Within the gleaming Ivory Towers of Castle Canterlot, resting atop a massive equine-made platform jutting out from the side of a purple mountain peak like the rest of the city, was a library. The single greatest, most prestigious, and most voluminous depository of knowledge in the known and civilized world. Why, any book worm worth his or her salt-licks had, at one point or another, a list upon which being allowed admittance into the library was at the tippy top.
For one Twilight Sparkle, however, it was only Tuesday.
"Heheheheheheh!" she giggled as the soft fluttering of her purple wings echoed off of the walls and she danced in the air in what an outside observer could only describe as 'elated jubilance.'
Perhaps 'dancing' was giving her too much credit. For, while Rainbow Dash's guidance had allowed her greater control over her new appendages, she maneuvered in a way that was the aerial equivalent to the 'dancing' she engaged in at parties when her hooves were planted on terra-firma.
Still, one could hardly blame her for enjoying one of the perks that came with being a recently ascended royal goddess of the Equestrian throne.
For now, by royal decree of Princess Celestia and Luna, certain wings of Castle Canterlot's library, previously inaccessible to her as a filly and even after that fateful day when Celestia had sent her off to Ponyville, were now open to her. Once, where there were the biggest and meanest looking of royal guards defending locked doors of the darkest obsidian in stone silence, there was now only squeals of joy.
The kind any book worm worth her salt-lick gets when shelves and shelves upon tomes whose names had never before struck her ears suddenly surrounded her in a swirling and surrounding syntactical spire.
After five straight minutes of happy 'flying' that resembled a bumblebee with injured wings, Twiligh finally landed on the marble tiles of this particular rotund partition of the library, the 'omega-wing,' and sat in a chair before a desk she had placed at the center.
"Alright Twilight, get hold of yourself! Breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out..."
She closed her eyes. For several seconds Twilight repeated this until, she thought, she had reached a state of calm.
"Now-" she opened her eyes.
She couldn't help herself.
She began tapping her forehooves together so fast that they became a blur of rapidly vibrating lavender and the shockwaves from the continuous impacts were causing the entire room to shake and buckle and she was overly giddy with excitement all over again.
"Which one should I read first!?" she yelled so loud that the two members of the biggest and meanest looking of royal guards standing watch just outside the obsidian door winced and covered their ears.
As her eyes gazed over the shelves, she noted one particular book resting upon one of the top shelves that seemed to glisten beyond the others. It called to her. Her eyebrows arched in a curious fashion and she flew up to it, pulling it out with the purple aura of her magic.
"Hmmm…" she said, rubbing her chin as she inspected the cover, which bore the tome's title and beneath that, emblazoned in gold, an infinity symbol that looked like a two headed snake eating itself. " 'Fatum Revelatum'…"
Sitting back at her desk, she gently placed the gleaming tome onto it. She began leafing through the pages containing the title of the chapters they belonged to, foregoing the table of contents or the index completely because, hay, when you can process information as quick as an alicorn, looking at those things isn't as fun as watching the pages flap from right to left and then from left to right at speeds that should, by all rights, cause them to combust.
Deciding on a section of the book to actually begin diving into in earnest, she stopped her super-speedy skimming and said aloud the name of the section she decided to stop at.
"Hrmmm…'The Legend of the Infinity Gems...' "
She cleared her throat as she read aloud.
"Long ago, before matter, energy, space, and time, before all physical laws and everything they govern as we know it today, there existed a being. An anomaly. One with might enow to bend all known fragments of reality, tear asunder all souls within, crush all minds within, warp all space within, empower those he chose within, and shatter all time within.
"It would not be boasting to call this being, this anomaly, God. The One. The True. The Absolute. The Only.
"But, this being, this anomaly, was unaware of its creative gifts, its potential. Unaware that it could split the lonesome void in which nothing but it existed with but a thought and give birth to myriads of fragments of reality that mortals could only dream and many of whom, could not.
"Instead, as time, or whatever its predecessor was, passed, this being, this anomaly, God, the one, the true, the absolute, the only, succumbed to the lonesome void, the nothingness.
"In its never ending grief, with but a thought, it killed itself.
"God killed Himself.
"God committed 'suicide'."
