26 I am He who is

The term God is totally overused these days, especially when it comes to villains.

I mean, it can reference aliens, ghosts, science experiments, power levels, kind of impressive magic users… it really doesn't matter.

Just because you can do a few things the average guy can't I'm supposed to treat you like a deity?

Pass.

And without a standard classification, Gods get their butts kicked all the time.

It's a pretty far cry from the majesty, horror and wonder of explaining away a reality changing phenomenon that you can't comprehend or control.

But it's also at least part of the reason that some people are convinced that Darkseid, resident Big Bad of the DC Universe, might just be a lot of talk.

I mean, have you ever listened to one of his speeches?

Darkseid is the New God! Darkseid is might above all! Darkseid is the tiger-force at the core of all things!

Darkseid is getting his teeth kicked in by Superman for the 11th time in a row.

Please, every would-be Conqueror sings from the same hymn sheet. Just calling yourself a God isn't enough to make you an actual threat.

But a closer look at Darkseid starts to reveal a labyrinth of unsolved mysteries.

Arguments about Avatars and True Forms that consume online fan sites.

Writer interviews characters vaguely implying there's more to him than meets the eye.

Strange facts about his history that seem to appear and disappear at random, alongside a single undeniable truth about the root cause of every conflict that's ever plagued the DC Universe.

Darkseid is the tyrannical dictator of a dystopian nightmare world called Apokolips.

Constantly in search of power he often finds himself in conflict with the neighboring planet, New Genesis.

He exchanged sons with their leader at one point as a kind of customary peace offering since both armies and their commanders are roughly equivalent in power.

But the problem is that everybody recognizes this treaty is just a formality.

The moment Darkseid finds a power source that can tip the scales, he'll tip them and then the rest of the universe shortly after.

Enter the anti-life equation, some sort of vaguely understood formula that once completed can force people into subjugation under Darkseid.

For mysterious reasons unknown to even him, key portions of the equation keep cropping up on earth.

So Darkseid developed a habit of invading the planet, the Justice League developed a habit of stopping him, and you've got comics.

Aliens heroes, Universal genocide and math. It's honestly a pretty standard set up.

There's a whole backstory about how Darkseid and his species rose to power after the Old Gods died, making them the New Gods, but like I mentioned before the word God is kind of overplayed these days.

You're totally justified in only seeing him as a really powerful alien with typical supervillain delusions of grandeur.

But perhaps he's not just that, and viewing him like that does a major disservice to the secret lore hidden beneath Darkseid's story.

In order to understand most of it, first we have to take a trip back to when everything began… the 1970s.

From what I heard, it was a good decade.

The first home video game was released, Disney World became a thing and comic book legend Jack the King Kirby left Marvel Comics to work for DC.

For those of you unfamiliar with the name, this was a really big deal at the time.

Jack Kirby was and is one of the biggest names in all of comic books, world-renowned co-creator of the Marvel Universe, artist and plotter to Stan Lee's writing and editing… so his presence at DC was a game changer, and as you might have guessed, Darkseid was his next big idea.

Jack wanted to create a group of DC characters with cosmic significance.

A type of modern-day myth, blending religion and mysticism with science fiction, modern culture and advanced technology.

Looking at some of his earliest work with the characters we can actually see the scattered pieces of a few storylines he never got a chance to finish.

For example, according to a divine prophecy, the conflict between Apokolips and New Genesis was supposed to finally end in a brutal fight to the death between Darkseid and his son, Orion.

Remember the one he traded to his arch nemesis and a momentary bid for peace?

Yeah, smart move there big guy.

The anti-life equation was constantly teased, but relatively little concrete information was ever given about it.

The New Gods were also specifically located outside the multiverse, set aside from DC's usual adventures in a realm beyond time and space for only Jack to work on it.

And their planets were so massive in size that later authors would go in to claim they dwarfed galaxies.

If you were to take the earth and drop it into New Genesis, it would barely displace the waters of a small lake.

But perhaps the most important plot point to take note of is exactly how powerful Jack intended these characters to be.

Take this guy for example, Magnar, relatively inconsequential, only appears in four stories as far as I can tell (one was a reprint and he was dead in the other two), but he can casually punch with the combined force of 100 galaxies flying at your face.

This sort of thing was standard fare for the New Gods. They were real larger-than-life characters.

It might be common enough for alien races to be depicted as stronger, faster and smarter than the average human, but these guys took it to the next level.

And Darkseid towered above nearly every single one of them, fast enough to surprise Superman, having the edge up in combat and occasionally moving with so much speed that Clark couldn't even see him.

Remember, these aren't ordinary eyes we are talking about.

Darkseid can cross the entire universe in seconds at worst.

He moves, fights and reacts all at about the same speed when he needs to, and he can think even faster.

Darkseid is a super genius, master strategist, inventor and battle tactician, with millennia of experience and war and combat training it's difficult to find a defeat of his that didn't turn out to be part of his plan.

He's outsmarted DC's finest on more than a few occasions.

He's unlocked the secrets of mind matter and soul.

Built machines that toy with celestial bodies like pawns.

Later stories would depict Darkseid trying to enter The Source in a bid for ultimate power.

If you've never heard of The Source before, it's basically this infinite sea of energy that transcends all things and spun every reality into being.

Since the beginning of time, nothing has been able to find a way around the pan-dimensional barrier that guards it at the edge of existence, unless they were a hair short of omnipotent or the source wanted them inside.

Except for Darkseid.

But of course, most notably of all, Jack Kirby's original version of Darkseid could go toe-to-toe with Superman and win… sometimes.

This was back in the day when Superman was known for punching out sentient universes that ticked him off.

He could break down fortresses that sat comfortably at the center of the Big Bang, raced to the edge of the multiverse in minutes and produce enough energy to collapse dozens of

Timelines by going all-out.

But Darkseid? He was a challenge.

Just to illustrate to you what I'm talking about, there was one story that centered around Darkseid waking up from his supposedly final defeat after nearly 1,000 years of laying dormant.

Needless to say, his power had dipped off quite a bit during that time, so he made it his mission to recharge his batteries by stealing three of the most powerful weapons in the universe, and draining them dry.

Then when that didn't satisfy him, he straight-up picked a fight with two different super villains known for endangering entire timelines, stole all of their power and still ultimately realized he was a lot weaker than back before the old 1000-year nap.

This overwhelming strength of his was in part drawn from a special cosmic force unique to Darkseid, known as the Omega effect.

I'll talk about that later.

But it was also partially due to him just being a New God.

Jack Kirby made him tough, some of the toughest in the DC multiverse, and it was clearly no accident that a veteran of the field cooked up a group of characters capable of challenging even the strongest superheroes.

And that's exactly where the problem started.

Fast-forward a few years to the company-wide event comic called Crisis on Infinite Earths.

DC executives had grown tired with everybody being confused about which characters belong to where in their massive shared multiverse.

Backstories were becoming convoluted, continuity errors were popping up everywhere, Superman had too many powers for any sane person to remember them all, and potential customers were starting to get intimidated.

I mean, one can't even enjoy a good Batman comic without knowing how he's doing with Commissioner Gordon at the time, which requires reading that Dr. Fate crossover from several years ago, which can only be properly understood if one know about Batman's death to a suicidal wizard on earth 2, and the established multiversal cosmology from flash 123, Superman meets He-man or that time Hitler summoned Captain Marvel across the multiverse to help him defeat the British.

DC desperately needed a reboot, a big reboot across all their titles that would drop every last intellectual property into a single universe with one cohesive timeline.

Starting from the beginning.

So in 1985, all the storylines they were running wrapped up a little early for readers to meet the diabolical Anti-monitor, a new multiverse shattering menace bent upon the Omnicidal destruction of absolutely everything.

A threat so great that every hero and villain across all of DC's history would have to band together to save existence itself.

And they did!

…

Kind of.

The crossover of a lifetime ended in a lot of deaths, a lot of changes and an infinite number of universes being completely erased from the cosmos, save for one.

The universe that would come to be known as DC's single definitive reality.

But what does all this have to do with Darkseid?

Well remember earlier when I explained that Apokolips and New Genesis existed outside of the traditional multiverse?

By all accounts they have been completely unaffected by this massive reality spanning crisis.

In fact later series, like the Orion solo run and Darkseid war, would paint the New Gods' involvement as something like passive observers to the whole thing.

They could remember the multiverse and everything that happened in it, but they didn't do much to prevent its destruction or to remind everybody that infinite universes once existed.

In the minds of everyone else, there simply never was a multiverse.

