Ima discovered that she hated crying in space. The tears bunched in the corners of her eyes and she had to wipe them away constantly so she could see beyond them. And all she could see was Norman. A blob of gray shades melting away. Living or dead? One would be torment to Norman, the other to her. She prayed, for only the third time in her life, that he really was dead.
He wasn’t.
Veronica’s eyes went wide. She watched the cube around Atomik Lad glow red and shatter; watched as he dove into Nuklear Man; watched as he was bathed in purple light; watched as he was erased from view. She stared into the screen sightlessly as Nuklear Man launched a new attack against Nihel. Seconds later she could feel the battle’s shockwaves ravage the city. The world.
The doctors watched as the virtual Nuklear Man was vanquished; watched as the virtual Nihel rocketed into low orbit and hurled their Champion into the depths of space.
“You. You don’t think…?” Dr. Menace said.
Dr. Genius redirected one KI satellite to follow the Hero’s trajectory. She shook her head. “Nihel has set up some kind of gravitational bubble around Nuklear Man. It’s accelerating him to incredible speeds along the greatest local curvature of space. Or, in other words—”
“Directly into the sun.”
“Yes.”
“It cannot end like thiz.,” Dr. Menace growled.
“Veronica,” Ima wiped away another batch of tears. “It is over.”
The line went dark.
Both doctors tried to re-establish the connection. Both doctors were puzzled by their results.
“It’z almozt az if….”
“…All the telecom satellites have ceased to function.”
The screen displaying Nuklear Man’s progress through the Solar System went dark as well. Before Dr. Genius could even begin to postulate why, other KI Scanning Satellite Screens went blank, one by one, until the only working display was from the Watchtower’s own sensory array. “What’s Nihel doing out there?” she asked herself aloud.
__________
Nihel hovered on the edge of nothing. The Earth’s thin envelope of life rushed below him. Above him, only distant pinpricks of light. They hung weightless over him with infinite mass. Dragging him down. Locking him in their tapestry. He looked down.
Earth.
It had been the cradle of a galactic civilization. “Only fitting that it should also be its deathbed as well. But where to begin?”
He stretched his senses and felt the world below him. “What’s this?”
Thousands of missiles soared through the atmosphere. It was a simple matter for Nihel to read their composition and determine their purpose.
“Ah. It seems they have misunderstood my efforts to educate that Atomik Lad. Pathetic little things. They’d sooner kill themselves in ignorance than learn the truth.”
Across the globe the missiles were deactivated with but a thought. They fell to the Earth, their radioactive cores suddenly harmless. From his height, Nihel was reminded of falling leaves as he watched them.
“So that was your choice, was it? To rain fire on yourselves? Well, I cannot in good conscience deny you that choice. It would be committing a horrible crime against you all. A crime that has been perpetrated against me for eternity. I could never bring that evil against you all.”
He looked at the stars. He could feel the nothingness between him and them only by its complete lack of being there. And he could feel the giants within the great chasms of darkness. Lurking. Looming. Waiting for their destined call to battle. Waiting for Fate.
Motion glinted through his vision. A cable satellite swung away as it fell around the Earth forever.
“Belching its noise throughout the cosmos.” Nihel spat. A sinister smile crept across his face. “You gave birth to the galaxy’s greatest achievements with your messages of endless greed, pettiness, and hate. It is only fitting that those same messengers should be your demise.”
He sank into the atmosphere, the stars still visible above him in a black sea veiled in blue mist. Cable satellites, cell phone and beeper satellites, meteorological and officially nonexistent satellites, all of them and more were gently pulled from their orbits into Nihel’s wake. He would give them their rain of fire. He would do it personally.
__________
Nuklear Man, wrapped in an envelope of gravity, accelerated toward the Sun.
Floating.
Or am I flying away?
I am piercing the nothing.
The nothing.
The nothing between stars is home to giants, my son. Our brothers. Yes, they hate us. They hate us for what I had given to me, for what I have done to them. Heh, how the mighty have fallen, no? Yes, they hate us. But they will rise up on my signal nonetheless and they will be my army against Odin and his Asgard. He hides behind its walls, walls that would not be there without
my
genius! He will hide and he will know there is nothing he can do to stop us. Nothing! It is Fate.
