Alis Propriis Volat

"In all known time there has never been a greater monster or miracle than the human being." - Bryant H. McGill

It began as most things tend to do. It started small, inconsequential, and nigh unnoticeable one cold, January morning. In a world devastated by loss on a daily basis, where a singular good day excluded the numerical loss of countless thousands of human lives, a precious few suddenly snuffed out were as droplets drawn from the sea. So small, so mediocre, no one could have known it for what it was or what it truly was capable of because as all things that have come before and those countless many that would follow in its wake…

It was learning.

The first true inkling began when it was no longer the loss of mere ants but an actual queen, or rather, a king of a hive. There was little love for the city of Ellisburg and its monstrous citizens born and crafted from the flesh of humanity and malformed to a madman's whims. It was a constant thought in the back of the mind, a looming threat of a predator caged only because the door was never truly locked to begin with, that it could leave whenever the whim struck it. They forgot that such a door could be opened in kind, that for all that the Goblin King and his horrendous horde could depart, so too could one enter into the boundaries of his kingdom.

How was the rest of the world to know that the inexplicable and abrupt demise of the self-entitled Goblin King was not one born from his own deranged hubris when such an idea was the stuff of madness? No sane soul would enter such a place so logic dictated that it had to have been one of the Goblin King's own spawn that did him in. That the last of his oft organically recycled creations, his children as he so proudly decreed upon donning his crown of flesh and bone, had finally turned tooth and claw upon their maker before they turned on each other?

What evidence did the world have that fateful morning, when the light of another day revealed a kingdom turned to ash with naught but a few spires of half-crushed stone and melted steel to stand as gravestones for the multitude of souls lost to a monster's awakening? Smoke colored the sky and painted it black with the ashes of the city that had been razed in the span of a single night, and not a soul had been awake or aware of what the cause had been only the effect.

The Goblin King was dead and the nightmare of his existence, such as it was, had presumably ended.

The people of the world could not have known then that the dream, such as it may have been, was what had ended and that the nightmare, the truest and vilest sort, had only just begun.

In the days that followed the death of the self-entitled Goblin King, theories came and went from the credited and the imaginative alike. From the sensible to the incredible to the plausible to the deniable, fact and fiction became as one and were summarily separated all the same. For though no one person could attest to the who, the how, the why, or even the what, the one irrefusable fact remained as a pinnacle above all others. The terrors of an S-Class threat had been ended and the people of the world heaved a collective sigh of relief when it was affirmed that the Goblin King was well and truly dead.

The second time, barely a month later, had been different from the first insomuch that there was one lone soul to witness what had transpired. That this witness was none other than a member of the recently deceased Slaughterhouse Nine, the infamous and rightly feared Bonesaw herself, left far too much skepticism for anyone to believe any words she had left to speak. Not that she had anything with which to speak with when they found her and what remained of the Nine.

"We are dead…" Such was what could be read by the movements of her lips, her voice gone away to the wind where her screams echoed still in the remains of the latest town to fall victim to the whim of a traveling band of murderers and psychopaths.

The site of Bonesaw's capture had been a long stretch of road some several miles out from what remained of the small, non-descript town. Remains of course being a very generous term as, just like Ellisburg before it, there was not but ashes and melted stone and steel left of what had once been a community of thousands. The only evidence that the rest of the Nine had perished with the town were Bonesaw's own broken admittance to the fact, the only words she could not speak over and over again, and what few remains that could be positively identified as belonging to some of the Nine.

Save for one.

In the center of the town, where a mayoral office once stood before it had been shredding amidst a storm of glass and summarily set aflame down to its foundations, there was a flagpole. Strangely untouched by the intensity of the flames that still left the ground burning hot even so many days later when the last of the flames had long since extinguished. It stood tall and unbending as it bore the weight of Jack Slash proudly at its peak, dull and round and nonetheless impaled with extreme prejudice through the man's back and out through his stomach. Yet it was not by way of impalement that he had perished.

Bonesaw had worked her magic upon Jack Slash, more so than even herself. It would take serious work to kill him and such had been done in spades. He had been butchered in every sense of the word, pieces of him ripped and torn asunder by something that had neither the patience nor the skill to do so with precision.

