Magic

Magic serves as 1 of the 3 enigmatic pathways through which intelligent beings across the cosmos navigate the complexities of existence, much like how later humans harness the powers of science and technology to elevate their lives. It is not merely a tool but a wellspring for extraordinary heroes, emerging from realms beyond the mundane confines of Earth-1218. Consider the intricate dance between magic, science, and technology. Imagine trying to conjure life into an ancient printer with a state-of-the-art computer. Science unfurls its rational solutions—crafting new drivers, firmware, or digital environments that bridge the old and the new. Technology seeks to reshape the old—updating hardware or melding it with modern creations to breathe life into the machinery. Magic, however, takes a daring leap beyond the ordinary, involving oneself in the alchemical manipulation of the very operating system of reality, bending and breaking its laws to compel the printer to fulfill its purpose. This mystical force weaves a tapestry of outcomes, predictable yet fraught with the potential for the unexpected. Many heroes find their genesis entwined with magic—through diligent study, curses whispered in shadowy corners, the lineage of mystical bloodlines, or by possessing artifacts that grant otherworldly powers beyond the comprehension of science or technology. In countless fantastical realms, such as Earth-196169, magic remains a cornerstone of understanding nature, a sacred key to the universe's profound mysteries.

The Primordials and Elder Gods followed the lead of Gaea and traveled across the cosmos to come to The Sol System, where Gaea rested upon the Earth. Gaea and her siblings birthed the other Primordial gods that would define the natural world as the Elder Gods began to weave magic across Terra and throughout the cosmos. The Old Ones emerged in the lands known as Mu and Lemuria shortly after, bringing their otherworldly energies that warped their environments. The other gods began to take on a more demonic form as their intents grew more malicious, and Gaea was weakened to the point where evolution slowed to a crawl. She summoned the Elder God Atum to cast out the demonic and eldritch forces, and Atum took to it with zeal. The slaying and devouring of the Lesser Old Ones and demons corrupted Atum, changing him into the Demogorge and empowering him further. Set and Chthon knew the Demogorge would come for them inevitably, so the Elder Gods prepared to manipulate the Earth realm from places beyond. Chthon, like the Great Old Ones with their scrolls of dead names, penned The Darkhold scrolls that birthed the school of Chaos Magic. Set hid his children all around Terra to undermine the evolution of mammals and herald his return at some point in the future.

When the Lemurians traveled to the Lemurian Isles and the Lands of Mu, they encountered many gods and eldritch beings that challenged their very perceptions of reality. Gods now known only as the Banished Pantheon learned how to feed on the fear, rage, and pain of mortals which sparked another war of the gods that led them to be exiled from the higher and lower planes and forgotten. The scrolls of forgotten names were found at temples dedicated to Dagon, and the magic began to be passed down to hominids by the gods and other beings that lurk in the shadows. Some who learned magic stopped worshipping the gods and stopped paying heed to the Old Ones. The Chthonic goddess Hecate called Chthon and Dagon's followers to war and these godless mages left Mu to continue East where they found the nameless continent. They traveled across it until they came to yet another great sea, what they did not know was the Western Sea that would lead them back to Atlantis and the Pictish Isles. Here they found underground caverns that they turned into a vast subterranean city known as Oranbega.

In the 7 Kingdoms of the Thurian continent, the Serpent-Men, sons of Set, were busy doing their work and working schools of sorcery not known to humans at this time. Unlike the Chthonic, Chaos Magic, and Witchcraft of Chthon, they used the early beginnings of sorcery to infiltrate the power structures of the governments in the West. To counteract the influence of Set, Oshtur and the Greater Old One Hoggoth come together to birth the first Sorcerer Supreme. Agamotto, who wrote The Sacred Book of Vishanti as a counter to the Darkhold scrolls and brought into existence other relics like the Eye of Agamotto and the Orb of Agamotto. An unlikely candidate took up Agamotto's mission to stand against the will of Set and his sorcerous children after the sorcerer supreme's demise, Kull of Atlantis. With his axe, he ruled Valusia as King and used his status and clear, barbarian mind to resist the temptations of the Serpent-Men and defend pre-cataclysm civilization.

Many of Chthon's scrolls remained in the Lemurian Isles and the Lands of Mu, but many had spread across the Thurian continent and wound up in Atlantis. Witchcraft of all varieties sprang up among the barbarian tribes of Atlantis: good witches who practiced healing and protection, and wicked witches who caused plagues and harm. Lilith, the first woman created by the Hebrew God to be Adam's wife but refused that plan, found her way into these covens and acquired as much of their magic as she could. It's unclear if she joined the original sect of Darkholders under the leadership of Varnae or if she was gaining access some other way. Still, it is widely believed among vampires that she was present when they used their scrolls of sin to transform Varnae into a vampire. It is also whispered that she assisted Varnae in creating his first brood of vampires, known in the next age as the Ancient. Others rumor that she lay with many ancient Atlantean chieftains to birth more of her Lilin, soulless and demonic beings that are born but never lived. The Lilin ultimately serve only Lilith. Agatha Harkness was born among these witches near the end of the Thurian age, but if she has answers about Lilith's means to power, Agatha hasn't shared them. Witches of The Blood and the first Spirits of Vengeance trapped Lilith's soul inside the corpse of the Leviathan before Atlantis sank beneath the waves. The angels Senoy, Sansenoy, and Semangol dismembered her body and scattered the pieces across Terra in an attempt to keep her from rising again. The Blood and the Spirits of Vengeance then went on to stop the rampages of her current thrall, the demon Zarathos.

After the sinking of Atlantis, Lemuria, and Mu, the practice and study of magic greatly diminished. The Vishanti continued to find new candidates to teach in the mystic arts during the early age of Acheron and Ancient Stygia into the Hyborian Age and the coming of the glacial period. These sorcerers were consistently embattled by the expansive number of Setites and those who had studied the dangerous teachings of the mysterious Skelos, but the true sorcerers on both sides often destroyed themselves through the malpractice of their arts before their names became legend. There were only 2 sorcerers of this age that rose up to any noteriety, and neither was known for having the best intentions. The first was Thulsa Doom, the nemesis of Kull in the Thurian Age who rose again to face and eventually be defeated by Conan the Cimmerian in the Hyborian Age. The latter was the Stygian sorcerer Thoth-Amon, who also caused quite a few problems during Conan's reign over the kingdom of Aquilonia until the end of the Hyborian Age and the Neolithic revolution.

Witchcraft went underground, and witches largely reserved their practices for divination, curses, and blessings. Any use of overt magic during this time could result in disastrous consequences for the practitioner or entire communities for reasons unknown to most. This era was also a time when the rise of magical and undead creatures became vastly more common, including the return of Varnae for a short while. Varnae awoke at the peak of Hyborian civilization, just before its decline, and he began collecting the Darkhold scrolls once more. Conan, Red Sonja, and her companion Zula defeated Varnae, put him back into slumber, and claimed the scrolls. More scrolls penned by Chthon had been found by worshippers of the white ape god Hanuman, so Red Sonja and Zula parted ways with Conan to stop the ape cultists from using these parts of the Darkhold. Agatha Harkness's activities during this time have been lost to the glacial ice, but it is believed that she lived through this savage, undreamt-of-age. Still, most of the monsters that plagued humanity at this time resulted from experiments and rituals of the Thurian Age.

Across the Western Sea, in lands unknown to the Hyborians, the faithful followers of Hecate, who once inhabited the continent of Mu, journey to Oranbega to conquer the city for their goddess, Chthon, and the Old Ones. The first battle is a failure, and Hecate's forces retreat to an island she raises for them out of the ocean. And on this island, they form the order of Mu Mystics. Whether by design or chance, the Mu Mystics were attacked by the Coralax, who once inhabited the caves and corals brought to the surface by Hecate. The Coralax are led by their goddess, Merulina, who came among the great floods to settle in what would become the Atlantic Ocean, their high priest, Calystix the Shaper, and the deviant monster Leviathan. The Mu proves too strong for even the Coralax's patron deity, and she falls silent, leaving the ocean dwellers lost and confused. Hekate imprisoned Leviathan beneath the new island, where its Necroplasm spawned more monsters over time. The Mu Mystics were then mobilized again near the coming of the glacial period to march on Oranbega once more and battle the godless witches there. The Oranbegans understand they cannot defeat the upcoming invasion, so they sink their city beneath the soil and rock. Most of the Mu Mystics perish in the sinking, and the people of Oranbega transform into bodiless spirits, wandering the physically abandoned city.

The rise of modern civilization and current history also saw a swell of the study of magic. Agamotto officially founded the Masters of the Mystic Arts and built the first temples of Kamar-Taj to instruct new students about discovering other parallel universes. Here, he trained powerful sorcerers of many traditions, such as Solomon, Pharoah Nectanebo I who was the greatest of all ancient egyptian artisans, and Jebidiah of Canaan, a wizard who would later learn to invoke the powers of ancient gods to become Vlarem! Agamotto trained Watoomb, the extradimensional magician who would become 1 of the 8 Principalities of powerful masters invoked by other sorcerers. The Winds of Watoomb may be one of the most commonly used spells among good and evil practitioners of the mystic arts. As threats from parallel universes began to move on Terra, Agamotto led the effort to build the Sanctum Sanctorum on the future sites of New York City, London, England, and Hong Kong. His life's purpose ended up being his physical demise, and Agamotto ended up with his mother and father in the dimension of light among the heavenly realms. He was another of the 8 mortal sorcerers powerful enough that others could invoke him for power, known as Principalities. Watoomb returned to his universe to become its protector and ruler, Solomon became the next Sorcerer Supreme and Principality, and Vlarem renewed his invoked powers with those of Solomon, Achilles, Titans, and Olympians to become Shazam!. Another group of ancient sorcerers, known as the Empyreans, were led by Shaderon into the Arctic, where they established Arcadia. In Arcadia, Shaderon built the Temple of Silence, where he masters the arts of astral projection and dimensional travel and transcends his mortal form to attain a higher plane of existence. Generation after generation of Empyrean sorcerers joins him when they tire of near immortality.

Witchcraft also saw a resurgence after the glacial period as the mystic bloodlines surged among the many pagan and animistic cultures. Several witches, the movements of the Darkhold and the Necronomicon, and books of dark purpose seem to find their way into the halls of human civilization. And so it was with the first cities in Assyria, Sumer, Samaria, and Judea where the first grimoire written by mortal hands was assembled and titled the Malleus Mundi. Lilith's spirit wiggled its way free of the bones of the Leviathan and joined in the plague of Lilitu, tempting young men in their dreams and killing pregnant women and newborns until she was trapped in Irkalla by her rival Pazuzu. Agatha Harkness traveled the cradle of civilization before making her way out into the Celtic or Gaulic wilderness that held the European continent before finding Mt. Wundagore and the lost inscriptions of Chthon. The ancient witch from Atlantis established herself in the Darque Hold to research the legends of The Scarlet Witch. The scrolls of sin traveled through the ancient world, with inscriptions found in tombs from before Babylon to modern times. Lilith's essence once again escaped and found its way to the sacred willow tree of Innana until she was cast out in a battle with the Eternal Gilgamesh, then she attempted to lead Job astray over 2 millennia later before she heard of a new Sorcerer Supreme banishing her Lilin. Mephistopheles, the Lord of Limbo at that time, directed his Earthborn servants to collect the scrolls of the Darkhold, assembling the book for the first time to banish a rival from the Earth before he scattered them again at his servants' despair. Lilith foolishly challenged Solomon, the most recent Sorcerer Supreme. The wisest of all kings made the Mother of Demons confess her sins by invoking the power of St. Michael the Archangel before commanding Lilith into physical form to be hung by her hair above the temple door. Over time, more witches, many of The Blood, came to Mt. Wundagore to form a coven with Agatha Harkness even as time moved from Antiquity into the Classical Period. From polytheism and paganism toward the dominance of Christendom.

The religions of the earliest ages of hominid civilization had become all but forgotten, and new faiths took prominence and evolved quickly over time. The Nordheimer of the Hyborian Age took to the cosmos through the wormholes of Yggdrasil and discovered the 9 realms. The Vanir settled on Vanaheim, while the Aesir continued to travel the universe, where they became known as the Norse gods. After the first convergence and war with the Dark Elves, Odin, the All-Father took the throne of Asgard and went about a campaign of conquest to unite the realms, and the Aesir and Vanir were now the Asgardians. This is the age of the rise of the Titans, then the Titanomachy, and the rule of the Olympians on Earth, who then made alliances with similarly named and fashioned Eternals of Olympia. The Ennead arrived in Egypt and chose human avatars to act on their behalf among mortals. The Wizard Shazam had decided it was time to transfer his power to a new host and chose the son of Ramses II, Teth-Adam. The Wizard’s daughter made a deal with the Elder God Set and corrupted Teth-Adam's empowerment. The ancient Hebrew religion had also evolved into something more closely resembling modern Judaism and early Christianity with the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth. The new Christian faith began causing an insurmountable wave of human conflict because it operated under the doctrine of proselytism. The violence of this new wave of human civilization brought about the return of the Amazons and the creation of their home of Themyscira by Zeus, the King of Mt. Olympus, and the Eternals called for the return of the Celestials once again.

