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Apocalypse
was born nearly five thousand years ago in Egypt as a member of the
Akkaba clan. Even as an infant, he inspired fear. Ugly and malformed, he
was abandoned by the tribe to die in the harsh desert sun. The baby was
found by a roving band of feared desert raiders known as the
Sandstormers. Most of them, too, thought the infant should die. However,
their ruthless leader, Baal, somehow recognized the potential power in
the child. He named him En Sabah Nur ("The First One") and raised him as
his own son.
As En Sabah Nur grew, he surpassed the other tribesmen in intelligence
and strength. Everyone in the tribe except for Baal hated and feared him
for his inhuman looks and great abilities. Nur did not understand their
fear, but hardened his heart against it. Moreover, he believed in the
principle that Baal and the tribe lived by, that only the fittest,
tested by hardship, would, and should, survive. On the day of his tribal
rite of passage into manhood, the seventeen-year-old En Sabah Nur killed
three armed warriors of the tribe using only his bare hands.
At this time Egypt was
ruled by Pharaoh Rama-Tut. On the day of En Sabah Nur's rite of passage,
Baal explained to him that Rama-Tut was no god, as most believed, but a
man, who had arrived in a strange vessel. Years ago the tribe had
stumbled upon the time-traveler's crashed ship, taken the injured man
back to their camp, and nursed the injured and temporarily blinded man
back to health. One night he wandered away, taking with him objects the
tribesmen had brought from his vessel. Weeks later, his sight restored,
Rama-Tut returned, wielding weapons of devastating power and leading the
Egyptian army. He massacred the tribe and enslaved the survivors.
Although he tortured them, no one revealed the timeship's location.
In actuality, Rama-Tut was a time traveler from the far future who would
later become known as Kang the Conqueror. Kang knew that Apocalypse, one
of the most powerful mutants who ever lived, and the one who was
destined to rule the wor ld, had been born in ancient Egypt. Hence,
Rama-Tut had gone back in time to find Apocalypse as a child, raise him,
and thereby become the master of the most powerful being on the planet.
On the day of his rite of passage, Baal brought the young Nur to a
sacred cave whose entrance became blocked by a cave-in, trapping them
underground. After a week of wandering without food or water, they found
the remnants of Rama-Tut's timeship within an underground Egyptian tomb.
Baal told Nur that he believed him to be a conqueror whose coming was
foretold in ancient prophecies, and that Nur was destined to overthrow
Rama-Tut. Then Baal died from lack of nourishment, and Nur, whose mutant
physiology kept him alive, vowed to take vengeance on Rama-Tut and claim
his destiny. Four weeks later he finally made his way back to the
surface.
Nur became a slave, but eventually he had a vision of the Egyptian death
god Seth, who urged him to become a conqueror. It was at this moment
that Nur first manifested his superhuman powers. Eventually, at a time
when many time-traveling super-heroes, including the Fantastic Four, the
West Coast Avengers, and Doctor Strange arrived in Rama-Tut's Egypt, the
Pharaoh finally came face to face with En Sabah Nur. Rama-Tut offered to
make him his heir if he would swear his loyalty, and then tried to kill
him when Nur refused. Nur defeated Rama-Tut's warlord Ozymandias and
Rama-Tut, who finally escaped back into the future, eventually to take
on the identity of Kang.
From then on Apocalypse plotted the conquest of the planet through
bringing about wars and conflict, in which the strong would defeat and
destroy the weak. Over the centuries he was worshipped by many
civilizations under a variety of names. Mutants, he was certain, would
one day rule the world, with him as their leader, and so he waited. Most
of what Apocalypse did during these centuries is as yet unknown.
At the time of the Crusades, Apocalypse arranged for the warrior Bennet
du Paris to activate his latent mutant powers for the first time.
Renaming him Exodus, Apocalypse made him his servant but later cast him
into a deathlike trance when Exodus rebelled against him.
In 1859, Apocalypse awoke from centuries of hibernation in an
underground chamber in London. It was then that he first met Dr.
Nathaniel Essex, who believed that through selective breeding of humans,
he could bring about the rapid evolution of superhuman mutants.
