This Is The Way The World Ends! Hal Jordan is out in visiting his brother Jim, his wife Sue, and their son Howie for Howie's first birthday. When Hal blows out Howie's birthday candle, he suddenly finds himself transported to a black void where a booming voice tells him he must stop Gracchus or the human race is doomed. Hal finds himself on what appears to be a decimated planet Earth, and changes into Green Lantern. Deciding to call in some of his fellow Green Lanterns, he is shocked to learn that his power ring summons informs him that they have all vanished. Deciding to go to see the Guardians on the planet Oa, Green Lantern notices that some of the star clusters look different and is shocked to find that Oa does not exist. He suddenly sees a phantom image of a little girl playing jump rope telling him to go back to Earth.
There he finds a woman who is being attacked by creatures made out of yellow gas, with his power ring useless against them, Green Lantern fights them off with his bare hands before sealing the cracks they came from with his power ring. He revives the girl and learns that her name is Teira, and learns that she is the daughter of Gracchus, the being he has come to stop. Telling her of his mission, Teira tries to convince Hal that her father is a good man and takes him to their ship. There Gracchus tells Hal that they are from the planet Ort. He tell's Hal how Earth was attacked and seeded with the gas creatures from alien attackers and that he has come here to stop them. When Teira tries to get her father to tell the truth, he silences her.
Hal, catching the lie, attacks Gracchus and forces him to tell the truth: Gracchus tells of a war between the planets Ort and Tro. He tried to make the two warring worlds learn peace however they rejected this notion and a disgusted Gracchus fled in a ship with his daughter to find a new world. Landing on Earth, he would scan the planets future and find that it too would eventually spawn a race of beings that would constantly be in conflict. Gracchus would then decide to not let this come to pass by preventing the human race from ever existing.
