He did not even need to draw on a star outside himself, or a trace of its light and heat.
The universe he carried within him was an inexhaustible perpetual-motion machine.
"Time to go back."
Lynn raised his arm and curled his fingers around empty air.
The miniature universe inside him suddenly contracted, becoming an arcane halo of law once more before sinking into the core of his Godhead.
But just as he was about to tear open space and return to Earth's reality,
a piercing, rigid sense of being watched broke through the membrane of the Multiverse from a void Dimension upstream of the timeline.
Lynn stopped in midair.
He raised an eyebrow and slowly rested his right hand on the hilt of the surgical knife at his waist.
That gaze... belonged to no god of any known Dimension.
It felt more like someone had shoved a red-hot iron ball into an enormous, antiquated bureaucratic machine.
At the End of Time lay the Void Realm.
It was a bizarre space between all physical universes and the River of Time.
There was no cycle of sun and moon, no ebb and flow of gravity.
As far as the eye could see stood vast complexes of buildings steeped in the retro-industrial style of the mid-twentieth century.
Gray-brown terrazzo floors, flickering yellow fluorescent tubes, and neat stacks of tan archival boxes.
And tens of thousands of blank-faced Time Guards in khaki uniforms.
The Time Variance Authority (TVA).
Here, the Infinity Stones, which could destroy galaxies in reality, were tossed into desk drawers and used as paperweights.
And great heroes capable of changing the course of civilizations were nothing more than strings of code on file folders, ready to be erased at any moment.
Everything ran according to the script He Who Remains