While King in Black has already amassed a sizable death toll, Marvel just revealed how one of Knull’s victims can never really, truly die.
WARNING: The following contains major spoilers for Venom #32 by Donny Cates, Iban Coello, Jesus Aburtov and VC’s Clayton Cowles, on sale now.
Eddie Brock is dead, and there doesn’t appear to be a clear path to bringing him back. Tony Stark’s plan to bring Eddie a symbiote didn’t work, and there is no one left who could possibly make things right. After being stripped of Venom and dropped hundreds of feet to the city streets below, there was little left of Eddie’s body but a crumpled pile of blood and bone.
And in Venom #32, Eddie himself, whose mind is now part of a greater tapestry of darkness, one that he can’t wait to escape. It turns out that death isn’t the end for those who have come into contact with symbiotes.
Eddie finds himself continuing to fall long after he had hit the ground. His mind reaches out, searching for his symbiote, but it is nowhere to be found. Even when he had been forced out of his own body by Knull and Carnage, he had always been able to feel Venom’s presence through the void. Now, Eddie fears that he is completely alone. As the living darkness begins to take hold of him entirely, a voice rings out through the abyss, one that doesn’t have time for Eddie’s self-pity. Desperate to get out, Eddie asks the voice how to stop falling, and it tells him in no uncertain terms that he needs to do it the same way anyone else does.
When Eddie finally looks up, he’s on the ground back in New York, and standing before him is none other than “Tyrannosaurus” Rex Strickland himself. One of the first men to become bonded to a symbiote, Rex Strickland died long ago, though his symbiote continued on as him for years before ultimately sacrificing itself in an effort to halt Knull’s approach. It takes some time for Eddie to catch on to what it is that is happening exactly, but he soon realizes that the world he is in isn’t the one he came from. After being passed through by a dragon symbiote, Eddie looks around to find himself now surrounded by thousands of bodies, all suspended by dark tendrils. Eddie might be dead, but he continues to exist alongside Rex within the symbiote Hive as a Codex, and that might just make him immortal.