After the anti-monitor was defeated and reality shifted back to normal, the memories of those affected by the Crisis just shifted with it.

Only one universe had ever existed, unless you were a New God who watched the whole thing go down from a safe distance.

Really observant readers might even remember a short line of dialogue near the climax of the crisis that implied the new gods had somehow managed to cloak their extra universal planets from the Anti-monitor during his rampage.

So you can call me a silly and annoying nitpicker, because company-wide reboot or not, no matter how you look at this problem, the New Gods had no reason to be affected by the Crisis.

Which kind of makes this next part really weird.

Superman fighting Darkseid post 85.

Superman might have been hit hardest by the reboot taking a colossal dive in power after the Crisis changed reality.

He went from toppling universes and timelines, to toppling… mountains?

And while he would eventually start working his way back up the ladder, it doesn't make a lot of sense to see him fighting evenly with Darkseid so soon after a fall like that.

Especially if this dark side was confirmed to be the same person who fought Superman's much stronger form.

It gets even weirder.

Later DC events would bring back the multiverse, through alternate timelines, possible futures, new ways of manipulating space, etc.

And sometimes, Darkseid would appear in those realities too.

A different Darkseid, someone with completely separate thoughts, experiences and even looks from the original.

While every official DC statement continued to claim that only one Darkseid existed, and he sat outside the multiverse.

Plenty of comics would reference this fact too, but sometimes Apokolips and it's dictators seem to just be out in deep space somewhere.

These apparent contradictions weren't unique to him either, they also affected the rest of the New Gods just as chaotically.

One day they would easily be able to craft entire universes in their hands, and the next they need to paint themselves yellow if they want to beat the Green Lantern Corps.

In one story, Darkseid could survive a bomb meant to destroy existence itself without a scratch, and in another one Doomsday nearly beat him to death with a few punches.

These issues went on for about 23 years, and as far as I can tell they were all completely…

…unintentional.

Yeah.

Some writers obviously didn't realize that Darkseid and his species weren't supposed to be

rebooted like nearly everyone else was, as evidenced by DC's never-ending attempts to retcon the problem away.

'Oh, Darkseid was a lot weaker than he was supposed to be in the last comic? … Maybe that's because he…wasn't really Darkseid! It was one of his minions in disguise! Or maybe it was an avatar, a clone he created under his own power to do dirty work for him!'

The New Gods actually went through so many different rewrites and retcons that DC made fun of it themselves.

Ouch.

But see, none of these answers ever seemed to quite solve all the problems.

The disguised minions and clones for example only focused on Darkseid, and completely forgot that every other New God was suffering from the exact same plot hole.

And okay, even if we assume that every New God sends out avatars to run errands for them while only existing in one form outside the multiverse, how do we explain stories where Apokolips just straight-up overthrows Darkseid? Or Darkseid has been dead for ages and there's a power vacuum? Or when New Genesis was reduced to ashes? Are the planets using avatars too? And whatever happened to that divine prophecy that Jack Kirby talked about?

Characters were always acting like the battle between Darkseid and Orion was fated to happen and neither of them could die until it finally occurred. How does that fit in all this?

Why can Darkseid sometimes bend reality, control life and death, see into deleted timelines.

Wouldn't those powers come in handy more often?

The New Gods were occasionally treated like necessary aspects of existence that could call meetings with other celestial forces, but they were also treated like ordinary aliens just as frequently.

There were just too many questions.

And even in the world of comic books, mysteries like this have an expiration date. They can only exist for so long, and only become so convoluted before they attract the attention of someone willing to provide fans with all the pieces they need to finally finish the puzzle.

Or just don't care about it anymore.

This is 'Final Crisis', our last stop on honestly a pretty complicated trip for understanding a single bad guy.

Sure there were a few detours along the way, but I think you'll find that every last one of them was necessary to uncover the full picture of exactly what's going on here.

Because you see, a lot of stuff happens in 'Final Crisis'.

It was heralded both as a celebration of DC's contradictions and an attempt to sort of knit them all together so they make more sense.

The New Gods, of course, were the main focus of the whole event, especially Darkseid.

And arguably, the lead writer, Grant Morrison, does an excellent job of clearing it all up for us.

But it takes some focus, and a lot of digging, he is a crafty guy.

Anyway, the story more or less opens up in the fallout of Darkseid finally obtaining the complete Anti-life equation.

Through dialogue, it's explained that he used his newfound power to wage war against New Genesis, but the results ended up being more catastrophic than even he could have predicted.

Nearly every single God died in the struggle.

This ultimately led to our long awaited cosmic showdown between Darkseid and Orion, but just as his dear old dad was on the ropes, an unseen sniper ended the battle early out of nowhere by shooting Orion dead with a Radion bullet, toxic to the New Gods.

Orion's fading body fell to earth, landing in Metropolis, and with the last real obstacle to his empire taking care of, Darkseid slowly but surely began his latest and greatest attempt at

Multiversal conquest.

Yeah, heck of a way to start a finale right?

Well full disclosure, the actual comic itself isn't near as linear as I probably just made it out to be.

A lot of details don't get revealed until later in the narrative, and there was a pretty infamous amount of hassle with scheduling and communication among a lot of writers and higher-ups, so the tie-ins to this book don't always fit the final product quite right either.

Exactly what counts as canon and where each of it fits in the timeline is clear enough if you read like everything.

But just understand that what you're hearing is a condensed version of the story.

So the Justice League started to investigate exactly how Orion died and who managed to kill him, while prophets of Darkseid started preparing for his oncoming invasion by essentially building small armies and establishing underground brainwashing facilities.

The first real sign that something had gone wrong was probably when a Darkseid worshipper actually managed to capture and kill the Martian Manhunter, a founding member of the Justice League.

It was a really shocking scene for a lot of readers, the Manhunter was one of DC's most powerful and righteous heroes killed off like a background character, with a flaming spear through his chest and a crowd of smiling supervillains.

A classic Game of Thrones move if you ask me.

And it didn't stop there either, throughout the entire first half of this series we basically saw every one of DC's heavy hitters systematically taken off the table from Darkseid's unholy arrival.

Batman was beaten and kidnapped by an agent of Apokolips, Wonder Woman becomes patient zero for a deadly artificial virus, both Flashes get stuck in a race through time against death itself, one Green Lantern is nearly killed while another is put on trial for attempted murder, and even Superman is confined to the hospital when a group of villains bombed The Daily Planet, putting Lois Lane in critical. She was so bad that Superman was barely keeping her alive with a steady stream of Infrared Vision.

But while the heroes were reeling from their sudden shift on the food chain, a lot of weird stuff was happening in the background too, we kept getting evidence that Darkseid and his minions were already invading earth somehow, as if they jumped into the bodies of regular mortals and we're parading them around like puppets.

It's a strange idea for sure, but once metropolis detective Dan Turpin starts claiming that he could feel someone in his head, it becomes clear that

there's more to the New Gods than we've ever considered.

Turns out that most of the major masterminds embarrassing the heroes are actually Darkseid's disciple God's resurrected from the war and possessing different characters.

Grant Morrison explained in supplemental material that this was all Darkseid's doing and early comics established that he could recreate his followers from memory alone.

But they aren't really full incarnations of the New Gods, more like aspects of Darkseid's will given form.

Darkseid himself was the only new God actually trying to manifest on earth, and he's doing it through Dan Turpin. He tried to do it through a mob boss, but he couldn't fully incarnate because the process requires corrupting a noble soul.

And once Dan finally gives in, space itself cracks open, the sky starts raining blood, time crumbles around Darkseid's new body like a cheap sheet of tin foil and the entire multiverse starts spiraling toward oblivion in a massive singularity that is Darkseid.

So what does all that mean?

Well, believe it or not, it's not total nonsense and it actually answers more questions than it raises, starting with the bullet that killed Orion.

See, during the Justice League's investigation, they found the bullet not far from where Orion's body had landed.

Which kind of makes sense, if you were shot in space, you'd just keep moving along the bullets path until you either landed somewhere or acted upon by another force, Newton's first law.

But what doesn't make sense is that the bullet they found had been buried in the concrete for at least 50 years.

Which basically meant one of three things, either one, somebody else fired a completely unrelated hyper-advanced God killing bullet in this exact same spot over fifty years ago, two, Orion was killed fifty years ago, or three, the bullet had somehow traveled through time.

Batman having compiled extraordinary amounts of information on the New Gods (as any good

Detective should), opted for option three, positing that a god weapon could feasibly fire something in the future, launch its projectile backwards through the present, kill Orion a few days ago and keep the bullet going for 50 years until it ran out of momentum.