They tried to question her, those first days after her capture, but Bonesaw was as the grave, silent and unmoving. She would not attempt to speak when spoken to. Did not blink when lights were shone into her eyes. Even the touch of gloved hands, needles, and several more things aside, didn't earn so much as a twitch from the young girl. She sat motionlessly, living only in that she breathed and that her heart still beat within her chest.

No one of significance amongst the PRT, from the mundane to the parahuman, gave her or her perpetual silence more than a passing thought. Her silent words little more than that of a mad dog driven madder by the loss of her second family, or so the puppets of the PRT would say. Their unseen puppeteers were hardly better, not even giving the poor girl that much.

After all, she was one whom had been groomed to be one of, if not the worst, serial murderer to ever grace the Earth. Had been cultivated by the likes of Jack Slash to be if not his outright successor than at the very least his parting gift to the world. Of course, her own summation did little credit to what had remained of her sanity. For all that she had been broken and remade by the worst that humanity could ever conceive, had killed and tortured countless lives under the pretense of being a good girl, Bonesaw had seen something that had left her completely and irrevocably broken beyond even what the worst of the Nine could ever dream of.

It was by chance that the PRT found a means of getting a reaction out of her.

When she had been captured, it was by parahuman means that she had been brought in. Heroes, in their vibrantly colored suits and costumes. Machines in draconic hues of steel and painted metals as Dragon transported and contained her through various mechanical suits. When questions remained unanswered and Dragon and Panacea both assured that her enhancements had been removed to the last, she was to be handed over to the PRT and, eventually, to the Birdcage.

As the door opened before her, Bonesaw's eyes fell upon the soldiers, all of them men and women, buried beneath armor of deepest black and darkest obsidians.

The sound she made would haunt those brave men and women to their dying day.

The doors slammed shut and when she lost sight of them, Riley dropped like a lifeless doll, silent and unmoving as she had been before but for one difference. Her heart, once so calm and steady, now sounded as a war drum within her chest and her breath, a ragged gasp for air as her eyes stared wide and unblinking up at the lights, as though it would burn away whatever daymare plagued her. Blood dripped from the corners of her mouth, her throat damaged anew and again beyond repair save for parahuman means.

Following this, further attempts were tried to varying degrees of success to try and gauge the cause of such a profoundly terrifying reaction. In the end, it was something so simple it was almost ridiculous in its normalcy. Somehow, someway, Bonesaw, one of the most feared members in the entirety of the Slaughterhouse Nine, had become melanophobic.

Blackness, pure and dark as moonless night, frightened her to such a degree that the tiniest piece of polished obsidian had her screaming to the highest heavens and doing everything in her power to get as far away from it as was possible, even—no—especially if it resulted in greater harm to herself in the process. The moment it was out of sight, she was as a puppet freshly cut from its strings. Further attempts were met with further self-harm to herself in ever increasingly mad bids for escape.

Caught up in this bizarre behavior by the butcherer of hundreds, though by some grace of a long-dead God not the literal Butcher herself, notice of another, far more alarming symptom that ailed the girl remained ever oblivious even when it was outright obvious. It would not be until the Heartbreaker himself was as ashes on the wind and the majority of his territory similarly awash in hellfire that they would take notice it.

The reflection of the young woman born as Riley in place of the girl christened as Bonesaw.

What began with a king and a slaughterhouse swiftly moved on to equal if not greater threats. The Ash Beast disappeared from the desert of Africa, little left to show for its existence but the burning trail of destruction that was its tread and a sea of flames that burned brightly amidst the shifting tides of the desert sands.

The very heart of Heartbreaker's lands was little more than a deep crater, a literal lake of ashes and destruction on a city-wide scale that left no one, the damned and the innocent alike, alive but for those who had been fortunate enough to live well outside the borders, and thus the range, of Heartbreaker's latest dwelling. With such wanton destruction dealt to ensure the deaths of singular S-Class threats, many began to suspect that this was not the work of a mere human being, but a monster of the highest order.

They were right.

