A few weeks later.
Bruce had about two weeks of traveling through the galaxies before returning to planet Earth for some business, so he took this as one of his vacations, where he would collect lost technology from lost civilizations, relics, precious stones, gold, and anything else he could find that had no owner because they had died long ago.
Traveling through forgotten galactic zones, unknown even to the Green Lanterns , he was lost.
His name on some planets and dimensions was Tsuki; in galaxies outside planet Earth, among close friends, he had this nickname. He used names, pseudonyms, and other identities. He began hitchhiking with some of his allies and friends as he traveled through the galaxies.
He asked his engineers, in turn, to build a spaceship, even though this meant they were all involved in teleportation.
Bruce learned this when he began to hear the echo of the dead worlds, in addition to seeing all of this amidst his ships. He found a way to say that it wasn't looting, taking what is unnecessary for a fallen civilization, that's not pillaging. Others will need it, but more than zombies and dead worlds.
Even though each dream the Dragon sent him was a fragment of a lost era, he carried on with a warning, he carried on with a story.
When Bruce traveled through the ruins of time, he collected lost objects and technologies from ghost planets, undone cities, and kingdoms that burned like memories.
Bruce, for his part, had a mental map within him from absorbing the books of the ages, the library of the end, before returning back in time.
Following each of them, something was repeated, always accompanied by glory, arrogance, and forgetfulness.
Bruce was heading towards a Kingdom of Nareth , the Crystal World.
This was the era of Nareth , made of music and light, where its glass towers vibrated like harps when the wind blew.
The magicians there believed they could extract pure sound from the cosmos; in their libraries, they had many lost books, probably never read, not all of them, while he was placing them in his ship.
When they extracted it, he saw the story ?
But the sound turned into a scream.
He had a few hours, according to his calculations, to collect the money and then leave.
No sooner said than done.
When the final note was played, the planet shattered; it was far away, of course, with such a perfect symphony that it destroyed matter itself.
Sailing his spaceship to another planet in that solar system, he exited the ship upon landing, and Bruce now walks through the ruins, hearing echoes that never cease.
The Dragon warns him:
"There's too much music in pride."
Kael-Tir , the Kingdom of the Three Moons
Beautiful relics, technologies, everything from a kingdom reminiscent of ancient Greece ; he collected some items and placed them on his ship.
It was an empire of poets and oracles, even so, where the three moons dictated destiny, even if one astronomer dared to alter them, then, he pushed an orbit, rewrote the sky.
For a thousand years, the Kaelians lived in eternal light.
On the thousand and first day, the fire fell.
Then the moons collided.
The ocean rose.
Poetry has become silence.
Meanwhile, Bruce found the libraries petrified.
The pages, still vibrating, whispered verses:
Books that sing and tell stories.
"Eternity cannot bear to be touched."
It wasn't long after leaving the planet in his spaceship, traveling among the stars.
Altherion , the World of the Sleeping Gods
A planet covered in temples, one for each sleeping deity, even though the faith of men has been replaced by machines that promise salvation without sacrifice.
The gods, forgotten, rotted in a dream , but when they awoke, famished, they devoured the very sky.
While looking through the ruins, collecting objects.
Bruce read in the ruins:
The gods destroyed those civilizations.
"Faith that is not nurtured turns against man."
Moving on to other worlds, they had relics that he had collected.
Sirath , the World of Immortal Shadows
In Sirath, nothing ever truly died .
The inhabitants discovered the secret of immortality.
But the price was high — the soul was falling apart.
They lived forever, but without memory, without emotion.
Empty houses, hollow stares.
Petrified zombies, another wandering aimlessly, rolling remains, strange creatures, like legs, walking trunks.
Bruce spent a hundred days there, preparing his food, watching lifeless zombies wandering through those ruins. Everything was falling apart; every now and then ruins would collapse on some unsuspecting person. They didn't even flinch, but their remains continued to move, trunks walking, heads rolling.
Nobody saw him.
Nobody listened to him.
Just bodies walking, without a destination.
They didn't care, if they were conscious, but apparently, they didn't discover immortality, but death in life. Looking around, he picked up some objects, technologies that would no longer be used; he saw bodies floating far from the system, from gravity, in space, eyes and mouths flying.
"There is no worse hell than living without time."
He was walking around there when he got back into the ship and got out before he became part of those creatures.
Ilarion , the Kingdom of the Eternal Waters
An endless ocean, covered in floating islands.
The Illarians mastered the climate and the tidal cycle.
But his arrogance drained the strength of the waters.
When the final vortex closed, the planet dried up like a desert.
Bruce found the last submerged temple.
The walls chanted a mantra:
"Everything that flows must also depart."
Orthea , the Kingdom of the Two Suns
Two suns illuminated that world,
and two species were fighting for the same paradise.
For millennia they waged war, believing that victory would bring balance.
But when one won, the planet tilted.
The heat melted the north, the ice swallowed the south.
The balance lay in the opposites.
And they destroyed it.
Vahran , the World of the Infinite Library
Bruce found this world in the midst of a void.
It was simply a city—an infinite one—made of books.
Each soul, upon dying, was written.
But nobody read it.
The accumulated knowledge grew so much that it became a mass of knowledge.
And the mass collapsed under the sheer weight of the information.
"Knowledge without wisdom is the ruin of the wise."
In fact, the people were books, books that he took with him, he would have a place to keep them.
Dreth , the Kingdom of Voices
Dreth was a planet of living thoughts.
Everything that was said took shape.
An insult creates monsters.
A poem, flowers.
Until fear took over — and nightmares won.
Bruce walked among creatures made of guilt.
The Dragon warned him:
"The word is the seed of reality."
Tyrian , the World of Golden Ashes
Tyrian burned in glory.
Cities of gold, palaces of sun.
The inhabitants believed themselves to be children of fire.
But when the fire answered them,
It even tarnished their reputation.
Today, Tyrian is a gray sphere.
where shadows move like warm breezes.
Eshara , the Kingdom of the Stone Queens
Twelve petrified queens guarded the entrances to the temple.
They were entities that maintained the flow between worlds.
When the men decided to free them, time ran out.
The hours tore apart.
The days began to dawn before the nights.
Then Eshara disappeared.
Aion Prime, the World of Suspended Cities
A technological planet that has mastered the vacuum.
The cities floated above the abyss, moved by crystals of temporal energy.
But each leap through time cost a life.
Aion disappeared in a final leap, a collective leap, in search of an eternity that never arrived.
Thalar , the Last World
The saddest of all.
A world that survived.
But upon learning of the fate of the other eleven, he decided to erase himself by choice.
"We don't want to be the next mistake."
Even so, they tried, that's what they did, in what was a planetary suicide, silent and serene.
Bruce watched the star fade, bringing tears that he couldn't tell if they were his or the Dragon's.
The Guardian of Echoes
Now, when he closes his eyes, Bruce doesn't fall asleep when he listens.
The voices of every lost world.
Every mistake.
Every regret.
He studies them, records them, and keeps them.
Not as a god, but as the ultimate archivist of creation.
On windy and silent nights, in the City of Lovecraft, whoever passes near its tower will hear ancient echoes whispering between dimensions:
"Here lie the kingdoms that dared to conquer time."
The 20 Legends of the Lost Worlds
(Recorded by Bruce, the Guardian of Echoes)
"No planet dies from a single mistake."
They die like gods: slowly, silently, believing they are eternal."
— Codex of Aion Prime, fragment 0032.