As they did at the end of the Hyborian Age, the Eternals summoned the Celestials to return, demanding that the gods stop interfering in the progress of human society. The Olympians heed this demand and retreat into the cosmos, abandoning their patronage of Rome. The loss of their divine protection led the dominant Roman Empire to falter even after adopting the upstart Christian religion. Rome had seen the practice of magic as subversive activity and had stored away many powerful mystic relics that were raided after the old empire's collapse. Relics of the god Mot had spread far and wide, and many witches and sorcerers scrambled to acquire them for noble and nefarious purposes. Lilith took dominion over the city of Rome during the chaos, believing this was the beginning of the end of civilization. She decreed that all the new children of Adam and Eve should be murdered, and the demons loyal to her followed through with her command. This time of plague ended as the apocalypse seemed delayed, and eventually, the demonic forces moved on to other endeavors.

However, The Heaven and Hell realms were reluctant to leave human civilization to its own devices, and the Asgardians were not ones to abandon their friends and allies on Midgard. Eden continued to send angels to the mortal realm to combat the influences of the Lords of Hell and Lilith. The elders of K'un Lun and the Seven Capital Cities of Heaven have always dedicated themselves to studying Chi. A group of 5 elders became obsessed with using their knowledge to unlock the secrets of immortality. The other elders banished this group from the heaven realm, and those 5 formed the heretical order of The Hand. The Hand dug beneath Mt. Vesuvius, causing its eruption that destroyed Pompeii. The inhabitants of The Otherworld, also in the Heavenly Realms, returned to the British Isles to restore the waning power of The Seelie and Unseelie Courts and to search for Britain's rightful king. In this endeavor, The Lady of the Lake began training the young sorcerer Merlyn, who was eventually brought to Kamar-Taj to complete his education. Solomon's long life ended shortly afterward, and Merlyn ascended to become the next Sorcerer Supreme. Odin had returned to Terra to battle angels looking to punish the Germanic Huns in the North of Europe. In the midst of battle, Odin believed his infant daughter, born of an angel, was killed, so he used the Odin-Force to seal off Eden from Midgard.

Europe entered a dark age of superstition while Asia preserved previous ages' scientific and technological progress. The Roman Empire collapsed into the Holy Roman Empire and Byzantine Empire. Arthur Pendragon, born to Celtic Briton and Roman parents, claimed Excalibur and united Britain under Camelot. His kingdom faltered when Lancelot, Arthur's closest friend and confidant, had an affair with Arthur's wife, Lady Guinevere. Arthur's half-sister, Morgan Le Fay, bound the Darkhold and empowered her son Mordred, and they raided Camelot. An apprentice, troubled by visions of a mad Merlyn, found the Darkhold and freed the dark entity Chthon. The apprentice sacrificed himself to save a maiden from Chthon once he realized he had been tricked. He and the Darkhold both disappeared. Former knight Jason of the Blood joined Morgan and Mordred, opening the gates of Camelot in that battle that dealt King Arthur his fatal injury. Merlyn cursed Sir Blood with immortality and made him host to the demon Etrigan. Meanwhile, Danish King Hrothgar built the finest mead hall under the heavens, but the Jotunn Grendel attacked it night after night. Beowulf answered the call to kill Grendel and did so, then Grendel's mother when she sought revenge and was awarded a crown of his own and lands in East Anglia until he died from wounds sustained while killing a dragon.

The Deviants from Lemuria and Subterranea, led by Kumiho, attacked the Korean peninsula and called the attention of the Eternals to put them down before the Celestials returned and caused more devastation. Kumiho drew intense power from a bead she kept on her until the Eternals destroyed it and later destroyed her. New mystic and religious texts were being written on the other side of the Asian continent, with the prophet Muhammed bringing the Quran al-Qur'n down from the mountaintop. At the end of the same century, the mad poet Abdullah al-Hazrad traveled across the cradle of civilization and penned his Kitab al-Azif that exhumed the mysteries of long forgotten, ancient beings such as Yogsothoth, Dagon, and Cthulhu as well as the black magics they imparted to the world. After finishing his work and discussing it in public, al-Hazrad was attacked and devoured in a public square in front of dozens of witnesses. All the while, Lilith was up to her usual business until an unnamed midwife somewhere in Asia had wronged her. The mother of demons decided that she would kill every newborn the midwife would bring into this world, but the plan failed when the midwife trapped Lilith in a bottle that she was unable to escape for 200 years. Before returning to Europe, Marco Polo received a lantern carved from a strange green stone as a gift from Kublai Khan. This trinket stayed in Marco Polo's private collection for centuries, untouched and unrecognized as a powerful Oan relic.

Thor heard the prayers from Kolkumyrar, Iceland when it was attacked by Frost Giants and fought off the Jotunn. He found friends there and made a second home before Odin called him away. Hela Lokisdottir would not be dissuaded from continuing the Asgardian war for unification even though the realms were all but united, and she turned on Odin. She had murdered the valkyries, and nothing but Odin and his sons were able to stop her. Frost Giants from Jotunheim invaded Midgard as if waiting for their cue. Hela was once again imprisoned in Niflheim, and Odin left with his sons, where he joined the defense of Tønsberg against the Jotunn alongside Gilgamesh and other Eternals of Earth. The Asgardians pushed the Frost Giants back to their world, where they were put into submission before Odin returned to reward Gilgamesh with the recipe for Asgardian mead. Odin found a fondness for Tønsberg himself, but the Eternals left for the new world to build up civilization there.

A wayward monk back in Europe went about reassembling the Darkhold once again near the end of the Middle Ages, but he was caught and arrested. There has always been a rumor among vampires that the Darkhold contained The Montesi Formula that would destroy all of their kind. Varnae had recently risen and went after the couriers, taking the book back to the Vatican and killing them to keep the Church from acquiring the spell. Varnae and the Vatican wouldn't come away with the Darkhold, however. Morgan Le Fay would steal it for herself. Along with the original, skinbound Necronomicon assembled in Sumeria, Morgan began trapping mortal sorcerers in the otherworld to allow her faerie kin to drive them mad. Many members of the Masters of the Mystic Arts attempted to stop her and rescue her prisoners, but they, too, were driven mad before the crisis was over. Malebolgia, Lord of the 8th Level of Hell, sent a Hellspawn to find what remained of the Darkhold and followed what he thought was a solid lead, but he was tricked by a divine bounty hunter known as Angela. The Hellspawn didn’t survive the encounter with Angela. Vlad III of Wallachia escaped captivity from the Ottomans over 2 centuries later and found himself fighting to maintain the lands of his beloved people against the interest of neighboring powers. Near death on a battlefield, the Impaler awoke in the night to newfound power and a hunger for blood. Then he spent the next several decades hunting the vampire that cursed him, a hunt that eventually had him stealing Varnae's throne as the master of all vampires.

Europe found a new passion for enlightenment, and the people there renewed their dedication to science and technology while Asia's progress began to slow to a crawl. The mark of this change started with the birth of 2 key figures in the future of human civilization. In Arabia, what we now know as the Middle East, Ra's al Ghul was betrayed by a prince, whose life he saved by using a mystical Lazarus Pit, and was framed for that prince's crimes. Ra's escaped imprisonment poisoned the prince, killed the prince's father, and burned the city to the ground. This founded The League of Shadows, and Ra's became known as the Demon's Head. Yao was also born in Tibet at the dawn of the European reawakening. Yao unlocked the secrets of immortality with his underground society of sorcerers, but a mishap killed his peers, students, and teachers. He journeyed into the Himalayas and found his way to Kamar-Taj to search for answers. Yao became known as The Ancient One, and then he earned the title of Sorcerer Supreme after Merlin stepped down after 350 years of unnatural life.

Odin returned to Tønsberg with the jewel of his treasure room, the Tesseract. He entrusted it to the humans there for reasons unclear to anyone but himself, but this may have been done just in time. An Asgardian woman known as Lorelei had taken control of all of the men in Odin's realm shortly after the All-Father's return. Lady Sif ended the enchantment and subdued Lorelei, restoring order to Asgard and the 9 realms. Lilith found herself summoned to Greece by Rabbi Yosef Della Reina, who had summoned and enslaved her current lover, Asmodeus. Lilith defeated Rabbi Della Reina, where Asmodeus had failed, and forced him to summon more of her children to attack the queen of Greece. The rabbi committed suicide when the weight of his wickedness became too much to bear. The Vatican decided it could no longer abide by the existence of Dracula and the growing infernal power in his castle, so they organized an assassination attempt. The murder was a complete failure, leaving only a survivor named Rachel van Helsing. However, Dracula discovered that his mortal son had assisted in planning the assassination. Dracula killed his heir for the betrayal, then decided he would leave to see the New World. This trip turns out to be a disastrous misadventure for the people of the New Salem colony, and Dracula returns in time to meet with representatives of the Church to negotiate the return of the Darkhold. Alessandro di Cagliostro was a human sorcerer who eavesdropped on the negotiation and devised a plot to steal the Book of Sins in transit. Cagliostro wanted the Darkhold to find a cure for his immortality, but he failed to acquire the book and was reportedly executed for the attempt.

The mystic arts of all kinds had been present in the Americas for as long as there had been people there. The Mu Mystics had already inhabited The Rogue Isles when the French arrived to colonize them, and just across the last stretch of the Atlantic Ocean is where Oranbega sank into the earth. The spirits of Oranbega have been traveling across the world through the Astral Plane, where Girolamo da Verrazano could map the supposed location of Oranbega on the coast of Rhode Island before it had been explored. Verrazano also recovered information about a demon known as The Envoy of Shadows and evidence of activity by a group of allegedly spirit-possessed mystics known as The Circle of Thorns from his travels across the old Roman Empire. The Eternals had been active in the Americas for centuries when the Spanish Conquistadors arrived, but no one had seen Atlanteans since the Thurian age until the adolescent Namor rose from the ocean to bury his mother and found a Spanish villa where he expected a village. Her people were enslaved, and so he led his loyalists in burning the villa before they gave her the funeral she requested. The Eternals Druig created a sanctuary for the native peoples of Latin America and worked closely with the Atlanteans in thwarting the Spanish expeditions across the continents. Many bands of Conquistadors went missing as they traversed the New World and were unable to avoid an encounter with Druig or Namor. Near the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, Blackbeard began harassing French ships around Fort Hades until he finally took it for himself. Colonists, escaped slaves, and criminals from Europe and America flooded the Rogue Isles, and eventually, they declared themselves independent from France.

The westward expansion started with the rise of automation and industrialization worldwide. Free African-American settlers had created the settlement of Wonderment to get away from the complicated environment of the slave-owning South and the North that must respect it under the Constitution. Bandits hit the town and made it one of their favorite raiding sites until they spilled innocent blood, and the Ghost Rider came with a posse of enhanced heroes to exact vengeance on the greedy white men. The North-South, racial, and liberty issues in the states boiled over, and the election of Abraham Lincoln set off the bloodiest war in American history - The U.S. Civil War. Jonah Hex, a European who grew up among Native Americans, joined the Confederacy in an attempt to protect the people who raised him from further disenfranchisement from the North. Jonah accidentally shot General "Stonewall" Jackson, marking him as a traitor to the Confederacy. He surrendered to the Union but refused to give up his unit, but they used the mud on his shoes to find and kill them anyway. Jonah was left for dead, and the nearby Apache found him and cursed him for what they believed was a life of betrayal. The Civil War ended with the surrender of the Confederacy and was followed by the assassination of Lincoln. The Ghost Rider went on a tear through the American South, bringing vengeance on former slave owners for all of the innocent blood that they shed. Hex had become a bounty hunter in the West by this time and had to bring his posse together with a group of strangers to bring down a criminal gang with advanced weaponry only those strangers had seen before. After that, Hex caught a lead on the League of Shadows, attempting to sabotage the new continental railroad and cause a disaster that would destroy the Capitol. This led Hex into a confrontation with Ra's al Ghul directly, one that both men would walk away from, but Jonah would stop the League's plan to stop the rise of Americanism in the West.

While forces unknown to most European and Asian forces were at work in the U.S., ancient and dark eldritch energies were seeping out of the Atlantic Ocean and into the communities. An ancient creature generally summoned and controlled by Atlantean leaders in ancient times known as a Giganto had attacked whaling vessels, causing significant losses to a ship led by a man named Ahab that drove his men to cannibalism to survive. Ahab went back out to sea with a new crew to hunt the creature he called Moby Dick, which took his life and the lives of all but 1 member of his crew – call him Ishmael. Robert Blake was a paranormal investigator who traveled to Providence, Rhode Island, to study a rumored cult and discovered The Church of Starry Wisdom, which held a hand-copied Necronomicon and The Shining Trapezohedron. Robert gazed into the Trapezohedron and unintentionally summoned the Haunter of the Dark that hounded the investigator until he found himself in an early grave. Robert Blake’s encounter with the Shining Trapezohedron was not the last strange occurrence connected to the Old Ones in New England. The powers that pulled the powerful revenant from Slaughter Swamp that haunted Gotham City, New Jersey for almost 2 centuries are unknown. The swamp has been a favorite dumping site for industrial waste in the rapidly growing area near Gotham, and it has a history of occult activity. The raising of this dead man may result from either of those factors or just one of them. All that's known about this brutish corpse that walks the mortal world is, "Solomon Grundy, born on a Monday...”