But that would require the New Gods to exist in some greater form of reality than we do. They'd literally need a higher dimensional gun and a nonlinear perception of time.

But here's the big twist, he was right.

Yeah, shocker, Batman got it right.

It was a magic bullet, literally an all-purpose God killing projectile that can be loaded and fired over and over again from any gun ever invented. Essence of Bullet.

The New Gods are incredibly powerful living ideas from the kind of platonic archetypal world, now imagine a god bullet fired backwards through time to wind up embedded 50 years deep in the concrete's past.

We live in a very simple world, the first dimension is length, the second dimension is width, the third dimension is depth and the fourth dimension is

Time.

But that's when you realize that Darkseid has very specifically always existed beyond time, beyond space, all the New Gods have.

Time deforms in their presence, weeks smash into days, space starts to collapse, Darkseid comes from a world beyond our simple four dimensions.

A higher reality is speculated to exist in theoretical physics, through string theory and all of its variants.

And in this story Grant Morrison is finally acknowledging that.

Treating the New Gods like what they should be when taken to the logical conclusion.

The person who saved Darkseid in the battle against Orion was Darkseid himself, but the fight damaged him so severely that he fell onto the multiverse.

That's why it's collapsing, the same way a two dimensional universe would collapse if you fell through a flat plane of existence.

Every other time we've seen Darkseid it's been a mere three dimensional fragment of his infinitely larger hole, explaining the inconsistencies, the changes in power level, all the nonsensical abilities, how there can only be one of him when there appears to be infinite.

The truth is that the real complete Darkseid, the one who lives beyond space and time, is bigger, heavier and more powerful than the entire multiverse itself.

So after he was bested in battle, before he was finished off for good, he positioned his fall to land on top of everything.

One last spit in the face to the endless realities of heroes who would never let him have control, he wanted them to know that he could have destroyed them at any time and he'd used the Anti-life equation to finally rule existence for a brief moment before collapsing it all into an endless pit at the center of creation, erasing absolutely everything below with his last breath.

And this depiction is consistent with Grant Morrison's work in case any of you were wondering.

I'm not speculating here, he's made it very clear through a dozen interviews that Darkseid and the New Gods all come from a higher dimension and we've just been experiencing their projections into our reality.

In fact, there are even hints to this all throughout Final Crisis.

References to string theory, quantum mechanics and higher dimensional concepts as Darkseid breaks through to the material world.

It's an idea Grant likes to play with a lot in comics, a recurring theme if you will.

In Morrisonian Cosmology existing in a higher dimension gives you godlike authority over the dimensions below, near omnipotence.

You have more than volume, you have hyper volume, you have more than mass, you have hyper mass, you are infinitely more powerful than the creatures in the dimensions below you because you exist relative to gods to them like humans exist relative to drawings.

And DC's map of the multiverse reflects this too, explicitly placing Darkseid and the new gods several dimensional layers above our average comic book universe.

They're like Lovecraftian gestalt entities that transcend and intersect our reality at innumerable points.

But all that being said, this still doesn't address everything.

What exactly does it mean to be a New God? What kinds of abilities are afforded to these immense pan-dimensional deities? And how do they interact with our world?

What about all those times our 3-dimensional heroes actually traveled to Apokolips?

Are these all the same places? What does it mean for the DC multiverse? And how can any of the Justice League even hope to defeat someone with transinfinite more power than all of existence combined?

The most important thing to take away from it, is that this guy, the rock monster person one typically sees fighting the Justice League, isn't really Darkseid.

He is only a single slice of an infinite God that exists in every reality simultaneously, the true Darkseid.

This isn't a theory and not a lot of people know that, but it's been canon since at least 2008 and was still referenced as recently as 2018.

While DC Comics is famous for giving their characters multiple interpretations and explaining that they each exist in a different part of the multiverse, every Darkseid variant is intentionally designed to be only one aspect of a collective hive mind that makes up a much larger much more powerful God sitting outside of time and space.

He controls all the smaller Darkseids like puppets from his true throne room.

He doesn't usually enter the multiverse himself because he's so powerful that doing so risks destroying it.

As a matter of fact, one time he nearly erased infinite realities just by falling on them.

But let's back up a little bit.

If we're going to understand this giant God and his importance to reality, maybe we should start by looking at his relationship with reality.

Namely, how does anything fall on the multiverse?

The multiverse is everywhere, right?

It's a word we designed to mean everything and all its infinite permutations.

Well, it depends who you're asking.

To an ant, the backyard might be everything, to a squirrel a few acres of forest might be everything, and to Super Mario the eight worlds with four levels each might also be everything.

Have you ever wondered why for the most part Mario only jumps on enemies or over them in this game?

Of course not, because we all understand that in Super Mario Brothers going around isn't an option.

Even if you could talk to Mario and make the suggestion, he probably wouldn't understand what 'around' is, it doesn't exist to him.

There are four directions, that's it.

Well, we encounter a similar problem when discussing Darkseid's relationship with our reality.

When one imagines a universe they probably think of outer space, stars, planets, comets and stuff.

But what most don't think about is the concept of 'directions'.

Our reality has six primary directions, up, down, left, right, forward and backward, with a lot of combinations you can make in between.

But what if, like Mario, our reality is just a tiny part of a much bigger reality with beings and things that exist and move and directions that we can't experience or even really comprehend.

DC Comics tells us that's where Darkseid exists in his entirety, the gods of DC are these massive

Multi-dimensional entities that primarily interact with each other outside of time and space.

And our whole multiverse is like a tiny flat world on their computer screens… kind of… I mean, there's no computer and there's no screen and we're sort of just floating there like an infinitely flat plane.

In fact, can we even really call it a reality at that point?

I mean for all practical purposes, from their perspective, we don't even really exist.

So you can see the problems that might arise

if one of them fell on us.

Now I know what you're probably thinking, this seems a little nonsensical, a classic example of comic book companies going overboard with 'my character is stronger than your character'.

But this idea that Darkseid exists in some higher realm is actually built on the previously mentioned concept of String Theory (or M Theory, or Super String Theory, Super Gravity).

It's a genuine scientific model for understanding the universe, proposed by theoretical physicists and beloved by famous DC author and continuity tailor, Grant Morrison.

Essentially, there are a lot of issues with how we understand reality.

Some of our most fundamental laws of nature change behavior under certain conditions and most people don't know why.

The best and brightest humans have been working on a few theories to tie everything together, but so far nothing's really panned out.

Unless we start adding other dimensions to the problem that we can't see or access.

That's what String Theory does, it's math that tells us that until we come up with something better, higher dimensions probably exist, and who knows what might be waiting for us out there.

Just imagine the sheer power behind something so massive that it doesn't even recognize our multiverse exists.

And not out of some cosmic misunderstanding or run-of-the-mill ignorance, it knows exactly what you are, and objectively speaking, from its perspective, you might as well not be real.

There's a famous saying in the DC Universe, 'Darkseid is'.

That's the entire saying, it's a full sentence and it pops up in comic after comic as a sort of catchphrase associated with the God of Apokolips.

But a lot of people don't understand what it really means.

Maybe it's just there to look cool.

Consider this, perhaps Darkseid says he is, because everything else isn't.

It's a significant phrase because he's informing us that we're being visited by an entity higher on the ontological scale than anything else we've encountered.

He actually exists, while we and everything else we're surrounded with don't, or at least not from where he's standing.

A similar story pops up in the Bible, Old Testament, Exodus, in which God appears before Moses in the form of a burning bush that refuses to be consumed by its flames.

Moses basically asks 'When I tell people about this encounter, who should I say sent me?'.

And God responded with: 'I am He who is'

The idea that there might be things out there that exist more than you do can be frightening to some people, or confusing to others.

But as hard as it might be to wrap your head around, you don't actually have to believe in God or a String Theory to believe in Darkseid, you just have to believe in the color red.

Picture an Apple in your mind.

It is physical, made up of matter, subject to time and causality, most of us can agree that it exists.

But does the color red exist?

Not the red peel, but the color itself.

What about triangles, happiness or dances?

I'm not asking if triangular objects, happy people or instructions on how to dance exist.

I'm asking about the ideas themselves.

These are called abstract objects, or abstracta, and philosophers are currently in debate about whether or not any of them are real.

Nominalist believe they aren't, Platonist believe

they are.

If one found and burned every single copy of the Lord of the Rings, would it really be appropriate to say that the story of the Lord of the Rings doesn't exist?

Maybe you could say no copies of it exist, but the story itself?

