"Father? Your species can give birth?" The question, so innocent, so quintessentially Peter Parker, was a tiny, fragile pebble dropped into an ocean of cosmic dread.
The black symbiote, Venom, went utterly still. Thoughts—not words, but raw, primal feelings of fear, regret, and a deep, instinctual horror—rained through Peter's mind via their partial bond. It spoke nothing, but its white, jagged eye-patches widened, its gaze fixed on the crimson figure that had risen from the Abyss.
Then it sighed. A deep, weary, and utterly defeated sound that seemed to carry the weight of a thousand sins.
"**Boy!**" Venom's voice was a low, desperate growl that vibrated through Peter's very bones. Black tendrils, no longer calm and integrated, writhed and contracted across the surface of the suit, a physical manifestation of pure, unadulterated panic. "**Run!**"
Peter Parker looked around. A strange, unnatural calm had fallen over the immediate battlefield. The Klyntar dragons, which had been a relentless, seething tide of claws and fangs, had stopped their assault. They circled him now, their movements no longer aggressive, but wary, almost… reverent, as if in the presence of something they both feared and respected.
Even his Spider-Sense, which had been a continuous, high-frequency shriek of alarm, had quieted. It no longer tingled from every direction, only from a few specific, distant threats. Even the crimson figure, the son of Venom, didn't trigger his Spider-Sense with the same overwhelming intensity as the dragon horde had. It was a different kind of warning—not a chaotic storm of danger, but a single, focused, razor-sharp point of absolute, inevitable doom.
He took a moment, forcing himself to take a deep, steadying breath. The suit, sensing his physiological stress, provided him with an optimal mix of oxygen and calming agents. It repaired itself, microscopic ultralinks ingesting tiny fragments of the emerald ground he stood on, converting matter into energy, sealing the tears and breaches in the fabric. Nano-injectors, silent and painless, accelerated his self-healing while providing a direct infusion of nutrients.
"Why should we run?" Peter asked, his voice a mixture of genuine confusion and a dawning, terrible curiosity. "Isn't he your son? Can't you just… talk to him? Give him some father-son advice, maybe? Or, hey, maybe we can cut his connection to Knull and make him one of ours? Like the Agents of the Cosmos? After all, they're all the same species, aren't they?"
His head tilted, his analytical mind kicking in even in the face of abject terror. "Except he's… redder. He looks much cooler than you, no offense. And his red kind of matches my red. We could be, like, the Symbiote Spider-Bros!"
"**BOY! HE IS MY SON, BUT HE IS MADDER THAN US ALL!**" Venom's psychic roar was one of pure, frantic desperation. "**We reject our Creator because our goals do not align, because we do not wish for a cosmos of only black! But he… he willingly, joyfully, chose Knull!**" Black tendrils slithered across Peter's suit, trying to physically force his body to turn, to flee. But the suit, under Peter's own subconscious will, did not comply.
"**Knull might accept us back, even as traitors, for we are his children. His offspring. An extension of his will. But my son will not. He will tear us apart, piece by agonizing piece, and extinguish our existence for the crime of defying his god. His true father. He took the name Carnage, for he embodies the pure, unadulterated savagery of our Creator!**" Venom tried once more to fully bond, to take control, but the ultralink suit, now wary of the symbiote's panic, denied it access. "**Now run, boy! For we do not stand a chance!**"
Before any response could come out of Peter, his Spider-Sense, which had been a focused point, suddenly flared into a wide-angle warning. He saw them—Xenophages, the cannibal hunters of the Abyss, sleek, multi-limbed horrors, rushing towards him from the periphery, their movements a silent, deadly blur. He readied himself, webs coiling at his wrists, his body tensing for the onslaught.
Then, they were gone.
A single, impossibly fast red tendril, thin as a razor wire, had lashed out, bisecting the rushing Xenophages in a single, fluid motion. It skewered them all, their still-twitching bodies held aloft like grotesque shish kebabs. The tendril then retracted, bringing the gruesome trophies back to its source.
Carnage.
It watched the skewered Xenophages, its eyeless, crimson face expressing a twisted, orgasmic pleasure. Then, with a wet, slurping sound that made Peter's stomach churn, it ate them. All of them.
"**Father.**" Carnage's voice was a discordant symphony of madness and glee, a sound that seemed to crawl under the skin. "**Our Creator has ordered your death, and the death of your new little host. And what kind of a son would I be if I could not ensure that my own father died by my own hands?**" Carnage's jaw unhinged, splitting open to reveal a spiraling vortex of needle-sharp teeth, the epitome of savagery. "**Child. The new host of my father. My father seems to have forgotten to mention one simple, elegant detail. I was not made to be a soldier. I was made to be an executioner. An executioner of my own kind.**"
Its form shifted, flowed, the crimson and black of its body swirling like blood in water. It was not a creature of brute force; it was a living weapon of terrible, artistic grace.
"**And your fear… your pain… your desperation…**" Carnage's voice was a soft, sibilant whisper now, a sound more terrifying than any roar. "**Oh, it is the most beautiful canvas I have ever seen. So much potential. So much vibrant, screaming color to be released. This dull, boring blackness… it needs a splash of red. Your red.**"
Its tendrils, no longer just weapons but now delicate, artistic instruments, began to shape the air around them. They sculpted the dissipating essence of the Xenophages, the ambient darkness of the Abyss itself, into grotesque, beautiful, and terrifying forms—a screaming face, a flower with petals of solidified shadow, a ballet of dying, abstract shapes.