The United Kingdom had dominated the colonization of the New World and the Far East at this point, but the rest of Europe turned their greedy, lustful eyes to Africa. The British engaged in the Second Opium War when Canton authorities arrested the crew of the cargo ship Arrow on accusations of smuggling opium. France and the Russian Empire joined the conflict. British and French soldiers who marched out of the British Raj traversed The Himalayas to scout another possible front when they discovered the open gateway to K'un Lun and the Heavens. The soldiers were defeated by The Iron Fist and put to hard labor until the war was finished. The missing soldiers prevented other expeditions into the same area. Ra's al Ghul had escaped to Northern Africa after his plan to destroy Washington, D.C. was defeated, where he finally discovered his second Lazarus Pit in the Tomb of Thoth Khepera. He found Thoth Khepera there, alive in the pit and surrounded by the mummified corpses of those who had come before him. Ra’s tried to negotiate with her to gain the secrets of the pits, but Thoth Khepera attempted to drain his life in exchange, and he barely escaped. A Russian noble known only as Baron Zoria emigrated to England and was followed by people across Central Asia, North Africa, and Europe. They form an official secret society known as The Circle of Thorns, recruiting more people from Britain who reportedly have an intense personality change and seem to suffer severe memory loss. Dracula purchased several properties around London after driving both of his solicitors mad. Dracula immediately began targeting women to join him as brides in this new home until he encountered Abraham van Helsing. This van Helsing pushed Dracula back home, where they believed he was destroyed once and for all just before the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Baron Zoria led his secret society across the pond to Rhode Island once the Great War began.

About a year into World War I, a young Gefreiter by the name of Adolf Hitler stumbled upon a secret experiment to re-animate the bodies of slain soldiers from the war by Anton Arcane under the patronage of The HYDRA Society. Hitler's true feelings about the occult, religion, and theosophy are up for debate, but what is known is that he recognized their utility in propaganda and made deep connections in this secret society. Dracula reemerged on the bloodiest battlefield of the war, converting dying soldiers at the Somme into fledgling vampires to command back at the British and French allies. A British private named Constantine was one of Dracula's victims, but the plan didn't stop the Allies from pushing into German territory. Hitler was blinded by mustard gas near the end of The Great War and claimed that he received a vision from the Teutonic Gods in which he restored the purity of the Aryan people and bestowed on Germany the 1,000-Year Reich. After the Russian Empire left the war, American spy and air serviceman Steve Trevor found intelligence of the German Empire, developing new and deadlier weapons. He stole the lead scientist’s research notes on those experiments and a plane but was shot down near the coast of Themyscira. Princess Diana fished him out where she faced the pursuing Germans with the other Amazons. Diana left Themyscira with Steve, despite her mother, Queen Hippolyta’s, protests, to fulfill her destiny and end the war. Steve Trevor sacrificed himself to destroy the only store of lethal weapons that the German Empire could manufacture, and Diana defeated Ares, who had been fueling the engines of The Great War. The year after the Central Powers surrendered the future Fuhrer would go to a meeting of the German Worker's Party, formed by the far-right Thule Society, where he would find another avenue of supernatural and spiritual iconography to create his populist movement. Then Hitler would find himself in prison for attempting to overthrow the Bavarian government.

Hitler spent a year in prison, and his National Socialist Party quickly rose in popularity among the German electorate over time. The U.S. Navy destroyed a chapter of The Cult of the Shaper, killing human and Coralax cultists in the process. Baron Zoria returned to Europe to follow clues he had gathered to find the Malleus Mundi in an abandoned Templar Fortress before returning to Rhode Island. He started a golden age of the Circle of Thorns with record expansion and using his powerful grimoire to lead his followers into the sunken city of Oranbega. A group of robber barons, wealthy politicians, and hired thugs gathered in Salem, Massachusetts, where they created the secret satanic cabal that they cleverly codenamed DEMON. DEMON’s chief members, known as Morbanes, then returned to their homes where they established their many Demonhames as the first step in their new world order. Tombs discovered in ruins around Babylon and Sumeria traced back to undreamed-of ages where inscriptions from the Darkhold and the Necronomicon are discovered. The walls of these archaeological finds also depict Chthon and the original inhabitants of The Nameless City near ancient Sumeria, as envisioned by Abdullah al-Hazrad, who described the knowledge he acquired during his journeys. The remnants of ancient and forbidden lore from these ancient sites drive the researchers there mad, but the texts inspire a surge of Eldritch activity in New England.

Johann Schmidt came out of nowhere to climb the Nazi ranks and convinced Hitler of the value of finding the power of the Norse gods and proved himself by capturing HYDRA researcher Arnim Zola. Schmidt then ingratiated the Nazi Party to Spain with a successful test of Zola's weapons in their civil war and was placed as Hitler's representative on HYDRA's ruling council before folding it into the regime as the deep science division. Stefan Richter and his best friend, Marcus Cole, worked as mercenaries since the end of World War I as Marcus sought the mythical Fountain of Zeus. Their company was originally comprised of their unit, but only Richter and Cole survived when they finally found it. Cole had been exposed to chemical weapons in the war and was near death when he drank from the well, which turned him into the Statesman. Richter drank next and became Lord Recluse. They discovered Pandora's Box near the well, and Richter opened it, releasing its contents into the world and sparking a new wave of enhanced individuals. The Ahnenerbe immediately set out across the Germanic world to prove the existence of a pure Aryan race and the existence of Thule, the island they believed inspired the myth of Atlantis and was the genesis of the race. They also sent expeditions into the Holy Lands to find mythic artifacts of the Judaic and Christian traditions, specifically the Ark of the Covenant, The Holy Grail, and the Spear of Destiny. The United States received intelligence about these endeavors and immediately recruited the best archaeologist in America, Dr. Henry Jones, Jr., also known as Indiana Jones. Fresh off an escapade in the British Raj, where he confronted a rogue death cult, and a failed expedition to South America, Indiana Jones raced to recover both artifacts for the Americans before the Nazis could acquire them. Although the Nazis are not known to have come into possession of these relics, it is unclear as to whether the Americans ever did either. What is clear is that Dr. Jones was among the few men to be seen again after these misadventures.

The Industrial Revolution became increasingly grim, like the soot clouds from factories, yet points of light could be found in that dark era before the next great war. A sorcerer named The Dream Doctor began investigating the disappearance of children in Paragon City, Rhode Island, eventually linking the kidnappings to The Circle of Thorns. He forms a team known as The Midnight Squad to stop the abductions and sacrifices, which ends the public presence of the Circle that same January night. Thorn mystics still emerge from Oranbega from time to time. So, The Dream Doctor made the Midnight Squad a permanent fixture in Paragon City and the Rogue Isles always recruiting and ready to face any supernatural or paranormal threat. Lucio Nuti lost his whole family to the murderous Baron Krutze. He goes to The Witch of the Hills, who uses the Necronomicon to provide him a way to possess a clay mannikin so that he can exact revenge without getting caught. As he drives the Baron and his family's dead bodies off a cliff, Nuti realizes that he was never given a way to escape the clay body and perishes in the resulting crash. Baron Gregor Russof copied as much of the Darkhold as he could into a journal that had belonged to one of his ancestors, a witch. While doing so, he read the origin of lycanthrope out loud and cursed his family line to become werewolves. The sorcerer Taboo reclaimed the Darkhold after this and disappeared for almost 2 decades.

The powers of the arcane and the divine seemed to rise to meet the coming darkness, choosing champions and sending them gateways to power. Egyptologist Robert MacDonald traveled to Egypt to scout a dig when he encountered the ancient god, Osiris. MacDonald accepts Osiris' offer to become his avatar and takes up the moniker of Dr. Twilight. Geologist Harrison Chase was hiking Yellowstone National Park when he came across a rock composed of a mineral he had never encountered. Upon picking it up, Chase was granted fantastic powers and became the first Meteor Man. A track worker named Alan Scott in the United States thought he had died for a moment when a train nearly struck him, but the lantern carved from the Starheart saved him instead. It’s unclear how the carved meteorite found its way to a railyard from Marco Polo's collection. Scott discovered the Guardians of the Universe, also known as the Oans, placed an entity inside. Alan Scott bonded with the Starheart being and became the first Green Green Lantern on Terra in many centuries months before Germany invaded Poland.

The build-up to war began with Germany deporting their Jewish inhabitants to Poland once they were stripped of their citizenship, Japan invaded Manchuria, then engaged in the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Spanish Civil War, and Germany's annexations of Austria and the Sudetenland. The war is officially thought to have kicked off when Germany invaded Poland, which prompted declarations of war by the United Kingdom and France. German battleships and U-boats littered the Atlantic sea floor with ships, many of which were supply ships from the United States heading to its European allies from the last war. Namor the Sub-Mariner, Prince of Atlantis, grew angry over the surface world littering his oceans with their wreckage and first attacked New York, where he was convinced that Nazi Germany was the enemy. Namor then returned to Atlantis, where he gathered loyal members of his sea nation and attacked Berlin directly, and at an opportune moment when German forces had British and French soldiers pinned down at Dunkirk. Namor announced Atlantis' declaration of war on Germany and its allies as he flooded the city, which brought the Human Torch and Toro to push him back before he could drown German civilians. The attack fell short of ending the war early, but it gave British troops a chance to retreat, and created a rebel faction in Atlantis.

Hitler announced that he had acquired the Spear of Destiny and that Jehova was on his side now, all of his opposition should surrender. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt gathered a team that included The Flash, The Green Lantern, Wonder Woman, and others who acquired the spear and brought it back to the States. The rebel Atlanteans joined with soldiers from Lemuria and the Japanese Navy in the attack on Pearl Harbor. Namor and his loyalists got word and raced to the Pacific to repel the attack, though the Japanese still launched their surprise attack that pulled the United States into the war. Namor returned to Lemuria, deposed their ruler, and evicted the rebellious Atlanteans. He led the vanguard in the naval battles, starting with Wake Island, to Midway, Gazala, Gilbert and Marshall Islands, Mariana and Palau Islands, the Normandy Invasion, and Iwo Jima. In crisscrossing the globe to battle the Axis in every major theater, Namor also found the time to save the British Prime Minister.

While The Shutzstaffel absorbed The Ahnenerbe after its continued failure to prove Aryan evolutionary superiority, connections to Atlantis, and losing all of the relics that would have elevated Hitler beyond dictator, Johann Schmidt arrived in Tønsberg. There, he acquired the Tesseract and had his men murder everyone in the village before they left. The Red Skull met with HYDRA researcher Dr. Werner Reinhardt, who had discovered ancient Kree artifacts, including the preserved body of a rebellious Kree. Dr. Reinhardt was ready to turn over everything he had to Schmidt, but Schmidt only wanted the monolith and told the doctor to keep the rest, especially a Kree Obelisk, as Schmidt believed it might hold the key to life and death. With the Reich collapsing at the end of the war, HYDRA ready to enter its final phase to supplant world powers, and Captain America hot on his heels, Schmidt attempted to use the Tesseract to open the Kree Monolith HYDRA was originally founded around and steel the power of Alveus, the creature on the other side. The monolith opens, but Cap, Peggy Carter, Nicholas Fury, and The Howling Commandos disrupt the operation, causing a catastrophic failure that destroys the Monolith site, Castle de Krake, with the Red Skull inside.

As the Americans enter the war, new teams of heroes and villains emerge. Arachnos had formed near the beginning of the century and moved from Italy to the Rogue Isles, where they infiltrated the neutral government and several other organizations. This included the Mu Mystics. The Italian nationalists among Arachnos broke off and returned to Italy to form the early Council. The Nazis sent a large counter-intelligence force to Paragon City that they called The Fifth Column with the mission to disrupt major supply shipments to the allies in Europe. German operatives infiltrated Britain, where they kidnapped both King George VI and Prime Minister Winston Churchill. British intelligence did their best to keep this secret, but two hero teams rescued the British heads of state. Captain America, Bucky, Human Torch, and Toro are deployed to rescue Churchill and almost fail until the Sub-Mariner emerges to turn the tide and complete the team that Churchill dubbed The Invaders. Alastair Sutton brought together Europe's greatest heroes to form Dawn Patrol, which included the mysterious Hero One, who wielded the legendary Excalibur. They chased the King's kidnappers to the Scottish Highlands, where Sutton was able to keep them from escaping until the rest of the team rescued King George VI.