If there's a chess move that has literally never been seen before, is it appropriate to say that that move isn't real?

Numbers also seem to exist independently of their various representations, you don't get any closer to ridding the world of five by erasing the number five then you do to getting rid of someone by tearing up a picture of them.

Add to that, the fact that science relies on numbers to predict reality and they really don't seem like arbitrary constructs we invented.

They're part of how the universe works.

They exist whether we discovered them or not.

They exist more than we do.

Philosophers who believe in abstracta basically agree that these things have to be timeless, acausal and immaterial to have these weird properties.

I mean, if the concept of a book is not actually any particular instance of a book, then it must exist beyond time and space where nothing in our universe can truly affect it.

Sound familiar?

Ancient Greek Philosopher Plato called this area the realm of the forms, with forms essentially being the name he gave to abstracta.

In Greece, when a large number of stone decorations needed to be made, the master would carve a single perfect version of the sculpture called a form and regular stonemasons would be enlisted to copy the design across dozens of iterations.

Just like abstracta, and Darkseid, exists beyond space and time with infinite imperfect copies scattered throughout our physical world.

It gets creepier.

Hundreds of years later, Platonis, a different Philosopher, equated this cosmic duplication to the way our Sun radiates small fragments of itself down to earth.

If this was the form, he called the imperfect copies emanations, which is the exact word used to describe Darkseid's physical manifestations in the universe.

In fact, if you take a look at Platonis' map of the cosmos you might notice it bears a striking resemblance to DC's official map of the multiverse.

The physical world is at the bottom, both describe the border as the limit to matter, the realm immediately above houses souls, personifications, forms and abstracta… and all the way at the top you can see the entirety of creation imposed upon one vast all-encompassing unity, containing everything and nothing, similarities and contradictions, infinite sets of infinities which both sources call The Unknowable.

Now, don't get me wrong, there are differences.

DC's Map of the Multiverse isn't a copy and paste, but it is an adaptation, and this cannot be an accident.

Platonis believed that our layer of existence and everything in it had emanated downward as a less perfect copy of the realm of the forms, like a shadow beneath true reality.

So could those maps be telling us that Darkseid and his world are all Abstracta?

And our lower String Theory dimensions are just lesser copies of what goes on up there?

Do Darkseid and the New God's control our multiverse just by existing?

Well in the story 'Final Crisis', when Darkseid and the other evil gods are at war with their good counterparts, and winning, we actually see the same thing start to happen on earth.

All the sudden, out of nowhere, superheroes who usually beat bad guys every other day start losing.

The entire event was built as 'The day evil won'.

When Orion, the New God of War finally dies, suddenly everybody's combat edge starts fading away, and when Batman finds a bullet fired from Darkseid's world, he says…

'It was the blueprint, the template for every bullet there had ever been. It was the original of the bullet that killed JFK, Martin Luther, King John Lennon, Gandhi, Archduke Ferdinand, Thomas and Martha Wayne.'

Characters like Mister Mxyzptlk can reach down into our flat reality and warp creation to their liking from superior mathematical planes.

But this is a whole new level of control.

Darkseid and the New Gods don't just exist with more length, width, depth and power than every other character. They are literally the Abstracta of things we encounter every day, and they shape the multiverse we exist in with every breath.

The universe bends around their footsteps.

With every action, they could change the fundamental laws of nature.

They are, in a lot of ways, integral to

existence.

Wonder woman once claimed that each God represented a human ideal.

So if Ares had somehow actually managed to kill the entirety of Aphrodite (the Greek goddess of love), he would have done a lot worse than just kill an immensely powerful higher dimensional entity.

He would have literally killed the concept of love, and it would no longer exist.

Gods and New Gods, like Darkseid, are self-aware ideas.

They use concept weapons, anti-life equations, hunter-killer metaphors.

The New Gods are incredibly powerful living ideas from a kind of platonic archetypal world.

At the end of the day, this really only leaves two questions.

What is Darkseid the God of? And why is he so powerful?

So a lot of people in the know seem to think Darkseid is the god of tyranny, and I can understand that perspective.

He runs his planet like a fascist dictatorship, has ambitions for multiversal conquest and his big evil plan is to complete a metaphysical anti-life equation that will force all living things to submit to his will.

Sounds pretty tyrannical.

But then you take a closer look.

The only sources found officially linking Darkseid to Tyranny were an interview with Grant Morrison, where he named off possible types of Gods, and one sentence in a wiki article that wasn't cited correctly.

Not the most compelling evidence.

When Darkseid once called a meeting with the personifications of Order and Chaos, Order condemned Darkseid as an enemy, while Chaos called him a brother.

That would be kind of unusual if Darkseid were the concept of Tyranny, because cruel though it may be, most people would say Tyranny results from an excess of order, not chaos.

And in one scene when Batman lists different physical beings that might have embodied Darkseid, one of his examples is a Tyrant.

That seems really out of place in a list if he's literally the concept of Tyranny.

Tyrants are by definition just anybody expressing Tyranny.

It would be like saying 'Happiness can be found in many places, like a child with a new toy, a woman who just became a mother or a person who is happy'.

It's redundant and doesn't really make a lot of sense.

There's also the fact that Apokolips was based on Nazi Germany well before Darkseid was written as the embodiment of anything (to our knowledge), so it's possible Tyranny just comes with the territory.

Needless to say, that is a very disappointing answer.

Looking over a wider variety of materials to see if there was any other particular concept that popped up more often than tyranny, there was one result.

As early as some of his first appearances, Darkseid was referred to as The God of Evil.

The embodiment of evil.

Evil personified.

Evil incarnate.

People have even confused him for the devil on occasion, and that makes sense.

Darkseid's creator, Jack Kirby, not only fought Nazis during World War Two, but he himself was Jewish during the Holocaust.

Maybe this is what the truest, purest form of evil looked like to him.

But it creates the same chicken-and-egg problem that we get when labeling Darkseid the God of Tyranny.

If these quotes and this inspiration were just a bunch of flowery language meant to build up a particularly really bad guy, then they don't mean anything.

Plenty of villains are referred to as Evil Incarnate without actually being the literal Abstracta of Evil.

But what is evil?

What characteristics would somebody have to display to be rightfully labeled as the most evil thing possible without an ounce of good inside them, no hope for redemption.

What does the form of evil look like?

Well since we're dealing with a multiverse inspired by Platonis, and a character inspired by Plato, the best person to give us those answers is probably…

Saint Augustine, a philosopher and catholic bishop from 5th century North Africa.

Not only was he a major influence on the development of modern Christianity and Western philosophy in general, but he was also an avid scholar of both Plato and Platonis before he even found Jesus.

So a lot of his ideas built off of concepts they had already established, and St. Augustine spent a lot of time pondering the nature of pure platonic evil.

When you think about it, both major worldviews seem kind of incompatible with evil on the surface.

If the reality our universe emanated from is so perfect, then where does evil come from?

And if everything in the universe was made by a just and loving God, then why did he make evil?

Augustine actually came up with a pretty clever answer to that question that works well for both scenarios.

He says Evil doesn't exist, it's a nonentity, like darkness or cold it represents a lack of something else.

In their natural states, everything in the universe is good, and evil is just a word we invented for the failure to live up to that nature.

It's the absence of good, the hole in your life where God should be.

So evil in its purest form is… the hole.

Did the people writing Darkseid know about this theory?

Probably.

Grant Morrison was the architect behind DC's multiverse map and 'Final Crisis', where Darkseid killed Gods, fell on the multiverse and was first officially revealed to be an abstraction.

But Grant was also writing DC's ongoing Batman series at the same time.

And it was during this run that readers were introduced to a Batman villain whose name has gone down in infamy due to his sheer level of malice and the unparalleled number of problems he caused for the caped crusader.

Dr. Simon Hurt.

Bear with me.

How do I even count the number of things this guy did?

Well, first of all, he's immortal.

He was originally an early American cultist in a 1765 version of the town that would one day become Gotham City, and he tried to summon a powerful demon but the ritual was botched before he could finish, cursing him with eternal life and trapping the demon in a state of limbo between the earth and hell so it couldn't leave the town.

Have you ever wondered why Gotham City is usually such a hotspot for insanity and criminal activity?

Well, it's because the location is literally possessed by a demon.

A demon summoned by Hurt.

And as if indirectly causing practically every horrible thing that's happened in Gotham wasn't enough, this individual was also funding, supplying and coordinating a massive portion of Batman's rogues gallery for who knows how long.