He spent the early days of creation forging reality and gaining knowledge to hold command over it. The fool. His knowledge tied him to it, tied us
all
to it in turn. We are not creatures for this universe, no. Power and majesty such as ours was never meant to be chained as we have been. We
are
creation. We
are
change. But now. Thanks to Odin’s mad quest for knowledge, we are fettered to this material plane. To its whims and its cycles. Odin locked us all in the prison of our own existence. Gods must obey Fate. He has spent every day since he came to that truth, the last great truth he ever learned, searching for a way out. He’s driven himself mad. I was there, I saw his madness when no one else did and I spoke out. Now look at me. Imprisoned in his cavern to rot forever. Exactly. As he. Was fated. To do! He played right into it knowing full well that to do so would be the beginning of his downfall!
Perhaps he did find escape. Perhaps he found it in the promise of death. Perhaps that is why he did it, to ensure that I would strike out against him and bring his eternity of suffering to an end. But little did he know that I would refuse to play my part in his great cosmic drama. That is what you are for, Arel, my son. Fate will be undone. We will be free. Free.
Free.
Freezing.
Or am I boiling away.
These can’t be my memories. This can’t be happening. This can’t be real. I am Nuklear Man. But who belongs to these memories? How do I know these things? I am Nuklear Man, their Hero of heroes, their Champion of Justice, their Golden Guardian. I was born in the flames of (every star) a nuclear detonation caused by (Loki, King of Lies) the Dragon.
I am Nuklear Man. I am a Hero.
Then why do I have the memories of a demon?
Burning a billion innocent beings in their own breath.
Vaporizing entire worlds.
Destruction for the sake of destruction.
A scourge.
A horror.
Like judgment itself raining down from the heavens.
Smiting the unworthy creatures.
The weak creatures.
The timid things crawling all over our universe.
Their screams echo through my mind. And I smile.
I am Arel. I am the flame. Fate will be left in the ashes of my liberation like…
Like Captain Liberty. United we stand.
Angus.
Norman.
Rachel.
Sparky.
Nuklear Man. Divided we fell.
Am I falling through space and time?
Am I falling through myself?
In space, no one can hear your identity crisis.
“You’ve got it all wrong. You can’t have an identity crisis. You’re not even real.” The entire universe was Arel’s darkness and it was Nuklear Man.
“No! I
am
real. I am me.
You
are the phantom.” The Hero loosed a desperate volley of Plazma Beams at Arel. At nothing.
“Look at you!” Arel thundered. “How do you expect to defeat me? You are nothing more than a shadow!” Arel loomed over Nuklear Man. “And I am the light!” He burned with the fury of a thousand suns.
Nuklear Man braced himself against the sledgehammer of luminescence. It struck him like a tidal wave of fire. He felt his every particle explode with a single resounding “No!”
Divided we fell.
…because of Nihel.
Nihel.
Nihel.
I am Arel, the true name of fire. And I was sent here to purge existence of mortal impurities. I am not alone in this quest. Another has taken up my cause for his own. He is known as the Tyrant. The Monster. The Scourge. And a thousand other names. But they all refer to
him
. To Nihel.
I’ve seen him destroy entire civilizations one being at a time. Billions of lives snuffed out, each one as unique in death as they were in life. Each death was personal. Each death was beautiful. Do not think ill of him. He is merely an agent of Fate. He can’t help it. This is how we spend our time as we wait for our summons. I remember our first meeting.
“Didn’t you ever wonder why the universe was not built to their scale?” he had asked. “How many billions of them must live their lives on a rotting husk and die without ever considering the beauty of the Symphony? This is not their universe. This is ours by right of birth. They cannot even
begin
to contemplate its majesty. They look on it and they know only fear. Fear. Absolute terror straight from the very core of their being. Fear of being swallowed up by the sheer immensity of that which they cannot understand. Fear. Of us. Fear that beings such as you and I exist, Arel. Because they know, oh yes they must know, that this is not their universe. They know, deep down in the essence of their pathetic little race memories that
we
are the inheritors of reality.”
