Darkseid

Darkseid is the ruler of the planet Apokalips. He is as near-immortal as the other Homo Immortalis and immensely powerful. Darkseid's power stems not only from Celestial genetics, but also from the Omega Force he wields. Whereas the Power Cosmic is used to create, the Omega Force is used only to destroy. He was provided this power by the Guardians of the Universe, who sought to curb the rapid growth of potential they had witnessed on the sister planet of New Genesis.

Darkseid has been trapped in a civil war with New Genesis and their leader, Highfather. It has been a constant arms race for some 50,000 years as Darkseid tries to assemble an unstoppable army while the Forever People have upraised an immensely powerfully, techno-magical society. Darkseid's lieutenants are obscenely powerful yet very few in number due to constant internecine fighting and betrayals. The only crime on Apokalips is defying or subverting Darkseid's ambitions. Highfather's forces, and the intense gravimetric distortion around their demesne, has kept Darkseid from deploying the whole of his armies into realspace. Still, he is considered a highly dangerous individual by spacefaring races more evolved than Earth (of which very few Earthlings are even aware of his existence).

History

During the Celestial invasion leading to Ragnarok, scientsts from Oa approached Darkseid covertly. In exchange for ensuring that New Genesis could not aid their cousins near Earth, they turned the asteroid of Apokalips into a giant manufactory to make endless weapons of war. They also granted Darkseid the ability to channel the deadly Omega Force. The Oans assumed this would kill him; instead his Divergent DNA protected him from the immense energy he channeled. Darkseid is now one of the most physically dangerous people in the universe as well as being a near-unparalleled tactical genius.

Approximately 1600 CE Darkseid became aware of the existence of the concept of a Life Equation after speaking to the Martian people. Initially he posed as their friend and ally until they shared with him that conceptual axiom. From this, he extrapolated the existence of the Anti-Life Equation. Darkseid betrayed the Martians and created H'ronmeer's Curse, which infected the Martian race with a pyroclastic psychic contagion. In the space of a few decades the species was virtually annihilated.