Batman often speculated that there was someone behind the curtain, just out of sight, subtly manipulating dozens of factors in his life to account for the sheer organization that seemed present in his constant battle for justice.

That person was Simon Hurt, who knowingly referred to himself as the enemy, the piece that can never fit, there since the beginning… the hole in things.

And this isn't a one-off line either.

Hurt constantly refers to himself as the hole in things, and so does Batman.

In the same comic run, Bruce described the death of his parents as a hole in his life, a hole in everything.

I don't buy even for a second that it was merely a coincidence.

The one man responsible for bringing corruption and evil to Gotham is referred to as a hole while the one major act of evil that ruined Bruce's life is also referred to as a hole.

I believe these are intentional allusions to St. Augustine's teachings, like a flashing sign trying to tell the reader 'when you see hole, think evil'.

All just in time for Darkseid, some mysterious unidentified platonic abstracta to fall on the DC Multiverse and become a literal hole in everything, during the same publishing period, in a story written by the same author.

Still not convinced?

Well why don't we take it a step further.

Remember that demon I told you about? The one Dr. Hurt summoned that ended up cursing Gotham with malice and imbuing him with immortality?

Yeah, well, it was later revealed that that demon was actually the Hyper Adapter, otherwise known as the Omega Adapter, the Omega sanction, an infinitesimal portion of Darkseid's infinite power.

That was the thing cursing Gotham for centuries, that was the thing that possessed Dr. Hurt and made him what he is.

The hole in things is Darkseid.

250 years ago, the Hyper Adapter infected a human host, a pure strain of platonic evil.

Darkseid tried to incarnate in Hurt.

Do you see what's happening here?

This story is directly connected to Darkseid's disastrous fall onto the multiverse, which left a hole in things so massive that the only reason reality even exists anymore is because Superman managed to kill him and fix everything at the last second.

That hole is Darkseid.

Everything inside of it is Darkseid.

It's heavily implied that given enough time the Omega Adapter would have allowed Darkseid to return to life by reincarnating inside Dr. Hurt.

Which is why Hurt's line "I bring hell on Earth and to the world debasement", is clearly a dark parallel to the famous Bible verse "Glory be to God in the high heavens, and peace on Earth and to men good will", describing the birth of Jesus, the ultimate good and a god and human flesh.

Come to think of it, there are a lot of references to the Bible in this story, like how Darkseid literally falls from heaven and nearly drags the entire multiverse with him into a pit, or how Dr. Hurt falls for one of the Joker's traps by slipping on a banana peel and falling down the stairs only to eventually be buried alive beneath the earth.

Could this represent Michael, the Archangel, throwing Lucifer out of heaven and confining him to hell?

It's almost like it all fits together, like Darkseid's entire existence is tied to the very first act of evil in all of creation and every form of his being is destined to repeat this same fall over and over again until the end of time.

Constantly drawn toward corruption, darkness, the rejection and absence of God.

It's just a part of his nature. Every act of cruelty ever committed was based on Darkseid.

Every villain to ever hurt anyone was for that moment possessed by Darkseid.

Being evil is just being Darkseid-like.

So when you ask how evil someone is, what you're really asking is how close they are to being Darkseid.

—————————————————————

PART 1

In the first attempt of invasion of Earth, Steppenwolf and his parademons (genetically bred army from Apokolips) Boom tubed themselves into the downtown area of Gothic Metropolis, where they began attacking every human they saw.

Fortunately, the aliens were easily outgunned despite their massive swarm numbers by the Defense Agency.

Diana spotted Steppenwolf about to breach into an evacuation center (who had been tricked to seek a mother box) and swept down from the skies as a falcon would do to attack its prey, severely hurting the exiled New God with her superior weaponry.

Soldiers and civilians alike cheered for their champion god as he and his pantheon joined The True Goddess of War, as the agents continued to eliminate the parademons with even more drive.

Right after Steppenwolf made some stereotypical speech about how he would not be denied, the injured New God fled back to the Boom Tube that brought him there, barely escaping a killing blow from Diana and merely losing one of his horns.

The remaining parademons sacrificed themselves to allow their master the chance to retreat, but none survived long enough to cause any significant casualty.

In the aftermath of the battle, the Defense Agency, led by Amanda Waller, began cleaning up the terrorized area while Wayne made a public speech congratulating the efforts of the brave soldiers, who were clearly equipped and enhanced by his inventions.

He even thanked the aid Sentry gave and insinuated that the two were working together to put an immediate end to the new alien threat.

In his second attempt to retrieve the Mother Boxes stranded on Earth, Steppenwolf emerged from a Boom Tube once again, this time somewhere else in the world as his army of parademons emerged from other separated points.

Steppenwolf's forces were seen equipped with better technology, deploying hellish monsters much more powerful than the common parademon, along with wristbands made to shield them from Earth's weapons.

Regardless of reaching other regions of the globe, the Defense Agency had jurisdiction wherever they found themselves to be.

Before the alien army was allowed to lay waste to cities through a clash against Waller's Agents, The Dark God's forces emerged from the deep sea darkness to put an end to it.

As Arthur wielded his Trident-Scythe, he merely stood there allowing himself to be 'shot' at by a barrage of powerful lasers from Steppenwolf's forces.

Needless to say, but it didn't harm him in the least.

The embodiment of death effortlessly decimated countless hordes of parademons while simultaneously fending Steppenwolf off.

As Sentry circled around the globe in a flying golden flash, bringing peace to the targeted cities, instead of letting them go, The Dark God pushed Steppenwolf through a Boom Tube he casted himself, bringing the New God back to his homeworld.

The very same he had been banished from, by his own nephew, due to his pitiful act of betrayal and self-pride.

The Dark God hovered menacingly facing the vast army of parademons and Apokolips's egredious landscape.

"You don't seem to understand." He remarked with a chilling voice that resembled a whisper and a gasp. "The Multiverse isn't yours to conquer."

—————————————————————

At first I had planned to just fend off Steppenwolf invasion of Earth and postpone any move against Apokolips, thinking that by slowly dividing their forces my chances of success would be much more granted.

But with the unexpected rate I had become so powerful, I knew I could already face the entirety of Darkseid's army.

Scratch that, I needed to face him.

My forces required the challenge.

Securing my universe would not prevent an attack from outside.

I mean, the Darkest Night was after all a series of events I would be foolish to allow to even take place.

Life on Earth was on the cusps of changing drastically.

Earth had just recently laid the foundation of what would one day become an intergalactic empire, protected and guided by all the Lantern Corps.

With all the planets of the Solar System being prepared to be terraformed, there would be no shortage of space for the species I deemed useful to either guard or serve the mainland.

Eventually my travels to the multiverse would allow me to pick and choose some interesting choices as well.

I had my plans set for some I had not found in my current reality.

Beyond that, perhaps some Viltrumites, Ragnars and even some Saiyans would be interesting additions as well.

As the Champion God, I would openly reign as a fair leader from Oa, which I had just fully merged with my Olympian heaven, standing as a larger than life mighty pillar of peace.

My actions against the Guardians would undoubtedly be either forgotten or framed in a way that benefited me.

Regardless, as The Dark God, I would take the role to dirty my hands, having the entirety of the Lost Sector merged with the Underworld as my infamous domain.

Basically, what I had already been doing through my Court of Shadows, but with a little more flavor against interesting groups of aliens and at a much larger scale.

All my followers eagerly awaited for our next 'crusade', standing in order with absolute discipline.

Just waiting for my words.

"Show your might to those standing in our path and either subjugate them to my will or get rid of them completely." I announced.

"WE WILL TRAMPLE ON THE BRIGHTEST DAY AND BLACKEST NIGHT! SUBDUING ALL WHO RISE TO OPPOSE US!" They shouted in answer.

"You are all glorious." I admitted proudly as they displayed with masterful skill the powers I had gifted them.

"IN SENTRY WE TRUST. IN HIM WE MUST! LEADER, LET YOUR LIGHT FOREVER SHINE! NOW AND FOR ALL OF TIME!" They tapped their weapons in harmony while emanating a powerful aura.

I grabbed the hilt of a giant spear-sword, laying before me as I infused it with my power.

It took me a fraction of a moment to once again admire my weapon craftsmanship, the intricate golden patterns wrapped around silver and celestial jewels.

I had merged together all my powers to build this.

My children called it the Weapon of Divinity, it was crafted very close to the center of countless suns arrayed together, with gravity beam hammers and boson wave generators.

It was so heavy that none of my strongest followers were able to even lift it properly.

I won't feint humbleness, it was magnificent.

