Laying his head back against the wooden desk, inches away from the frozen body of the park ranger, the wounded Aquaman rested his eyes and immediately began to dream.

Arthur knew he was dreaming. He also knew some dark figure, its one arm replaced with a freeze pistol, body dripping with melting snow, was pursuing him, grasping for him.

He was still running in the dream; like Flash had done, he remembered, though it hadn't saved him either. He felt his heart thunder in his chest and his leg muscles knotting in protest. Cold breath washed over the back of his neck. There was a hunger in that cold; an unimaginable emptiness.

Run.

He's going to get you.

Run!

He wants to freeze the flesh from your bones.

Run!

He wants to bury you in the ice.

Run!

His heart was pounding so hard that he felt that it was going to explode in a splash of dark blood and ruptured muscle. His head throbbed with splinters of pain. A tight cramp formed in his left side, threatening to double him over.

But he couldn't stop. He could only run as the hooded figure followed him.

It's only a dream, Arthur told himself. He knew this. If only he could awaken, he would be alright.

Some lines of verse Arthur had once read fluttered into his mind:

Like one who on a lonesome road doth walk in fear and dread

And having once turned 'round, walks on and turns no more his head.

For he knows a frightful fiend doth close behind him tread.

The dream changed. He imagined a rushing slope of water like a mountain, trembling with streaks of foam, swelling, growing until he could not see the top. The people in the surrounding communities had no chance; those that fled, fled in vain. The majority would be struck dead by the force of its impact, and wouldn't feel a thing as they died, carelessly flung into debris or the sides of houses and buildings. Those trapped in cellars or basements below the waterline would drown. Having been blessed with a set of gills, Aquaman would never experience the sensation of drowning. He had heard from his father that it was a horrible death, quick but painful nonetheless. Their brains would be starved of oxygen, their heartbeats would flutter and then falter, ceasing only as their metabolisms slowed to complete stillness. Only a matter of ten to twenty minutes, and it would all be over.

He awoke suddenly. Going from unconsciousness to full-awareness instantly.

"I can't wait," he muttered. "...have to get out there." Arthur rose to his feet.

Pain!

It began with a ringing in his ears; a drone incessant, pulsing. It was like his sonar but playing on a frequency detecting sea life that he was completely unfamiliar with. Still tiny, but murmuring distantly, like a chorus rising and falling.

Although the pain was mild at first, the fear it brought caused his heart to race so fast that the beats could not be counted. Shivers ran along his spine, to his overwrought brain. There was also the nausea, a violent wave of it, bringing bile to his throat. Sweat erupted from his brow. He bit his tongue and tasted blood. He hyperventilated, struggling to keep conscious as well as stay on his feet. He moved forward, but as though his body were on autopilot. He stumbled to the station's restroom as blood continued to stream from the wound on his chest. It started slowly, rising to become a small gush.

As he stared at his pale reflection in the mirror, his vision suddenly went from hazy to hyper-sensitive. Everything became intensely, painfully bright. The dim shadows seemed to float before him. He wondered if he was having a heart attack. He felt the blood surge in his veins in a massive explosion, and then there was nothing but a redness running across his vision. It was the redness of unbelievable pain. And this time, he keeled over sideways. There was only the red, the overwhelming fear and the terrible pain in his chest.

Suddenly he remembered Black Manta, recalled how the water from within the suit had burst forth to spray him. Had there been something in that seawater? Had Black Manta's suit been a carrier for something, and if so, that something was now...

"...inside me!" Arthur screamed.

The something was inside of him, the something was crawling so deep inside of him that if he did not cast it out immediately, it would draw even deeper and become inaccessible.

"Parasite..." His lips parted as if to speak but could only belch out an enormous fistlike knot of blood which landed in the toilet. With horror, he realized that it wasn't just blood. Even the individual drops seemed to have move on their own, as though each was a microscopic colony all their own. He saw the main mass struggle and then break apart.

And he finally saw them. Floating, a few swimming in the bowl. Some were black and shiny; like tiny crabs no larger than a dime with pincers, and others were scaled like fish, but were not fish. There were batrachian things with webbed feet and tadpole tails. Protoplasmic blobs that could almost be mammalian fetuses if not for the flipper-like arms, patches of scales and protruding eyes. All sorts of sea-life - but none that he recognized. He saw the eggs, like tiny poisonous pearls instantly hatching upon contact with the water in the toilet.

