Harrier

[Avenger Assembled]

Freedom League Oral History Project

Harrier

I remember a place. And I remember how it fell.

It came first among the worshippers of their gods, a slow, gradual turning away from their faiths that broke the world's connections with the supernatural. A predatory sexuality among the previously chaste priests of Sol Invictus, then another turn among users of magic, as the slow infiltration of entropic radiation into their souls drove them into drug-addled degeneracy that left them blind to the crisis which they faced. In their defense it was no magical crisis at all, but they had no way of knowing that - a power beyond their knowledge was cutting the cords that bound them to creation, one by one by one.

Then came a light in the sky over Great Britain and a body that fell to Earth in the Belfast Lough at the mouth of the River Lagan. This was a world that knew nothing of the Terminus and the dangers of entropy, nothing even of the larger multiverse. So the scientists and adventurers of that world's Great Britain took the inky-black asteroid to their capitol and began to study it. But even as they did, the Lagan asteroid began to _change_ them, a slow, subtle corruption that spread first through the British Isles, then the United States as scientists, the superpowered, and others began to carry fragmets of the asteroid to their homes for further study.

The study of entropic radiation was profitable. Nations began building armies powered by entropic energy, soldiers given great and terrible power by the energies suffusing their bodies. Their souls left warped by the energies inside them, these soldiers began to appear in nation after nation; hard-faced commandos with holes in their souls, casually murdering and desecrating wherever they went when not obeying the orders of their dark masters. One soldier in particular heard the voices of his _true_ masters with special interest, and so became their greatest soldier. He slew his husband and children first, then began to kill his world's heroes.

By then the corruption had settled into their souls as well, those few able to resist it murdered by their peers, assasinated by terrorists, or simply made laughingstocks until they fled the planet entirely. Violent, jaded sybarites, they were easy prey for a veteran soldier with powerful weapons and unnatural powers. The citizens of the world, corrupted on their own by the pulsing, beating heart of the Lagan asteroid, cheered on the one-eyed killer as he slew corrupted champion after corrupted champion, the soldier himself knowing he was doing what he had to do to save his world from the real monsters.

Finally, he used a Terminus-enhanced nuclear weapon to assasinate his world's Patriot League, catching them in the Freedom City bordello where their grim bacchanalias had nearly burned the city down around it. It was when they died that Omega tore open the gateway from the Terminus and gloatingly stepped into the burning city, the proud Physician Friendly at his side. It had been a remarkably successful experiment. As the Terminus energies poured from skies turned red, the T-soldiers were warped into ravening ghouls, monsters that tore apart the world they had once defended as Omegadrones fell from the skies.

Finally, their world's last god came to their aid. In a small city in the Americas, a priest was imbued with supernatural power by the last fragmets of the Unconquered Sun, given a voice to break the will and cow the soul even of the maddened T-fiends, the power to defend his dying world from the forces of the Terminus.

I remember the look upon his face when I struck his head from his shoulders. For an Omegadrone, there is no voice louder than Omega's.

The world fell into stinking ash and black fire and was gone. The soldier lurks around the court of Steelgrave still, a grim-faced assasin who will infiltrate any world and kill there any enemies of Omega, punishing those who would stand before the purity of the Terminus.

Cynicism and suspicion are not virtues. Darkness and hatred are not strengths. These are the lessons of the Terminus.