As I raised my Weapon of Divinity overhead, pointing it forward while energizing it with my golden white aura. "Onward to victory!"

I was going God hunting.

Again.

This time, not only to a Hellish world, but one in a Heavenly world too.

Probably a first for me.

"VICTORY!" They all shouted, mimicking my gesture with their weapons.

My fatherbox conjured billions of hush tubes for my army to advance.

And thus was the start of my crusade to New Genesis and Apokolips.

—————————————————————

Reality and it's laws, it all changes when you get to a higher dimension.

For example, everything here now took on a larger size than it did in the normal dimension.

What I came here for was the real deal.

Darkseid in his fullest, most powerful form.

The real origin of all other Darkseid's, the spawning point of it all, his Abstracta.

On the very edge of existence stood the real Apokolips, a colossal titan sized planet, at the diametrically opposite side of New Genesis.

New Genesis and Apokolips came into existence after the war that destroyed the Old Gods and split their homeworld of Urgrund into two entirely opposite planets separated from the rest of the universe in a location known as the Fourth World.

Since then, both planets have been in an eternal war of good against evil.

I now hovered before its fiery, wretched glory.

Fires that provided it with light, for the planet had no sun or moons.

The same fires that provided it with torment.

The glaring fires shot off the surface in anger, the planet was roaring in wrath.

It was vengeful.

It was furious at the atrocities being done to it.

I could hear it all.

The dark barren landscape facilitating the agony and torture of its inhabitants.

I could hear screams and cries.

I could hear it all.

From the newborns lucky enough to survive to the last screams of dying mothers.

Every second a thousand inhabitants were being tossed into the fiery depths, alive or dead the results are the same.

They were incinerated.

Before me and my emerging forces of pure darkness, an army of screeching parademons gathered in wait.

Like minions from hell, they drooled nasty muck from their filthy maws.

The pale skinned giant, spotting one remaining bull-like horn and hooves, recovered from the push I gave him and pointed with his battleaxe.

"You dare thread on these lands! Your corpse will make fine flags! I, Steppenwolf, will make it so!" He announced with unfiltered fury.

'This impudent one had the audacity to step foot on my nephew's territory.' Steppenwolf thought. 'I will turn him into an example. Show him the might of Apokolips, and my nephew will surely be proud of me.'

That was what he was thinking, but to be honest, this little vermin was too weak for me to acknowledge.

I wanted them all together here, and soon enough there they were.

Scantily dressed women, who look like twisted versions of amazonians on a poor horror movie budget, were led by a larger, elderly woman in a metallic one piece.

"No, that glory will belong to Granny Goodness and her furies!" She said with a sneer, her voice uncharacteristically heavy as more parademons blotted the skies with her arrival.

Granny Goodness laughed in mockery.

'This fool!' She called him in her head. 'He really dared to come to Apokalips? Ha! Not even the New Gods of New Genesis dared thread on these cursed lands without the lord's permission. He will join countless others in the pits of fire. Feeding the suffering that is Apokalips, his corpse would soon be desecrated and his skull used as an ornamental cup.'

She hungered for his blood, she would show her lord the power of her army.

She wouldn't fail.

She never had.

Not like the failure that was Steppenwolf.

It left a distaste in her mouth that he was merely banished.

Well, her humor was about to improve, for today she would prove her worth to the lord, eliminating both trespassers.

And Darkseid would recognize her value.

…

From where I was, I could see the palace of the Evil God.

I could see his belittling gaze on me and my forces.

"Mera, clean the skies for me." I requested without shifting my cold gaze at the tyrant God.

"Of course!" She immediately replied as the hum like sounds of her own power filled the skies for a brief moment.

A bluish wave, like the one that caused the doom of Atlantis was emitted from her as its focal point, and when the wave receded, so did the parademons that once blotted it.

Not even ash remained.

Steppenwolf, Granny Goodness and her furies had varying degrees of burns on them.

As a virtue of their New God physiology.

"GO AND PURGE THIS WORLD!" I said coldly.

"AT ONCE!" My army answered with power.

"FOR THE DARK GOD!" The planet actually shook from their thunderous roars.

Humanoid shapes accelerated in hypersonic speeds towards their enemies.

Yellow, Red and Orange Lanterns summoned powerful constructs as my horde of undead trenches cascaded down the enemy.

Even my elite assassins were proven their worth in the hellish battlefield.

All that filled the air was shrill screams.

It was said that parademons were incapable of feeling fear.

Well, my Yellow Corps debunked it.

Angry red flares tore through the atmosphere.

Orange flashes blasted holes in the landscape.

The sounds of flesh colliding at speeds it wasn't meant to resound out.

In less than a minute, the furies were subjugated.

"FOR OUR DARK GOD!" Granny Goodness's still bleeding head was held in the grasp of Thalia as she used the Power of Law I gifted her to raise the dead.

"FOR OUR OVERLORD!" Lady Shiva and Atlanna responded over Kalibak's bloody corpse and went on to decimate the fleeing parademons.

By that point Bane was merely toying with his opponent, Stepppenwolf, while Slade and the Dark Archer left a trail of pure carnage.

Black Manta led a wave of darkness over the remaining New Gods that served Darkseid as Deadshot's silent bullets instantly took out any significant threat.

I shook my head, this was almost unfair.

Damn, is this how villains with super armies feel?

I mean, thanks to my prolonged exposure to a blue sun, I had gifted all of them with powers of an enhanced Kryptonian under the yellow sun and granted weapons capable of killing such platonic concept beings, what else could I have expected?

And I wasn't worried about the minions of Darkseid being resurrecting against us.

Not only would my powers as both the embodiment and wielder of the Power Law of Death guarantee that they would only rise to serve me, but my Fatherbox also had a part to play in this battle.

"I see you, little thing." Suddenly I heard a voice being directed at me. "Cloaked behind a veil of obscurity, intently staring at the shadow of a universe that your kind routinely mistakes for reality. Your thoughts will be hollowed, the equation will be retrieved and your body will be casted back into a world where you are only imaginary. After all, your reality isn't, Darkseid is! Face me at your own peril, insignificant being."

This time I delivered my best Bat-glare at the Evil God, who remained seated on his throne.

He cared not for the massacre being delivered to his minions.

Darkseid just sat on his throne and watched with a disinterested look.

It was my time to act.

"Impressive work for a deficient singularity, naively seeking power its primitive mind can scarcely comprehend." Darkseid remarked again.

I steadily ascended the steps that led to Darkseid's gigantic throne.

His figure easily towering over this form of mine even as he remained seated.

The stony dark texture of his skin blending into the dark gloomy atmosphere of his throne.

His eyes a demonic blazing red, proving that he was alive and not just a weathered and cracked statue.

"You dare invade Darkseid's priva-" Desaad who walked out from behind Darkseid's throne was turned to a pile of ash, courtesy of my invisible eye beams.

I didn't have time for side characters.

"Uxas the Farmer. How does it go? " I asked in ridicule.

What?

The guy really was a farmer.

Hmm, well would you look at that.

Darkseid and the original Kal-El were both raised as farmers. Is it just me or is this the invasion of the crop boys.

Heh.

Oh, I had many ways to defeat him.

Mainly, using counter-vibrations to cancel out his existence, it would only take me a casual shout to do so.

But there was something I wanted to confirm first.

If Superman was truly serious, could he actually kill Darkseid in a fistfight?

Darkseid's red glare intensified.

His face shifted from a picture of boredom into a perfect definition of cruelty and viciousness as the omega symbol on his waist came alive in pure angry red energy.

"INSOLENT!" The omega beams shot out of his eyes and took sharp turns in thin air, slamming into my open palm.

I wanted to feel it.

And how did it feel?

"Wow, that actually hurt." I admitted with a wide grin displaying my shark-like teeth.

It really did.

It felt like a slap to the face, or a powerless kick to the shin.

Hah!

I imagine how the original Kal-El would have felt, when he was so much weaker than I was.

Darkness flashed around my eyes and I entered my God perception as time began reversing itself.

Not stopping, actually reversing.

The minimum damage I had felt just vanished as if it didn't even happen in the first place.

That's how fast I was going.

With an ear to ear creepy smirk, I grabbed the frozen New God by the neck and threw him through the Hush Tube that opened up behind him.

We were transported to an empty universe, one before its big bang occurred. Its obscure void massively empowering my power as the embodiment of death, raising it at its strongest condition thus far.

I sucker punched the New God across the face, with the hold of gravity not existing, he flew far away into the deep dark.

Flying after him, tanking any omega beam that was shot at me, I smirked with malice.

