WARNING: The following contains major spoilers for Venom #5, available now from Marvel.
Eddie Brock has been facing unfathomable terrors ever since ascending to his symbiote throne. Not only are some of his oldest enemies making their own comeback on Earth, but a seemingly lethal attack has left Eddie himself somewhere out of time and space. Thankfully, Eddie isn’t alone, though the other Kings in Black he has stumbled upon aren’t exactly friendly. In fact, one of them is behind nearly everything that has happened recently, and it has all been building up to the most horrifying Venom of all time once Meridius claims Eddie’s old symbiote for himself.
Following the explosive assault on him by the Life Foundation, Eddie Brock has ended up in the mysterious Garden of Time. As explained by Meridius, another symbiote being, the Garden is where all Kings in Black will find themselves after becoming lost in the depths of their own powers. While it would seem as though Eddie and his fellow symbiote gods are effectively trapped in the Garden, Venom #4 by (Al Ewing, Bryan Hitch, Andrew Currie, Alex Sinclair, and VC’s Clayton Cowles) reveals that Meridius isn’t caged in quite the same way as the others. As it turns out, Meridius is still able to traverse history through his darkly divine powers, and that is exactly how he brought Eddie to where they are now.
While all the other Kings in Black have made an uncomfortable home for themselves in the Garden of Time, Meridius has been traversing the past in a bid to manipulate the lives of Eddie and Dylan Brock. More specifically, Meridius’ plot is set to drive Dylan Brock to bond with the Venom symbiote and, eventually, bring the latter of the two right into his own arms in the far future. Everything that has led to now was because of Meridius. On the surface, the scheme is unnecessarily convoluted at best. On closer inspection, however, the winding path might be just as important as the symbiote Meridius is after.
Every symbiote and each of their various hosts are all stored somewhere within the symbiote Hive as a Codex, effectively a living record of everything that makes them who they are. It was in this way that Eddie Brock and Flash Thompson were able to bring themselves back to life from within the Hive as purely symbiotic effigies of their former selves. Considering the symbiote’s decades-long shared history with Eddie Brock, not to mention the myriad of other hosts it has had, it only makes sense that Venom would be so highly sought after. It isn’t just the knowledge and experience that Venom already has that makes it so valuable, as there is also the hundreds if not thousands of years between Eddie and Meridius’ reigns for the latter to acquire as well. With so many Codices at his disposal, Meridius would easily become the most powerful King in Black that has been seen since Eddie, and the most terrifying since Knull himself.
If Meridius really can direct Eddie’s past and future to suit his own desires, it may already be too late to stop him. Even if Eddie were to rally the other Kings in Black against him, Meridius has made it clear that none of them will ever really be able to harm one another. At least, that’s the case so long as they are all part of the Hive. Should Meridius find a way to use Venom to remove or erase any Codices of those who stand in his way, it would only be a matter of time before he is the only King in Black left.
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