After the signing of the Tripartite Pact, Emperor Hirohito of Japan had the sorcerer Iron Father cast a Sanctuary spell around the Axis nations to keep superpowered invaders out so they could not strike deep into the heart of the war effort. Enhanced individuals and metahumans fighting on behalf of the allied powers who tried to cross into Germany, Italy, or Japan would find their powers gone before growing weak and eventually falling into a coma. Nick Fury and the Howling Commandos moved into Bulgarian-controlled Romania after participating in the D-Day invasion, where they saw Romani being gathered up and loaded into trains. Their target was much further on, but the squad decided they couldn't ignore what was happening. They engaged the enemy but were quickly overwhelmed until the countryside seemed to come alive. Bats and wolves attacked the Nazis before Count Dracula appeared among them. With Nazis fleeing or dead, the Howling Commandos thanked Dracula for his help but informed him that they would have to tell the van Hellsings that he had returned. Later, the SS moved into Romania as they continued to press forward and set up shop inside Castle Dracula to process Romani people to be sent to the camps. They had thought that the castle was deserted, but then the Nazis started showing up dead and drained of blood. The SS hunted for the murderer and tried to blame the Roma and Sinti prisoners, but when there were only three left, they discovered the captain had been turned by Dracula and was killed under his control. The last surviving SS officer staked him and fled, and Dracula freed his countrymen. There are no clear records of how the sanctuary spell ended up coming down, but whoever caused the Sanctuary spell to come down or the ultimate fate of Iron Father is unknown. A final Nazi hold-out group attempted an assassination attempt of the Allied leaders at the Potsdam Conference that was thwarted by the Sub-Mariner and Soviet superhero Alexei Shostakov.

There were supergroups during the war that were publicly known, but groups like the All-Star Squadron and The Invaders. These associations loosened as heroes focused more on protecting their respective homefronts. Communism began to spread in the Eastern hemisphere, and the Soviets sent agents from Leviathan into the United States for the first time. Johann Fennhoff, a psychologist, a master hypnotist, and an avid occultist led the Leviathan team. His codename with Leviathan was Doctor Faustus, and he used his gifts to manipulate Howard Stark to get to his advanced and fringe technology to bring back to the Soviet Union, then to kill himself in a plane crash, convinced he was saving Steve Rogers. Peggy Carter broke up the scheme despite the best efforts of Faustus' Black Widow Assassin, recovered Stark's technology, and broke up the Leviathan team. Unknown to Carter, Howard had been forming a new organization to replace the SSR called S.H.I.E.L.D. and had been fighting to get Peggy to head it with him while he researched the Tesseract. The United States Congress finally signed on because of this feat and she was an Army's Distinguished Cross recipient who recovered The Zodiac.

New threats encroached on the old powers, some born from the post-war environment and some from spheres beyond. A malignant spirit known as The Piper manifested in Southern California and enchanted the people of Los Angeles, turning them on The Liberty Corps. Doctor Oblivion teamed up with the outlawed heroes and exiled The Piper back to where he came from. The Piper's magic flute was found by a citizen and pawned, where it disappeared for several decades. Years later, a relic labeled the Spear of Destiny was stolen from the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. Soldiers who were operating as a part of the Maoist uprising were operating in Tibet, replacing the British Colonizers with Chinese Communist aggression and their ambitions for expansion. They stumbled upon the gateway into K'un Lun just as the British had during the Second Opium War before them. The Iron Fist kept them from entering heaven, although 16mm film was preserved of the encounter and eventually found its way into the hands of The Hand and The Chaste. The Freedom Phalanx continued operating as a tightly knit team after the end of World War II. Subsequently, they stopped a chemical weapon attack by the villain Nemesis and became the first publicly recognized supergroup when they stopped a bombing in Paragon City. The Dawn Patrol and the Midnight Squad followed shortly afterward. Reports of missing persons and unsolved murders started becoming a nightly occurrence around this time in the Astoria district of Paragon City, with more reports about strange things wandering the streets at night.

Channeling power through artifacts was also a big part of the expansion of sorcery, including some old things that became new once again. El Espectro was the world heavyweight champion of Lucha Libre and was anonymously gifted a silver mask enchanted with mystic power. He took up battling supernatural evil as he invoked the power of his new luchador mask and continued defending his title in the circuit. Baron Gregor Russof had a growing family, one that would inherit his curse of lycanthrope when he died, and he was unable to acquire the Darkhold from the Vatican or Dracula. Russof headed out to Mt. Wundagore instead to find the tomb of The Darque Hold to find Chthon's original inscriptions of the Book of Sins. The act awoke Chthon, who lashed out at Russof and seemed to kill him, and then Chthon began to plot from Mt. Wundagore and take control of Transia. Abin Sur was the guardian assigned to Sector 2814 in The Milky Way Galaxy, which included The Sol System and Terra. Abin Sur crash-landed in the California desert after an insectoid planetary race attacked his race. He sent his ring out to find his replacement, and it chose Hal Jordan. Abin Sur and Jordan didn't know about the existence of Alan Scott and the Starheart on Earth as Hal Jordan went on to discover that his mentor and commanding officer in the Green Lantern Corps, Thaal Sinestro, was subjugating Terra through fear. Hal Jordan defeated Sinestro in a duel and Sinestro was banished from the Earth Realm.

The Sub-Mariner hadn't been seen since the end of the war until Johnny Storm of the Fantastic 4 found him at a flophouse in The Bronx. Johnny recognized Namor from newsreels, but the Atlantean Prince didn't know who he was, so Johnny pushed him into the ocean hoping the salt water would help. It did, but Namor attacked New York City when he found a devastated Atlantis upon returning home. The Sub-Mariner’s attack continued until he became infatuated with Johnny's sister, Susan Storm. Namor wasn't the only rival for the Fantastic 4's braintrust, as Victor von Doom had an accident with a device he thought would allow him to save his mother from Mephistopheles. The accident left him scarred, and his rage at Reed Richards, whom he blamed for the accident, caused him to get suspended from the university. Doom traveled the world instead, studying science, engineering, and sorcery with 2 goals in life now. A witch descended from the Black Knight that opposed King Arthur's Camelot, and another witch came upon the Iron Crown in an infernal ritual outside of London. Surging with power, the man who now calls himself Dark Seraph kills everyone present at the ritual, including the members of his coven, before he goes on a spree of chaos and destruction.

Loki Laufeyson, the Asgardian trickster manipulated the Hulk into rampaging through a railyard in his initial attempt to conquer Earth. The employees called the Fantastic 4 for help, but Loki misdirected the call to make sure Thor Odinson would hear it, and Tony Stark got the call instead. With the Fantastic 4 unavailable, Stark recruited Hank Pym, and Janet van Dyne confronted Hulk and Thor before realizing they were duped. Loki attacked Norway with the help of an army of Frost Giants, but the newly formed Avengers defeated him. A year later, the Avengers would find themselves in a battle against Namor and discover Steve Rogers' frozen body. After nursing him back to health, Captain America led the team moving forward. A group of evil sorcerers summoned a demon of immense power, and the hero, Nightwraith, arrived to stop it. Nightwraith was an anti-occult detective who suffered for years under a mysterious order of sorcerers known as The Circle of the Scarlet Moon. When all seemed lost for him, his former arch-nemesis arrived, and together, they banished the demon. Nightwraith disappeared only a few months later. Shortly afterward, Doctor Doom led a peasant revolt against the fascist dictator in his home of Latveria and declared himself monarch when successful. Under his rule, Latveria flourished, continuing to make what was once old, new again.

The effects of the largely espionage-based Cold War also affect the worlds of the beyond. Dark Seraph attacked the Strategic Air Command to trigger a nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union. He was stopped by a hero named American Eagle and a team known as The Minutemen. This attack inspires The Circle of the Scarlet Moon to destroy Dark Seraph, but they barely escape the confrontation with their lives. All of the major nations that signed onto the NATO treaty met on the island of Malta to discuss partnerships with far-right Nationalist groups in the battle against Communism. Unbeknownst to everyone attending, several members were hosts for spirits of The Circle of Thorns, and the militant Malta Group was formed. Sensing this universe on the brink of near annihilation, a being of such power that it devours entire realities came to Paragon City. It was known as Rularuu the Ravager, it and its 7 aspects prepared to lay waste to Earth-196169 until the Midnight Squad trapped it and its minions in The Shadow Shard, a place of shattered thoughts and madness. A rebel Atlantean from the war known as Steel Shark seized control of the Atlantean Army and attacked Florida, attempting to pose as a Soviet invasion. Queen Atlanna, Namor, and the Fantastic 4 drove Steel Shark and his Atlantean soldiers out of the Sunshine State and back into the ocean. Hulk also found himself embroiled in the conflicts of the turning of the decade when Doctor Stephen Strange recruited him for The Defenders, and he faced off against extradimensional threats like Dormammu as well as some from within the Earth realm.

Johnny Blaze took over the daredevil act for his adopted father and mentor Crash Simpson when he got too old to do it himself, but then Crash developed terminal cancer. Johnny couldn't handle the thought of losing Crash and sold his soul to Mephisto to cure his cancer. Crash died in an accident the day after he discovered he was cancer-free but the deal had been done and Johnny was now the Ghost Rider. Gregor Russof's son tried to escape the family curse by moving to the United States and changing his name to Jack Russell, but the curse found him anyway. He returned to the old country and back into the Soviet Union's sphere of influence to find the Darkhold and the cure for his lycanthrope but it was lost before it could be useful. Russell then sought out his father's journal but Dracula possessed it. The Count allowed him to read the journal but it didn’t contain a cure. Thanos came to Terra for the first time when he discovered that an organization called Advanced Idea Mechanics had constructed a Cosmic Cube, the same kind of device as Odin's Tesseract. The Avengers had taken the cube before AIM could use it and stopped Thanos' fleet in orbit thanks to a distress call. The Mad Titan had taken the Cosmic Cube while the Earth’s mightiest heroes were distracted with the fleet, and ascended to god-like power. When he thought he had drained the cube of all its power, Thanos abandoned it. Mar-Vell smashed the Cosmic Cube and demanded Thanos' deeds be undone. They were and Thanos fled with his fleet.

No one was quite sure where the original Necronomicon went after the frenzy of activity caused by cultists using the Necronomicon in the interwar period. The Vatican had a copy in its vault that Cardinal Isaiah Curwen believed to be the original. Doctor Strange claimed to have the original copy and used his Book of Dead Names to enter the dream realm to battle Nightmare. A coven of witches set out to destroy every copy of the Book of Dead Names against the advice of Agatha Harkness, who said that it may be needed later. After nearly 2 decades of hunting and little progress, the coven gave up this quest. Statesman flew into Soviet territory to rescue the pilots of a downed American spy plane but was met with a nuclear strike that nearly killed him. American and Soviet metahumans engaged in atomic sabotage of the opposing side's arsenals when Hero One stepped in to negotiate a peaceful solution. Doctor Lirby Koo befriended the metahuman Ultraviolet in Texas and convinced her to raid a DEMON base in search of a specific item locked in a numbered vault. While there, Ultraviolet encountered Dart who attacked the same DEMON installation at the same time serendipitously. Although the Cold War shaped so much of this era, the crumbling of the Soviet Union began to put the nuclear threat in the background.

Consumerism, excess, and the background dread of nuclear armageddon dictated the next decade in Terran history as the Cold War gasped its last breaths. The High Evolutionary came to Terra in search of inspiration. He had heard about the strange happenings at Mt. Wundagore during his travels and went there to find its source. This awakened Chthon who demanded the Evolutionary's service, and he played along until a pregnant woman appeared. Chthon tried to kill her and her unborn children, but the High Evolutionary recognized something powerful within them and banished Chthon. The mother dies in childbirth and the High Evolutionary keeps the twins in stasis until he finds a suitable family to raise them, the Maximoffs. The Minutemen broke up when members retired and some took work with government agencies, but American Eagle remained an independent operator. The villain Charger attacked him and American Eagle was defeated, but Charger had to escape when Captain Thunder arrived. Around this time, Back Alley Brawler stepped away from international and global affairs to form The Regulators and focused on ending the drug trade, starting by teaming up with Hero One and the Dawn Patrol to attack drug fields and trade routes in Asia and South America. In the early clashes, the Regulators accidentally killed Harry Frost, the capi di tutti capi in Paragon City, before they received a tip from the Midnight Squad about a Superadine drug lab in Paragon City. Back Alley Brawler assaulted the lab alone and turned over all of the drug paraphernalia to the Freedom Phalanx.

The United Nations Tribunal on International Law was created by the Security Council and General Assembly in 1963. It had acted largely as a minor law enforcement entity and investigative agency for nearly 2 decades. Then UNTIL went to work on major busts: capturing the villain Sapper in Canada, seizing the base of KRONOS, putting them out of business, killing Dr. Lirby Koo, and destroying his base. These moves didn't go unanswered. Ultraviolet, Dart, and Diamond retaliated for the death of Dr. Loo with a raid on a UNTIL base and released Orb I. Then high-ranking DEMON operatives lured 4 superheroes and several UNTIL officers to a fake summit. DEMON revealed their true intentions when their guests arrived, ambushed the heroes and officers, and sacrificed them to gods of darkness. Another Kryptonian arrived on Earth shortly after these events, and she turns out to be Superman’s cousin and possibly the last survivor of Krypton. After several months where she trained with Wonder Woman, lived with the Danvers in Smallville, and stood against several sorcerers’ attempts to use her against her cousin, Kara Zor-El was granted the title of Supergirl.