It began, as most things are oft to do, rather small. A distant spark on the farthest horizon, little more than an acorn's circumference in size and yet shining brighter than a newborn star. The noonday sky above darkened as the moon moved to another's whim, each passing moment allow the tiny spark to swell and to grow until it was as visceral tear in the fabric of space and time. The waters beneath it turned crimson as blood dripped from the gaping wound as alarms sounded across the surface of the world.

Another Endbringer had at long last, come to call in full revelation rather than secret proclamation.

Those who would face it, knowing full well that this could be their last day, awaited it on the distant shores of the city of Brockton Bay. They waited and they watched with baited breaths and quivering hearts as the tear in the open sky remained open and the bloodlike substance continued to spill forth.

It emerged slowly from the gap. One clawed hand massive as that of a god, stretching out and impacting against the bloodied waves bearing the weight of the damnable appendage with little protest. Another emerged, falling just as smoothly upon the surface of the water. When the whole of the Endbringer emerged, it was met with a sudden inhalation of air and a heavy weight of disbelief, horror, and awe.

Those that had come before it had been abominations, malformations, and singularly ugly in their overall shape and formation. Behemoth, a cyclopean titan of stone and flame, a mishmash of the legends of similar giants that arose the mountains and plowed forth the valleys. Leviathan, a reptilian humanoid, arisen from the depths of the oceans where nature's nightmarish designs dwelled yet unseen. The Simurgh, a blasphemy of an angel, an image once conceived as an icon of hope and of prayer remade into a siren's song of damnation and desecration.

This Endbringer though, was different from its brethren.

It was, in the simplest of terms, a dragon.

A great and towering example of the species heralded since the Darkest of Ages' past in the then-yet-to-be-tamed wildlands of Europe, but it was a dragon still, no matter the stature or perhaps even because of it. It bore no mutation of the flesh, no malformation of organs or limbs. In every possible way, it was an animal, a beast, and little else.

So why did its mere presence feel so utterly terrifying to those who saw it?

Because Behemoth was a creature of stone with an aura of burning death. Leviathan a nightmare arisen from the depths with the waters that housed it at its beck and call. The Simurgh an angelic abomination who fell from the stars in cruel mockery of a fallen grace of God. They were of simple shapes, wretched designs, and horrific if not recognizable imagery made up from the nightmares of mankind. They bore a semblance to life but even the most oblivious could see they were not nor had ever been alive, not in the ways that mattered.

This Endbringer was a beast born and bred by the imaginations of mankind across the entirety of the World. There was nary a soul that did not know of the word "dragon" and the majesty such a beast represented. A beast of flame and winged terror to the Western lands, a majestic nobility arising from the waters to the highest of heavens out in the East… A monster, a beast, a legend, a god, and a devil, variable and diverse as only one other species to grace the World could ever be.

It breathed, its scaled chest broadening with its inhalation and collapsing upon exhalation. Its wings twitched to the gentle caress of the wind that moved across the sinew of tightly bound membrane. The great, horned head arose upwards upon a serpentine neck, a tongue of flesh licking lightly upon fangs longer than a full-grown man. Scales, black as the deepest of obsidian, glimmered beneath the muted rays of an eclipsed sun as eyes remained closed in a crystal clear dismissal to what was little more than pests.

For a moment, brief and passing as a sudden thought often is, hope ignited in the hearts of those gathered to face the Endbringer. Tales innumerable told well the stories and the legends of dragons and the knights who slew them dead. Men and women who stood tall against a creature of nightmare and walked away with the head of the beast caught in their iron grasp.

And as quickly as hope had arisen so too did it swiftly die with a quick and terrible realization.

The gaping wound, the tear in the fabrics of reality itself, had not yet closed behind the Endbringer, whom was merely the first of many to emerge from it. Those with the means to see and to hear across the vast distance relayed what they could discern. Descriptions varied by the speaker; words lost as they tried to express the horrors of what they were witnessing through the gaping hole in the fabric of reality itself.

"Horrors… yes… that will do."

A mediocre name perhaps, plain and rather ordinary in its simplicity but in the current circumstance easily the most fitting name. They ran, they leapt, they flew, and they swam in one giant avalanche of clawed appendages, flaring wings, and each and every one of them some manner of distorted semblance to actual life. They moved in one chaotic mess of raging sinew and bloodied blackened shadows made into corporeal flesh. They were literally tearing each other apart in a mad race to depart from the tear and gather at the clawed feet of the Fourth Endbringer.

