Marvel’s Powers of X Reveals a Major New X-Men Villain

Marvel’s groundbreaking X-Men Reboot event “House of X” has now come to its end, but the final installment of the story still managed to reveal quite a few twists. Powers of X #6 didn’t just give us the final reveals of the “House of X” storyline – it also introduced some new twists that will carry over into the upcoming “Dawn of X” X-Men relaunch and well beyond, possibly bringing threat to the entire Marvel Universe. Ironically enough, this “new” threat is actually something that Powers of X has been dangling in front of us all along: namely, the Year 1,000 timeline and the mysterious Librarian character.

Warning: Major Powers of X #6 SPOILERS follow!

Throughout Powers of X, the Year 1,000 timeline has been focused on a tale of The Librarian and the mysterious beings of that future society using advanced A.I. and nanotech to create a “Worldmind” machine planet that could attract the Phalanx to Earth. The Librarian’s goal has been “Ascension,” a process of converting the living beings of Earth into part of the Phalanx collective, as means of escaping death itself. The only problem is: in joining the Phalanx collective, organic beings get erased from existence.

Powers of X #6 finally takes us inside The Librarian’s mysterious “Preserve” where reminants of the old world care kept in an artificial habitat. In a major reveal scene, we learn that The Librarian has been keeping two mutants in this strange zoo, and they are none other than Moira X and Wolverine! It’s then that we learn the big twist in the story we thought we knew: The Librarian is part of a race called Homo novissima, or “Post-humanity.” Basically, Post-humans are created through the combination of human genetic engineering and advanced bio-tech integration, and it’s revealed that such beings are, and always have been the true enemy of mutants, as they are a competing tribe in the race for human evolutionary dominance. Moira and Wolverine realize to their shared horror that in all the battles with “evil mutants,” and the various human/machine threats, the X-Men never really had the real enemy in sight.

The scene ends with a major head-trip, as The Librarian makes a drastic decision: With Phalanx set to annihilate the world, The Librarian thinks that becoming part of the collective, no matter how much like godhood it is, would be a mistake. Instead, Wolverine and Moira surprise The Librarian and seemingly kill it, and it’s there that we get a final major twist of “House of X”: this Year 1,000 timeline was actually Moira’s 6th lifetime.

As “House of X” comes to an end, it’s now clear that Moira X’s larger mission is to not only combat the new human threats (Project Orchis), and evolving machine threats (Mother Mold and Nimrod), but also prevent the eventual (inevitable?) rise of the Post-human threat, as well. How that threat will now first manifest itself in the Marvel Universe, is something we’re eager to see – how about you?

House of X and Powers of X are now done with all six issues of each book now on sale.