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

The cables connected to his costume would allow him to translate his speed energy to the Time Sphere, hauling it through the time stream with him as he ran. He’d designed it so that when they intersected with their own present, the Time Sphere would drop out of the temporal zone and back into reality.

It should work.

It had to work.

Behind him, standing just inside the Time Sphere, Oliver put a hand on his shoulder and gazed at him with great emotion.

“I know, I know,” said Barry with a forced smile. “‘Run, Barry, run.’”

“No. Just . . . Godspeed, Barry Allen.” Oliver paused. “And . . . we’ll never forget you.”

Barry whispered, “3X2(9YZ)4A.” It was the only thing left to say.

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He ran, vibrating his body as he did so. There was still a chance—a good chance, honestly—they were wrong about all of this. It was all theory, none of it proven. For all they knew, this was a Big Crunch, not a Big Bounce, and he was running to a place and a time that simply did not exist. In which case no one could say what would happen.

The Time Trapper’s hand came down, hard. But it didn’t matter. Not any longer. They were already fading seconds into the future. The last thing Barry saw at the End of All Time was the circuitry he’d laid out flaring to life as the Iron Curtain of Time solidified.

A series of bright white bursts of light erupted all throughout the void. The activated circuitry had also reversed the Trapper’s latest breaches, sending the super villains back to their native time periods. Barry wondered if they would just imagine this whole episode had been a bad dream.

It’s done. We did it. The Time Trapper is penned in. We stopped him.

Now the question is just whether or not we live to tell anyone.

Barry ran, his legs pumping. He felt the Speed Force. He felt Wally lending him speed along the cable connection. He felt the vibrational energy from the Earth 27 speedsters, that ripple that had grown over the eons into a tidal wave. It all propelled him forward.

Forward. Reality was blueshifting as he ran, condensing down. The distance between stars became measurable in miles, then in yards, then in feet, then inches . . .

And then the whole of reality—the entirety of fifty-four universes—compressed down to atomic size. A single, primal atom, lost amid an infinity of absolute nothing.

And still Barry ran. There was no light—photons did not exist—and nothing to run on, nothing to push against. Somehow, though, he did it. Somehow, he kept running. Converted to math, to numbers, to pure information, as he’d surmised. Shielded by the mad science of the Speed Force. He’d been bending the laws of physics for years—now he utterly smashed them to bits and trampled on the bits.

And ran.

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And kept running. No Landmarks. Nothing to judge his progress against. It felt like running in place, only there was no place because there was nothing. There was an eternity of empty.

Still, he ran. Faster than he’d ever run before.

And then

And then

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Light!

No sound. There was not yet anything remotely like an atmosphere to carry sound, so the Big Bang happened in absolute silence. Barry whispered a “Yes!” to himself as the Multiverse erupted into existence all around him, universes spinning out of one another.

He was running in the so-called Planck era, the earliest time in all of reality, the first 10-43 seconds in the universe, a time so small and so quick that even he could barely perceive it.

And then: cosmic inflation! The creation of the quark-gluon plasma, a “soup” made of the particles that would give rise to neutrons and protons, the very foundation of all matter and energy.

Barry kept running. He had to outrun the universe itself, the rapidly expanding, redshifting plasma flung out from the center of reality. The Time Sphere could withstand the rigors of time travel, but not the incredible heat birth of the universe.

He ran thousands of years in the blink of an eye. The universe cooled around him. Atoms coalesced; nuclei formed. Electrons whirred and spun. Reality was coming into view.

He dared not peer over his shoulder to check on his friends. He could feel the mass of the Time Sphere tugging at him, but he had no way of knowing if they were okay. Turning to look would slow him down, and he could not slow down. Not one instant.

He ran, each stride a millennium, pulling the Earth 27–generated wave with him, hyper-accelerating beyond his own top speeds.

The heat enveloped him. He outran it, but he felt it tugging at him nonetheless, wicking along his costume. The Flash uniform was designed to handle the heat of superspeed, but this was beyond superspeed. Pieces of the uniform smoldered, caught fire, peeled off, and drifted into the incipient vacuum of aborning space.

Stay strong, Barry. Don’t stop. You can’t stop!

You can do this. You have to do this! This is what you were born to do. To save them all. To make the world safe for the ones you love.

Thousands more years. Hundreds of thousands. Millions.

Tears collected in his eyes, then whipped away into the Speed Force. He would never see them again. He would never hold Iris again. Never feel Joe’s arm around his shoulders.

It’s OK, though. It’s OK. The world—the Multiverse—is safe. Two timelines, protected. That’s what matters. You set it right.

Lights flickered around him. The universe, coming into being as he ran, solidifying around him. He wavered in and out of the Speed Force, stumbling occasionally. His vibrational pattern locked in on home and guided him there, pulling him along even as his strength flagged.

Almost there. I can feel it. Almost there.

His body was on fire from within. He could feel his muscles dissolving, using up their lactic acid, feeding on themselves. He’d run billions of years, passed through the fire of Creation itself.

You couldn’t do such things without consequences.

Something hovered into view before him. Walls faded into existence. It