The noise the Horrors made was not meant for human ears and many a cape swiftly found their courage dwindling as the cacophony of furious roars, frenzied screams, and terrifying howls grew ever louder as the monstrous horde continued to swell. Theirs was the sound of tearing skies, broiling seas, and the sundering of the land all singing together in a disharmonious choir to the melody of damnation no living soul was meant to hear.

It is the symphony of the Apocalypse, the scream of the World as it tries in vain to bring itself to an End.

Somewhere, lost amidst that sea of heroes and villains, an epiphany is made and given a voice of horrific realization.

"It's just sitting there."

It is a whisper, lost amidst the wails, the howls, and the roars, and yet it rings loud and true to all those gathered as it is repeated through braceleted armbands one after the other, but there is no more time to give them further thought.

Behemoth carried forth the earth and unleashed the fires of hell. Leviathan awash the world beneath its tsunamis and torrential downpours. The Simurgh turned the brilliance of ingenuity and made it its own as the air reverberated with the echoes of its maddening song.

This Endbringer brought forth an army of Horrors, abominations both small and great, benign in appearance to hideous in design. What power did it hold to command such forces, to gain such reverence, as to be unto them a king if not a god outright?

The answer was almost foolish in its simplicity.

The great horned head of the Endbringer rose higher into the air, great and terrible wings flapping lightly as it arose to stand upwards upon its hindlegs. Its eyes opened and almost as one, the gathered took a step back.

"Oh God have mercy…"

A foolish sentiment. The Gods, both the Young and the Old, were dead and gone from this world ages ago and even if they were not, even the likes of They would not dare to have such eyes turned upon them.

There was no indifference or alien detachment in those crystalline orbs. There was fury in its gaze, cold as the arctic heart of an ancient and bygone era of ice and snow that once enwrapped itself about the World like a vice. A ferocity hot as the molten heart of the sun freshly born and blazing brightly in a once dark and lightless space.

Anger or hatred, it did not detract from the singular fact that this Endbringer held within its breast a Heart and what a Heart it was, to hold such fury and scorn for what stood before it. Its eyes tracked over the crowd of capes slowly and they quailed beneath such a gaze. They could feel its judgment as it gazed not at the flesh and the bones but at the hearts and souls of those gathered and found them wanting. Some were fortunate to be dismissed quickly from its scrutiny, a disdainful sniff little more than a minute sign of its indifference to them. Those who caught it gaze however felt a cold sweat gather upon their wrinkled brows, the drumming of their heart echoing like thunder in the ears as those intelligent, sentient eyes narrowed by the slightest margin before moving on.

A winged king of horrors, a black-scaled god of nightmares.

"Melas Oneiros…"

No one knew who spoke it.

They only knew it for what it would now serve as a name for the Fourth Beast of the Apocalypse.

For what felt like hours but was in truth mere moments in time, Melas Onerios' eyes roamed through the gathered masses only to stop in full.

The sound it made was a wailing scream of a roar, high-pitched enough to shatter the glass of nearby skyscrapers to dust in an instant. Of course, "nearby" is a relative term to such a gargantuan creature and the whole of Brockton Bay felt its rage down to the last as its call was echoed by the vile sounds of its horde of Horrors that answered its cry with several of their own.

They surged forward with renewed purpose; all but killing each other outright in a maddened bid to reach the shores and their disorientated enemies. Barriers arose in all shapes and form and were as silken threads to the Horrors, many a cape caught beneath flaying claws and biting fangs before they had a chance to realize the inadequacy of their defense. Names were called out with robotic efficiency as capes fell like dominoes, with few putting up more than a momentary refusal to lie down and die before they were summarily laid low for their hubris.

A united front quickly descended to a frenzied free-for-all as the best defenses were made into the worst offenses.