Parasite? Don't you just wish that was all we are!?

In a panic at the voice, Arthur instinctively pulled down the handle and flushed them. He heard their unearthly shrieks as they went down the drain, like glass flexing and breaking.

He knew it wasn't over. He sensed more of them inside. More things began to break through his inflamed wound, and new ones opened up like malignant flowers on his chest and throat. Creeping things were hatching from microscopic eggs that now seethed to be born. Stirring as they began to claw their way out. Arthur felt them pour from his chest as well as rise up his throat, spilling out like bile, choking him. There were dozens of them. Hundreds, madly fleeing, gestating within him, and then eating their way out. Some of them fell to the floor, others joined their brethren in the toilet or sink. He could feel their movements hasten as they gnawed and tore at his flesh, swallowing it in small shreds, becoming excited over the taste of his blood. He felt their jabs, their stings, their bites - he felt them eating him as they emerged from his wounds, his life's vitality quickly ebbing from him. In an instant he was utterly drenched in his own gore. They left his body only to return. When he opened his mouth to scream, they sensed it and tried to crawl back in his ears, his mouth and eyes.

He began to slip, to slide.

The knowledge invited the agony to settle upon him and Arthur gasped, never before understanding that such pain could exist. Yet it wasn't enough. Even as the alien things forced their way down his throat it was only a punctuation to a greater agony - a grinding of failure. It was too much to bear, that final, aching thought. He had failed.

You're going to die, Arthur, that same ugly voice seemed to be speaking in his head. And not only that you're going to die in agony and terror – and no one will know.

Had that thought merely been his inner fear, bursting through in his head? Or had it come from somewhere else? It seemed such an independent thought, so malevolent, so intense and evil.

That wasn't my voice. That couldn't have been my voice.

Come now, this wouldn't be the first time you've heard voices in your head. This surely can't be the first time you've encountered thoughts other than your own? Your thoughts, your knowledge of language as easily cannibalized as your blood and flesh. Won't be much use to you much longer. Much easier to let your pulse slow, slow… So much easier to just drift downward, downward… deep inside, to that inner core of your being where the fish and the man become one, the inviolable heart of yourself that is yours and yours alone.

The depth of his pain grew, fed by the fear of what was happening to him. Beyond the pain, beyond the fear, was the realization: They're not just eating me, they're spitting me out! Rewriting my...Neptune, not AGAIN! NO! NO! NO!

He mumbled the mantra, as though he could deny the inevitable with a simple word.

Once before, a dose of hard radiation had mutated Arthur Curry back to a Missing Link form, a creature that had been among the first to regularly dwell in sea and on land in bipedal form, before some force made the choice for either. Regurgitated – or perhaps defecated out, his DNA was once again finding the form of the creature that had survived the Great Asteroid at Yucatan.

Arthur felt a comforting stillness, one very different from the tumult he'd been enduring for an hour now, as it beckoned to him, offering him peace and quiet at last. Arthur's last thought was a distant memory, of him sitting with his human father beneath the lighthouse that had been their home.

"First there was Heaven and Earth. Darkness on the face of the deep. That's what the Good Book says." his father whispered. "The ocean will be there when we're gone. The scientists say we came from fish. All of us. We came up from the deep."

His skin split, mouth ripping open as though something inside were struggling to emerge, like a butterfly emerging from its cocoon, but far far less beautiful. He grew larger – first doubling in size and then tripling as well as becoming darker. His skin became rough, almost like armor, a mix of white and dark gray hardened shark scales; perfect countershading for undersea camouflage. His head became all angles, and purest rage, but the eyes... the eyes stayed Arthur's. Deep blue - the blue of the deepest sea. That would not leave him, even in this.

Aquaman was given a more merciful fate than Flash. His mind was quickly destroyed by the transformation, and this time there was no going back. Its scaly hide meant it knew no cold or heat, always balanced perfectly.

