Raven stared out into the endless black horizon. It seemed untouched by whatever civilization tried to tame it, to interrupt it's terrible reach, endless and consuming. There was no escape. Her clothes had been literally ripped apart by the force of the taint of her father's evil. There was no stopping it, for her father's will was endless, as long as there were mislead people like Slade existing, people's who's pain and suffering and pasts had turned them in upon themselves, casting out the light, drawing them into ropes attatching her father to life, ropes stretching just as endlessly as the sky.
She sighed. There was no use pretending - it was really going to happen, her father really WAS unstoppable, there was not going to be made an exception for her, nothing could be done.
The raven. Tiny and seemingly weak, it is one of the smartest birds. No problem will stump it, not for long.
A solitary animal, unique and beautiful in it's own dark, brooding way. It never falters in it's purpose, strong willed and free.
But the raven has it's own way of saying goodbye. Never faltering, either, when it's time comes. never wavering, staring straight into the depths of it's demise.
But just before the crucial moment, when the open, defiant eyes glaze, it sucks in breath and explodes it's appendix, making the bird's body pop like a balloon. Anyone who brings down and ends a raven will inevitably doom themselves.
......
Raven saw one last glimpse of the world before her body, arched and tense, was ripped to shreds by the blast, and saw the earth fo a milisecond as it truly was - naked of all the things humans tried to force on it. The sky was nothing different than it was and always would be, someone had just slid an orange film over the camera lens. Nothing crucial. The term, " The world will end," was a silly romantic idea thought up by humans. The earth was a living, funtioning machine. The silly humans invented gods to try to understand how such a huge, compicated machine could function so endlessly. It was a huge rock. It would go on, live unfazed, continue its wretchedly relentless cycle of life and death. It was the very thing the humans lusted after, and feared. It was eternal. It was endless. It was immortal, ageless, infinite. Just as the concept of time was baffling, and it took years to grapple with, even for the smartest of the race, the fact that the earth was immortal simply scared them too much. So they ignored it.
Perhaps frightened by the thought that life, somewhere, would still go on, even after all of this, Raven burst forth her power from her being, which almost certainly would have returned to her except that by the time it came back, there was nowhere for it to go, except to her friends. Her entire being was annhilitated, grated into oblivion, all senses, she was exterminated. She simply ceased to be. And with that, she had unknowingly saved them all.