Energy blasts of all shapes and form pierced through the Horrors, gunning them down with merciless efficiency. More arose from the splattering remains, each individual piece giving rise to a new monstrosity of flesh and shadow. Efficiency turned to mania and iron control became wild with fear. A block of horrors was glassed with one such blast and the scattering ashes hovered in the air before they coalesce into new Horrors, burnt and smoking but no less enraged as they alighted upon their killer in a deranged frenzy.

Fists flew and were summarily devoured within the blackness, with entire bodies swiftly joining lost limbs down into the abyss of a Horror's body. Those engorged Horrors were lost amidst their starved brethren, and as valiant as the rescue attempts were, they ended the same way each and every time: a cold and emotionless voice listing off another statistic, another tally mark to an already incredibly long list of names.

Speed was key in evading the Horrors and those who were blessed by it used it with everything they had and more besides. Fliers soared like hawks against the deranged vultures that were the many Horrors gifted with malformed limbs capable of flight and plenty others who weren't but managed all the same. Those bound to the land tried in vain to find some corner bereft of fanged shadows but no matter where they turned or appeared, a Horror was there to greet them with grimly smiling jaws and grisly welcoming claws.

When the sun, their only true source of light in an otherwise darkening desecration of a city already lost long ago, started to dim even further, realization struck. Like a sharp slap to the face, it hits them and leaves them feeling an already icy pit become a vast canyon in their stomachs. It comes to those who managed to survive the initial wave of Horrors and miraculously hold their own against an ever-growing tsunami of fangs, claws, and malicious darkness, that their attentions had become too narrowed, too focused.

In short, they had forgotten about Melas Oneiros.

It soared on its wings of flesh and bone, an almost impossible grace for a creature of such magnitude and nigh impossible natural design. It hovered before the eclipsed sun, a draconian jewel of flesh and bone before the dimmed and shadowed light that peaked through the edges of the waiting moon. A small shape arose to meet it, a mere speck of life against that which was as death itself though nowhere near as merciful or as forgiving.

Alexandria does not miss, her tightly clenched fist meeting dead center with Melas Oneiros' snout and its head shoots backwards from the blow and the resounding crack is as thunder to those on the furthest horizons.

The sight of such a blow… It emboldens them, those stragglers who've yet to fall to the Horrors. They cannot hurt the horde, cannot deal death to that which is not truly alive, but the maker of such monstrosities? If it can bleed, it can be slain and though no death of an Endbringer has ever been accomplished before, they feel that today, perhaps, will be that very day at long last.

That faint ember of hope is blown to smoke in a single breath as Melas Oneiros head slowly curls back downward upon its serpentine neck, its gleaming eyes meet the singular orb buried beneath a mask of cloth and flesh alike. The Horrors grow strangely silent and still.

They know what it is to come.

Behemoth brought forth the heat and the earth. Leviathan the sea and the waters of the heavens. The Simurgh sung a melody of the mind as it twisted brilliance into insanity.

Melas Oneiros was not like them.

They were fake in body, little more than engines of destruction wrought by beings older than the planet upon which it soared like a legend of old brought to life. It was alive, in every way that mattered, more so than even the brilliant tactical mind of its angelic sister. She could play her games, she could plan, and yes, if the situation called for it, she could even think.

Melas Oneiros could do far worse than think.

It could feel.

And looking down into the face of Alexandria, the fury it felt burnt hot within the confines of its breast just as the sudden, cold unbridled fear takes hold of Alexandria's own heart in a vice she had not felt for years past as she sees within the Endbringer's eyes something she had never, ever expected to see again.

The flame it expels turns the darkness into light and is as a second sun above the city sky as towers of steel and glass lose their gleaming spires to the intense heat that burns just as hotly even with such a great distance.

A snap of fanged jaws and the darkness descends once more. A huff of satisfaction echoes from above to those below as a body, pristine and untouched, descends to the earth below. Those Horrors beneath it move as one and it lands with a resounding crack of shattered masonry and broken steel atop a broken tower in the city.

The Library of Alexandria lays dead but unburnt.

The irony is not lost on Melas Oneiros as it lifts its head high and laughs and the sound is made worse as the Horrors, each and every one of them, share in their draconic master's delight and let loose their own deranged elations for all the World to hear.

