WARNING: The following contains major spoilers for New Mutants #14 by Vita Ayla, Rod Reis, Tom Muller and VC's Travis Lanham, on sale now.
The Marvel Universe has plenty of nightmare-inducing villains, and the X-Men have come across nearly all of them. Some have been around longer than others, even if they've taken on more human forms.
And now, New Mutants #14 just revealed how the X-Men's most terrifying villain went from being an ancient psychic force to Amahl Farouk.
The Shadow King possessed Farouk at an Egyptian marketplace in the 16th century. Farouk was the son of a merchant, who seemingly had some telepathic mutant powers. After a plague killed his father, the Shadow King -- a malevolent primordial psychic spirit --promised the boy a chance to never be alone again. From that moment on, the Shadow King and Amahl Farouk were joined.
It's a heartbreaking story for sure, and one that provides some vague yet important details regarding the origin of the Shadow King as the X-Men know him. First introduced in 1979's X-Men #117 by Chris Claremont and John Byrne, the Shadow King was in control of Cairo's thieves at the time that Charles Xavier was on a sojourn through Egypt, having just been left by Moira MacTaggert for another man. Xavier was robbed by a young Ororo Munroe, one of Farouk's young wards, and when he stopped her with his mutant powers, he himself was struck by a vicious psychic attack. After hunting down the source of the attack, Xavier and Farouk came to blows in a psychic duel on the astral plane, one from which Xavier would narrowly win.
As a multiversal manifestation of the evil that lurks in the deepest recesses of the human consciousness, the Shadow King spent decades terrorizing the X-Men, more specifically Charles Xavier. Even after Xavier's death, the Shadow King found a way to keep a portion of the mutant leader's spirit, dragging it to the Astral Plane in order to force his old foe to battle him for an eternity. Eventually, Xavier and Psylocke, along with a network of other psychics were able to put an end to the Shadow King once and for all, finally ending the nightmares that he had wrought upon humanity and would surely continue to sew.
While Amahl Farouk himself has already been seen on Krakoa, it wasn't clear if the Shadow King was still a part of the mutant's life, at least not until now. When a group of young mutants finishes their training in New Mutants #14, they head for the caves on Krakoa, far from their instructors. There, Amahl Farouk, clearly still possessed by the Shadow King, waits, listening intently to the young X-Men and doubtlessly planning something sinister for Marvel's youngest mutants.