Chapter 594: The Fall of Apokolips

Arthur summoned his God killing spear instead of his scythe, its haft wreathed in crackling, restless lightning. He drove it forward himself, closing the last of the distance between them, and looked directly into Darkseid’s remaining eye as the point sank through armor as though the metal were nothing more than a costume, burying itself to the haft in the heart beneath.

"This spear was not made merely to kill what stands before me," Arthur said quietly as lightning crawled outward from the wound in branching, violet-white veins. "It reaches further than that. Whatever avatar you sent here, whatever true self you kept hidden and safe elsewhere... this wound finds both. You will feel this everywhere you exist, Darkseid. Not just here."

Darkseid’s remaining eye blazed crimson in one final, defiant surge, refusing even now to simply yield, and the Omega Beam tore free in a last, desperate act of violence. It struck a barrier of pure, absolute dark that had bloomed silently around Arthur without warning, and shattered against it without leaving so much as a mark.

Darkseid’s eye dimmed.

The light within it guttered, flickered, and finally went out entirely.

Then the hands came.

They rose from the abyss itself, from the endless black pressing in on every side, countless dark, skeletal shapes unfolding out of nothing, reaching, closing around Darkseid’s massive body from every direction at once around his ruined shoulders, his throat, his failing limbs, dragging him down into a blackness that had no floor, no bottom, no mercy waiting anywhere within it. He did not scream. Whatever remained of his voice by that point had already been swallowed along with everything else, his body dissolving inch by inch into the dark that consumed him, until nothing remained of the Lord of Apokolips at all, no sound, no trace that he had ever stood upon that ruined world in the first place.

The Abyss closed over the last of him, and went still.

A moment later, it too was gone too, folding back into nothing as quietly as it had first bloomed into being, taking the darkness with it, restoring the ruined, smoking wreckage of Warworld to its natural, bloodied twilight.

And Arthur too was already gone.

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APOKOLIPS -

Apokolips, the world of black iron and ash-choked skies, its towers rose jagged and cruel against a permanently bruised red sky, monuments to a tyranny that had never once, in all its long history, known what it was to be threatened from within its own borders.

That history ended the moment Arthur appeared above it.

He floated in the sky, violet eyes blazing bright enough to cut through the ash and smoke that perpetually shrouded the world below, his ashen white hair drifting in a wind, and behind him, the sky itself seemed to darken further, filling with shapes, thousands upon thousands of shadow soldiers hanging suspended in perfect, silent ranks, and violet-burning eyes, and at their head, wings spread wide against the ash-red horizon, floated Bellion, Grand Marshal of the Shadow Monarch’s army.

Apokolips, for the first time in its existence, was undefended in the way that mattered most. Its master was gone. Its armies, scattered across a dozen fronts, had been bled thin by a war Darkseid himself had orchestrated and lost. What remained below was a world of immense, brutal machinery and ancient horror and no one left who could truly command it.

Arthur raised one hand, and a spear of black light formed within his grip, its point angled down toward the world below.

"Bellion," he said, his voice carrying easily across the assembled ranks, "target the planet’s own subterranean energy devices.. the Hellspores.. turn his own weapon against his world. It will save all of you considerable effort, the planet will be destroyed faster that way."

Bellion inclined his head, wings flaring once in acknowledgment. "As you command, my Monarch."

He raised his blade, and the shadow army descended.

It was not a battle. It was an extinction event in the shape of an invasion.

The shadow soldiers fell upon Apokolips like a plague of violet-eyed night, tearing through its skies and its iron cities in a single, unstoppable wave. Parademons rose to meet them by the tens of thousands and died by the tens of thousands in turn, torn apart before they could even properly defend themselves. Paradragons that had been built to terrorize entire star systems found themselves matched and broken against Arthur’s own shadows, violet fire against Apokoliptian flame, the sky itself lit by the collision of two forces that should never have been permitted to exist in the same universe, let alone the same battlefield.