A scream dares to interrupt the jubilation, a streaking light of emerald hue shining like a meteor races upwards to meet Melas Oneiros and stops when the draconic Enbringer's eyes turn towards Eidolon for the second time and the most powerful parahuman stops dead in his tracks.

Limited as he was with the supposedly dying embers of his powers, Eidolon had not sought any to allow him the means to see it in clearer detail than what his own, human eyes could allow. Now, mere meters away from the massive Endbringer's snout, he sees the same thing as Alexandria had, that what brought her pause and ultimately her death.

He sees not the eyes of the Endbringer but himself.

Not the he who has become but the he that he once was. The weak and pathetic visage of a boy bereft of the use of his legs, forever plagued by seizures that threatened to break his mind if not his body, and a resolve to be more than he was and failing that, sought the sweet relief that was death.

In short, Eidolon saw David for the first time since he had killed him an entire lifetime ago with one gullible sip of a devil's sweet promise.

The Horrors arose in a massive twisting tide, reaching for Eidolon who offers no resistance as they hold him in place before the horrific reflection of Melas Oneiros' gaze. Those whom try to aid the famous hero are summarily interrupted, their great strength useless against that which cannot be broken, their great speed immeasurable against a faster adversary, and their burning power a mere kindling to an inferno.

Before the visage of what would be known as the Final Endbringer, Eidolon utters a word, lost and unheard to all but that which it was directed to.

"Why?"

Whether or not it understood the question, Melas Oneiros chose not to answer with mere words.

Its mouth opened impossibly wide before its teeth come crashing down and tear Eidolon in twain with a single terrible bite. The lower torso falls to the oceanic waves, the remains free of their shadowed captors whilst Melas Oneiros itself crunches what remains in its mouth before it too expels what's left to the earth to bury amidst dust and debris.

And in the blinking of an eye, the dead become alive again.

A great cacophony of sound erupts, screams and cries and tears and shouts as those who believed themselves well and truly dead find themselves wrenching free of the shadows that bound them to death. The sun is bright and shining as it ever has been and the sky, once awash in blood and darkness now rests as impassively blue as it had ever been. The city of Brockton Bay remains as pristine as it had ever been, skyscrapers gleaming beneath the rays of the sun and its waters clear and bright, an act repeated over and over and over again.

What was once lost became found and those thought little more than ashes arose again from the shadows that had swallowed them but for a select few, the well and the truly dead and gone few though they might have been, the World would nonetheless be a better place without their stain of an existence plaguing it.

The Horrors, the blackened tide of misshapen limbs and malformed bodies, disappears as smoke in an unfelt wind until all the only true darkness left is that what made them.

Melas Oneiros descends slowly, wings spread taught as its claws catch upon the surface of the highest skyscraper in the city. For all their sharpness and the weight behind them, the building barely shudders beneath the shadows of the Endbringer's wings. Its tail curls possessively around the tower, its back hunching forward as its serpentine neck bends low.

Its eyes are different now.

Alive in a way that it hadn't been before.

Angry. Hateful. Spiteful.

But tired too.

So very, very tired.

Alexandria, the last to fall and the first to arise, it's the first thing that comes to her mind when she sees the Endbringer but it is lost amidst the storm of emotional turmoil raging within her heart and soul as she meets the monster's gaze with her own downturned. Her lone eye aimed steadfast at its snout. It looks at her in silence for a long moment before it dismisses her with a disdainful huff of smoke, and she cannot help the flinch but by then, the Endbringer's eyes are no longer upon her.

Its eyes fall on those gathered atop another rooftop, those whom had seemingly done the impossible and had escaped the horde of Horrors through wit and guile, though one among them realizes rather belated that such a feat was not by their own merit but the Endbringer's own design.

It looks at them all but its eyes are only for one whom stands dead-center, her arms clutched protectively over a girl, a child, as a swarm of insects gather around her, her charge, and her unwitting allies alike. It is a futile gesture, she knows this but for the wrong reason entirely as Melas Oneiros breaks another creed of its ilk.

It speaks.

"Hello, Little Owl."

Taylor Hebert stiffens, her grip and jaw alike slackening with incredulous disbelief as she answers with a hushed gasp.

"Mom…?"