There would be no establishment of an Orwellian dystopia because that specific year would see the reality of Earth-196169 torn asunder by a cosmic being known as The Beyonder. The Beyonder works through the fabrics of reality from somewhere outside the 6^th Dimension to reshape realities into better versions of themselves—at least, better versions than they were according to it. Once reality was shattered, The Beyonder used the pieces to assemble a universe known as Battleworld. He summoned metahumans and enhanced individuals from across spacetime to Battleworld to prove if the power of good was greater in this reality or the power of evil. However, Doctor Doom immediately coveted The Beyonder's power and approached Reed Richards with a scheme to steal it. Reed refused and the sides were drawn, with the disparate factions forming their own settlements. With the other villains on board, Doom took The Beyonder's power for himself and believed he had killed all of his opposition when they came to stop him from remaking the Universe in his image. Captain America showed up to Doom's surprise, and when Doom used his ill-gotten cosmic power to annihilate Cap, the man out of time reappeared somewhere else. Eventually, Doom's abuse of cosmic power overloads him and he is consumed by it, bringing back the Beyonder who allows the heroes to return to Earth-196169 as it was.

The Paranormal Research and Investigation Mission of the United States was founded in 1964 by Lyndon B. Johnson as a Federal law enforcement agency specializing in superhuman and paranormal crime. The organization started with several high-profile disasters, and then The Circle of the Scarlet Moon delivered the Earth Crown of Krim to them after killing its previous user, Earthmaster. Months later, the anti-democratic paramilitary organization known as the Venomous Imperial Party of the Eternal Reptile, with the help of Chameleon, framed the super group, The Champions as a distraction while they stole the Earth Crown. The Champions cleared their name and worked with PRIMUS to stop VIPER's heist. Professor Philippe Moreau was the third generation of geneticists in his family working on evolving animals into higher life forms. Professor Moreau had succeeded with a gorilla he named Doctor Silverback. Silverback sent out a covert message for help from Moreau's secret lab on Monster Island, and the supergroup The New Knights of the Round Table answered. They found him a home with Cambridge Medical Labs where he worked with Doctor Tina Morrison.

Monica Cole was the sister of Lord Recluse before she married Marcus Cole and took his name. She was gifted The Girdle of Hera from The Furies that granted her powers as Maiden Justice and she ran an independent paper called The Paragon Free Press. After the reconstruction of reality, Statesman decided Recluse had to be brought to justice and went to face him alone. He was overwhelmed and defeated. Then Lord Recluse joined the Tyranny Legion with other villains such as Protean from The Fifth Column and Giovanna Scaldi of The Carnival of Shadows. They set into motion Operation: WEB, a plan to control the minds of the citizens of Paragon City so that they can get their chosen mayoral candidate elected and create a foothold in the continental U.S. Statesman gathered the next roster of the Freedom Phalanx to stop them. As the Phalanx ended the Legion's plot, Monica "Maiden Justice" Cole passed away from old age alone. Doctor Doom scoffed at the Tyranny Legion's meager attempt and created a device that allowed him to take control of the minds of the entire world. And once that was completed, he had the United Nations declare him Emperor for all times. The Avengers tracked Doom to an island base, found the Psycho-Prism, the mind-control device, and smashed it to free the wills of humanity. Doctor Doom fled back to Latveria where international law protected him.

Around this same time, a group of Atlantean rebels known as The Shark Squad stole what was, at that time, called the Powerstone of Lyonese. This was the fabled Rock of Ages that once held Excalibur before Arthur retrieved it and proved he was the true King of England. They then took a group of scientists hostage to figure out how to employ the Powerstone, which they did and turned themselves into The Four Winds. The London Watch, a team of British superheroes, two of whom employ enchanted armor and weapons, tracked down the Four Winds and recovered the Powerstone. After 2 weeks of evading agents of DEMON, the hero Powershift is kidnapped from the Appleton Mall in Manhattan before the Champions can save him. They attempted to rescue him from an underwater lair only to walk into a trap and the heroes barely escaped before the base self-destructs. The Champions then tracked DEMON to an uncharted island in the Atlantic Ocean, where they found Powershift and rescued him before DEMON could use their device to summon a powerful Nether Lord. The villains involved were apprehended but the mastermind, a Morbane named Heironomous, escaped.

The Green Lantern Corps decided that they needed to expand their numbers as the threats across the universe had become greater and more numerous. After months of surveillance on Earth, they sent Hal Jordan to recruit a political activist and community organizer in Detroit, Michigan named John Stewart. Hal and other members of the Corps raise concerns, but the Oans insist that Stewart is the right choice. His first assignment appears to be a failure when he lets an apparent assassin escape after an attempt on a Senator that Stewart was assigned to protect, but the rookie identified that the assassination was a ruse planned by a bigoted politician. His peers accepted him from that point on. When the Minutemen defeated Doctor Destroyer in 1976, they confiscated an artifact known as the Starcrystalthat radiated power but its purpose was unidentified. Unfortunately, the Starcrystal was a cage for the Starspawn. It got free and damaged much of their base, Homestead, and the surrounding neighborhood. While the Champions fought the Starspawn, The Hand infiltrated Homestead and stole large amounts of information from their databases.

Danny Ketch promised his sister that they would ride down to Machpelah Cemetery to photograph Harry Houdini's grave for her birthday, and he kept his promise. Unfortunately, that put them in the middle of a shootout between Blackout and his thugs, and a group of Kingpin's collectors, and Danny and his sister, Barbara Ketch was hit. Danny pulled Barbara behind cover where he found a glowing motorcycle and when he touched the strange gas cap, he became the next Ghost Rider. Ketch would find himself teamed up with Logan and other heroes who were tempted to evil to battle Blackheart in the small town of Christ's Crown, Utah. Blackheart offered the answer to the mysteries that plagued them and darkened their hearts, but the heroes sent the son of Mephisto back to hell instead.Portal Corp. had been operating for almost 6 months after the Freedom Phalanx received advanced technology recovered from a Superadine lab. The Phalanx had explored several realities before they encountered Earth-155139 where the Axis Powers won World War II and Marcus Cole became The Reichsmann. Like Marcus Cole in this universe, The Reichsmann had also drank from the Well of Zeus and became an Incarnate. They fought the Phalanx out of their dimension and then poured into ours with The Reichmann as their vanguard. Heroes and many villains, most everyone can't stand Nazis in our dimension, gathered and fought them back, destroying Portal Corp facilities and imprisoning The Reichsmann.

The next decade saw the fall of the Soviet Union and communist bloc and it changed the landscape of global politics and conflicts in ways that wouldn't be realized in years. Tang Tub Ci was a career criminal and immigrant from Laos who was convicted of manslaughter when a Superadine deal went bad. He studied under soldiers who took him in during the Vietnam War after his village was destroyed in endless sorties. Tub Ci, "Tubby" learned everything he could from them about military tactics and logistics before smuggling himself out to "Asia Town" in the Siren's Call where he joined up with the Triads before bouncing around to other gangs until his arrest. When Doom's robot legions thought he had been killed after the failed mind-control endeavor, they abducted his son and brainwashed him into believing he was the real Victor von Doom and placed him on the throne. When the true Doctor Doom returned, he had to siege his castle to use a trigger word to end his son's hypnosis and retake control of his drones and his country. Then he went about catching up on what he had missed and plotting his next move against his rivals. Vincent Dimitrios was freed from Tyrannon's Thanic Rod by the Circle of the Scarlet Moon, who he had assisted on occasion before. Dimitrios had been tricked into his imprisonment, which convinced his master Tyrannon, an ancient interdimensional sorcerer to attack Earth-196169 after he promised not to do it while his servants lived.

Before they hurt anyone else, the Champions had to travel into the Canadian wilderness to find the demonic Frostbite and his frost demons. With the help of a local hero named Ice Shadow, the Champions came out of the battle victorious and Frostbite was forced to retreat deeper into the tundras. At this time, Lilith broke her physical form free of the bounds of Leviathan's skeleton and walked across Terra once more. Doctor Strange recruited Ghost Rider and Johnny Blaze to gather a prophesied group that he referred to as The Midnight Suns to put a stop to her before she could resurrect her Lilin and attempt to take over the world. Lilith countered by sending Nightmare to attack Ghost Rider and Johnny, and tricking Suns recruits The Nightstalkers into attacking them as well. She poisoned a cure that Michael Morbius the living vampire had created which only pushed him further into his monstrous nature, and she tried to kill Victoria Montesi, heir to the creator of the Montesi formula, and the other Darkhold Redeemers. The Midnight Suns were a loosely allied team of heroes and anti-heroes, some of whom had an active rivalry with other members, but they were able to pull the team together and stop the looming threat of Lilith.

Jean Grey was the founding X-Men member known as Marvel Girl who became Charles Xavier’s right-hand woman and the head teacher at his school. Jean was performing a test flight of the supergroup's experimental spacecraft that they were going to use to extend their reach into the stars when she was struck with an extraordinary amount of solar radiation. Xavier took his student home to her family to recover, but they were attacked by an extraterrestrial race known as the Shi'ar. That was when The Phoenix, a cosmic being of mystic power, awoke inside of Jean and she led the X-Men on a campaign against The Shi'ar Empire whose relic, the M'kraan Crystal could end reality. The Phoenix ended the threat by trapping the Shi'ar emperor in the crystal and repairing it. While The X-Men were ending the tyrannical regime of D’ken Neramani, Xavier was summoned to a meeting in Wakanda by King T'Chaka and Tony Stark to discuss a new initiative. The mutant professor joined Stark, T'Chaka, and his son T'Challa, Namor, Doctor Strange, Reed Richards, and King Blackagar Boltagon to listen to the proposal for The Illuminati. Stark planned to gather the greatest minds on Terra to guide humanity into an enlightened age and end global conflicts. All those present but T'Chaka and T'Challa joined. Together The Illuminati gathered The Infinity Stones, banished the Beyonder from the Earth realm, and launched the Hulk into space.

As war raged on in the former states of Yugoslavia, Paragon City opened its doors to refugees fleeing persecution from militants in that region. The Petrovic Brothers were among those refugees and with them came their dark sorcery. They formed the violent street gang and death cult known as The Skulls involved in drug dealing and turf wars with other gangs like The Trolls and the Devil-worshipping Hellions. Amid the chaos of the street violence, Tub Ci was released from prison where he gathered together his fellow Hmong immigrants to form The Tsoo in the mold of the Triads that had fostered him. They use sorcery to enchant tattoos on their bodies to empower themselves to battle the superpowered protectors and rivals that roam the streets in the so-called city of heroes. Near the end of the decade, the British-based Hero Corps, a for-profit superhero contractor, announced that they would be establishing a North American headquarters in Paragon City. Statesman and the other members of the Freedom Phalanx lobby the federal and city government to prevent Hero Corps' expansion to no avail, even after the lauded supergroup and the pay-for-play superheroes encountered the same villain, and the villain ended up escaping as the 2 groups fought over jurisdiction. Following the Freedom Phalanx-Hero Corps incident, power-armed soldiers destroyed the Hero Corps building just before its grand opening, and metahuman mercenaries used poison gas on a secret Midnight Squad installation in Terra Volta killing 47 people. Hero Corps gave up on Paragon City after this as they had blown their expansion budget by 500%.

Years after the battle in Christ's Crown, Utah, Blackheart returned and used an innocent girl to lure the heroes who denied him back to the small town again. Ghost Rider, Wolverine, and the others arrive to see Blackheart and the girl in a wedding dress but before he can kill her, the heroes dispatch her with apparent ease. When Blackheart has been left to his failure, Mephisto arrives to collect his son and put him back on his leash but Blackheart kills Mephisto and steals his throne in hell instead. The Kings and Queens of The Hellfire Club discovered that Jean Grey still had the Phoenix Force inside her and broke down her mental barriers until it was released. When Jean realized that the Phoenix would destroy the Sol system to empower itself, she tried to race back to the M'kraan Crystal in The Shi'ar Galaxy. Unfortunately, she was too weak to make it the whole way and the Phoenix took over. It consumed 2 solar systems between Sol and the Shi'ar empire, and the X-Men and Shi'ar had to work together to defeat the Phoenix. In doing so, they believed that Jean Grey had been killed. As many of Terra's native heroes were out stopping the end of the universe, Xu Wenwu worked out how to make his way through the changing bamboo forest and to the gates of Ta Lo. He is kept out of heaven by a woman using styles of kung fu long lost to this universe but his persistence makes him come back and try again and again. Between battles Xu and the guard Ying Li begin to get to know each other, and they fall in love as people do. Ying Li agrees to marry the crimelord as long as he swears to give up his life of crime and The 10 Rings of Power.

