The harrowing of doom, p.27
The Harrowing of Doom, page 27
part #1 of Marvel Untold Series
And his mother would burn.
Doom cried out as the future harrowed him.
Except.
In the flames of ruin that waited for him, there were other truths. He saw universes threatened. He saw the shadow of the total annihilation of existence.
He saw the threats ended, because he was there to end them.
And there was a gap in his lived future. Hell stopped showing him his mother’s damnation.
Maybe there was hope. Maybe, in the agony to come, she might still be free.
He didn’t know.
With a roar of pain, Doom made his choice. He chose the pain of the years to come. He would condemn his mother and Helm to Hell. Because the truth was that there was no choice. He had always vowed to do whatever was necessary to save the world. He did so now.
I accept the price.
Doom refused the Harrower. He refused it utterly.
The darkness fractured.
He had returned from the darkness before through will alone. The Harrower’s will was no match for his.
The darkness broke, a mirror falling into fragments. All was silver again, trembling.
The Harrower tried to pull away from Doom. He did not let it. Its being writhed. The will that had created it now turned on it.
“YOU WILL SUFFER,” the Harrower promised.
“Maybe.” He clutched onto the hope that he could use the knowledge of what he had seen to avoid the catastrophes of his destiny. He would change this future too. He would not make the mistakes he had seen.
He would begin by destroying what he had created.
“Raise nothing more from Hell,” Doom said to the Harrower. “I cast you into the furrow we have dug.”
The Harrower screamed. Its will collided with Doom’s and snapped. Roaring again, stabbed by all the pains of the future, he refused all that he saw. He seized the controls, because he willed them to be there, and the Harrower could not resist, and when he felt them form in his grip, he tore the core of the Harrower apart.
All that was silver exploded.
Remember, Doom commanded himself in the heart of the Armageddon flare of light and pain. Remember.
Remember.
Epilogue
“I have not been thy dupe, nor am thy prey–
But was my own destroyer, and will be
My own hereafter.”
Byron, Manfred, III.iv.138-40
Dawn.
Doomstadt after Walpurgis Night. The bonfires extinguished, nothing left but piles of logs reduced to charcoal.
Doomstadt after the demonstorm. The horrors gone, the vision of the infernal city gone, swept away by the blinding silver flash that severed the Harrower’s hold on the world. Nothing left but the bodies, the trauma, and the mourning to come.
On the hospital roof, Orloff looked up into a gray sky and the soft fall of ash coming to blanket the city. It puffed about her feet as she walked slowly back to the roof’s exit. Her heart wanted her to run to the castle, to find Karina and know that she was safe. Her body wanted her to curl in a ball and sleep forever. Her duty to the patients in the hospital demanded that she return to them. She obeyed her duty.
In the ruins of St Peter, Zargo drew breath through a bruised throat. Warmth returned to his body. Still on his knees, he gazed at the rubble of his life and faith and identity, and he wept. He did not think he would ever rise again. The dawn that had come to Doomstadt had not come for him. Night was eternal. And still, he could feel the thrum of the powers in the earth. They were not finished with him.
In the central tower of Castle Doom, the walls were solid again, and the stairs had an end. Verlak climbed, fighting through her exhaustion. She emerged in daylight, in what had been the hall outside the laboratory. The rest of the tower was gone. She was surrounded by silence and aftermath. Near collapse, she stumbled over the mounds of shattered pavement to the gap where the parapet had been. She had to see if anything other than the castle still stood. She swayed at the edge of the drop, and looked out over Doomstadt. The city was still there, dim and grey in the fall of ash, but solid too. It was damaged, but it was real. When she saw that the hospital was intact, she sank to the ground, her breath jerking into a sob of gratitude.
At the entrance to the lab, Fortunov shook, uncertain how he had survived the blast that had disintegrated the tower. The Harrower was a twisted mass of machinery in the center of the open space.
Is it over? Are they both destroyed? It was perverse to hope at all, much less that his great hope had been fulfilled after all, but he clutched the thought as if desperation could alter reality.
The wreckage stirred.
Fortunov knew what he would see. He knew who would emerge.
Fortunov fled, terrified of the anger that would seek him next.
Doom rose. He shrugged off the debris.
Remember.
Remember what?
No. Oh no.
Remember the future.
He had seen it. He had seen everything.
Seen what?
Even the sense that there had been knowledge faded away.
I made a choice. I know that. If I made a choice, then…
Had he made a choice? The fact of a decision became a doubt, and then it was gone too. It was all slipping from him, all the memories from the other side leaving while he struggled, as if he were trying to grasp water in a fist.
Then gone. All gone, except for dread weight of griefs present and griefs to come. Nothing left but the certainty of pain.
Doom roared. He roared, and the ash fell, slow and soft and grey as the last breath of dreams.
Acknowledgments
I’ve told everyone until they’ve begged me to stop that Doctor Doom is my favorite Marvel Comics character, and has been for over forty years. Writing a novel about him has led to a rather bruised arm, a result of constantly pinching myself to make sure I wasn’t dreaming. So I would like to say some thanks to the people who made this dream a reality for me.
Thank you, as ever, to Marc Gascoigne, Lottie Llewelyn-Wells, Nick Tyler, Anjuli Smith, Paul Simpson and everyone at Aconyte Books for giving me this chance, and for the guidance and support that saw me through from pitch to conclusion. Thank you to Lottie for her editorial insight and unfailing enthusiasm, and if you, dear reader, have enjoyed this book, then you should thank her too.
Thank you to Marvel Comics, for entrusting me with this most magnificent of characters, and Caitlin O’Connell at Marvel for her invaluable feedback.
Thank you to Fabio Listrani for an absolutely stupendous cover.
Finally, always and forever, my thanks to my family. To my stepchildren Kelan and Veronica, my thanks for all the ways we revel in the pleasures of stories. And to my wife and inspiration, Margaux Watt, more thanks than I can list. This novel was written in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, but because we weather the storms as one, there was only joy in its creation.
– Winnipeg, 2020
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
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Kornukopia
The Valedictorians
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Table of Contents
Cover
The Harrowing of Doom
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
Part I Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Part II Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Part III Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
By the Same Author
Aconyte Newsletter
David Annandale, The Harrowing of Doom
