The Legends of Forever by Barry Lyga (books to read for beginners .txt) 📕

the enormous black void within the Time Trapper’s hood stared down at them.

50

The Iron Curtain of time still stands. And from this side, you cannot breach it.

“Once this Multiverse contracts to a single point, I will use Vibe’s power to peer into the other timeline. Then I will use the superspeed energy collected by my temporal battery to hurl that primal atom into a breach.”

“What? Why would you do any of that?” Barry had recovered before the others, his superfast metabolism allowing him to rebound from the shock of slamming into the Iron Curtain of Time.

The Time Trapper peered down at him. “Why, to invade that timeline, of course. It has been weakened by its own Crisis, its foundations soft and malleable. The primal atom I fling at it will cause an explosion of universal proportions that will eradicate most of that timeline’s Multiverse. The remains . . . I will rule over the remains. This timeline—this Multiverse—will be no more, its existence having served merely to create a weapon for me to exploit. The other timeline will be mine. . . And I will then be King of All Reality. This timeline, this Multiverse, serves only as my weapon. Its inevitable death powers my path to the other Multiverse.”

“Man, and I thought I was ambitious for wanting to win the Ivy University Science Department Challenge,” Ray muttered, shaking his head to clear it.

“And the best part, Flash? The best part is that you and your friends brought my victory to me. Here, where everyone and everything has died, where gravity captures matter. Everything collapses. Into the palm of my hand. And then a new Multiverse, a new reality, a new timeline for my own amusement.”

“Great,” Cisco complained. “That other Barry Allen screws up the timeline and we have to fix it.”

Barry grabbed Cisco and whisked him over to Mick. “Cisco is the most important person here right now, Mick. The Trapper can’t execute his plan without him. You’re the powerhouse—get him as far away as you can and keep him safe.”

Mouth open to protest, Cisco only had the chance to say, “Heeeyyyyyy!” as Heat Wave wrapped him in a green bubble and took off into space with him.

The Time Trapper turned as the green blur painted its way across the black sky. Barry gave Oliver a nod, and Green Arrow launched a series of explosive arrows directly into the Trapper’s hood. Just enough to distract him for a split second.

“You wage war to no purpose. My victory is proven. The collapse of the universe is proof of it. Entropy wins.”

And then he turned away from them, growing and reaching out into the depths of space for Cisco and Mick.

“It’s now or never,” Oliver said. His quiver was empty, but you wouldn’t know he was weaponless to look at him. He was still the steady, resolute warrior he’d been since his days on the island Lian Yu. “We need to get to the Time Sphere and get out of here, with Cisco. That’s the endgame.”

“You heard the Trapper—we can’t get through the Iron Curtain of Time.” Sara coiled up her glowing rope with but a thought, the thing slithering into her grasp and neatly wrapping itself in a circle. She looked around. They were all exhausted, wounded, depleted. Retreat was the only option—and a winning one, as a bonus—but it was also impossible.

And the Time Trapper, inexhaustible, could keep throwing enemies at them, wearing them down, until it was all over.

Which would be soon, no doubt.

Wally turned to Barry. “Do you feel it?” Wally’s voice trembled, but there was a deep confidence in it. “There’s something out there. Something for us.”

Barry knew immediately what he meant. That sensation he’d felt ever since they’d arrived at the End of All Time. He’d ignored it in favor of the immediate problem at hand. And because he’d thought he was about to confront Thawne again. He’d allowed his own thirst for vengeance to cloud his judgment. What a fool. In such a hurry. Always in such a hurry.

Now he did what Madame Xanadu had advised him to do long ago, the day he’d met her at the Central City Pier: Slow down.

He relaxed. Despite the certainty that the Time Trapper would return his attention to him at any moment, Barry settled in and focused on his breathing. Meditation had never been his strong suit, but he’d always been good at concentrating. He did it now, focusing on his breath, then reaching out. Feeling . . .

The Speed Force. The ever-present, extradimensional source of his powers. HyperHeaven, Johnny Quick had called it.

And something else. Something similar . . .

“I can feel it,” he murmured.

“What is it?” Wally asked. He, too, was in a near trance, seduced into the sensation. “It feels like . . . me. Like running. This sounds crazy, doesn’t it?”

But then Barry realized. He understood what it was.

It was the vibrational energy from the Earth 27 speedsters. He could still feel it, billions of years in the future. It was not gone. It was part of the fabric of reality now.

“It’s . . . it’s bigger than the Speed Force,” he said softly. “It’s had billions of years to grow. We planted an acorn in the twenty-first century, and now it’s a forest of oaks.”

And there was something within that speed energy. An encoded message, pulsing with vibrational tones stretching across all of reality, permeating the fabric of the Multiverse. And only a speedster could read it.

“This was the weapon,” Barry said, his eyes opening. “Madame Xanadu and Owlman planned it this way. We were just a conduit, to get through the Iron Curtain of Time. The vibrational energy was supposed to rip the Time Trapper apart. But something went wrong.”

“No one could accurately calculate the impact of billions of years passing as the energy traveled,” Superman said, limping over to him. “So the impact was lessened, even though the power grew.”

Barry understood. “What was supposed to be a blast from a water cannon became a river instead. All the water