Danny Ketch and Ghost Rider had parted ways after they had dethroned Blackheart and the rider had returned to Johnny Blaze, yet Danny found himself desiring to become the rider once more when an unseen spirit teased him with some of its power. That entity was Zadkiel, an angel barred the long-sealed realm of Eden condemned to perform the Hebrew God’s most bloody work’s. Zadkiel shows Danny how to steal the power of the Ghost Rider from other hosts in exchange for a share of that power being returned to the angel, and Danny agrees. A short time later, a young college student named Peter Quayle entered a pawn shop where he found an antique flute for sale. When he took it home he discovered that the flute had arcane powers and Quayle took on the identity of The Bard, a mystic protector of Los Angeles. He does not yet realize that this flute once belonged to the spirit of the Piper. In the spirit of finding long-lost and forgotten artifacts, Vanessa DeVore was an art history student from Paragon City studying in Florence, Italy when she tried on an old porcelain mask for the first time. She found the mask for sale on a weekend trip to Venice and then discovered it was a powerful arcane artifact containing the spirit of Giovanna Scaldi once she bought it. Terrified of Scaldi's spirit and the power the mask granted her, Vanessa swears never to wear the mask again.

Dark Seraph had been behind the collection and thefts of The Crowns of Krim so that he may empower others with demons of the underworld as he was. Once he had filled his villainous council, he discovered that the Louvre had a powerful grimoire on display and resolved to steal it. The Crowns of Krim hit the museum with a surprise attack and collected the book, but UNTIL agents and the hero Skydragon arrived to block their escape. All 43 agents and Skydragon were killed in the conflict but Dark Seraph lost the book in his escape when the next wave of superheroes arrived. In the neighborhood of Paragon City known as Eastgate, the Trolls had begun digging tunnels underneath every home, shopping center, road, and park. The next phase of the plan was to blast open a large area to destroy the high-end neighborhood of wealthy citizens so that the Trolls could move in and take over before recovery crews could survey the damage. No one knew there was already an extensive network of caves under this area and when their explosives went off the damage was far greater than they realized and creatures known as the Igneous emerged from the ground. The Outcasts moved in to loot the abandoned shops, while The Circle of Thorns chased a portal that legend said existed in the area. Eastgate is now better known as The Hollows.

The black ops soldier Albert Simmons had been assassinated and then thrown back into New York City as a Hellspawn for nearly a decade. Malebolgia had been manipulating him through surrogates and demonic minions to get him to create a global mass casualty event using an illegal biological weapon developed by the United States government. Simmons maintained his humanity with the guidance of former Hellspawn and first son of Adam now going by Nicholas Cogliostro. He averted the catastrophe and condemned the mortal souls behind it to their eternal punishment. Simmons and Angela, now forsaken by the other angelic bounty hunters in the Earth realm, descended into the 8th Circle of Hell and defeated Malebolgia. That victory came with the price of Angela's time in the mortal coil. When the alien scientist-sorcerer Yandroth returned to the Earth realm, Doctor Strange summoned the Defenders once more to prevent him from destroying Earth to empower himself even further. When Yandroth was banished he cursed the Defenders to gather every time that Terra was in danger and suffered delusions of grandeur. Over time, the Defenders began referring to themselves as the Order and manipulating events to take over the world until Yandroth returned. They defeated him again and the curse was broken.

Shortly after the attack on the World Trade Center, Johnny Blaze clawed his way out of hell with the help of Zarathos. Neither of them knew that this was a plan by Lucifer Morningstar to escape hell but when Lucifer's spirit hit the barrier of the Earth realm it shattered. Those fragments possessed newly deceased corpses and when a possessed body was put down, the fragment joined another in a possessed corpse. Johnny spent years executing a plan to keep Lucifer from collecting in a single body and stepping foot in the Earth realm. Wonder Woman returned to Themyscira although forbidden to do so, and she found that all of the Amazons had been turned to stone. She scrambled to find the source of this curse and came upon a male sorcerer. He demanded an ancient relic that would open the gates to Tartarus for the Titans in exchange for restoring Wonder Woman’s sisters and mother. Diana reluctantly agreed but recruited Batman to help her trick the sorcerer. She returned with the relic but the heroes ambushed the sorcerer before he could open the gate and he restored the Amazons. Just a short time later, Batman was trounced by a woman during a bank robbery and he called Diana for assistance. Batman kept a piece of the woman's jewelry that proved she was likely an Amazon and Wonder Woman confirmed it when she confronted her. The rogue Amazon had created a virus that made men deathly ill and she hit many male heroes with it before releasing it over a major city. Batman and the rest of The Justice League stopped the spread of the disease. Meanwhile, Diana arrested the rogue Amazon through good teamwork.

Cleanup was still ongoing from the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, which killed nearly 3,000 Americans and destroyed seven towers in New York City's World Trade Center, as well as a section of the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. During this time, reports of mysterious disks of light began to appear around the world. Authorities determined these were wormholes or portals, and a hero named Star Strider volunteered to enter one. That was the last time he would be seen and the beginning of The Rikti Invasion. Superheroes from around the world united but the Rikti seem equipped to handle each of them except those who wield the power of magic. Vanessa DeVore found herself stuck in ground zero of the Rikti War Zone of Paragon City, so she put Giovanna Scaldi's mask back on and it stayed on every waking moment of the rest of her life. The United Nations formed its first military division, The Vanguard, to end the Rikti threat and deal with future extraterrestrial threats. When The Vanguard had pushed the Rikti threat back to 1 remaining portal in Paragon City, where their mothership remained, they formed the Alpha Team, led by Statesman, and the Omega Team, led by Hero 1 the son of the original Hero One and inheritor of Excalibur. Both teams leaned on mystic power. Alpha Team kept the Rikti's attention by attacking them head-on while Omega Team entered the final portal and disappeared like Star Strider before them. Omega Team's mission was considered successful, however, when that final portal was closed then the heroes of Terra crashed the Rikti mothership.

Near the end of the Rikti invasion, all of the world powers were racing to acquire arcane and eldritch powers to turn against the Rikti, and the witch Morgan Le Fay used this to her advantage to chase down the Philosopher's Stone. She had learned that archaeologists had discovered the ruins of Camelot under South Cadbury in modern-day England and that was the last place the stone had been found. Jason Blood recruited Batman to help him stop Le Fay from using the stone to resurrect her and her half-brother's son Mordred so that he may take over the world. They were too late to stop Mordred's resurrection but defeated him and ended Blood's curse, allowing him to leave this mortal coil and separate from Etrigan. When the Rikti War ended, a dense fog moved over the Astoria neighborhood in Paragon City before animated corpses, floating wooden masks and animated wooden statues began wandering the streets. Citizens fled the neighborhood claiming the creatures were conducting strange rituals and chanting the names Lughebu, Rambetu, and Mot among others. As the residents fled the scene, the Hmong sorcerers of the Tsoo and the witches of The Circle of Thorns flooded in.

The witch Rachel Roth came across a group of young superheroes pinned down by an extraterrestrial girl with the apparent power to bring down the whole city of San Fransokyo, California. Rachel decided to take a tact that the three boys hadn't considered, diplomacy. They learned her name was Starfire, and she was a political refugee hiding on Terra. Together, Rachel, going by the alias Raven, Starfire, Cyborg, Beast Boy, and Robin formed the Teen Titans. Soon they would establish their headquarters in San Fransokyo, Titans Tower. The ecoactivist Hamidon Pasalima led a raid on a Paragon City University lab with several followers and created the Will of the Earth using a combination of eldritch magic and science. Several heroes showed up to put an end to the raid and hostage situation but Pasalima escaped. After the raid, the neighborhood of Woodvale, which was destroyed during the Rikti invasion, was quickly taken over by plant growth, and then a creature known as The Hamidon emerged from the soil. Animated plants and minerals followed the Hamidon and spread their way across several other neighborhoods of Paragon City. They became known as the Devouring Earth, and some grew into giant monsters. The largest of those Devouring Earth monsters were Jurassik and The Crystal Titan.

The Teen Titans looked into strange attacks happening to American naval vessels off the West Coast of the United States when they were attacked by a creature who identified itself as Trident. A blonde-haired boy who seemed perfectly at home in the ocean came to the Titans' aid. He introduced himself as Arthur Curry and said that the creature was a fellow Atlantean engineered to be the perfect warrior and it was building up to invade Lemuria. Beast Boy and Curry went to find Trident while the rest of the Titans fixed the T-Ship. The 2 boys found that Trident had stockpiled nuclear materials to fuel his cloning operation to make more of him. Beast Boy and Curry ended the threat by collapsing the cave, and then the Titans and Arthur said their goodbyes. The newly formed Justice League raced to the location of an impact event where they found the Green Lantern Kilowog who warned them of The Cult of Despero. Despero had bound the nature deity of his world and claimed to be the true spiritual ruler as his world started dying. The Justice League battled him until they freed their goddess and she devoured him.

Several members of the Justice League began acting strangely after the next operation where they stopped soldiers on a United States military base, so these members were brought back to The Watchtower. The affected members seemed fine, but others claimed they were the Angel of Wrath. Barry Allen discovered this was caused by a gem that each affected person was passing between them and Barry used a sonic boom to shatter the gem. Unfortunately, anyone who came into contact with the gem shards subsequently became affected by it until Barry used the station's power core to cause an electromagnetic field that banished the Angels of Wrath. After recovering from the incident with the Angel of Wrath, the Justice League was called in to assist with the apprehension of Solomon Grundy but the forces of Atlantis intervened. The League traveled to Atlantis where they discovered that Grundy was essential to stopping the return of the Old Ones. The Justice League joins in the battle against those that came before the creation of the universe, but it took the selfless sacrifice of Grundy to seal the Old Ones away once again.

Wonder Woman brought 2 other Justice League members with her to investigate a sudden outbreak of civil and political unrest in Central Asia. The heroes discovered a bronze and iron behemoth they called The Annihilator at the heart of the northern faction forces in the civil war that had erupted in the region. Wonder Woman recognized The Annihilator as the work of Hephaestus and she left to interrogate him, but the god of forges wouldn't reveal its weakness. In the end, the heroes discovered that the behemoth was fueled by violence and they convinced both sides to drop their weapons and negotiate peace. This diplomacy angered Ares who had been behind the conflict in the first place. An ancient race of serpents began attacking residents of Mercy Island in The Rogue Isles. They swarmed the communities above their underground lairs and then battled the Arachnos soldiers who came to run them out. Arachnos left them the southern part of the island when the losses became too great. Across the short stretch of the Atlantic Ocean, the Rularuu were summoned from The Shadow Shard and attacked Paragon City. It's assumed the infamous Malleus Mundi was used to summon the Rularuu after it was stolen from the Lubyanka Museum in Moscow a little over 1 month earlier.

About 6 weeks after the attack of the Rularuu, on Haloween night, the leader of the Fir Bolg, Eochai manifested from the faerie Otherworld and led his forces along with other forces of the night - witches, werewolves, vampires, zombies, and ghosts - on a rampage through the still reeling streets of Paragon City. They entered people's homes through mirrors, from closets, from under the bed, and swarmed out the doors of residences. Several superpowered heroes pushed Eochai's invaders back into the other universes from whence they came. Almost 10 months later, the war between the Tuatha Dé Danann and Fir Bolg spilled back over in the resort town of Salamanca outside of the city. Another month later, a spectral ship full of a ghostly crew sailed through Independence Port and Talos Island in Paragon City for the first time. The ship's crew of the dead terrorized the local citizens on its way through before making its way back out to sea once again, and then it returned at random from then on to resume its course through the waters around Massachusetts and Rhode Island again and again. Come Winter, the threat of the fae worlds came back into view when The Winter Horde under the leadership of Lord and Lady Winter invaded Paragon City with the help of the sinister Snaptooth and his Redcaps who had kidnapped the cosmic embodiment of the coming new year.

Amanda Waller under Project Cadmus had formed Task Force X, more commonly known as The Suicide Squad, of which Felix Faust’s apprentice Tala and the indestructible behemoth, The Annihilator were a part. When several members of the Justice League showed up to investigate what these villains were after, after Batman had been injured investigating Cadmus, they too suffered debilitating injuries. Faust tricked Tala into taking his place in his prison, a magic mirror, and then his disembodied spirit took over The Annihilator and conquered Tartarus. Wonder Woman went to Themyscira along with Shayera Hol and other members of the League battled him and ended up using Hawkgirl's Nth metal mace to disable The Annihilator and restore Hades’ rule over Tartarus. Shazam! was recruited to the Justice League where he stopped a villain rampaging through Metropolis while the usual heroes in that area were rescuing the passengers and crew of a plummeting airliner. Afterward, the new heroes gathered around to meet Shazam! and the press soon followed. Without any regard for all the media attention Shazam! makes an offhanded comment about Lex Luthor’s reformation and rumored political ambitions. The rest of the league became suspicious of Shazam!, not the ancient wizard but the young Billy Batson who the wizard had finally chosen as his replacement. A short time later, Luthor announced the opening of Lexor City with the rest of the League having suspicions that the power station appears to be a weapon of mass destruction. After an incident where Shazam! had to battle the other League members, it was discovered that the destroyed power station was not designed to be a weapon. Shazam! resigns from the Justice League over the incident, and the League is publicly humiliated just as Lex Luthor and Amanda Waller had planned.