Darkseid gritted his teeth in anger, the omega symbol on his waist flashing even brighter this time. "Imbecile! As the Red Sun was to the priests of Rao, as the burning bush was to Moses, so is this form to your limited and infantile perception."

Red lines formed on his body, his arms were covered in the same angry glow as his eyes, and his size became larger.

And then he disappeared in a burst of speed.

One that would've completely startled the original Superman, and possibly even the Flash.

I casually raised my hand, instantly stopping an overhead strike as the sudden stop of momentum resulted in a wave of power blowing my tattered cloak, as the Omega effect still affected me on a miniscule level.

He then switched tactics, now opting to teleport.

I casually parried a flurry of strikes that were aimed to obliterate me, but when I punched him back, I could clearly feel him resisting the urge to not cough blood.

Flashes of red repeatedly flew out as his omega beams continually dissipated into the abyssal darkness that was my form.

His skin now showed clear signs of damage as I hit him with deadly precision using speed force armor constructs.

"YOU ARE PUTTING UP A GOOD FIGHT FOR A KRYPTONIAN. BUT YOU WILL BE VANQUISHED!" His heavy deep voice resounded through the empty primordial space.

He was talking about the various realities our other forms were based in.

Realities where Superman usually lost.

"I know what you are." I replied unfazed while my invisible eye beams clashed against his omega beams.

"The same could be said for every creature of creation in the deepest recesses of their being. I am the hole at the center of all things." Darkseid then proceeded to create an army of clones out of thin air. "The first scion of Morningstar." One of his coles said. "The revelation beast that consumes mind and soul alike." Another added before they all spoke in unison. "When you cry out in your dreams, it is Darkseid that you see."

Defining the reverse flow of time I established, they all rushed at me with omega beams and blasts.

"Still not impressed." I remarked with a grin before I conjured a black misty portal circling around as my hand disappeared into it.

I then pulled out my Necro-Scythe, holding it in a double hand grasp and swung.

A singular all encompassing arc of pure darkness and screeching howling shot out towards the encroaching clones.

The clones disappeared in the silent explosion of shadows.

The original Darkseid was pushed back, now metaphorically sweating as his purple suit of armor cracked and blackened.

All his clones were decimated.

I stashed my weapon away and shook my head.

One might be ranting that I should be taking him more seriously.

But do you have any idea the number of times I could have killed this guy?

I'm not joking, damn even Batman severely wounded him.

At my current power level, what I saw was a coward who stole a piece of incomplete primordial power from dying titanic gods.

He was corrupted by power since he had never wielded such before, and he immortalized himself.

The simple truth is that I wasn't lazy or complacent about it, even when I could afford to be.

I knew I wasn't going to get rid of the hole in things.

No, I would become it myself.

My power would be solidified, and I would explore and discover without being restricted.

I'm sorry if you were expecting a story where I suffer in battle against such a foe.

A story where I go through a hard battle and barely win by the skin of my teeth.

This won't go that way because I was sufficiently prepared and I wasn't an idiot, or a character in a story conforming to the whims of a writer and its public.

I was a person from a world more real than this one.

Not a plot bound character in a book.

And I'm sure that any reasonable people from the same earth as mine would in my spot would also make choices to strengthen themselves.

Not living like 'friendship is all we need! So let's dance in a field of flowers and rainbows, holding hands and kissing ass'.

"Mortals are a confused species. The vast majority perceive reality as the physical. Truth is a local phenomenon. I am the hole that remains when everything else is gone. The emptiness shaped like God. The fire that consumes your heart. I have been there with you from the moment you understood anguish, or pride, victory, retribution. Each time you are led to the burning desire for satisfaction that only I can provide, you serve Darkseid. The ecstasy you feel in the heat of subtle manipulation is my own. When you lash out at your loved ones, bystanders, enemies, you are but a mere fraction of my will. Surrender and submit, die for Darkseid."

"Shut up!" I interrupted his monologue. "Bla, Bla, Bla! You bore me out of my mind! Are you finished?"

His expression turned even angrier.

"NOT YET! DARKSEID DOES NOT DIE! FULL OMEGA SANCTION!"

"Are you sure, Uxas?" I simply asked with a snicker. "Isn't that wish fulfillment on your part?"

I saw his pissed off expression.

Probably detesting the future I had decided for him.

Or perhaps, simply being unable to see his own future as he once did.

I felt his telekinesis desperately trying to hold me in place, but my bio aura enhanced constructs effortlessly sliced through it.

Darkseid smiled, thinking it would be enough, even if I was stalled for just a second.

Of course It wasn't.

I wouldn't be a fool to let this specific blast actually hit me.

By amping my God perception much further thanks to blue sun radiation, I watched it all froze in place and slowly reverse back again.

Have you guys seen the movies or comics where superman, or most times the flash, performed an infinite mass punch?

If you're like me then you know it's bulshit.

Why?

Because nothing survives infinite mass.

Picture this: An elephant stepping on a chicken's egg is an example of what increased mass can do to something of lesser mass, the egg would definitely be absolutely crushed.

Now imagine the elephant had infinite size (which represents mass in my example), it grew to be as large as the moon and it was still growing, the earth is quaking and the chicken's egg is crushed to dust.

Now it's even larger than the earth, the egg is disintegrating, the earth is breaking apart and buckling under the mass.

The elephant is now as large as the sun and it's still growing, the fabric of space is bending, the planets are way off their paths.

You would see them unravel and rush beneath the elephants feet where the pull was strongest, matter was actually breaking apart, the gravitational pull would be too much, a black hole would soon be created, light couldn't even Hope to escape from its pull, the sun would be swallowed and now a singularity was about to be formed.

And the elephant in question was still growing, and it would grow till that singularity was fully formed and all matter or anything with mass in that local galaxy was swallowed.

That was just one example of infinite mass.

Darkseid's eyes were widened in terror as I prepared to give him a serious punch of mine, but his body was immediately frozen by the pull.

Even he couldn't ignore such a mass clashing against him.

We were falling downwards through space beyond lightspeed.

So when my magical bio aura and speed force enhanced construct fist first made contact and almost disintegrated his upper body it didn't stop, his whole body suffered and then, as I dragged him forward in time, something expected happened.

The reason why I chose this universe in the first place.

As the pure white light of creation swept over everything, the virgin pure radiation, rejuvenating the other side of me as I now absorbed everything as the Embodiment of Life and Death.

I caused the Big Bang of this universe.

My actions created it and seeded it with all my powers.

And also a resulting black hole that maintained several quasars locked in place as a chain reaction of atomic explosions started.

Matter was being created.

It was a song I remembered all too well.

The vibrations were so familiar.

My raw aura was once again pushed towards its recently established ludicrous limits.

It advanced and evolved under the strain of the punch, my body was evolving further under the pure white light as darkness fought back and explosions around us took place.

I summoned various rods and went to work.

"ARGHH!" Darkseid yelled in agony as Radion rods were stabbed into his major nerve clusters.

Radion was to the New Gods and Darkseid, what Kryptonite was to Kryptonians, and I had acquired vast quantities of it.

I did say that I had so many ways of killing this God of Evil.

As the reality we resided on was breaking apart like glass, both my hands were placed on his cheeks stroking them till my thumbs hovered over his eyeballs, I pushed my fingers against the soft balls of flesh, embedding them into his eye sockets.

"ARGHHH! AHH!" The screams of Uxas were music to my ears.

"I will grant your wish, Uxas." The stony giant was suspended by my left hand clasped around his neck. "I won't kill you."

I raised him fully over my head, my other hand channeling the Power of Law for a purpose I hadn't imagined I would actually use when I first got them.

"URGH!" Uxas grunted in absolute agony as his figure slowly became something different.

The stone pattern of his skin became smooth while still remaining grey, his baldness gave space for a bob cut and his face morphed from that of an imposing male to a cute, if not slightly chubby, female.

His muscular build was reshaped into a more voluptuous figure, with massive breasts, thick thighs and wide hips.

"I will make you my bitch." I announced, grasping her cheeks with one hand close to my face.

Ripping off the last remaining of her armor I felt the satisfaction of ravaging the previous Incarnation of Evil's pussy and ass flow into my soul, alongside a little bit of the Omega Effect.

"What a great crusade." I said before conjuring a slave leia bikini on her, made of Radion, and smacked her ass with enough force to make her rush towards the Hush Tube of my Fatherbox.

As I arrived at Apokolips, pulling my bitch with a Radion leash, my forces were already being worshipped.