Twilight's eyes widened in shock at this, that last line, particularly, that last word. Though she had never heard it once before today, she now knew its meaning well.
Suicide.
She took to a few feet in the air and trembled at what she had just read.
"Wh-wh-what type of pony could do that to himself? Why would anypony take their own life!? It's unbelievable..." she thought to herself as she looked at the pages, both hooves to her mouth in horror at the idea and that there was a word that encapsulated it.
For she was always taught that life, ANY life, was a precious thing and to take it was to lose a piece of yourself. Not in any tongue she knew, not in Equestrian, Germanian, Sponish, Prench, Griffonian, Minotaurian, or Romane, was she aware of any word or series of words that could adequately convey how heinous of a crime such an act was.
She was beginning to suspect that whoever had authored this book was a special kind of deranged, even more so than Ponyville's famous 'Barking Mare.'
And yet...her curiosity got the better of her. As morbid as it was...she found herself floating back to her chair at her desk with the intent of finishing this most macabre of legends. She just had to know what would happen next and how it would all end.
She just had to.
She sighed and buried her muzzle in the heavily stylized text once more.
"However, from such an entropic action, the first act of death in creation, a paradox arose.
"For it was from such an entropic action, the first act of death in creation, that creation itself and all of its fragments began, along with matter, energy, space, and time, and the physical laws and everything they govern as we know it today.
"In His death, came life."
Twilight lifted her muzzle from the tome and rubbed her temples, her mind reeling and trying to reconcile that somepony's 'suicide' could have such a positive effect.
Yet she kept on reading.
"In His death, arose six gems. Six gems said to contain the fractured remains of His being and all of His creative abilities within.
"Yet make no mistake: whomsoever wields all six gems will not use them for the purpose of construction. Rather, their power will corrupt their wielder, if said wielder is not already corrupt, for the sole purpose of wasting such potential for destruction's purpose instead.
"For the stench of His death is strong in His six fractured remains and in all mortal hands, it WILL turn the wielder towards the embracement of death as the ultimate absolute of reality like He did so long ago.
"Beware of these gems of death. Beware of them, these gems of death with might enow to bend all known fragments of reality, tear asunder all souls within, crush all minds within, warp all space within, empower those chosen within, and shatter all time within.
"Beware…
"Beware…
"Beware..."
Twilight shut the book tight with her magic, her eyes still in shock about what she had just read. Could it be true? Could there be a pony somewhere out there just wishing to inflict death on a universal scale? Could there be a pony resourceful enough to gather these gems and accomplish such a macabre goal?
She shook her head at that question.
Of course there was. There was a being bent on chaos after all who could warp reality to his whim on a planetary scale.
Narrowing her eyes in determination and her every gnawing hunger for knowledge, she trotted off to where Celestia was holding court. She surprised the guards standing watch outside with how suddenly her magic aura had thrust open the doors of the omega-wing and with how fast she trotted away.
However, despite her determination and hunger, she was unaware of events transpiring elsewhere.
For in the vast reaches of reality, there were places where the destinies of equine and a race known as 'men' were being sown by creatures with powers far beyond those of mere mortals...
0-0-0-0-0
One such place was a dimensional partition separated long ago from the normal cosmology of its home universe and multiverse. Within this partition laid two distinct worlds ruled by a great yet divided race that resembled men greatly.
The new gods.
The first world was one blessed with immense natural beauty and bounty that stretched across the surface of every continental landmass in a continuous pristine sea of healthy greenery. Ruled by the benevolent half of the new gods from their perpetually nomadic floating fortress of a city known as 'Supertown', this world, New Genesis, was an Eden for all who held heroism in their hearts and possessed a burning passion to see the light of goodness shine throughout the cosmos.
The second world was its inverted and distorted mirror twin. It was cursed with immense natural ugliness and barrenness that stretched across the surface of every continental landmass in an almost continuous polluted sea of sickening red. A sea broken occasionally by vast stretches of bleak urban development and massive torrents of flame belching forth from the fire pits that dotted the planet and that were dug deep into the core. From orbit, this hell-fire made it appear as though the planet was exploding from within, venting into space its own inner struggle between staying a planet and killing itself to end the misery of the hapless life clinging to its surface.
Apokolips.