The ranger station could contain him not at all. Enraged at being confined, the Sea-King reduced the structure to timbers with one swipe of a taloned foot. Escaping into the outside, he looked towards the horizon and the faint column of icy energy leaking into the world. In response he leaped, twenty feet into the falling snow. In spite of his size, he was agile, moving with speed and grace, like some massive feline.

In the distance, he saw something moving in the snow-laden trees, something that shook the earth under a colossal tread. There was a click of a trigger, and a ray of translucent white energy froze another section of forest.

The fear was gone. The Sea-King gave voice to his warcry, and, bounding back on clawed talons, he finally confronted the enormous Toyman robot and locked horns with it. Leonard Snart had been tucked away on the shoulder of the colossus. The impact of the two monsters' struggle dislodged Leonard from his perch, shattering both of his legs. The villain did not react to the pain, merely surprise at this turn.

Having toppled the enormous metal jester with a sound like an avalanche, the Sea-King instinctively went for the throat. Lacking a trachea, even a metal one, the Toyman robot survived the initial bite and responded by raking bloody furrows across the beast's armored back. The ground split under their combined weight, conifers were crushed like toothpicks.

The battle went on for long minutes, but robot eventually fell before primordial predator and all that remained was the one who taken the life of Aquaman's friend. But there was nothing resembling vengeance, merely hunger and fury. All that had been Arthur was washed away - like a sandcastle swept by the incoming tide.

As Leonard's head was torn away, he grinned despite it all as if to say:

"Still doesn't matter."

Howling and feasting, the creature finally bore down into the ice, which was still spreading, and let himself be frozen in, not to die, but to hibernate.

In the far future times when it awoke, the last thing that would be on any of its targets' minds would be a hero once laughed at and derided.

A new generation had been born this day, born from blood into a new world – new universe. And that birthing had vastly magnified the hunger of the spreading fan of spawn. Those that possessed mouths worked their jaws rapidly, smashing toothless gums together. Those that possessed eyes stared at the brave new world before them with infantile alertness. They did not recognize this place, even calling upon their dormant racial memories. It was so similar, but not quite the spawning grounds that they had known. The temperature was cold, not warm and humid like that Other Place, Other Time. It didn't matter, the temperature would be sufficient for the growth that would come. Some of their number had perished in the transition. These were cannibalized by their clutch-mates. Nothing was wasted. always use the tools available was a truth written in their DNA like holy scripture, and they would obey it.

From the ruins of the ranger station, the tender spawn leapt into the water, shedding their protective translucent films as they did so. Some instinctively fled the cold turbulence of the river in favor of warmer, stiller climes downstream. Others took up residence in muddy coves curtained by leafy vines along the backwater tributaries. Their instincts were so attuned that they could sense the presence of a drop of seawater in a radius of many hundred square miles.

They stretched, their scales rupturing even as the first vestigial limbs sprouted from their sides, feeling the ground beneath their bodies, long mouths snapping, sucking in the new air and dreaming of new flesh. They had tasted their first human blood. Intriguing in its flavor, though they longed for the taste of the False Spiders of this place, the ones who called themselves a Guild. Their motivation was conquest, not satiation. Such blasphemy would be punished with rituals designed just for such fundamental apostates. The invertebrates had had their fill of the fallen hero's body, even as they divested themselves of his indigestible bits, but were still hungry.

And so they searched. Searched for more blood and tissue of the same kind. Animals - squirrels, raccoons, field mice - who had drowned or were trapped by the flood waters were the first to be devoured; easy prey for the new life that erupted from the Sea-King's wounds. The corpse of one particular frozen park ranger was next, though its outer shell would have provided an ideal nest for the next generation.

Something else was missing. They felt her absence, but could not quite understand it. There was no Queen in this place – the Great Mother was absent – but the hierarchy – the hive – would have to be established nonetheless. In the meantime they would fulfill the purpose, the greater need, concentrating on the search for sustenance, grow to strength and maturity, dutifully laying their eggs. Where there were towns and cities, there would be storm drains and sewers, backyards and gardens for them to hide until they grew to maturity, which would be very soon. She was not be here to keep them in check or supervise their growth, and so it would be up to them to replenish this world and subdue it.

Their numbers would multiply, and then their time would come.

Thanks to Gojirob for his contributions to this chapter and others.