People dressed in rags, skin and bones, walked through the resurrected bodies of parademons and my forces before kneeling.

We stood like heroes above slain and subjugated oppressors.

In the core, the innermost center of the planet Apokolips was the Omega chamber.

The Omega chamber was where the omega effect would converge after the true death of its host.

It wasn't artificially created, it just came to be.

So imagine my surprise when I spotted some little shits trying to claim my prize.

Some wannabe usurpers were trying to sneak into the center field.

They never heard me approach him, they were too focused on the power at hand, almost in their grasps as they argued.

A slap to their skulls turned their bodies into a blood mist, all schemes are useless in the face of absolute power.

"Stupid side characters thinks they can claim my stuff." I chuckled.

Shadow flashed on me and my armor was disassembled as my naked dark skinned body and ashen hair were fully brought to view.

I stepped up to a red floating ball of energy, roughly the size of an ostrich egg as a bright but somewhat chipped omega symbol hovered above the glowing energy ovoid.

I then proceeded to utter the words of power again.

The vocal representation of the fundamental makeup of reality across the infinite multiverse in the form of an equation.

The abstract power over life and death, capable of subjugating sentient wills and abuse matters to the wielder's whims.

LONELINESS + ALIENATION + FEAR + DESPAIR + SELF-WORTH ÷ MOCKERY ÷ CONDEMNATION ÷ MISUNDERSTANDING × GUILT × SHAME × FAILURE × JUDGMENT n=y WHERE Y =HOPE and N =FOLLY , LOVE = LIES , LIFE =DEATH , SELF = DARK SIDE

THE ANTI LIFE EQUATION, power over life and death and so much more.

A darkness mixed with threads of red began to coalesce over my open palm in the form of a matrix.

The complete version of what I had since birth.

My will was tested and so was my might.

Obviously, I stood strong.

The Omega sanction was always incomplete, that was why my bitch so fervently sought after the anti life equation.

Not only for the powers it held, but because it would complete the Omega sanction as it was always meant to.

Space around me was being bent, reality was turning into concepts.

Sound took shapes, colors spoke, numbers painted a 4th dimensional field of reality, branching into the 5th dimension and beyond.

The ovoid remained constant, as did I.

The anti life egg was like a reddish black writhing mass of equations and numbers.

And the omega egg was a missing part of it that reached out to once again be conjoined.

I held the egg in my hand and eased it towards my existence, not physically, metaphorically.

At these levels, matter was all about concepts and imagination.

The egg gave one last pulse of energy and a complete omega symbol appeared over it.

I felt ultimate pleasure and satisfaction as the egg finally sank into my chest, it's red tendrils wrapped around me to form a cocoon of pure power.

I was being reborn, I was being evolved, I could feel it.

I could sense my innermost being.

Power, so much power coursing through me.

Ripples were spreading out.

What I did was never meant to occur.

My bitch was once a constant in all realities and unrealities.

As long as there was an Omega effect, then there must be a hole in things.

What I have done is alter the constant.

The role was broken.

And my actions were being set into the laws.

I completed the Omega sanction, I reunited it to the anti life equation.

I now held absolute power over it.

My actions, my doings were rewriting the fundamental laws.

Right before my eyes I could see The Source change as a result of my other counterpart doing.

I could feel the vibration spread throughout the eververse.

—————————————————————

In the world of New Genesis, in contrast to the industrial wasteland of Apokolips, covered in lush forests and grasslands filled with abundant flora and wildlife.

The only urban location was Supertown, a floating city designed not to affect the planet's surface which was usually inhabited by a group known as the Primitives who decided to live a life free of Highfather's rule.

This planet also hosted a race of super-evolved insectoids known simply as the Bugs of New Genesis.

Both Primitives and Bugs haven't been accepted as equals by the Genesisians.

Which perfectly suited Sentry's opportunism.

As the New Gods had just been subjugated by Sentry's pantheon and his Lanterns, aided by the dissatisfied residents of New Genesis, they all felt the changes spread across reality.

They saw the energy that emanated from Apokolips, striking a dark contrast to Sentry's, which signaled that the previous God of Evil was no longer and something else had taken the vacant place.

The Genesisians wished to peer into it, but even if their current subjugators gave them the freedom, the power was too strong.

Another being too powerful to speak off, similar to Sentry, seemed like a part of the All-source.

But then they all witnessed it happening on their own planet.

The Highfather's heart beat in trepidation and concern as the ten feet tall giant blond man, clad in angelic golden white armor, raised him by the neck and took his place as the living avatar of The Source and inheritor of The Alpha.

COMPANIONSHIP + UNDERSTANDING + ASSURANCE + JOY + ALTRUISM ÷ RESPECT ÷ COMMENDATION ÷ SYMPATHY × INNOCENCE × DIGNITY × SUCCESS × ACCEPTANCE y = n WHERE y = DESPAIR AND n = CATION, LOVE = TRUTH, DEATH = REBIRTH, AND SELF = LIGHT SIDE

The all too familiar celestial power was too much for the warrior-king Highfather to withstand.

Two absolute powerful beings had just taken the center stage.

—————————————————————

When the cocoon receded, I came out a new being.

One born of ultimate evil.

Scarlet Omega symbols were etched onto the back of both my hands, in my tad darker tone of skin.

My armor was saturated in the Omega Sanction and it changed.

It turned more regal, the Dark Armor now bore in it a pure scarlet Omega symbol.

Red Speed force and magical electricity weaved into the armor like fabric, forming sections where it held it together.

I hovered above the kneeling masses of people on the planet of Apokolips.

No, no longer Apokalips.

I showed them all the defeat of their once though undefeatable ruler, I showed them how I made the previous tyrant my bitch and took his wives as mine.

When they fully comprehended it, I pushed myself, the matter manipulation powers going to work.

With each step I took towards my palace, it merged with the Underworld, as mythical trees grew and the fires turned silent.

The barren planet began to rejoice as it bore life, and something it never had before, water.

Waters rained down from the skies above, and I could not only see and hear, but experience the feeling of the masses as they exclaimed in praise and wonder, kneeling with their tears of joy being washed away by the rains.

The dead demonic hoard of parademons were merged with my undead trenches to increase their numbers and power.

I looked above, wielding Artemis's Power of Law and ordered the birth of stars.

Meteors bounded together to form beautiful moons which hovered above the planet, next to its massive blackhole.

Mythological birds sang, legendary animals dug through the fertile sands and appeared before me as exotic and magical plant life of all functions took root and grew fruitful.

My throne was before an imposing black sun that very much resembled an eclipsed sun.

My forces knelt before me in their shadowy armors of darkness.

I walked, each step accompanied by the powerful pounding of their weapons and armors.

Each and every gaze on this Dark Utopia could see me clearly.

I sat on the glorious throne of pure blackhole radiation.

"I AM" The power behind my words was consolidated.

It spoke into the minds of everyone present here and not.

It reverberated through space and reality.

The ceremony was complete.

"LONG LIVE THE SUPREME OVERLORD!" They responded with shouts that shook the very ground.

Each and every individual on my Dark Utopia praised in joy.

When I met with my Light counterpart, I found actual Gods bowing for us.

Hah, Gods, sounded so cheap.

Everyone's a God these days.

I wasn't one.

I am more.

I AM.

And it's high time I go visit other dimensions.

If not for power, at least for the satisfaction of it.

—————————————————————

(26/09/2021)

*If this chapter interests you, you should totally check out "The Imaginary Axis" YouTube channel. Most of the reflection about Darkseid and the other Gods were taken directly from his amazing videos about the subject matter.

Same could be said for the "In Zod We Trust" conclusion.

** Apologies for not fully describing the invasion of New Genesis, the chapter was too long as it is.

But I hope this big chapter is of your liking.

Anything you wish to ask, feel free to do so.

Thanks as always for your attention and please be safe.

Any problems with my writing, just point them out and I will correct them as soon as possible.

***Thanks everyone for staying with me until now!

The first season is over! Did you like it? I sure hope so, because I love it!

Please, for those who haven't already, review my story. You can be honest as much as you want, every criticism is welcomed! It really helps me grow as a writer!

For now, I will be taking a break from this story.

Next one to receive some love will be my Game of Thrones/Gamer story, hopefully I can convince some of you to give it a chance.

Well, at least after I make a quick correction of my initial chapters. It has been quite a while since I last updated it, so I believe my writing skill has increased considerably.

I don't know when I will be updating this fic again, but don't worry, I won't drop it.

Anyways… I'm sure that I'm forgetting something, but let me thank you again for following me on this journey.

See you around dear reader!