The air in the abyss twisted. Reality groaned like an old beast waking from a cursed slumber. In the forgotten depths of the multiverse—beyond the reach of the Celestials, beyond even the darkest thoughts of Mephisto—there stood a throne. Fashioned from bone, bound by chains forged from the agony of gods long dead, it pulsed with malevolence.
And upon that throne, the Scarlet King stirred.
He opened his seven burning eyes.
His presence wasn't merely malevolent—it was antithetical to existence. He was not death. Death had rules. Death had balance. He was unbeing. A walking paradox, a hatred so pure and ancient it predated time itself.
For eons, he had been sealed behind veils layered across the multiverse by those who feared what his release would mean. But now, a crack had formed—small, nearly imperceptible. A consequence of reckless tampering, multiversal incursion, and broken timelines. A universe weakened by war and fractured by power.
This universe.
The Marvel Universe.
The tear formed in the heart of the dimensional veil like a cancerous rift. To most, it was invisible. But to the Watcher, it was a cataclysm.
Uatu stood atop his lunar observation post, his eternal gaze fixed on the anomaly blooming in space like a red lotus of entropy.
"This should not be," he murmured, his usually passive voice laced with tension. "A force outside the equation… an error in the code of creation."
The rift pulsed. A beat. Then another. Like a heart. A heartbeat not of life, but of malice.
And then—he came through.
Not all of him. Not yet. The full form of the Scarlet King could not yet exist in this reality without shattering it. But a fragment—a seed of his consciousness—bled into the world.
Far beneath the Earth, in the icy heart of Siberia, the ground trembled. Snow melted into crimson sludge. The trees blackened, curling into themselves as if afraid. Seven obsidian pillars erupted from the ground, humming with ancient language that no god or machine could decipher.
And in their center, floating three feet above the earth, hovered a child.
A boy, pale and thin, eyes like empty sockets filled with swirling darkness. Rags clung to his tiny form, stained with dried blood and sigils no one could identify.
The boy spoke in a voice layered with thousands of mouths, echoing with contradiction—both ancient and new, high and low.
"I… am… coming."
The Russian military had already responded to the disturbance, but they arrived too late. The first wave of soldiers either fled screaming or turned their weapons on themselves. One soldier slit his own throat with a look of bliss. Another chanted nonsense until his heart stopped.
A single camera drone survived. The feed reached S.H.I.E.L.D. within the hour.
---
In a darkened S.H.I.E.L.D. base, Nick Fury stared at the monitor in silence.
The video played on loop. A child floating in red mist. Soldiers dying. And symbols that corrupted the data feed itself, forcing analysts to restart systems manually.
Fury didn't blink.
"Get me Strange. Richards. Hell, call Stark's AI if you have to. I want eyes from every field on this thing. Magic, tech, psychic—doesn't matter."
Maria Hill stood stiffly behind him. "Do we classify this as cosmic?"
Fury slowly turned. "No. This ain't cosmic. Cosmic has rules. This… this is something else."
---
At the Sanctum Sanctorum, Doctor Stephen Strange snapped out of his meditation with a violent shudder. The Eye of Agamotto glowed without his touch—wild, erratic. He opened it and peered into possible futures.
Nothing. Just… blank.
He tried again.
Nothing.
"I've seen everything from Dormammu to incursions," he whispered. "But I've never seen nothing."
Wong entered, clutching a scroll that had begun bleeding ink. "These symbols appeared at Kamar-Taj. Ancient ones. Before recorded time. We cross-referenced them with elder texts from the Dark Dimension and… they match none of them."
Strange narrowed his eyes. "It's something new… or something we were never meant to remember."
---
In Latveria, Doctor Doom felt it too. Doom always felt the shifting tides of power. His mystic senses screamed. This was not just a being—it was a concept. A malignancy.
He raised a gauntleted hand and conjured a portal. "If the Scarlet King has entered our world… then Doom shall greet him."
---
Elsewhere—in Wakanda, in Asgard, in the X-Mansion—powerful beings felt the shift. Shuri's sensors picked up energy signatures that were… inconsistent with any known force.
"It's not magic. It's not technology," she said, frowning. "It's… entropy."
Even Thor paused mid-battle in Vanaheim, Mjolnir trembling slightly in his grip. "Something wrong enters the world, brother," he told Loki.
Loki, unusually solemn, merely nodded. "Yes. I feel it too. A song older than Yggdrasil."
---
And above them all, in the void beyond time, Eternity turned.
But even Eternity felt the chill of recognition when it heard the voice echo across dimensions.
"I see you."
The Scarlet King's voice rang through the multiverse like a splinter. For the first time in eons, Eternity faltered.
"You will fall," the King hissed. "You all will."
And in response, across realities, a counterforce stirred.
The Living Tribunal raised its head.