"I hear them. I hear them all. They need us. Now like never before.

I hear the screams of Chaos. Their perverse glee in aimless ruin echoes throughout the stars. They bring destruction without understanding what they destroy. I have seen the eight-pointed star plastered on the corpses of good men who died horrible deaths. It must end.

I hear the grunts and snarls of savage brutes. Orks, too busy pillaging and slaughtering to realize they have no reason to. Mere weapons without proper soldiers to wield them, they run loose like mad dogs. Like all rabid beasts, they must be put down.

I see the folly of the Eldar. They have suffered to the point of near extinction, yet they refuse to learn. Their arrogance plunged a galaxy into darkness and now they stumble blindly, pretending to see. They are broken and beaten, and now they lack the both the will and the strength to set things right. I think we must do it for them.

They are hardly any better from their cousins. Liars, thieves, pirates, and murderers, they think they are safe, indulging in the very decadence that brought their species to its knees, they think nothing can touch them. We will show them just how wrong they are.

I can smell their hunger from here. With teeth and pincers and acid and venom they chew their way through the stars. Disgusting, revolting things, they are gluttony given form, an infestation of hunger. They will be exterminated.

Cold, mechanical, and long-ago dead, they are mere shadows of a foolish choice made by weak-minded idiots. Millions of years later, and the galaxy must still suffer for their avarice. Though formidable, I know they can be stopped. But only by our hands.

They're not bad people. In fact, they're the closest thing to good in the entire galaxy. But that doesn't make them good. It doesn't make them any less hypocritical or their words of the 'Greater Good' any less empty. It doesn't make them any less tyrannical in their own right. They will not stand in our way.

Lastly, there are the humans. The Imperium of Man. Oh, how the mighty have fallen! They cower and shrivel behind monstrous walls of flesh and steel. They were once so much more. Once, they were curious and adventurous, brave and bold! Yes, they were no strangers to hate, but they were no strangers to love either. Now they scurry like rats, trapped in their own cities, living off the scraps that fall from the High Lords. The humans I knew would have been outraged at the state of their people, enraged at the fists of steel which bind their entire race, always around their throats.

Those humans were heroes. But there are no heroes in the 41st millennium.

How can there be? On some grand level, the people of this millennium have simply given up. They've already surrendered to the grim darkness of a fate they think they cannot escape. But I know differently. I know they can win. They just need to be shown how.

They just need to be shown the light."

There was quiet. No one dared to breathe. Finally the little blue man spoke.

"Thank you. Your report has confirmed what we already know."

He looked at his compatriots, who all nodded in agreement. He continued.

"This council of Guardians has decided to put the question to you all." At this he turned around and faced the assembled crowd. "Will you march to war?"

More silence.

Somehow, they all knew what was going to happen. They just wanted to see how.

A voice came, not from one of them, but from all of them. Was it a psychic? Perhaps the Guardians compelled them to do it. Or perhaps their rings were making their voices known.

In Brightest Day,

In another part of the universe, a Farseer stopped. He could sense it. Like the first breeze of an incoming typhoon, he could sense it.

In Blackest Night,

On some planet, where the sun never shined, and the voices of the damned took up more space than the oxygen in the atmosphere, the Inquisitor felt it. Like the last flares of a dying star, he felt it.

No evil shall escape my sight.

Somewhere, within the Eye of Terror itself, where the whirling thunder and lightning of the Warp Storms towered over the planets themselves, they felt it. All of them felt it.

Beware my power-

On holy Terra itself, deep within the Imperial Palace, where sat the corpse of the God-Emperor, one would never have noticed it even if one had been standing right in front of the Golden Throne. But if you could have gotten really close, so close that you wouldn't have dared to breathe for fear of disintegrating what was left of the His body, you might have felt it: the tiniest intake of breath, a miniscule gasp. And you would've known. He'd felt it.

GREEN LANTERN'S LIGHT!

And all throughout Oa, it could be felt, like the rumbling of an Earthquake. Only it felt as if the very fabric of reality was shaking, as if the energies being released were too much for this dimension to handle.

Slowly, it calmed down, but the light would not fade, instead it settled into the rings. Thousands of them. All of their bearers were listening. They knew what this meant. The Corps was going to war.

The Guardians all looked at one Lantern in particular, the one who stood in the middle of the council chamber. He had been silent in all of this. He felt as if the words of his fellow Lanterns had all been meant for him, as if the will of the universe was giving him its vote of confidence. All of the Lanterns were focused on him as they hovered around the Guardians of the Universe. At last the same Guardian spoke up.

"Now we must ask you the same question. Are you ready?"

The Lantern looked at his superior with shining blue eyes, too intense to even be human. Not surprising really. He had never been human, although for centuries everyone looked to him as the paragon of his adopted homeworld. The Guardian continued.

"Will you lead the charge, Kal-El?"

Clark stood there for a moment, his ring glowing bright as his willpower only increased. Upon his chest was a symbol similar to the one he had worn all those millennia ago, only now instead of the familiar red letter, there was the symbol of the Green Lantern Corps. He thought of all that suffering, all those people forced to live under the heel of an undead tyrant. He thought of all their pain, all their anguish. Even here on Oa, he could still hear them.

"Yes."