A literal hell on earth. A place where food, water, and even shelter and safety are considered luxury items to be fought and killed for. A place where demons filled the skies as they kept pairs of yellow, animalistic eyes, on the slaves of the planet, which was the entire population even for those who were not officially and derogatorily referred to as 'The Lowlies.'
A world where the only means of escape was death.
The gods here, the weakest of them more than capable of grinding the bones of mere mortal men into edible meal, feared many things. But that which they feared more than anything, a fear they allowed to be beaten in them with gusto if they knew what was good for them, was not to fear 'a' god like them, but THE God.
The new god of evil.
Their eternal lord and sovereign.
Darkseid.
Beyond the outer walls of the slums of Armaghetto.
Beyond the outer walls of 'The Obsidian Palace.'
Beyond the duo of foreboding and forbidding larger than life statues of him raising an iron fist into the air standing watch at the entrance to his throne room, he sat upon his obsidian throne, a pensive look on on his ashen, grey face.
"Desaad, turn the scanner to quadrant 615," Darkseid said, leaning forward, putting a hand to his chin.
Before him was a spherical holographic display emitting from a hexagonal device, a type of scanner. On each of the scanner's six sides was an interface, one facing Darkseid directly. On the opposite side of the scanner stood Desaad, clad in a purple cloak.
"Yes, lord Darkseid!" Desaad said as he began to type a sequence upon his interface, changing the display's image from that of a microcosmic view of a massive tsunami striking a version of the mortal city of 'New York,' to a macrocosmic view of stars of many bright colors swirling around one another.
Silently, Darkseid's crimson eyes watched as Desaad zoomed in on one of the stars and the third planet away from it in its system. Images of mortals, both mere and mighty, in costumes fighting criminals and standing against other costumed mortals, both mere and mighty, were brought up.
As Darkseid gazed at these sickening displays of righteous heroism, his mind wandered back to an event that happened only a few years ago. He thought of a war waged between two massive titans that were much closer to having the divine right to call themselves 'God' than even he, though he would not admit this to anyone and would reduce anyone to their base atomic components with his O-Mega beams if he did. A war between the 'champions' of his Universe and another that these two 'Gods' had set up to determine which Universe would live and which would die.
He had no part in that war, nor did he care of its outcome. It did however introduce him to a being with just as much ambition as himself and just as much of a burning desire to see it carried out. Though they had a fight over certain... ideological differences...he had discovered, thanks to the being, the existence of six items within that Universe that had piqued his curiosity.
When the two 'Gods' were satiated with the chaos they had wrought and separated the Universes again, Darkseid had thought these six items he wanted to gain were lost to the ages. For though the Universes had indeed met, they typically belonged to two different multiverses entirely, and trying to breach the barriers between separate multiverses was several orders of magnitude more difficult than between separate Universes. Impossible even.
Recent events proved him wrong, though. For once in his tens of thousands of years of existence, he was most glad to be.
He was brought out of his musings by Desaad's shrill, shrieking voice. He'd have to remember to find some way to punish him for sounding so annoying.
"S-s-sire! It seems that this earth, perhaps even this universe, is slowly dying from an unusually powerful zombie infestation!" Desaad said, cowering in fear as Darkseid glared upon him in anger. "B-b-but it seems that this universe is very close to the one that we're searching for! Even closer than the last! So much so, that I believe that if we go to the next one, we'll find the main one you seek!"
"Very well then. Continue your search for universe-616," Darkseid commanded, his voice low and deep.
Smiling, he admired the bright ruby red gem, one of the six items that had so piqued his curiosity long ago, as it sat at the center of the scanner. It was positioned directly beneath the holographic projection and propped up by six poles that jutted out of the interior points of the scanner. It had made the scanner's construction feasible. It hummed and glowed faintly with power and promise of even greater power.
Though it was an emotion he rarely displayed, he supposed feeling gratitude for whoever or whatever had sent the gem to Apokalips was not an unreasonable thing. Assuming that whoever or whatever immediately bowed before him and recognized him as lord and sovereign, of course.
"Sire! We have found him!" exclaimed Desaad as the screen zoomed in on a large starcraft, two miles in height, and shaped like the skull of some purple alien demon with rounded ears and with eyes of comparable crimson to Darkseid's own.
