The Tyrant Skies: a Marvel: Untold Novel, page 27
part #6 of Marvel Untold Series
Doom finished his address. An atmosphere of anxiety hovered over the refugees. Good, Verlak thought. They had heard him. Perhaps they understood. That would make her job easier later if they had.
The refugees filed out of the courtyard, ushered to the exit by guards. A second, smaller audience, a captive one, in chains, was ushered in for Doom’s next address.
Verlak and Elsa leaned forward on the parapet. Verlak had been curious to see how the refugees would respond to the options fate offered to them. She had a vested interest in seeing how this crowd reacted to what awaited them. Until now, the enemy had not received a full and just punishment. Death, even the terrifying one Elsa had brought, was too quick a mercy for what had been done to Latveria. And these were the people in whose cause the soldiers had fought.
Doom looked down on the imprisoned billionaires for a long moment, letting them feel the weight of his gaze. Verlak did not envy them.
A cold wind blew through the courtyard. It made Doom’s cape billow around him. Dark clouds had arrived in the late afternoon, a suitable omen.
“You are war criminals,” Doom said. His voice, low and icy, a warning and a threat.
At least a few of the prisoners did not heed either.
“You have no authority to make that claim!” one protested.
“You have no authority over us at all!” another said. “We have rights! We’re citizens–”
“Of Wolkenland?” Doom interrupted. “Your nation no longer exists. You are citizens of nowhere.”
A worried pause. Then someone laid claim to American citizenship, and another demanded to speak to the Russian ambassador, and a clamor of frantic repatriation rose from the courtyard.
You miserable worms, Verlak thought, you still don’t get it. Hatred for the Wolkenlanders coursed through her veins like venom.
As if reading her thoughts, Elsa said, “Their bubble has burst, and they still don’t realize it.”
“They will, though,” Verlak said.
“I’m counting on it,” said Elsa, her tone low and dangerous.
Doom let the clamor of the worms build for another few seconds before he spoke.
“Silence!”
His voice cracked like thunder, demanding and receiving obedience.
“I am Doom. That is all the authority I need. Your protestations are meaningless. You invaded Latveria, and for that you will pay.”
“We didn’t know!”
Verlak had been waiting for that particular wail. Her jaw clenched in anger. Elsa’s breath turned into a growl.
“You didn’t know,” Doom repeated, contempt dripping from the iron voice. “There are among you those who may well believe that, and who believe that exonerates them. Were you imprisoned on Wolkenland? Were you forced to take up residence on the island? It was useful to you to turn the other way. It suited you to pretend you could not see the marching soldiers, and that you did not know the publicly expressed beliefs of your fellow residents. If you truly did not know, you were the Red Skull’s useful idiots, and that fact alone condemns you.”
The wind blew harder. The prisoners huddled in on themselves in their misery. They did not clutch at one another for comfort. Instead, they kept far apart, as if fearing the contagion of guilt. They did all they could to stay away from Hauptmann and Cadavus, both on stretchers, but conscious and frightened.
“What are you going to do to us?”
The question all of them wondered, but none had dared to ask until now.
“Yes,” Verlak whispered. “Let’s hear it.”
Elsa nodded.
“You will live,” Doom said, and his tone turned the words into a threat. “Your fortunes, your businesses and your industries are forfeit. Reparations for war crimes.”
“Good,” said Verlak. “Good.”
“He took their souls,” Elsa said.
“You are condemned to hard labor in perpetuity,” said Doom.
Verlak nodded in appreciation. “Their bodies, too,” she said.
Doom leaned down to look at the insects groveling below him. “We have mines in Latveria, too,” he said.
•••
Doom waited alone in the throne room for Valeria to arrive. He sat on his elevated throne of granite and iron, the great, golden “D” of his emblem inlaid in the back above his head. He had his arms on the rests, fingers curling over the ends. He sat thus when he rendered judgment and passed sentence. As he was about to do now.
On himself.
The massive bronze doors to the chamber opened, admitting Valeria. They closed behind her with a solemn boom. She walked through the echoing space of the throne room, dwarfed by the gothic vaults where gloom gathered and meditated. She stopped at the dais and looked up at Doom.
“You heard me speak?” he asked.
“Every word.”
“You approve?”
She didn’t answer right away. “Of the punishments, yes,” she said.
“But not of everything,” he said. With dread, he saw that the conversation was proceeding exactly as he had planned.
She didn’t answer right away. When she did, she surprised him by changing the subject, as if she couldn’t yet face what both of them had to. “Is he really gone?” she asked. “Is the Red Skull dead?”
“He is gone,” said Doom. “That does not mean he is dead. He has returned from what seemed certain and complete destruction before. It is as if as long as the ideology he embodies survives, then so does he. No, I do not believe he is dead.” Then he forced the issue. “You did not approve of everything you heard.”
“The way you spoke to the refugees,” Valeria said. “That was… That was…”
“Yes?” he said, making her say it. He spoke with no warmth. He did not rise and come down to her level, and he did not gesture for her to join him. He confronted the pain and began the process of cauterization.
In truth, he had passed judgment before she had entered. His sentence had already begun.
“You didn’t sound like that on Wolkenland,” Valeria said. “You spoke today as if they could be punished, too.”
“I am not responsible for what you think you heard.”
“What I know I heard.” She put a foot on the dais, as if she meant to come up to him. To touch his arm again.
To hold his hand.
He did not move, and she stepped back. “Victor…” she pleaded.
“No,” he said. “I am Doom.”
