Shadow Monarch in DC

APOKOLIPS -

Darkseid sat upon the throne, indifferent to the concept of ever needing to justify its own existence. His crimson eyes, twin embers banked low, stared through the reports scattered before him rather than at them. Twisted heaps of shattered Paradragon carapaces had been dragged into the chamber as evidence, still smoking faintly, arranged like a funeral no one had asked for.

Desaad entered the way he always did sideways, stooped, a smile stitched too tightly to his face for the news he carried. He clasped his hands together with the eager unease of a man who has learned that silence, in this room, is often mistaken for guilt.

"My lord," Desaad began, voice oiled with false cheer, "the retrieval teams have returned. What remains of them."

Darkseid did not turn his head. "Show me."

A holographic pall unfurled above the ruined husks battlefield footage, jagged and half-corrupted, capturing the last moments of an assault force that outnumbered its enemy a thousand to one. Paradragons fell as though some silent hand were sweeping them from the board one calculated motion at a time. And amid the carnage stood a single figure, unhurried, radiating a violet-black aura that seemed to consume the light of Darkseid’s own Omega beams rather than merely resist them.

The image froze on a shadow-wreathed monarch standing over the last of the Paradragons, Darkseid’s answer to biological perfection, war-beasts bred to be unkillable. It lay in pieces.

For a long moment, no one spoke.

"The Paradragons," Darkseid said finally, "were meant to be unmaking. Extinction given scale and teeth. And he unmade them instead. In minutes!"

"They were prototypes, my lord," Desaad said quickly, too quickly, hands fluttering as though he could physically bat the failure away. "Early strains. The gene-forges on the western fire-pits are already cultivating the second generation, stronger bone-lattice, triple-layered hide, the instability in the mutagen has been..."

"I do not care for your excuses, Desaad." Darkseid’s voice did not rise. It never needed to. "I sent an army against a single planet. That army no longer exists. And you offer me the comfort of a timetable."

Desaad’s smile cracked at the edges but did not fall. He had survived a thousand years at this man’s side by knowing precisely how much fear to show and how much to hide. "The Furies fared no better, my lord, if it eases your judgment of the Paradragons at all. Their blade could not so much as part his shadow. They simply... collapsed against him, as though their rage itself had been declared irrelevant in the face of his Shadow Generals." He allowed himself the faintest, venomous chuckle. "Weak. All of them. I did warn Granny that her stable had grown soft on victories against lesser worlds.."

"The Furies," Darkseid said slowly, "are among the deadliest instruments this planet has ever forged. If they are weak, Desaad, then explain to me what that makes the legions we have already lost trying to test this Shadow Monarch."

That landed. Desaad’s mouth opened, then shut. He had no answer that would not indict himself further, so he simply lowered his eyes, a courtier’s oldest, safest maneuver.

Darkseid rose. It was not a fast motion, but the chamber seemed to shrink around him, he walked toward the projection, toward the frozen image of the Shadow Monarch’s eyes, twin points of violet ruin, calm in a way that no mortal calm ever was.

"He grows," Darkseid said, and for the first time something other than contempt threaded through his voice. "Every cycle he is stronger than the last report claimed. New soldiers rise beneath his banner faster than we can count the graves he leaves behind. He does not merely defeat what I send. He absorbs it. Turns my dead into his army.."

"A necromantic discipline, that’s his powers my lord but they can still be destroyed." Desaad offered, grasping for usefulness. "Some manner of extraction. Souls bound to service rather than release, it is crude."

"Crude." Darkseid’s laugh was a single syllable, humorless, a crack of thunder with no storm behind it. "He sealed the Anti-Monitor, Desaad. A force that unmakes universes, that I myself have avoided provoking directly for eons, he sealed him, and did the same to the Empty Hand. He did not do this alone. He had help from the Dragon Monarch who stood beside him, and together they closed a door that I was not certain could be closed."

He turned from the projection, and now his gaze found Desaad directly and Desaad, veteran of a thousand cruelties both witnessed and authored, felt something in his stomach turn to ice.

"Two entities capable of erasing concepts from existence," Darkseid continued, "sealed away like misbehaving children. And you bring me prototypes and excuses."

"My lord, I only meant.."

"I should have killed him the moment he surfaced." The words came out flat, final, a verdict long overdue. "When he was nothing. A crawling thing clawing its way up through the universe, no god would deign to notice. I saw him as beneath my attention. A curiosity. I was wrong, and I do not often have cause to say that word, Desaad, so mark it well... I was wrong, and now that crawling thing has grown into something that stands in rooms like this one and dreams of my throne!"

"You believe his ambitions extend so far? To conquer the universe and gain more power?" Desaad asked, and for once the question was not flattery, it was genuine, unsettled curiosity, because even he had not dared assume a mortal-born thing could set its sights on Apokolips itself.

"I do not believe it," Darkseid said. "I know it the way I know the Source burns. Every move he has made, every time his soldiers meddle with our plans, every god-being humbled by him, every impossible seal placed on impossible horrors, it is not conquest for its own sake, he is preparing. He is clearing the board of every rival power in the universe, one by one." His hand closed into a fist large enough to crush stone without effort. "His goal was never territory as well, Desaad. It was never worship or the small hungers that drive lesser tyrants. His goal has always been my reign! He means to end it. To sit where I sit and call the Anti-Life his own!"

Desaad, for once, said nothing. There was nothing safe to say to that.

Darkseid stood in silence for a long moment, the projection’s cold light throwing his massive shadow across the chamber floor, taller and darker than anything in the room.

"We will not throw more of our strength against him blind," Darkseid said finally, decisive, the way a general speaks once grief has curdled fully into strategy. "No more armies wasted to satisfy pride. No more Paradragons bled out on a field he barely has to acknowledge. From this moment, Apokolips stands on the defensive. Fortify the fire-pits. Recall the outer legions. We do not spend what remains of our firepower proving a point he has already made a hundred times over."

"Defensive, my lord?" Desaad could not fully mask his surprise. Apokolips had not postured defensively in ten thousand years. "Surely a show of overwhelming force, properly coordinated this time, with the Elite personally.."

"You were not listening, Desaad." The words cracked like a whip, and Desaad flinched, actually flinched, a rare and delicious admission of fear that under any other circumstance Darkseid might have savored. "Overwhelming force is precisely what we have already spent. Precisely what he has already devoured and turned into more of himself. Every soldier I feed him makes him stronger. I will not continue arming my own executioner."

He turned, already walking toward the chamber’s edge where the air had begun to hum and fold with the low violet crackle of a forming Boom Tube.

"Then.. then what course remains, my lord?" Desaad called after him, torn between relief at being dismissed and dread at being left behind, for a summit convened and abandoned mid-thought was rarely a good omen for anyone still standing in the room afterward.

Darkseid paused at the threshold of light. When he spoke again, his voice had dropped, no longer the roar of a god addressing his court. "This is no longer a war for legions, or Furies, or gene-forged beasts bred in vats by men too comfortable in their laboratories to understand what true failure costs." He did not look back. "I underestimated him once, and paid for it in armies. I will not repeat the error by sending anyone else to finish what only I should have started."

The Boom Tube yawned open behind him.

"I’ll do things myself this time."

And then, without ceremony, without the pageantry his court had grown to expect of him, Darkseid stepped through and was gone, leaving Desaad alone in the vast dark of the throne room.

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