"Excellent," Darkseid said, leaning back upon his throne. Letting loose a low chuckle, he smirked devilishly. "Hack that love sick simpleton's comm-system. It is time to have a dialogue with the 'Mad Titan' once again. If all goes well, perhaps we may not even need to initiate Plan-Beta in the very real likelihood that he tries to plant one of his daggers into my spinal column…"
0-0-0-0-0
On board the ship, dubbed Reaper-1, Thanos stood with his fists against his hips in the rotund command center. Behind him floated his hover-throne. Before him was a massive super computer-bank beneath an even larger screen. The screen gave him the same view of what lay beyond Reaper-1's secondary adamantium-carbonadium alloy hull as if the vessel's two 'eyes' were not weapons and were genuine.
His own eyes, pitch black and soulless, moved back and forth across the lifeless expanse as it raced by. "Is it not lovely, my lady? Does it not simply take your breath away?" he asked to no one in particular, placing a yellow gloved hand onto the screen. "An endless void of death and dying that stretches out for hundreds of light-years. This quadrant of Andromeda is a potential graveyard all ours to waltz through at our leisure."
He sucked in a large amount of air and let it out with a sense of serenity. He stood there, soaking in that sense, until a different yet familiar sense, washed upon him. It was a putrid stream that had plagued him ever since he was a lad on Titan and that had once more burst forth from its endlessly rebuilt reservoir.
Doubt.
He stole just a glance over his shoulder, at a statue of a mysterious woman clad in a raven robe that stood next to his hover-throne and clutched a long scythe at her side. Then, like an innocent schoolboy who had just unintentionally seen the object of his affection, his crush, undressing, he looked back at the screen. A wave of shame washed over him and he hung his head low and brought his face into both of his palms.
"Tell me, Lady Death. Please. Tell me what I must do to make you as happy as you've made me over the years, and I shall make it so," he said, his voice muffled.
The statue remained silent, casting a quiet look upon Thanos.
His head perked up suddenly and he walked up to the statue. "What's that, my love?" he asked as he caressed its chin with a gentleness the casual observer would say was ill-befitting a beast as large as he. "There's a long forgotten yet familiar player approaching our game board?"
Thanos looked at the ground as he rubbed his frilled, skrullish chin in ponderment.
"Lord Thanos!" boomed a deep voice.
Thanos turned back towards the screen, seeing the computerized image of Reaper-1's A.I., aptly named 'Reaper' and aptly resembling the vessel, appear.
"What is it, fool?!" Thanos boomed back. Through gritted teeth, he said, "Are you so blinded by your stupidity that you cannot plainly see I and Lady Death are speaking in private?!"
Fortunately for Thanos, he had not given Reaper much of a personality. If he did, the A.I. might have made a crack about himself being no more stupid than the idiot who programmed him in the first place.
"There's a being whose just hacked the comm-link."
"WHAT!?"
"He says that he has something you might want."
Some being dared to call into questions HIS mountainous brilliance as an engineer by grand-standing his own eloquently designed security protocols? Some being dared to posses the sheer unmitigated gaul to not only hack his ship's comm-system and interrupt him as he had an important conversation with his Lady, his love, and demand an audience afterwards?
Why he would transmute this little hacker's entire race into cosmic vapor through liberal application of world leveling energy blasts and would do the same to any other race that dared to remind him of the existence of the hacker's race. He would crush them all with a gesture!
Thanos huffed and puffed for a few moments. Then, he remembered what Lady Death had said, and calmed himself down considerably. He looked to ground and rubbed his chin once more, considering this new development in light of her words.
He sat upon his hover-throne, looked back up towards the screen and said, "Put him on."
Reaper disappeared from view with a slight fuzzy haze of static. In Reaper's stead, the hacker that possessed such sheer unmitigated gaul took up the entire screen, sitting in an obsidian throne of his own of sorts.
The hacker's skin was grey, like dark ash. All of his clothing was predominantly a dark, navy blue. His entire center mass was covered in a single piece of body armor that lacked sleeves or leggings. On his arms and legs he wore a pair of gauntlets and boots respectively. Around his head sat a helmet, shaped somewhat like a widened bullet, that left his face from his forehead down to his chin on full display, especially his dark, crimson eyes.
Those eyes.
