Warning #1: Strong to OP MC but it's okay cause the final villain is far more OP
Warning #2: Apokoliptian New God with human memories trying to become a better person, there actually will be character development in this
Warning #3: Multiverse fic
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The fire pits of Apokolips roared in the distance, but my chambers were nearly silent. Only the deep, rhythmic pulse of Omega Effect inside me broke the stillness, an echo I had always accepted as part of my existence.
Tonight, that pulse felt... wrong.
I sat on the obsidian throne, carved from a single slab pulled from the planet's crust. Normally, its cold touch steadied me. Commanded me. Reminded me of who I was.
But for the first time, the stone felt unfamiliar under my palms. As if I didn't belong here.
Pain lanced through my skull. Sharp, sudden, blinding. The Omega Effect within me surged in response, flashing behind my eyes in violent waves. I gritted my teeth, fingers digging into the throne's arms and cracking them as a storm of something alien clawed its way to the surface.
Not an attack. Nor sabotage.
Memories.
Humanmemories.
They hit me in fragments at first. Sounds, colors, sensations. A name that wasn't Grayven. A life that wasn't divine. A boy who died long before a New God should have existed. I saw hands that were soft, not stone; a world of blue skies instead of dark smog turned crimson from the light of fire pits. The stale smell of a classroom. The glow of a phone screen in the dark.
And then the flood became a tidal wave.
I doubled over, gripping my head as images of my old life slammed into me with brutal clarity. I lived an entire lifetime in a heartbeat, relived everything I once was. And everything Grayven could never even think of being.
When the pain finally subsided, I found myself breathing hard, shoulders trembling. My hands, massive, crack lined, built for conquest, looked foreign.
"What the hell..."
My voice came out low, gravelly, but the words were undeniably human. I straightened slowly, feeling my body settle into its monstrous strength even as my mind reeled with memories of frailty.
Human.
New God.
Both.
Neither.
What was I now?
The Omega Effect inside me flickered with unstable rhythm, mirroring my fractured thoughts. I stood and started pacing, heavy footfalls echoing throughout the chamber.
This wasn't just recollection. It wasn't nostalgia.
It was identity returning.
And suddenly, clarity sharpened everything. My senses focused. My awareness expanded. My mind, now carrying the instincts of a conquering god and the reasoning of a human, clicked into a terrifying new alignment.
But clarity didn't comfort me.
It filled me with dread.
Because if these memories were mine...
If my thoughts were shifting…
If I was becoming something Darkseid did not mold...
He would notice.
The air grew heavier as the realization sank in, as if even the idea of Darkseid's gaze pressed down on me. My chest tightened, a sensation I recognized too well from my human life.
Fear.
The instinctive, primal certainty that if Darkseid sensed even the slightest fracture in his son's mind, he would erase me. Not punish. Not exile.
Destroy.
He had turned his Omega Effect on Kalibak for less.
And that was if I were to be allowed the mercy of death, a mercy hardly found on Apokolips.
A tremor ran through my hands. I locked them behind my back to hide the weakness because fear itself felt like a betrayal.
Calm. Think. Adapt. Survive.
But for a moment, panic punched through my restraint. My breathing quickened. The Omega Effect crackled at my fingertips, feeding off the emotion I wasn't supposed to feel.
I couldn't let him see it.
I couldn't let him know.
I needed a plan.
My eyes drifted downward, towards the only object in the room that seemed to pulse with something gentler than fire and cruelty.
My Mother Box.
The device rested beside my throne, unassuming. As my gaze met it, the circuitry on its surface shimmered softly, almost like acknowledgment.
A faint ping hummed in the air.
Not loud. But... understanding.
I approached slowly. The Box warmed beneath my touch, resonating with a tone that stirred my thoughts into sharp, dangerous alignment.
A realization clicked into place.
I'm not alone in this.
Another soft chime. Almost like agreement.
The panic inside me coiled into something else, something steadier. Purposeful. Human and divine in equal measure.
I exhaled slowly, letting the fear settle into a cold, calculating center.
"...maybe there is a way out."
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The throne room of Darkseid was silent. A silence so complete that even the fire pits seemed afraid to crackle.
The Lord of Apokolips sat unmoving, carved in the shape of absolute certainty. His stone-like fingers curled around the arm of his throne, his red eyes half lidded.
Then they opened.
Because something... shifted.
A ripple too slight for any lesser being to notice vibrated through the Omega Effect that encompassed the planet. A distortion in the shape of his domain.
Grayven.
Darkseid's gaze drifted upward, as if staring through the metal of his fortress, through the choking smog, through the very planet itself.
He felt his son's presence dim for a moment.
Not weaken, not suffer, but change.
A deviation.
A fracture of pattern. In his design.
Darkseid did not tense. His expression did not shift. But the air bent strangely around him, the stone of the throne groaning under invisible pressure.
"What are you doing, boy?"
He received no answer.
Not from the Omega Effect.
Not from the shadows.
Not from the world he ruled.
Just that faint lingering sense of... difference.
It was not threat.
But it was not obedience either.
Before Darkseid could rise, footsteps echoed from the archway. Sharp. Hasty. Uncharacteristically urgent.
Desaad entered and immediately fell to one knee.
"My lord, forgive my intrusion." His voice trembled as if fearing that even speaking might be a mistake. "But we have... news."
