The Hands

The Hands's History

The Hands are a race of super-celestials working for The Source and tasked with creating countless numbers of Multiverses throughout the void, using the Anti-Crisis Energy. With the creation of their Multiverse, each member of The Hands would pass on, giving their lives to create new life and then allow their energies to return to The Source. The rogue among them, Perpetua, refused her fate after creating her Multiverse and attempted to use the Crisis Energy to turn her creation into a self-sustaining weapon on which she would use against her kind. However, her plans were thwarted by her children who alerted them of her doings. Their response was to send the tremendous energy, known as the Cosmic Raptor, to seal Perpetua, her power, and her army of Apex Predators in the Source Wall and her reality was reset properly.

Dark Nights: Death Metal
After Perpetua was freed from the Source Wall by Lex Luthor, she transformed him into an Apex Predator like her former army's members. She used him and his legion to twist the Multiverse's balance of justice and doom and defeat the Justice League of Earth 0; in the end, Perpetua restored her Apex Predators' army to defend herself and its creatures from the Hands' vengeance.

After being advised that her enemies were saved from total annihilation, Perpetua allied herself with the Batman who Laughs, an evil Batman from the Dark Multiverse who proposed her to supercharge her with the eternal Crisis Energies from his realm so she chose him as her new right hand.

While Perpetua was moving through the Multiverse, the Batman who Laughs became an almighty God after his mind was transplanted into the Batmanhattan, a Dark Multiverse being who possessed the Connective Energy of the omnipotent Doctor Manhattan. The fresh-born Darkest Knight planned to use his newfound strength against the Mother of the Multiverse and, after that, to kill the Hands and conquer every other multiverse.

The Darkest Knight redirected the Crisis Energy from Perpetua to himself and gained more power which he then used to battle her. As the Multiverse was expected to die, the Hands sent there one of their heralds; the Chronicler, a being who was tasked to describe the history of dying multiverses and their final death.

After finally killing Perpetua, the Darkest Knight confronted a Forge of Worlds-empowered Wonder Woman and took her to the Creation of the Multiverse; then, they reached the End of Time where the Darkest Knight revealed her the truth about the Hands: the almighty rulers of the Omniverse had already decided to destroy the Multiverse as its inhabitants had gone too far, causing one Crisis after the other too many times to be spared from annihilation. The One who Laughs proposed her to ally with him as he was going to kill the Hands, before they could annihilate the Multiverse, and conquer the Omniverse.

Diana refused and ultimately killed the Darkest Knight, thereby accepting the final fate of the Multiverse; however, the Hands were so surprised by her selfless choice to save Them that They spared the Multiverse and its inhabitants while, at the same time, restoring all its iterations and also allowed Diana to ascend to an Higher Plane of existence.