Thanos glared at those eyes as he noticed them wandering from himself to Lady Death on his left, and then back to himself.
"Greetings, Thanos of Titan."
That voice.
Thanos could hear Lady Death's words even more clearly now than ever before as he fully recalled the hacker before him. Indeed, after his home universe was merged for a time with another universe from a completely different multiverse by two beings with power enow to challenge perhaps even the Infinity Gems, how could he forget?
"Darkseid…"
Thanos's eyes opened wide as the memory of the conversation and subsequent clash with the Lord and Sovereign of Apokalips flashed before them.
It was not a pleasant memory.
"Darkseid!"
Thanos gripped both armrests of his hoverchair with enough force to crush two moons the size of earth's. Luckily though, before he could actually succeed in crushing their gold painted true-adamantium forms, he throttled his anger instead and calmed himself.
After all, with a conniving wretch like Darkseid that could smell weakness like a shark could blood, it paid to be as stone faced as him.
"Ah, you remember me. That's good. It means we can skip the required pleasantries and head straight to today's business."
Thanos huffed. "Please oh 'new god of evil,' the day I engage in pleasantries or business with you will be the day my Lady destroys both our universes through cosmic expansion." Thanos smiled. "However, if you wish to meet her sooner than either of those inevitable heat-death events, why don't you give me your coordinates so that my ship can grant you your request?"
Darkseid did something that Thanos had never before witnessed Apokolips' Lord and Sovereign do.
He smiled.
Immediately, Thanos's guard was up, though he remained stoic.
"Very well. At present, I sit upon my throne, which itself sits upon my world, which itself sits upon a pocket dimension, which itself lies in my home universe, which itself lies in my home multiverse."
Were Thanos some lesser intellect with a lesser stranglehold on his emotions, he would given away his shock then and there. Instead though, a skeptical look made its way upon his face where it remained for several seconds.
Darkseid continued to smile. "I see you do not trust my words. Good. You're not completely mentally inept then."
Thanos took Darkseid's barb without so much as a flinch. Darkseid's unfaltering smile, though, made the task of keeping his composure gravely uncomfortable.
The Lord and Sovereign of Apokalips lifted up a gemstone lying on his palm so that it was visible upon the screen. "I figured, this may interest you."
Thanos's composure left him then and there, for the size, the oval shape, and the ruby red coloration of the gem left its identity unmistakable.
"The power gem!" Thanos yelled, leaning upon the edge of his hover-throne.
"Indeed. With the power implied in its name, I have constructed a device from my inborn genius that can pierce through the veil that separates our two multiverses and allow for viewing and communication as well." Darkseid pointed at Thanos. "Speaking of which, I suggest you crush that statue of your 'Lady Death' into pebbles and then de-atomize what's left. I hear mere mortals can develop many mental issues if they talk to themselves for too long."
Thanos's face cycled between fury for Darkseid daring to mock the bond he and Lady Death shared and complete flabbergastation at this revelation. "But... how!? I thought that the 'heroic' pests that populate my universe had taken the gauntlet away from Adam Warlock and split the gems up a year ago!"
"Ah... so a piece of the picture puzzle finally fits into place," Darkseid said, looking deeply into the powergem before him.
Thanos slammed a fist onto one of his armrests. "Must you be so cryptic!?"
"Really? Hrmmmm… perhaps I was mistaken earlier on the subject of your mental ineptitude."
Thanos's response was for his eyes to glow a deep gold with cosmic power and for him to grit his teeth and yell out in barely contained rage.
"If you must know, I suppose it seems that the 'heroic' pests of your universe have cast off at least some of the infinity gems into the depths of other multiverses to prevent them from being joined onto your former gauntlet once again. By luck, I suppose that the powergem fell into my lap."
Ah yes. Luck. Truly a more cruel mistress than his Lady could be if she would bless a dime a dozen domineering dictator with something like the power gem instead of him.
"How… fortuitous for you," Thanos said, both of his hands tightening their grips on his armrests.
"Quite."
"But why contact me? In fact, with the gem and the device you possess, why not just attempt to do away with me if a foe as formidable and potentially problematic as I ever crossed your mind?"
"I was getting to that proposition I have for you."
"Well get to it faster. I have an entire nebula cluster I could be life-wiping at this very moment."