"**I am not just a killer, little spider.**" Carnage declared, its head tilting with a chilling, bird-like curiosity as it admired its own horrific creations. "**I am an artist. And my art is chaos. My medium is suffering. My masterpiece… will be you.**"
Carnage moved. It was a blur of crimson, a stroke of a bloody brush across the canvas of the void. Peter dodged, weaved, his suit now in Speed Mode, his movements a frantic blur. But Carnage was not just fast; it was everywhere. A scythe-like claw raked across his back, and this time, the reinforced plating of his suit tore like paper. Peter cried out, the pain sharp, intense. Venom shrieked, trying to heal the wound, but the cut sizzled with a strange, dark energy that seemed to inhibit its regenerative properties. Carnage's very being was anathema to their own.
"**Yes! Beautiful!**" Carnage hissed, appearing before him, its claws dripping with his blood. "**A vibrant, beautiful red! But it needs more… more texture! More depth!**"
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The Enigma Force. A flicker of cosmic static. An error in the grand, silent equation of nothingness, born from the futile machinations of the Beyonders. A lock for a cage they could not build, a leash for a beast whose hunger was a fundamental constant of reality. It was… an irrelevance.
And this human, this Robert Reynolds, a fragile vessel of shivering anxieties and quaint pleas for repentance… he was gaining control. With every golden punch that dented the fabric of the Abyss, with every searing blast that momentarily illuminated the darkness, Knull felt it. The Force was settling, finding its temporary champion, stabilizing.
A little more time, and this mortal would touch its full, boundless extent. Were it another time, another tedious cycle of creation and decay, Knull might have found it amusing. He might have even allowed this fleeting host to reach the absolute zenith of its capabilities.
It would have been a final, predictable spectacle. An absolute, definitive contest between the primordial Darkness and the desperate, fleeting concept of Light. A war to end all wars. A final, perfect brushstroke to complete the masterpiece of oblivion.
But now, he had no such luxury. Not because he was threatened, but because his attention was divided. The now All-Father, crackling with his inherited, second-hand divinity, was a persistent noise. The most interesting mortal on his stolen emerald throne was an intriguing variable. And then there was the other, that subtle anomaly in the tapestry of fate. The fisherman.
The King in Black closed his eyes. The darkness, his birthright, his very essence, came into full view. Not the churning chaos of the Abyss, but the perfect, silent, absolute black that preceded it. The true void. For a single, beautiful microsecond, he remembered peace.
He raised his hand. The black—blacker than the Abyss, a color that was the absence of all color—flowed into his palm. It did not just take a shape; it remembered its shape. It extended and solidified, a process not of forging, but of becoming.
His sword. All-Black, the Necrosword.
He had let a child of this seventh cosmos wield it once. The child, in his simple, vengeful rage, had used it for its first, truest purpose. To kill the divine. Albeit lesser gods, pale imitations of true power, but divine nonetheless. The sword remembered the taste.
The blade now hissed in his hand, a soundless, psychic vibration of pure animosity, for it did not like the fragile, arrogant light of the Enigma Force.
Knull opened his eyes. The sword fell.
It did not cleave the space before him. It did not slash through the torrent of golden energy Captain Universe unleashed. It did not cut time, nor space, nor any aspect of the immaterial. It cut a concept. It severed the line between a man and his hope.
Both the host and the Enigma Force were incapable of dodging it, for there was nothing to dodge. The light, the brilliant, defiant golden aura around Robert Reynolds, dimmed, stuttered, and was snuffed out like a candle in a gale. In its place, the Abyss surged, wrapping the man in a cocoon of living symbiote, no longer attacking his flesh, but whispering of his failures, of his sins, of the sweet, final release of surrender.
The King in Black did not give the Enigma Force a second look. A neutered god was no god at all. The now All-Father? Were it the Odin of before, with his cunning and his ancient, terrible wisdom, he would have been a variable. This son, this Thor… he was a constant. Predictable. A problem for later, or perhaps never.
The sword moved in his hand, a slow, languid arc, with no rhythm, no flow. It was not a weapon now, but a dowsing rod, a divining instrument, seeking a resonance in the fabric of fate.
Then, Knull's lips curved, an expression that held no mirth, no triumph, only the cold, detached satisfaction of a calculation confirmed.
"**I found you, little anomaly.**" his thought-voice was a simple statement of fact. "**For fate dictates your appearance before me.**"
And Fate, in this domain of darkness, obliged. The Abyss itself split apart, not from an attack, but in supplication to its master's will. A chasm of deeper, more absolute black opened, and Ranger, who had been a ghost, an unseen observer, was swallowed. He was plunged into a bubbling, sentient sea of pure, undiluted Klyntar and a writhing, chaotic mass of a million symbiote dragons. The fisherman had been hooked.
Whether he lived or died was of no consequence. All things, in time, returned to the black. Knull was merely… tidying up.
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Anyways this is it. All the stockpile. And I am gonna keep the story for about a month or so and then delete it.
May we meet again when I become a better writer or if I ever have the time to write again.