Bloodlines
A Teen Titans Fanfiction
Prologue: In the Watches of the Night
Purple lightning crackled across the orange sky. Raven was running, though from where, and to where, she wasn't quite sure. Well, 'running', perhaps was the wrong term; she was fleeing for her life. She was being chased by flaming winged skulls, and the ground had become a mire in which she would sink if she alighted. She knew this with the awful clarity that comes to us in our dreams, be they nightmare or no. A shadow blocked out the sun, and she turned to fight, a dark aura enveloping her hands, her eyes beginning to glow.
Join me, the shadow spoke to her, join me and together we can bring order to this world.
Never! She screamed back, though she was not conscious of moving her lips at all. I beat you already! You are gone forever, now leave me in peace!
Foolish child, I will never be truly gone from this world. And you will join me, though whether it will be as consort or servant is for you to decide. The shadow beast laughed, a roar that drove the lesser demons to the ground in fear. A gout of black fire enveloped Raven, and suddenly there was no ground beneath her feet. She tumbled into the abyss, with the insane laughter of the dragon following her down. From an eternity above, she heard massive wings begin to beat, and she knew she was finished. Falling helpless down the chasm, she could see a river of fire beneath her, and the sky was blotted out by the demon diving towards her.
Everything began to slow to a snail's pace she could see every contour of the walls to either side. Horribly slowly, the dragon's talons reached out for her, she closed her eyes and bit back against the screams she knew must come….
…and she jerked awake in her room in the titans' tower, gasping and bathed in a cold sweat.
Another nightmare about Malchior, she thought. Why do I keep having them? She looked over at the bookcase on the wall opposite her, to reassure herself that the book she had bound him in years before was still where she had left it. Sure enough, the leatherbound volume was still on the shelf, double-warded to keep it from causing mischief, either physically or metaphysically. She crossed the room and laid her hand on it. The spells haven't been broken, she deduced, maybe it's just me dwelling on it.
And that wasn't such a far-fetched notion in and of itself, with all the team, and raven personally, had had to deal with in the last few years. First, Terra betraying the whole team to Slade, then her 'father', the demon Trigon, attempting to conquer the planet, the brotherhood of evil, five individuals nearly succeeding where thousands of other villains had failed: they captured almost every hero in the world, and imprisoned them. With all of that going on, surely some nightmares were nothing exceptional, right? Yeah, keep telling yourself that, she thought, maybe you'll even start believing it.
She glanced at her wall clock. It was nearly 6 am anyway, so she decided to go straight down to the kitchen and make some breakfast. She turned to walk away, when something clicked. She spun on her heel and looked at Malchior's book, and the shelf it was on, again. It took her a moment to realize what was wrong.
While the shelf it lay on was coated in almost three years of dust, there was none on the book itself, though she could remember thinking just the day before how ordinary it looked, coated in a quarter-inch of dust. And there, on the shelf just to the right of where it had lain, was a single handprint, slightly larger than her own.
Somehow, someone, in the middle of the night, had sneaked into her room, disabled or disregarded a half-dozen different types of security, and meddled with Malchior's prison.