"What? Does such a thing qualify as a honeymoon for you and your Lady Death?"
Any and all faux affability Thanos had put on immediately blasted away like a stellar mass ejection. Before he knew it, he stood before the computer screen and held a cosmic energy covered fist up in indignation.
"You better retract that little comment of yours now or I'll-"
"Do what, Titanian?" Darkseid's mocking visage asked. "Force me not to poke fun at the false idol at the center of your odd little pathetic brand of theistic nihilism further?"
"Death is no false idol you manipulative self-centered supremacist, and my love for her is not odd, little, or pathetic!"
"You are correct. What truly is, is that you are so convinced of your self-defeating delusions."
Thanos screamed at the top of his lungs and with the control he could exercise with his power cosmic, even with such vitriol clouding his judgement, created an orb of energy from the tip of his forefinger the size of a pea. With a cry of battle, he let it jet towards his hover-throne, where it exploded harmlessly against the shielding, which was fortunately calibrated to activate at just the right moment.
His eyes glowing gold again, he turned back to the screen and said, "Though the size and blast of that miniscule cosmic blast lacked spectacle, I assure you that it contained enough power to turn your precious little 'Apokalips' into nothing but a memory." Thanos slammed his fistss against the computer bank, denting it to the point where the picture of Darkseid became staticy for a bit before returning to normal. "I further assure you that you'd best hurry with your proposition. For though I lack the knowledge as to how at present, I will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill you."
Thanos's and Darkseid's eyes remained locked, attempting to whittle down the object of their gaze. But Thanos wouldn't dare budge by blinking or speaking. His composure returned to him like a loyal dog and he had a confident resolve that always proved to be his sword and shield when it came to standing for his Lady.
Though Darkseid did not blink, he was the one to capitulate by saying, "What if I were to tell you that, while using the power gem to scan multiverses for its brethren, that I had found a similar set of gems?"
Thanos remained silent for a moment.
Then, he scratched his chin in thought.
"I'd ask you to continue."
"What if I were to tell you that, these gems possess similar energy to the infinity gems, but rather, represent life every bit as much as the infinity gems do death?"
"I'd ask you to send me to their location right away so that I could destroy them and whatever or whomever created them for daring to mock my lady by their very existence," Thanos said, returning back to his hover-throne.
"While I could frankly care less if the indigenous population of the planet in question underwent a sudden genocide, in fact, I'd prefer it since I find them equally as ideologically repugnant as you, I'd rather the other set of gems brought to me. Intact."
"If that is so, then I too, could care less and suggest you send one of your innumerable slaves to play fetch for you if you expect me to follow such a fiat like a good little pet," Thanos said, now seated firmly back on his hover-throne. "Reaper! I don't care what you have to do! I want you to cut the transmission on our end, and if you find you can't, shut down the ship's power!"
"Yes Lord Thanos!" Reaper's voice said.
The image of Darkseid began petering out, his frantic voice sounding as garbled as a drunken Skrull spy trying to remember the language of whatever race it was impersonating.
Thanos could not help but smile.
"Shutting down power-"
Before Reaper could finish that sentence, Darkseid's image became clear for about three seconds, which was sufficient time for him to let out one word. One that was like music to Thanos's ears.
"Wait!"
Thanos chuckled. "Reaper. Oblige him," Thanos said with a wave of his hand.
"Yes Lord Thanos."
The image of Darkseid became clear again on the screen, and in the moment before his face returned back to its standard, neutral setting, Thanos delighted in seeing Darkseid's teeth gnashed together.
Thanos placed his arms over his chest in amusement as Darkseid cleared his throat.
"You didn't let me attempt to sweeten the deal for you."
"Of course not," said Thanos, snickering. "After all, how sweet could you possibly-?"
"I will tell you the locations of the rest of the infinity gems if you find this other set, these 'Elements of Harmony,' for me."
Thanos returned to what was fast becoming his favorite pastime with Darkseid. That was, he was staring intently at him, though this time, far more disbelievingly.
His eyes narrowed.
"And why would do you something as foolish as that, I wonder."
The Lord and Sovereign of Apokalips's response was to smile distressingly at Thanos once more.
Thanos's brow, despite his best efforts, began to sweat.