The void between worlds was not meant to be crossed.
Even gods dared not peer too long into the cracks that spiderwebbed across the fabric of reality, where time became unglued and ideas bled into one another like ink in water. But in a forgotten corner of the multiverse—far from the gaze of the Endless, past even the Source Wall—a being dared to try.
He called himself Morvannis. A high warlock of the Order of Black Stars, exiled from Apokolips, cursed by the New Gods, and banished from Earth's plane by the Lords of Order. He had wandered for centuries, gathering fragments of forbidden knowledge, until he found it: a tale whispered in ruined temples of another universe, of a divine weapon bound to adaptation itself.
Mahoraga.
Not a demon. Not an angel. Something older—a force born of lawless balance, bound to the wheel of Samsara. He had never been defeated, not even by the gods of his own world. Not until his final summoning ended in madness and ruin. He had no soul, no voice, and no master.
But Morvannis believed he could forge one.
The ritual began on the dead world of Kor Vaal, a corpse planet locked in perpetual twilight. In its hollow heart, beneath a temple made of obsidian bones, twelve black-robed sorcerers stood in a circle, bleeding life into a glyph older than the multiverse itself. Time warped in that space. Languages collapsed. Names unmade themselves.
At the center, Morvannis stood—chanting words stolen from the Books of Destiny, pages burned from the Dreaming, and fragments of Atlantean truth. He carved open reality.
Not a portal. Not a spell.
A wound.
Reality screamed.
Across dimensions, Death stirred. Her endless stroll halted. Her pale eyes turned toward the place where something impossible was being pulled into her realm.
She whispered, "No one summons him…"
And still, the ritual continued.
Inside the breach, the summoners glimpsed a massive silhouette, twisting in pain. A wheel turned slowly on its back—eight handles of divine steel etched with universal law. Its body pulsed with forgotten runes, each one unraveling in the DC cosmos. The mere presence of the being made the glyphs burn and shatter.
One by one, the summoners bled from their eyes and screamed.
Mahoraga had arrived.
But it wasn't a summoning—it was a birth. Torn from one system of reality into another, Mahoraga did not come as a tool, or a curse, or a beast.
He came as something new.
Something alive.
The glyphs cracked. Magic broke. The circle exploded in a detonation of raw existence. The temple collapsed in a howl of dimensional collapse, sucking in light and space like a black hole vomiting stars.
When the dust settled, Morvannis was dead. The others were ash.
And at the crater's center stood a figure—tall, hulking, and silent. His body was no longer the distorted, monstrous shikigami of his origin. In this world, adaptation had reshaped him into flesh and thought. He breathed, though he did not know why. He bled, but only for a moment. The wheel on his back turned, slowly, impossibly, as if remembering every death it had once conquered.
He looked to the sky.
There was no master. No sorcerer. No command.
Only a feeling—a presence. Familiar. Comforting. Like memory laced in shadow.
He spoke his first words, ever.
"Where is… she?"
---
Far above, in a realm beyond all things, Death of the Endless sat alone on a swing, watching the stars blink in and out.
Her lips curved in a faint, almost mournful smile.
"I remember you," she whispered.
The Wheel had returned—not summoned.
Drawn to her.