While the Justice League was targeted by Project Cadmus under the Defense Department, the Titans learned that Slade Wilson had returned from the dead and was hunting Raven. What Slade and Raven knew that the others didn’t was that Raven was destined to give all her power to her father, Trigon the Terrible, and bring about the apocalypse. On the final day of their lives, as they’d know them, Raven tried to give the Titans one last perfect day before they witnessed the young witch destroyed by Trigon. The remaining Titans reluctantly allied with Slade to fight Trigon. Slade revealed that Trigon had brought him back as an undead minion to fulfill this prophecy, but he had tried to betray the demon. He gave the Titans the Ring of Azar to protect them from Trigon’s power, and they split up—Robin and Slade searching for Raven, while Starfire, Cyborg, and Beast Boy held off Trigon. Robin found a powerless, younger version of Raven, and after overcoming numerous obstacles, they reunited with the others, only to discover the Ring of Azar had shattered. Just as all seemed lost, Trigon attacked. But Raven shielded the Titans with her powers. Her robes had turned pure white as she faced Trigon, she had grown back into the young woman she was before and used magic from the monks of Azarath and the love of her true family—the Teen Titans. In the end, she defeated her father. As Raven’s magic overwhelmed Trigon, Slade, now human again thanks to her powers, vanished into the shadows, leaving the Titans to celebrate their victory and Raven’s rejuvenation.

The Hellions street gang began their arson spree in Steel Canyon, Paragon City amid the insanity in the Midwest and on the West Coast, which created an absence of the usual Superheroes. The fires kept emergency services and street-level heroes busy for quite a while. The escalation in supervillain attacks inspired Statesman and his granddaughter, the inheritor of Hera's Girdle, Ms. Liberty to assault Lord Recluse and his regime in the Rogue Isles once again. Ms. Liberty formed the paramilitary group Longbow to act as the ground troops while Statesman organized the Freedom Phalanx for the invasion. When the Phalanx and Longbow landed, Recluse ordered the WMDs on the island of Warburg to launch, but the island's marshal, Jason Blitz had already gone rogue. In the end, this invasion left several areas of The Rogue Isles illegally occupied by Longbow forces but Arachnos remained in power across the archipelago except in Warburg. Marshal Blitz maintained control of the island's stockpile of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons as well as several Soviet-era ballistic missiles thanks to his own loyalist troops and allies within the Malta Group. Rumor has it that Blitz experiments on human beings to this day to recreate Stefan Richter's power and has created hordes of eight-limbed freaks called Arachnoids.

Following the incident with Trigon and the failed invasion of The Rogue Isles, the Justice League had to compete with continued government interference from Project Cadmus and the emergence of the Legion of Doom. The Teen Titans became embroiled in bringing down the Brotherhood of Evil once and for all. While the rest of the primary Titans team organized their response to the Brotherhood, Raven found herself stuck babysitting superpowered toddlers until agents of their enemy showed up and the toddlers went from a chore to useful allies in bringing them to justice. Diana is summoned to a summit on global warming as a representative of Themyscira, and she insists that J'onn J'onzz joins her because his experience with the history of Mars will be helpful and he has been antisocial. The Legion of Doom attacked the summit, Diana and J'onn were joined by other league heroes who defeated the attackers despite their enhanced powers brought to them from the minds of Lex Luthor and Brainiac. The witch Jinx has a change of heart when she meets the new teen hero on the street calling himself Kid Flash, and he shows her that her mentor in the Brotherhood, Madame Rouge is an abusive guardian. Just as Jinx is about to betray the trust and faith Kid Flash put in her, she defeats Rouge and the 2 disappear together. The Brotherhood of Evil comes back and captures almost all Teen Titans, including many from the offshoot teams formed over the last few years.

Beast Boy rallied the few members who weren’t captured when Jinx and Kid Flash returned to help and their final battle against the Titans' biggest foe was over. Beast Boy later meets someone that looks like a girlfriend that died saving the Titans from Slade but she insists that she's not the same person, and he has to accept that things have changed. The villains that attacked the climate change summit are broken out of jail by the Legion of Doom and attack a sacred temple, taking the temple's heart that contains the psychic remains of thousands of former monks. The spirit of a hero from that temple tried to stop them but failed, so he possessed the heroes of the League and requested their help. With the help of the Justice League, they reclaim the heart and other stolen relics for the legion's plan. The failure prompts Luthor to stage a coup and take over the organization. Hawkgirl and the league discover that the Thanagarians had visited the planet 6 millennia ago when the current reincarnation of Hawkgirl's lover exposed the truth. His agenda was to recover a Thanagarian psychic computer and not romance and he left Thanagar when he had it. Everything comes to a head when the so-called New Gods descend on Metropolis and the league eventually defeats them. Government agents came to arrest the Leaguers as their activities carried over the passing of registration and their activities were unregistered.

The invasion of the Rogue Isles roused the Coralax when they hadn't been seen for 14 millennia, and these aquatic creatures had begun to crawl up onto the shores of the Isles, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts. These ramifications and other overreaches by superheroes, whether actual or perceived, led to the United Nations passing the Sokovia Accords and the Superhuman Registration Act by the U.S. Congress. These actions split the superpowered community in new ways, as heroes and villains took sides on this issue that often broke the alliances and relationships of the past. Tony Stark led the regulation and registration agenda and used living material he collected from Thor Odinson through their shared history to create a clone he called Ragnarok. He equipped this blasphemous, Asgardian clone with a high-tech hammer to mimic Mjolnir so that he would give the public the public the impression that Asgard was on the side of registration even as the forces of Atlantis began to emerge off the East Coast of North America. This buildup began when Namor met at a summit with European leaders to push back on registration, knowing that these regulations would never apply to the ocean nations of Atlantis and Lemuria, and the Thunderbolts, under the leadership of Norman Osbourne, tried to murder the King of Atlantis. When the conflict boiled over in Central Park, Manhattan, the Atlanteans joined the fight on the side of Captain America and his anti-registration coalition. In Wakanda, T'Challa was following the rites of his coronation and taking challengers without the powers of the Black Panther when Ragnarok the clone attacked the prince out of nowhere. He had already caused several murders and was deactivated. Thor's genetics would not be contained until Herakles, a guest of the royal family, crushed the clone's skull and ended that abomination.

The chaos that followed the conflicts of the superhero civil war provided cover for many plots the following year, and many analysts and experts thought that Captain America's surrender would end the unrest. It didn't. Ying Li defended her children, Xu Shangqi and Xu Xialing, from members of a crime syndicate looking to make a power play in the underworld by killing The Mandarin. Unfortunately for everyone involved, Xu Xenwu wasn't home and Ying Li was killed. Xu Xenwu put the 10 rings back on when he discovered his wife’s body and started training his son, Shang Chi when Xenwu was told that his son couldn’t stop the assassins. They began the hunt for those behind the murder. Queen Hippolyta led an invasion of Washington, D.C. when her daughter never returned home and she learned Diana was being held in federal prison. Even as the armed conflict continued, the United States government and the Amazon Queen's retinue included Wonder Woman's longtime rival Circe. When Diana broke Circe's spell and stopped the assassination of her mother and the President, cooler heads prevailed and the invasion ended. The invasion of Washington, D.C. was just the first of many invasions, but the Amazons tied up federal resources and put the government on its heels for what came next.

While Circe was engineering conflict between the United States and the Amazons over the captivity of a princess, Hulk and his retinue of Sakaarian gladiators hit the Blue Area of the Moon and rampaged through Atillan. His first and only true target was King Blackagar Boltagon, an Illuminati member and part of the plot that put him into space. Once Black Bolt was beaten, he was flung back into Hulk's craft and they continued to Terra where Hulk laid siege to Manhattan. He demanded to have Doctor Strange, Namor, and the rest of the Illuminati brought before him, and his rage was strong enough that none of them could stand against this World Breaker. Susan Richards called for help from Sentry when Hulk battered her husband and set the defeated Illuminati up in Madison Square Garden repurposed into a gladiatorial arena. Hulk murdered Sentry and it was then that he realized that this had gone too far. During Hulk's revenge tour of Manhattan, the Rikti of Paragon City had repaired one of their portal generators and began the first steps of their next invasion. The Vanguard began recruiting new metahumans and enhanced individuals to prepare for the inevitable conflict as the Midnight Squad focused on leads for alternative methods to defeat the Rikti. In doing so, the Midnighters discovered that there are 2 factions among the stranded Rikti - the Traditionalists and the Restructurists - along with the origins of the homeless street gang known as The Lost.

The number of conflicts arising from the transgressions of other realities and universes crossing into the Earth-Realm and the flood of newcomers made it clear to those in tune with such things that something had frayed the fabric of reality. As the most recent conflicts in Washington, New York City, and Paragon City ended or fell into a stalemate a group that identified themselves as The Menders reached out to certain heroes in the Earth realm from a place known as Ouroboros. Ouroboros exists in The 5^th Dimension where the Menders keep the Pillars of Ice and Flame and allow users to travel through time. That's also when leaders and defenders of the ancient peninsula of Cimerora called to the Midnighters for assistance in fighting off the forces of Romulus Augustus and the Roman Empire. Like the Midnight Squad, the Cimerorans don't seem to differentiate between heroes and villains. Daedalus, the most trusted soldier serving the deposed King Imperious, commanded the heroes recruited from Paragon City. Sister Airlia, a witch and former member of the Sybils directed the efforts of the villains called from The Rogue Isles. The struggles of Cimerora were fueled by Requiem and his agents of the 5^th Column who had traveled back in time to change history.

Johnny Blaze had rushed a boy to the emergency room after he attempted suicide. The hospital couldn't identify him so Johnny waited with him as his parents were nowhere to be found and the former stunt driver turned Ghost Rider knew what it was like to be a kid and alone. When the boy woke up, he told Blaze of a vision where some force was taking all the powers of the Ghost Riders and went on to conquer heaven and Earth. He also led Blaze to believe that Danny Ketch had convinced him to kill himself, but that wasn't true. Blaze confronted Danny but it was too late, Zadkiel's trick had already worked and he had taken not just some but all of the stolen power from Danny. With that power, Zadkiel broke open the gates of Eden that Odin had sealed to lead a second revolt against the Hebrew God but Blaze and Danny chased him into Heaven with the surviving Ghost Riders and summoned the Spirits of Vengeance past to defeat the rogue angel and return the power to rightful hands. Meanwhile, in the Baumton neighborhood of Paragon City, a 5th Column sleeper agent named Roderick Mueller finalized all the arrangements and led an attack on the city. That was a diversion as he dug up Reichsmann's stasis chamber and released the interdimensional, fascist terror back into the world.

A rogue Asgardian invaded the forge of Nidavellir and demanded that the dwarves build him Stormbreaker, an Uru-forged axe of such immense power that it can supposedly control the Bifrost and cut the fabric of reality itself. Thor arrived in Nidavellir to answer the calls for help and found that most of the dwarves had been locked in cages, while the rogue had the others slaving away on what he thought was his prize. Thor learned that the hostage taker planned to use Stormbreaker to kill Odin and still his Odin-Force to rule Asgard. Thor knocked him unconscious with a lightning bolt. Thor returned to Terra afterward, though not entirely by choice. The future King of Asgard let his ego get carried away and let a slight by the Frost Giants of Jotunheim goad him into an attack. Thor was challenged to prove he was worthy of Mjolnir, while Loki plotted to seize the throne for himself. Thor remembered the importance of caring for others as a leader and a King, even those less mighty than him. When the god of thunder was willing to sacrifice himself for the mortals in a small New Mexico town and his Asgardian companions, he reclaimed his hammer. Loki was just a step away from solidifying his power by betraying the Frost Giants he promised could assassinate Odin in his slumber and announcing himself a hero when Heimdall opened the Bifrost and allowed Thor's return. Loki fell into the black hole that Asgard orbits after their battle and was assumed lost to the mysteries of the universe.

Wars in the seas, in the skies, and across the veils of reality flared up again after Loki's disappearance. The Atlantean state of Aqueos began to conquer its neighbor and annex territories closer and closer to the Atlantean capital over time. After being advised that the nature of their power may be discovered in the Necronomicon, Namor the Sub-Mariner advised a lieutenant to read it. That lieutenant learned that The Ancients of Aqueos feed on the eldritch energy from beneath their city, which dates back to a time before creation. They used this information to end Aqueos' campaign until The Worthy arose. The Vanguard intercepted intelligence that Emperor Cole, or Tyrant, was preparing an invasion of our Earth as his hold of Praetoria began to falter and the uncontrolled forces of the Hamidon in that dimension continued to swarm. The Vanguard launched a pre-emptive strike to disable the Clockwork invasion force before it could be sent through a portal to march on our reality under the command of their newest officer, a hero known as Apex. The strike was largely successful, but a secondary attack in Tyrant's reality led by Tin Mage Mark II shifted the momentum. What the leaders of Vanguard didn't know was that there were greater forces at work, and the Titan Prometheus, who already stole fire from the gods, arrived in Ouroboros to guide the chosen few to unlocking the same incarnate power that Marcus Cole and Stefan Richter held in most every reality.

