FORGE

Every weapon Forge ever built for the government sits in the shadow of one spell he cast as a young soldier. Trained in his youth by the Cheyenne shaman Naze, Forge had turned his back on magic for the Army, but in Vietnam his entire squad was killed around him, and grief made the choice that discipline had refused. Using the souls of his nine dead comrades as fuel, he cast a forbidden rite that tore open a gateway and poured demons onto the battlefield to avenge them.

The demons won the battle and then declined to stop. Forge called down a B-52 strike on his own position to drive them back and shut what he had opened, and the bombing cost him his right hand and right leg — the limbs he later replaced with cybernetics of his own design, visible in the gallery below. What he did not know was that the gate had done more than summon demons: it had shown the cosmic trickster called the Adversary the way to Earth, and the Adversary is patient.

The bill came due in Dallas during the Fall of the Mutants, in Uncanny X-Men #225–227 (1988). With the Adversary loose and strangling reality, Forge found the only counter-spell was the mirror of his crime: another nine souls, freely given this time. The eight X-Men present and Madelyne Pryor volunteered on live television, and Forge — the man who had once spent nine lives without asking — had to cast the spell again and watch nine friends burn into the energy that sealed his oldest mistake away.