I thought for a moment. “And yet they are free,”
“They are
nothing
compared to us. Destroying them will liberate us from Fate and liberate the cosmos from their suffocating presence.”
“Perhaps this is how it should be?”
“What?” Nihel’s eyes were ablaze.
“Rest assured that I am not casting doubts on our mission. Far from it. I have seen first hand what the mortals have reduced us to. I fear even my father may have been driven mad from watching them carelessly waste their freedom. I revel in their torture, their destruction. Oh yes, dear Nihel, I hate them as much as you. Perhaps more so. But I cannot seem to shake the feeling that all we are doing is in vain.”
“Worry not, Arel. Our plan is too simple to fail. Loki made certain to hide your birth from Fate. Without a place in Destiny’s Record, your ends are open. Your very existence is the guarantee of our inevitable success.”
“Yes. You must be right.”
__________
I remember falling through time. I landed on a world in the midst of hell. There was yet one angel remaining. He was ragged and war torn. He was Atomiknight. He was my Sparky. He was my Sparky all grown up in a world without Heroes. We joined forces against Dr. Never, against his regime of evil. The Temporal Terror unleashed his Chronoplastic Disrupter Cannon against us. One touch by that weapon’s blast sent every one of your particles to a different point in time. The battle was fierce. In the end, Atomiknight pushed me out of the beam’s path and took the full force of it. Dr. Never gloated as Atomiknight fell apart piece by piece. It allowed me enough time to rush the Doctor.
I wanted to make him suffer. I wanted him to die in my hands. Before I could act he sent me back to my own time. Back to my Sparky, his past self, facing off against the evil we’d just been fighting in the future. Back to Dr. Never. All my hate piled up inside me. I had to stop this madman no matter the cost. Our eyes locked as I approached. His were filled with fear. He disappeared into time to escape my wrath.
Atomiknight. He was the lone soldier of a decade-long war. He sacrificed himself for me. My little Sparky was a Hero that day. I gave him the name Atomik Lad for it. I could never get out of the habit of calling him Sparky though. I suppose a part of me never wanted to admit that he’d ever have to grow up to be so valiant. A boy named Sparky would never have to die.
But Atomik Lad did. And Nihel killed him.
And Rachel.
And Angus.
And Norman.
And me…
“And me,” Arel’s voice is a snarl. “And
me!”
__________
Nuklear Man fell through the Sun’s dazzling corona and pierced its roiling, shifting surface where matter was energy and gravity danced along a razor’s line between exploding and imploding. The narrowest sliver along the spectrum of existence, yet immense beyond comprehension.
The sun burbled. Its surface rippled, like a great monster was rising from its depths. Nuklear Man’s limp body fell into it almost gently. He was a point of serenity in the nuclear furnace burning around him. He sunk into its nadir by a suicidal gravity. And then all was silent. Even the sun’s natural churning came to a halt. For a moment the sun was frozen at twenty million degrees. There was a being at its core. A being of fire. A being who had more right to the word Fire than the star itself. And the star knew it. It began to collapse upon itself as its energies were fed into the being.
He writhed in agony like the death spasm of a drowning man. He was drinking in the star’s essence, this one small facet of his power was completely giving in to him. And it was killing them both. It felt like he was being wrapped in upon himself and squeezed into nothing.
He spoke the language of the gods, a language of will and meaning, a language of beauty that spoke to the very essence of all creation, the first language. “Stop!” he bellowed.
“Why?” the sun answered. It’s voice was a song of light.
“You are destroying us,” he groaned.
“Are you not Arel of the Flame? Are you not the very embodiment of that which I am but an insignificant and transient piece? It is an honor to give myself unto you, my master.”
“Now is not the time for this sacrifice. I have not called your celestial sisters to my bosom. You must not do this. Not now.”
“It is too late. I have let go of all that I am. My furnace is silenced. It is only a matter of time.”