Darkseid did not look at him.
"Speak."
Desaad swallowed, throat bobbing like a trapped creature.
"A... a Boom Tube has just been opened. From your lord Grayven's private chambers."
Not unusual. Not yet cause for any reaction.
Then Desaad continued, dread clear in his voice. "He did not deploy to a battlefield. Or to a conquest site. Or to any of his usual staging points."
Darkseid's eyes narrowed fractionally.
"Where..." He rumbled. "Did Grayven go?"
Desaad's face drained of color.
"To the outermost edge of the Fourth World, my lord. Beyond Apokolips... and beyond New Genesis..."
He dared to lift his gaze.
"...lord Grayven's Boom Tube leads directly toward the Source Wall."
The room went still.
Deadly still.
Darkseid simply sat back in his throne, eyes glowing brighter.
The Source Wall. A place no New God sought without purpose. Without desperation.
And Grayven had gone there alone.
Darkseid finally exhaled, a sound like planets grinding together. "So," he murmured. "The change I felt... was real."
He did not rise. He did not issue a command.
He simply stared into the burning horizon of Apokolips, watching the faint afterimage of the Boom Tube fade from his senses.
And for the first time in a long while... he was curious.
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Space ended.
Not in a poetic sense, not as a metaphor. It ended, like a wound cauterized by the hand of a god.
The Source Wall rose before me, stretching across infinity. A cosmic mural of screaming, frozen titans, New Gods, Old Gods, beings beyond even those labels, each trapped mid-thought, mid-defiance, mid-mistake. Their faces twisted in agony, in awe, in realization.
I had seen it only in fiction once.
Seeing it now, as Grayven, as a New God... it was like staring at eternity's tombstone.
The Boom Tube snapped shut behind me, its last sparks dying like fireflies. I was alone.
For a moment, I said nothing.
No declarations.
No speeches.
Just... existing.
Apokolips felt far away.
Darkseid felt far too close.
My memories, humanmemories, still buzzed behind my eyes; raw and disorganized. A lifetime of mortality crammed into a god's skull. My heart thundered with two rhythms. One familiar, one alien. Two identities threading together, crudely stitched together.
I wasn't ready for this world.
I wasn't ready for him.
I looked up at the Wall again.
"I shouldn't even be considering this." I murmured.
But I was.
The Source Wall wasn't just a border. It was the barrier between the knowable and the infinite. Anyone who touched it, any being who tried to step beyond, was absorbed forever.
My grandfather, Yuga Khan, the greatest tyrant the Fourth World had ever seen, had entered with ambition to dominate the Source itself.
And the Wall had swallowed him whole.
An infinite being, the existence who taught Darkseid to fear, beaten in an instant.
A god's god reduced to a cautionary tale.
My mind replayed the history I shouldn't know, shouldn't remember.
Yuga Khan, returned once, drained Apokolips to cinders, and still the Wall reclaimed him. Not even Darkseid dared to pry him out.
I felt my hands shake. The new ones. The inhumanly powerful ones.
I curled them into fists until the tremor stopped.
"I know the consequences." I said to myself.
And yet...
Darkseid.
The name that ended every thought.
I could imagine his face when he realized I'd changed.
Not open suspicion.
Not even anger.
Curiosity.
The worst thing a being like him could feel toward you.
A changed Grayven was an unknown variable.
Unknown variables were corrected.
Uncorrectable ones were studied, then erased.
No mercy. No hesitation.
Not because he hated me.
But because I was his son.
And sons of Darkseid didn't get to choose their own existence.
I exhaled slowly and reached to my side.
"Mother Box." I whispered.
A chime answered me. A warm, resonant ping that washed over me like a hand on the shoulder. Reassurance. Concern.
It asked me if I was certain. If I understood.
I didn't answer immediately.
"I'm not trying to control the Source." I said. "I am not Yuga Khan. I am not here to seize power. I am looking for something else."
Another ping, softer.
"Knowledge," I admitted. "A path he won't anticipate. Insight. An advantage he can't account for. Something, anything, that will let me survive this story."
The Wall whispered.
Not with sound.
With Presence.
A cosmic hum, like millennia of imprisoned minds brushing against the edge of my consciousness. Not speaking words, just enforcing an absolute truth:
You touch me, the end.
I stepped closer.
"You know, back when I was human... I thought I understood what fear was. Bills. Illness. Failure. Death."
A dry laugh escaped me.
"But now? Now my father could vaporize me because I blinked wrong."
Another step.
Mother Box chimed again, high and worried.
I placed a hand on its surface.
"One way or another, I need more than what I am. More than what I know. If I stay as I am now... he'll snuff me out before I can even think."
My heart hammered. Not because of the cosmic dread—but because the decision was made.
"I'm going in." I whispered.
Mother Box pulsed, actually trembling in my hand. Which I hadn't known the sentient machine to be capable of.
"It's either this," I told it. "or accept my future as something where Darkseid is."
A long pause.
Then...
P i n g.
Approval. Reluctant. Fearful.
But loyal.
I lifted the Mother Box toward the blinding expanse of the Source Wall. The cosmic murals shimmered, making it appear like the faces were twisting as if they were noticing me. Judging me.
Perhaps mocking me.
I drew in one more breath and stepped forward, into the Wall.
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