Below, in the black iron halls of the palace that Darkseid had ruled from for ages uncounted, panic finally, truly arrived.

Granny Goodness stood frozen at a high balcony overlooking the burning city, her ancient, twisted face contorted with something she hadn’t felt in centuries, it was genuine unfiltered dread, the fear of death. Beside her, Desaad’s sickly, cruel composure had cracked entirely, his eyes wide and darting as the sky itself seemed to fill with an army that had simply appeared, without warning, without any herald beyond the death of their god.

"He’s here," Desaad whispered, backing away from the balcony’s edge. "The Shadow Monarch. He’s actually here.."

"If he stands where our Lord should be," Granny Goodness said, her voice shaking, "then Lord Darkseid is.."

She didn’t finish the thought, the Shadow Monarch’s arrival told her everything.

Bellion found her within the hour.

He did not offer words. His whip-blade found her amid the collapsing ruin of her own torture-halls, and where she fell, a new shadow soldier rose in her place, violet-eyed and silent, one more soul claimed for Arthur’s endless ranks. Desaad met a similar end at Igris’s blade in the shattered remains of his laboratories, and one by one, across the length and breadth of the planet, the New Gods who had served Darkseid’s cruelty for millennia fell to Marshals who left nothing behind but corpses and new shadows rising in their wake.

Far below the surface, the Hellspores began to fail.

Arthur watched it happen from above, calm and unmoved, as veins of catastrophic red light began spreading across the planet’s cracked, ash-black crust, the world’s own doomsday architecture turning against the tyranny that had built it. Entire sections of Apokolips’s surface began to glow and buckle, ancient stone and iron splitting open to reveal the boiling ruin beneath.

Amid the chaos, his shadows did not forget the ones who mattered.

Chains shattered across a hundred slave-pits scattered throughout the planet’s lower levels, entire generations of beings, captured, broken, forced into service by a regime that had never once considered them anything more than fuel, finding themselves suddenly, impossibly free, shadow soldiers standing between them and the collapsing horror of the only world they had ever known.

It was into this that the Shadow Lanterns arrived.

They tore down out of the ash-red sky in a wave of sickly violet dark light, thousands of rings blazing in perfect unison, commanded at their head by Shadow Zeus, The Commander of the Corps, answering the call of the one entity every Shadow Lantern ultimately served. They fell upon what remained of Apokolips’s organized resistance with the same merciless efficiency as the rest of Arthur’s forces, clearing paths through the chaos, and where they found the freed slaves huddled amid the wreckage, they gathered them, wrapping them in shielding light and lifting them away from the dying world entirely, carrying them clear of the destruction that was coming.

Arthur watched it all unfold from high above, until at last there was nothing left below worth taking. The New Gods of Apokolips lay dead. The slaves had been carried to safety. The veins of world-ending fire spreading wider across the world.

He raised one hand.

His shadows answered instantly, disengaging as one, streaming back into the black sky and vanishing into his shadow, hundreds of thousands of soldiers folding away into nothing until only the fading echo of battle remained across the ruined planet below.

Arthur retreated to the vacuum beyond, drifting out into the cold, silent dark of open space, and there he simply watched.

Apokolips died beautifully.

The world cracked first along its ancient fault lines, veins of red-white fire tearing through, spreading, widening, consuming the black towers and burning cities in a slow, inexorable cascade that built toward something far grander than any single explosion. Light bloomed from within the planet’s core, growing, swelling, until Apokolips itself simply came apart.

Arthur floated in the silence of the void as it happened, his ashen white hair drifting weightless in the endless black, his violet eyes reflecting the dying light of a tyrant’s entire legacy unmaking itself before him, genuine satisfaction settled across his features as he watched.

Then, slowly, his body began to dissolve.

Shadow curled away from the edges of his body first, then spread inward, consuming what remained of him piece by piece, until nothing was left floating in that empty stretch of space at all, for this had never been more than a clone, a fragment of the true Shadow Monarch sent to finish what needed finishing, while the real Arthur remained exactly where he had promised he would stay.

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