Apocalypse offered to transform Essex into a long-lived superhuman being
himself to give him the time to further his research, but at a cost: his
servitude. Essex accepted, and Apocalypse transformed him into Mister
Sinister. However, the Askani, a clan of rebels against Apocalypse two
thousand years in the future, transported Scott Summers and Jean
Grey-Summers, also known as Cyclops and Phoenix, to 1859. There they
prevented Apocalypse from assassinating Britain's Queen and Prime
Minister.
Apocalypse, temporarily weakened by a virus with which Sinister had
infected him, went back to waiting for the proper moment to reemerge. It
came a century later, when in a short time the world became populated
with a new race of superhuman mutants. Apocalypse first reappeared as
the employer of the Alliance of Evil, a team of mutants who battled the
original X-Factor. X-Factor was a group comprised of the original
members of the X-Men.
Subsequently, Apocalypse began recruiting a team of mutant agents he
called his Horsemen. Apocalypse rescued Warren K. Worthington III, alias
the Angel, from death and manipulated him into serving him as the
Horseman named Death. Worthington's wings had been amputated, but
Apocalypse used his advanced genetic engineering techniques to give him
new wings with metal-like feathers. Eventually, however, Worthington
forsook Apocalypse and returned to X-Factor, and then to the X-Men.
Later, Apocalypse infected the infant son of Cyclops and Madelyne Pryor,
Nathan Summers, with a techno-organic virus, having recognized that if
this child grew up he would be powerful enough to defeat him. The Askani
once again stepped in and brought the child to their own time period,
two thousand years in an alternate future.
In the present day Apocalypse continues to conspire to rule humanity. In
the alternate future in which the Askani live, Apocalypse has finally
ascended to power. He became aware of the young Nathan's presence in
that time, but only succeeded in kidnapping a clone of the child which
the Askani had created. Not knowing this second child to be a clone,
Apocalypse ceased his hunt for the real Nathan. Raised under the
tutelage of Apocalypse, the clone grew up to become the terrorist Stryfe.
By this time Apocalypse had to transfer his mind and powers into host
bodies in order to stay alive. Since his current body had grown old and
feeble, Apocalypse planned to transfer his consciousness and power into
Stryfe's.
As for the real Nathan, the Askani leader Mother Askani transported
Cyclops and Phoenix to this future time. There, Summers and Grey raised
Nathan into adolescence. After so many millennia of menacing humanity,
the elderly Apocalypse finally perished in combat with the teenage
Nathan, who would grow up to become the warrior Cable.
To secure a new
host body, Apocalypse sought to siphon the awesome energies of "The
Twelve," mutants of incredible power, destined to alter the course of
human history. This time, it was Wolverine who fell into the warlord's
grasp. The feral X-Man fought his teammates ferociously as the Horseman
Death, but broke free from Apocalypse's control. However, Wolverine and
his fellow Horsemen had served their purpose. Taking advantage of the
distraction afforded by their actions, Apocalypse collected the mutants
he required to carry out his plan: Cyclops, Phoenix, Cable, Professor X,
Storm, Iceman, Magneto, Polaris, Bishop, Sunfire, the Living Monolith
and Mikhail Rasputin.
The Twelve were
linked to a machine that would channel their awesome energies into
Apocalypse, allowing him to absorb the body of X-Man, a time-tossed
teenager possessed of vast telepathic and telekinetic power. As his
teammates fell around him, a powerless Cyclops shoved X-Man out of the
draining circuit, merging with Apocalypse to create a new evil entity.
But the telepathic Phoenix, Summers' wife, Jean Grey, detected her
husband's psyche inside the composite being and prevented the X-Men from
destroying it. Cyclops was presumed dead by most of his teammates; only
Cable and Jean refused to believe he had perished. Investigating rumors
and hearsay, they helped him reassert his mind over Apocalypse. With
Jean's help, Cable exorcised the warlord and shattered his essence.
In an alternate timeline Apocalypse succeeded in taking over America in
the twentieth century. In this alternate timeline Professor Charles
Xavier died at the hands of his own son, Legion, long before he would
have formed the X-Men. As a result, Apocalypse led mutant kind in
conquering North America, reducing its human population to slaves. This
is the alternate time period known as "The Age of Apocalypse." However,
in this reality as well, Apocalypse was ultimately doomed to failure,
and perished in combat with Magneto, who had become the founder of the
X-Men in that timeline.
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