Darkseid ran away. Honestly, that single fact settles the debate.
The moment Perpetua tore loose from the Source Wall, Apokolips’ ruler skipped the grandstanding, the speeches, and the war council entirely. He made straight for the Ghost Sector, the lone sliver of existence her power couldn’t touch, and he sat there until the storm passed. A tyrant who conquers planets the way other people run errands went and found himself a corner to hide in.
Threats are never in short supply at DC. At the bottom rung, the Rogues are sketching out bank heists. At the top, you get cosmic entities angling to enslave all life and reshape reality to their liking. Darkseid is normally slotted in as the upper limit of that spectrum — the omega, the name that sends everyone scrambling for their costumes. That billing isn’t false, exactly. It’s just missing something.
He’s an enormous, terrifying fish. He simply isn’t the ocean’s largest.
She built a universe on purpose so it would never finish
DC’s creation story is, being generous about it, a tangle. Even so, a handful of structural details have calcified into canon. First came the Source of All Things, the single mightiest being in existence and the origin point for everything that followed. Early on, it produced the Hands — sixth dimensional celestial entities dispatched with a single assignment: construct multiverses.
Perpetua numbered among them. Then she discovered the fine print. Complete your multiverse, and you perish alongside it.
So she gamed the system. She assembled a reality that was deliberately unfinished, then bent it into a wheel destined to spin eternally between Crisis and Rebirth, bleeding off energy that sustained her. That universe readers have followed for decades? It’s a perpetual motion engine built to keep its own architect breathing.
The scheme succeeded. It also shattered every law the Source had established.
The prison that only slowed her down
Once the Source uncovered her deception, it dispatched the Cosmic Raptor to seal her inside the Source Wall. For nearly any other villain, that’s where the book closes.
Perpetua treated it as a waiting room. Sealed within the wall, she plotted, and she eventually clawed her way free using other people as instruments: Barbatos, the Batman Who Laughs, and Lex Luthor, each of them funneling her the power required to split the wall open from within.
Which is precisely when Darkseid grabbed his things and got out of town.
The Anti-Life Equation is her signing bonus
This is the wrinkle that recontextualizes the whole picture. The single obstacle standing between Darkseid and absolute rule is the Anti-Life Equation. With it in hand, he steamrolls the New Gods and the heroes without so much as slowing down. He’s pursued it across his entire existence, and it has eluded him every time.
Perpetua possesses it. She also couldn’t care less about it.
She gave the Anti-Life Equation away to Mobius purely to recruit him. Darkseid’s white whale — the prize he’d incinerate a thousand worlds just to grip for five minutes — and she deployed it as a hiring sweetener. A job perk. Initial here, and here’s your parking space plus the equation that annihilates free will.
It took a Batman infused with Dr. Manhattan to stop her
Nothing on this side of the Source Wall is capable of defeating Perpetua. She created the multiverse that contains the DC universe. Which is what makes her downfall borderline comedic, assuming you aren’t the one it happened to.
The Darkest Knight — the Batman Who Laughs, upgraded — managed it by piling up advantages that were never meant to coexist. He drained what remained of Dr. Manhattan’s energy. He secured the leftover fragments of the Source Wall that had confined her originally. Then he stuffed her back inside.
Locked away. Not killed. Comics understand exactly how much distance sits between those two words.
So she remains out there, held for the time being, biding her time the same way she did before. And off in the Ghost Sector, the DC universe’s most dreaded despot is holding perfectly still and perfectly silent, praying his name never crosses her mind.