Darkmount

Darkmount is a citadel, not a city: a vast dark tower complex rising over the Polyhex province, from which the Decepticon administration of conquered Cybertron is run. It debuts in the Marvel comics as the seat of Straxus, and its architecture is deliberately oppressive, all vertical black mass and industrial scale, sitting beside a lake of molten metal that doubles as the regime's execution facility.

Everything memorable about Darkmount happens in two consecutive Marvel issues. The Smelting Pool! introduces Straxus tossing prisoners into the molten alloy while lecturing them on Decepticon efficiency, and establishes the fortress as the centre of the occupation. The Bridge to Nowhere! has Straxus building a space bridge terminal at Darkmount to invade Earth, using the mutilated Spanner as its guidance system, until Blaster's intervention sends Straxus into the bridge itself. The fortress survives; its governor does not, at least for a while.

Darkmount's afterlife is larger than its original appearances. It became the standard Decepticon fortress name across the franchise, resurfacing as the intelligence hub in various guides, as a Decepticon stronghold in later comics, and most visibly as the towering fortress Megatron erects in Transformers: Prime's third season, which is what most people picture now. For G1 purposes the important point is that Darkmount is a Marvel creation with no cartoon appearance at all, and its association with Kaon rather than Polyhex is a later revision.

• Darkmount is described in franchise reference material as the former centre of Decepticon Intelligence on Cybertron.
• The fortress name was reused wholesale for Transformers: Prime, where Darkmount is Megatron's Earth fortress and gives the episode Darkmount, NV its title.
• Its design language, a black spired industrial monolith, became the template for nearly every subsequent Decepticon headquarters in the franchise.
• Straxus was Simon Furman's creation and the first genuinely frightening Decepticon the comic produced, which is why the fortress carries the weight it does.