He had learned the name of his "benefactor". Delirium. She was one of the seven Endless—a family of cosmic entities embodying concepts such as Destiny, Death, Dream, and others.
Delirium was the youngest sibling out of the seven. Delirium, as the name suggests, was a personification of madness, and among her seven brothers and sisters, she was an unexpected emotional actor. She would often bring changes and developments in the otherwise unchanging tale of their dysfunctional family of seven.
With her immense power, while being the living embodiment of madness, Delirium was capable of altering reality on a whim using her imagination that was not restricted by the bounds of a structured mind. Somehow, a being of her power decided to come here and get involved in Darkseid's life, changing his future, giving him dubious gifts, and messing with his head. He did not like that.
Darkseid was fuming; a little bit more rage and steam would come out of his nostrils. His black as night hair was waving sporadically around with each step he took while descending into his lair. Behind his back were three of his guards, the Furies. In his state of rage, he almost forgot that they were with him. Fortunately, he remembered before revealing too much to them. He did not trust them enough yet to let them learn any of his secrets.
He gestured for the Furies to stay behind and watch the door, preventing anyone from entering his chambers. He did not give out exact orders, but he hoped that the girls were smart enough to figure things out on their own. The three of them stopped following him and came back to the door at the top of the stairwell.
Darkseid kept going down, with only rage and dark thoughts on his mind. It was a fitting combination for his lair, where he performed his ritual of ascension to the status of Darkseid as well as the ruler of Apokolips. This was also the place where he built his machine, an entryway to other worlds. The one that he used to summon Hogyoku into this world, now fused with his soul.
There was a storm of emotions inside of him, a raging inferno of confounded and mixed feelings. He felt love at first sight today, a wondrous feeling that he had dreamed about feeling all his life. But the moment was ruined by the knowledge of a ruse. He was scammed, lied to, and used for entertainment. HE. THE DARKSEID. He was used as a circus monkey forced to perform for crowds for entertainment. He felt humiliated for the second time in his life. And both times were caused by the same person.
Her.
In the middle of the clearing that was leading to the omniverse gates, stood a figure of a slim girl. No longer the child, the form that she first appeared as. Short hair and a couple of colored braids seemingly put in random places on her head. She was wearing a slitted long black dress that resembled a stylised hospital gown, a pair of heavy high boots, also black, and what looked like a full body suit of fishnet mesh. She was surrounded by several butterflies that circled her like a honeycomb. Butterflies were unnatural for this place, creatures that had never been seen on Apokolips before. In her hands, she held a leash that was attached to a small white dog calmly sitting by her feet.
"Seidy! You came! Just like the butterflies told me you would!" Her happy, cheery voice sent him into frenzy. He started stomping toward her, fully intending to engage in direct combat with the girl, despite the power difference between them. He would not let his weakness deny him his justice.
"Bad Seidy!" Something whacked him on the head. Looking up, he noticed a toy hammer, a squeaky toy for little children, raised above his head.
"Bad!" Delirium said again. The toy descended onto his head once more. The force of the hammer strike was nothing like he had ever felt in his life. It was an overwhelming power; Darkseid sensed his knees failing under him, and an unnatural weakness was overtaking his body.
"Bad! Bad! Bad! BAD! BAD! BAD!" She whacked him again and again. With each word hammering him like a nail into the floor.
Only his immense willpower and perhaps a bit of stubbornness allowed the ruler of Apokolips not to slip into an unconscious state. He directed his unfocused eyes at her, trying hard to catch the expression on her face. She finally stopped hitting him, allowing him a moment of relief from strikes that felt harder than an earthquake.
He managed to focus his pupils on her after some time. He was expecting a victorious smile on her face, but surprisingly for him, he was wrong.
She was crying. Crying ugly tears that streamed down her face, painted in heavy white makeup. She was weeping… for him? Her emotions were a mess, just like his were, they were both confused. She beat him down into the ground, quite literally, but she cried because of that. That didn't make sense. She made no sense. She was mad.
"I gave you power! I showed you the future!" She screamed at him, making no pauses to breathe and no stopping for proper sentence intonations. The words she spoke were a tangled string of sounds, just like the mess both of them were right now.
"You should take a break, perhaps, Delirium", the dog suddenly spoke up in a low, manly voice. The girl nodded in response, put her hands on her face, wiping away her tears in embarrassment. She picked up her dog, hugging it while walking around the room back and forth. She was pacing like a teenager who couldn't contain all her emotions. Which was ironic, as she was as old as the universe itself.
"Why?" As the fiery storm of rage quelled in his mind, Darkseid was finally able to voice his thoughts.
"Why? You ask me why?" Her tears stopped just like they started. She ran to him and cupped his face. Her long nails scratched the skin on his face, drawing dark maroon blood from it. And from the little scratches where the nails punctured his skin grew patches of green grass. The green soon turned into red as the grass greedily drank the blood, feeding on it.
"You poor soul." She sniffled. "You were forced to your fate, bound by the darkest forces of the omniverse to be void of freewill, to be void of your own discretion. Just an instrument to be wrought, just an avatar to spread the darkness."
She was whispering to his ear once again, just like during their meeting. She was patting his head, tenderly and lovingly caressing him.
"You are no longer bound by that fate. I made sure that the Omega Realm would fold into you, not the other way." She slowly backed off from him. Her ethereal breath blew a dash of snow onto his face, cooling his wounds and murdering the grass. "I made sure that you would summon the Hogyoku, as it would make sure that you would follow the calling of your soul. And not follow some written out cosmic plot."
Shaken from the emotional roller coaster that just happened before his eyes, Darkseid slowly pulled out the dead pieces of plant matter from his face. He didn't want to ruin the moment, to stop her outburst, as it had given him so much information to think about.
"And I'm sorry." She said, her back turned to him. She didn't dare to look him in the eyes.
"I didn't know how it would affect your emotions. I didn't know how Hogyoku would rapidly change you".
She suddenly tossed her arm forward as if casting something into the darkness of the portal. A crack in the space tore the reality. On the other side of the tear in the space, a vortex of color, in various shades of red and green, was swirling around in a hypnotic dance. Sometimes battling each other like medieval knights in a tournament, sometimes whirling around like a loving couple on the dance floor, the color extravaganza was, simply put, too hypnotic to look at freely.
Delirium walked into the open portal, and her dog hurriedly followed behind. The portal closed in a matter of seconds as soon as the two had crossed, just as instantaneously as it opened.
It was as if Delirium was never here. Only patches of red grass were left lying on the floor, reminding the newly crowned Emperor of his fate. He was just a pawn in someone's game.