Sinthea Schmidt was the daughter of the Red Skull but her father made her believe she was never good enough in his eyes, but she knew he could never lift a hammer he had found in the Antarctic. She and the mercenary Crossbones traveled through the ice and snow to prove that she could succeed where he didn't. When she lifted the hammer she was overwhelmed by its power and imbued with the knowledge and memories of the goddess Skadi, while Níðhöggr reemerged and sent 7 more hammers to Terra and into the hands of his Worthy. Every enhanced individual and metahuman rallied to stop them but it wasn't until they received Uru-forged weapons from the Asgadians that they defeated The Worthy and the serpent Níðhöggr. On the heels of the defeat of Níðhöggr's Worthy, Shivan meteors fell from the sky. They destroyed Galaxy City, which spurred an Arachnos invasion into the Atlas Park neighborhood of Paragon City. Longbow retaliated on Mercy Island and took Fort Darwin there, while Alexis Cole-Duncan launched an attack on Warburg to take its WMDs out of play. The invasion of Warburg did not go as planned and Miss Liberty, Statesman's daughter, and Ms. Liberty's mother, was killed by Marshal Blitz.

Since the Fantastic 4 took over Latveria from a dethroned Doctor Doom, the kingdom had fallen into revolution and civil disobedience. The first family stepped down and the United Nations and NATO stepped in, where they held elections and a Latverian military general won. The population believed the election was illegitimate and continued their protests and riots, while rumors of Doom's return circulated. The general and president-elect sent out spies to determine if Doctor Doom had returned and eliminate him if possible, but they never returned. Doom did, however, and he forced all foreign powers out of Doom's boundaries before he retook his throne. As Doom plotted his secret coup to take back what's his, 2 men in Paragon City and the Rogue Isles executed their secret coup to steal Statesman's power. The former villain turned hero Malaise had secretly beaten Sister Psyche's changes to his personality and when the time was right he turned them around to shatter her mind and, in exchange, gave his life. That enabled his partner, Darrin Wade to lure Statesman into a trap when the captain of the Freedom Phalanx chased down who was responsible for the attacks on his comrades. Darrin used the relics he hired villains to steal for him from the Midnight Squad to steal Statesman's incarnate power and then absorb the rage of Rularuu the Ravager. As the new Rula-Wade readied to begin his tour of destruction, Lord Recluse brought together a team of fellow incarnates to stop him and he was delivered to the Vanguard. It was too late for Sister Psyche, however, as the trap went off in her mind and her husband and longtime lover, Manticore had to kill her as well. The psyche of Aurora Borealis had to escape her friend's mind and was finally able to pick up her own life in her own body once more.

Positron became the leader of the Freedom Phalanx after Miss Liberty and Statesman's deaths, and things seemed to have swung in the direction of the forces of evil when Loki returned to Terra again and stole the Tesseract from SHIELD. Agents of SHIELD Nick Fury, Jr., Phil Coulson, and others worked to gather the Avengers again for the first time since the Superhero Civil War. Hank Pym was unwilling to work with Tony Stark, and Janet van Dyne was incommunicado. SHIELD did gather Thor, Captain America, Bruce Banner, and Tony Stark who formed the new Avengers roster with Black Widow and Hawkeye from the agency roster. After an intense battle against Loki and the Chitauri army he brought from deep space, The Avengers assembled and saved Terra. Later that year, strike teams of heroes invaded the crumbling city of Praetoria in another reality and defeated Tyrant at which point Emperor Cole lost his incarnate powers. By this time it had been exposed that Tyrant came to power by letting Hamidon conquer their world so that the people would be dependent on the security state. When Tyrant fell, the out-of-control Devouring Earth and Hamidon overtook Tyrant's gilded city. U.S. and global authorities determined that the people of Praetoria must be allowed into our reality as the first instance of cross-reality refugees. Shortly after the Devoured claimed Earth-Upsilon Beta 9-6, the neighborhood of Astoria disappeared.

Astoria was pulled into The Dark Dimension by the Banished Pantheon where they began to draw upon the power of their buried gods there and the process of resurrecting the ancient god of the dead and everything that opposes life and fertility, Mot. The Dream Doctor reappeared after decades and guided many of Terra's greatest heroes to stop Mot's return and prevent the rise of the undead cultists. The Circle of Thorns and the Tsoo continued to scramble for items of power, which may have caused what came next. A little over a week after Thanksgiving the entirety of Paragon City and the Rogue Isles went dark and no communications came in or out of those areas. Many swore the cities were still there, but all that could be seen on satellite imagery was darkness and those that tried to enter the city were repelled. A little under a year later, Doctor Erik Selvig, who worked on the Tesseract project for SHIELD and was a brainwashed prisoner of Loki, was arrested at Stonehenge in England as he warned everyone about a coming convergence of the 9 realms. He was supposed to be meeting other researchers to study gravitational anomalies in the area that ended up transporting Doctor Jane Foster to an unknown realm where she found The Aether and it infected her. When Heimdall couldn't see Doctor Foster, whereas he could perceive all things in the universe, Thor went to find her and he discovered that The Aether was killing Jane. At the same time, Asgard's ancient enemies, the Dark Elves, returned in search of The Aether to be used during The Convergence and end reality. Thor raced to defeat the Dark Elves and brought Doctor Foster to Asgard where The Aether was safely drawn from her body.

Wilson Fisk of Earth-191610 and the Spider-Man of Earth-199289 began using portal technology to attempt to cross over into other realities including incursions into ours. This was when Peter Benjamin Parker discovered that there was a creature hunting people bitten by radioactive spiders across the multiverse known as Spider-Totems. Paker worked with Miguel O'Hara to assemble a team of spider-people that included Miles Morales and Gwen Stacy to put a stop to Fisk's attempt to steal his wife and child from this universe to replace those he lost and defeat the creature Morlun and stop his Great Hunt. After the end of the Spider-Verse incursions, the gates to K'un Lun reopened and the new Iron Fist, Danny Rand stepped out. After his family's private jet crashed in the Himalayas, he was taken into the Heavens and trained with the monks. His competitive nature earned him the honor of becoming K'un Lun's defender. Danny left his post to be reunited with his childhood friends and became embroiled with the family business, Rand Enterprises. That was when Danny discovered that the Hand had infiltrated the company and they were using it to further their agenda to return to K'un Lun and free The Black Sky. Danny had to defeat them within his element, with Kung Fu and the power of Shou Lao, and outside of his element, in the boardroom.

The multiverse began collapsing again and Doctor Doom was dissatisfied with how The Beyonder was holding up their end of the last engagement, even though he had violated the rules of the game and stolen its power. The Illuminati was reformed with different members now, as Namor and Thanos decided that this moment meant they would protect Earth-196169 from collapsing and incursions by destroying other realities as necessary. The Illuminati did their best to change the course of realities to avoid destruction and, when that failed, evacuate refugees. Doom found The Beyonder and his people, The Beyonders, and with the help of other energy-absorbing metahumans, Doom stole their power once more and began to rework the multiverse in his image. Doom welcomed the refugees of lost realities to his reformed Battlworld. Still, his dystopia was soon rejected and the heroes rebelled, rebuilt their universe again, stabilized what remained of the multiverse, and returned the power to The Beyonders when all was said and done. During the return to Battleworld, Thanos found himself inside a vision where he accumulated the Infinity Stones and finally wooed death by destroying half of all sapient life in the universe. But first, the Mad Titan needed something suitable to house the stones in and he invaded Nidavellir to force Dwarf King Eitri to forge him The Infinity Gauntlet. Thanos killed all the dwarves and encased Etri's hands in Uru so he would never make relics for anyone else again.

The former sorcerous mentor of Victor von Doom and a long-time holder of the Darkhold, Cagliostro copied much of the insights The Book of Sins provided him into his own book along with excerpts he could pull from the Necronomicon and other sources. The Masters of the Mystic Arts took possession of The Book of Cagliostro and filed it away in the forbidden section of the library of Kamar-Taj. If it weren’t for a sorcerer named Kaecilius and his disciples, that’s where Cagliostro’s forbidden knowledge would have stayed. After months of researching and planning, it came down to a daring escape from The Ancient One through the mirror dimension. A couple of months after Kaecilius betrayed the Masters of the Mystic Arts, the daughter of Tina Minoru was pronounced dead via apparent suicide. The coroner determined that Amy Minoru had overdosed on her anti-depressants and this left the whole family and Amy's circle of friends including her little sister, Nico devastated. Tina is a member of PRIDE who worked to advance the objectives of an Old One that radiated pure light that they all refer to as Jonah or The Magistrate. Tina also worked closely with Wong, Baron Mordo, and Kaecilius before Kaecilius' defection and Amy's death. Nico and Amy's close friend, Alex Wilder can't accept that Amy ended her own life but they have no reason to believe otherwise and the stress of her death ends up all but ending the friendships between the children of PRIDE.

Matt Murdock had learned Escrima and his fighting skills from his mentor among The Chaste, Stick. Another student of Stick was a woman named Elektra Natchios. During their tutelage, they began a romantic affair that continued after they ran away from The Chaste until Elektra's penchant for petty crime went too far. She and Matt reunited before she was killed in a conflict with The Hand. Danny Rand took Colleen Wing, his training and romantic partner, to see K'un Lun when he found the gates closed and assumed that The Hand had destroyed it. He later discovered that they had failed, but that The Hand had resurrected The Black Sky inside Elekta when they attacked. When the monks repelled their enemies, a new target was chosen - New York City, where another entrance to K'un Lun was located. The exiled leaders of the Hand were running out of their Elixer of Life and it could only be found in heaven, but Elektra killed her masters and took over the Hand just before the Defenders buried them under Midland Circle. Soon after The Hand was buried in Midland Circle, Kaecilius and his disciples attacked the Sanctum Sanctorums and burned down the 1 in London. Kaecilius and his disciples killed the Ancient One as they escaped from the New York Sanctum, leaving Kamar-Taj without a Sorcerer Supreme. After discovering Kaecilius' deranged plan to negotiate with the ruler of The Dark Dimension, Dormmamu, in exchange for eternal life, Doctor Strange went to Dormammu. He had come to bargain. Before Kaecilius and his diminished forces could attack the Hong Kong Sanctum again, Dommamu claimed their lives and retreated as he had promised Strange.

After the harrowing trial that Alveus, the original Supreme Hydra put Agent Phil Coulson and his team through, Agent Daisy Johnson, also known as Quake, went missing and the team went looking for her. While hiding from her team at SHIELD, she encountered a young man named Robbie Reyes who was a host for a Spirit of Vengeance. And, as if the Ghost Rider had sensed that he would be needed, the team encountered a research team from Momentum Labs that had been turned into life-stealing phantoms. It turned out that Robbie's uncle, Eli Morrow had discovered the team's plan and used their half-finished device against them to steal the Darkhold and their research for himself. Morrow perfects their machine and gives himself the power to conjure and transmute matter, but that doesn't stop the Ghost Rider from taking his vengeance. The Darkhold then fell into the hands of Leo Fitz and Holden Radcliffe’s Life Model Decoy, AIDA. After reading the Darkhold, AIDA uses what she has learned to build a digital, pocket hell dimension called The Framework and begins to capture every member of Coulson's team inside along with SHIELD Director Jeffrey Mace. She replaced each member with an LMD so the team would not be missed. Coulson's team managed to escape but Mace and Holden Radcliffe were killed inside the Framework, and a federal warrant was issued for the SHIELD agents in connection with the murders. Ghost Rider didn't spare AIDA though, and incinerated her with his hellfire for tampering with the Darkhold.

As Danny Rand was embroiled in a war between the Triads, his childhood friend Davos came to New York City looking for him. Davos appeared to steal Danny's powers in a moment of vulnerability and began calling himself the Steel Serpent. Instead of turning home with his ill-gotten power, Davos stayed until he knew he had his revenge on Danny. During that time, Danny learned how to access his Chi without the blessing of Shou Lao and defeated Davos. A short time later, the Olympian Enyo was released from her prison on Themyscira by a thief and destroyed most of the Amazon's home before leaving to do what she said had to be done. In Asgard, Thor’s brother Hodr had found an unusually large sprig of mistletoe and was getting ready to throw it at their youngest brother, Baldur. Thor realized too late that it was not Odin who looked on from the Throne of Asgard, but Loki in disguise, and Baldur was killed. Thus the Fimbul Winter began. Diana washed up outside of Tønsberg where she came upon Odin, they barely had time to greet one another before Enyo arrived only to be defeated but it took much out of the All-Father, surprisingly. Thor arrived on the rainbow bridge of the Bifrost to embrace his father. Odin told Thor to remember that Asgard was not just a place, but its people. It's then that Fenrir attacks and in the battle kills Odin before it tries to turn on Thor and Diana. Then the other Avengers arrive to defeat Fenrir and join Thor as he marches into Asgard to battle Surtur, Loki, Hela, their armies, and ultimately the Gods above Gods to break the Cycle of Rangarok.