensional fabric that the boundary between realities was made of.
In the hands of someone who knew what they were doing it was a surgical instrument of extraordinary precision.
In the hands of Loki, who was using it to punch a hole in the sky above a skyscraper in Midtown Manhattan while an alien army poured through it, it was something considerably less precise than that.
The overflow energy from the portal went somewhere.
It always went somewhere.
Energy didn’t disappear, it redistributed, and the redistribution of Tesseract energy operating at that scale and that frequency was an event that propagated outward from the point of discharge across every adjacent dimensional layer simultaneously, the way a stone dropped in water sent ripples in every direction regardless of where you wanted them to go.
It hit the boundary between universes, the source wall that kept everything apart.
And the boundary, which had held for the entirety of recorded existence in both realities, was not designed for this.
Not because it was weak.
Because nothing that had ever existed in one universe had previously generated the specific frequency of the Space Stone operating at portal-scale discharge, and the boundary had never needed to account for it.
It held for approximately four seconds.
Then it didn’t.
The breach was not large by cosmic standards.
Not large by any standards that would have been legible to a human observer.
It was a dimensional fracture of the kind that closed itself within moments, the universal boundary reasserting its integrity the way a cut closed over time, the two realities separating again with the finality of physics restoring equilibrium.
But four seconds was enough.
The shockwave that passed through the breach propagated across the dimensional boundary and into the DC universe like a stone thrown through a pane of glass, not destroying what it hit but displacing it, creating a pressure differential between two realities that had never been intended to interact.
And energy, as it always did, flowed from where there was more of it to where there was less.
The Marvel universe had no Emotional Spectrum.
It had emotion, billions of years worth of it, the accumulated interior life of every sentient being that had ever existed within its boundaries, but it had no framework for that emotion as a physical force, no infrastructure, no conduit, no organized architecture through which willpower and fear and hope and rage and compassion and love and avarice could be gathered and focused and directed.
It was, from the Spectrum’s perspective, an enormous vacuum.
A space of almost incomprehensible size that had been generating emotional energy since the first conscious mind flickered into existence within it and had never once had anywhere for that energy to go.
The Tesseract’s breach was four seconds wide.
Four seconds is nothing.
Four seconds is the time it takes to draw a breath, to register a sound, to turn toward a noise in the dark.
In cosmic terms four seconds is not even a rounding error.
It was enough.
The Emotional Spectrum poured through the gap the way air poured through a puncture, the way water found the lowest available point, with the absolute, physics-mandated certainty of energy moving from high concentration to low.
Not all of it.
Not even a significant fraction of the total that existed in its native universe.
Just the leading edge, the outermost layer of the Spectrum’s reach, the portion that happened to be closest to the dimensional boundary at the moment the breach opened.
And with it, dragged along in the current the way objects were dragged along by a tide that had no interest in them specifically, came the Central Batteries.
All seven.
Oa, green and ancient and vast, containing more concentrated willpower than any other object in its native universe.
Zamaron, violet and crystalline, built from the compressed love of a civilization that had organized its entire existence around that single frequency.
Odym, blue and quiet, radiating hope in a steady pulse that had never once faltered in the dozens of years since the first Blue Lantern drew breath.
Qward, yellow and corrosive, the distilled fear of every being that had ever understood what it meant to be afraid.
Okaara, orange and hungry, so dense with avarice that the space around it bent slightly.
Nok, indigo and ancient in a different way from Oa, older in its compassion than the Guardians were in their wisdom.
Ysmault, red and furious, the rage of beings who had been wronged so completely that the wound had never closed.
Seven points of light, each one the anchor of a Corps, each one the fixed point around which an entire system of power and law and tradition had organized itself for billions of years, ripped from their coordinates and pulled through a four second gap in the fabric of reality by the blind, indifferent physics of a pressure differential.
They did not arrive anywhere in particular.
The Marvel universe had no places prepared for them, no coordinates that corresponded to their former positions, no framework that recognized what they were or understood where they belonged.
They entered the new universe already drifting, already disconnected from the architecture that had given them purpose, and continued drifting outward into the vast dark of a cosmos that had no filing system for them.
With them came the rings.
Not all of the rings.
The ones that had been in active use remained with their bearers in the native universe, anchored by the living connection between ring and wearer that the dimensional displacement couldn’t sever cleanly.
But the rings produced by the batteries, the ones currently in flight between a battery and a bearer, the ones seeking new hosts, the ones that had been hanging in the space between assignment and arrival at the moment the breach opened, those came through.
Seven of them.
Each one a different color.
Each one carrying a fragment of its battery’s charge, enough to function, enough to seek, enough to do what rings were designed to do when they found themselves without a bearer in an unfamiliar sector of space.
They scattered across the Marvel universe like seeds thrown into wind, each one beginning the slow, patient work of learning the emotional geography of a reality that had never produced a Lantern and had no idea one was coming.
Most of them went deep into space, drawn toward the concentrations of emotion that the universe’s most intense and ancient civilizations produced, the Kree and the Skrull and the Shi’ar and the dozens of other spacefaring species that had been generating willpower and fear and hope and rage in industrial quantities for longer than humanity had been walking upright.
They would find bearers eventually.
The universe was large and the search would take time, but the rings were patient in the way that objects without consciousness were patient, absolutely and without limit.
One of them fell toward Earth.
The green one.
It fell not because Earth was the most obvious destination, not because humanity represented the greatest concentration of willpower in the Marvel universe, not because any calculation of pure power output would have pointed toward a small blue planet in an unremarkable solar system on the edge of an unremarkable galaxy.
It fell toward Earth because of one specific human being whose willpower the ring had identified in the first seconds after crossing the dimensional boundary, whose particular configuration of controlled, directed, purposeful will under the worst possible circumstances registered on the ring’s seeking protocols like a beacon in the dark.
The ring had found its bearer.
It fell through the sky above Midtown Manhattan trailing green light that nobody on the ground was looking at, because a parking structure had just collapsed, and there were considerably more immediate things demanding attention.