“You don’t have to be. You proved that on Wolkenland. There’s a way back for you.”
“There is only forward,” he said. “I am what I must be, and the world must be mine, or it will die. I proved that on Wolkenland.”
Valeria backed away, face a mask of sorrow. “I’m sorry I hoped.”
“Your hopes do not concern me,” he said.
“I don’t understand what’s happened.”
He could tell her. He could tell her that if she kept her hold on his heart, that he would kill her. He could tell her that he had experienced his murder of her a thousand times over, in a thousand different ways. But if he told her, she might say No, not this time, not here, you proved that, too.
And he might weaken and believe her.
He might weaken, too, in other ways. She had not imagined what she saw in him on Wolkenland. In her presence, he might forget the path that was his to walk. He might forget that he was Doom, and seek to be Victor again.
And who would rule the world as it must be ruled then?
His destiny, and her survival, demanded that he tear her from his heart. He must strike hard, and take the wound, scar his heart to match his face.
“It is not for you to understand,” he said. Every word drove the dagger deeper into his chest. The pain on her face turned the blade incandescent. He knew the uses of cruelty, but he had never turned them so forcefully on himself. “There is a shuttlecraft waiting to take you to the destination of your choice. I do not want to know where that is. Now go.”
She hesitated. Her eyes pleaded, clinging to a last hope, still offering the promise of the other path.
“Go!” he said, before he could weaken.
She left him.
Doom remained in the chamber, gazing at the empty space where she had been.
He stayed there long after he knew she would not return, waiting for the molten agony to harden into a scar harder than basalt.
Because it would harden, become as hard as he was, and forever must be.
Hard as the rule that would, in the end, extend from this throne, and cover the Earth.
Acknowledgments
What a wonderful journey my travels with Doctor Doom have been. It’s with decided melancholy that I bid goodbye to him, Verlak and Orloff for now, but I do so in the hopes that this is not my last farewell.
My huge and grateful thanks to everyone who made this journey possible. As ever, thank you to the teams past and present at Aconyte Books, including Marc Gascoigne, Nick Tyler, Anjuli Smith, Ashley Stephens, Jack Doddy, and Ness Jack. Special thanks, once again, to Lottie Llewelyn-Wells for her superb editorial guidance. She has an unerring eye not just for what a book wants to be, for what it needs to be.
Thank you to Marvel Comics for letting me have so much fun, and so much freedom, with a character so very, very dear to my heart, and to Sarah Singer, Claire Rushbrook and Caitlin O’Connell for their wonderful editorial feedback.
Thank you to Fabio Listrani for yet another glorious cover, and for giving this entire trilogy a look that has been my inspiration as I wrote.
Thank you, as ever, for the mutual support and writing sprints to Michael Kaan, Derek M Koch and Stephen D Sullivan.
And again, always again, joyfully again, thank you to my wife, Margaux Watt, and to my stepchildren, Kelan and Veronica, for all their love and support.
I would also like to acknowledge some of the inspirations informing the trilogy as a whole, and in particular The Tyrant Skies and Reign of the Devourer. First up are two particular comic stories. The two-part tale of the Red Skull’s takeover of Latveria first appeared in the stories “The Invaders!” and “A Land Enslaved!” from Astonishing Tales (1970) #4 and #5, and later reprinted in Super-Villain Team-Up (1975) #15, which is where my young self encountered it. This story, written by Larry Lieber and illustrated by Wally Wood, George Tuska and Mike Esposito, has haunted my imagination for over 40 years. The Harrowing of Doom refers to the events in it, and it forms the background for The Tyrant Skies. The other crucial story is, of course, Jack Kirby, Larry Lieber, and Stan Lee’s tale “Sserpo! The Creature who Crushed the Earth,” found in Amazing Adventures (1961) #6. And with regards to Valeria, one of the stories that played a role in shaping The Tyrant Skies is “Under Her Skin,” written by Mark Waid, with art by Mike Wieringo and Karl Kesel, in Fantastic Four #67.
It should come as no surprise that Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot gave me the seed of the idea that became Reign of the Devourer.
Doctor Elsa Orloff owes her last name and some of her ancestral details to two other Doctors Orloff – one was played by Bela Lugosi in Dark Eyes of London, and the other by Howard Vernon in Jess Franco’s The Awful Dr Orlof (yes, just one “f” in that title, but a second would be added for all the other, myriad manifestations the character would take on in Franco’s subsequent filmography).
Other films have informed different elements of the books. The laboratory of Bride of Frankenstein influenced my vision of Doom’s lab in The Harrowing of Doom, and there are numerous other nods to the classics of Universal and Hammer in Reign of the Devourer. And I owe the premise of checking for brainwaves in corpses to Lucio Fulci’s gruesomely poetic nightmare of a film, The Beyond.
Finally, my heartfelt thanks to you, gentle reader. I hope you have enjoyed the journey as much as I have.
Winnipeg, 2022
About the Author
DAVID ANNANDALE is a lecturer at a Canadian university on subjects ranging from English literature to horror films and video games. He is the author of many novels in the New York Times-bestselling Horus Heresy and Warhammer 40,000 universe, and a co-host of the Hugo Award-nominated podcast Skiffy and Fanty.
davidannandale.com
twitter.com/david_annandale
Contents
Cover
The Tyrant Skies, A Marvel Untold Novel
Prologue
Part I One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Part II Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Part III Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
World Expanding Fiction
Index
David Annandale, The Tyrant Skies: a Marvel: Untold Novel
