I really want to thank everyone who has reviewed "Darkness Calls." I'm glad you guys are enjoying the story, and you're feedback is infinitely appreciated. I'd like to apologize for taking the better part of two months to get this chapter to you, and what better way than making my opening comments brief?
Oh, a small note: this story is now rated M. Young people; you have been warned.
"It is vain for the coward to flee; death follows close behind; it is only by defying it that the brave escape" -Voltaire (1694-1778)
Darkness Calls: Chapter 4
The steady drone of a flat line filled the room. Raven couldn't believe it. Her knees felt weak. The shocked empath fought the urge to collapse. Cyborg was gapping at her for the second time in just as many days. Bursts of anger, pain, betrayal, fear, and disbelief rushed from her friends. The emotions bombarded Raven. She closed her eyes to escape, and they followed her into the darkness. Starfire was still hugging Robin's body to the bed, and the Tamaranian appeared unable to remove herself.
"Raven," Cyborg gasped. "What have you done?" The metallic hero got no response. Raven could barely keep her head up, let alone command her mouth and throat to produce speech. The bed shifted, and Raven glanced in its direction, expecting to see Robin rising from his prolonged coma. That's what was supposed to happen. Not this.
Seth had told her she'd have good luck; he'd said she'd find out how to help Robin. The Boy Wonder was supposed to sit up, stretch, and fall into step with the rest of the world as if nothing had happened. Instead Raven saw Starfire poking the monitor with a slender forefinger. The Tamaranian turned off the screen and waited a few seconds. Then she turned it back on. The flat line was still there. Its monotonous drone still reverberated through the air.
"Oh, man," Cyborg murmured. It was too real, too painful. Raven wanted to turtle into herself and never come out again. After everything Robin did for her, she killed him. Anger spiked in the air, forcefully making all other emotions peripheral. Raven felt the emotion slam into her like a physical blow. Starfire turned fiery emerald eyes on the empath.
"Why did you do such a thing!" she shouted. "Cyborg was prepared to administer a potential cure and you destroyed it! Is this how you repay your friends, Raven? Is this what you meant when you spoke of not giving up?"
Raven shrunk away from the angry words. Starfire didn't relent, storming up to Raven and shouting in her face. The alien's hands started flickering with the righteous fury of her starbolts. A ball of shimmering energy flew from Starfire's fist and struck Raven in the stomach. The cloaked girl hit the wall with a thud and slid to the floor. She didn't have the heart to get up.
"You have done a terrible and unforgivable thing! You are the worst of all clorbag vorblernelks, and it is my wish that we had never met you." Starfire's voice dropped menacingly as she spoke, and the last words came out in a venomous hiss. Already her fists were alight with green radiation for a second blow.
"You don't mean that, Star," Beast Boy said. The former changeling spoke with such authority that the Tamaranian hesitated before her vehement denial. Beast Boy shook his head. The boy's brow was furrowed, and his nostrils kept flaring as he drew deep breaths. "Robin isn't dead."
The drone of the flat line begged to differ.
Beast Boy walked to Robin and lowered his nose to hover over the acrobat. Raven barely dared to breathe. The former changeling turned to the monitors and deactivated them, muttering about distracting noise.
"B, my sensors say Robin's heart has stopped," Cyborg said, consulting the display built into his right arm. Raven cringed from her position on the floor.
"Your sensors are wrong," Beast Boy snapped. "That's the only way this makes sense. In a universe without order…" the green boy trailed off, and Raven could distantly feel his frustration over not remembering the words.
"All things exist in the places they're least likely to be found," she supplied meekly, head still bowed. Beast Boy nodded.
"The sensors have been wrong from the beginning. The poison's chemical structure never changed, it just fooled your instruments to make it look that way. Then you injected Robin with drugs that slowly killed him. The drugs were the problem." Beast Boy turned back to his friends. Starfire still loomed over Raven's crumpled form, and Cyborg was staring at Beast Boy like he'd gone mad.
The green boy growled and grabbed Starfire's wrist before pulling her away from Raven. He pushed Starfire's hand onto Robin's neck and manipulated her fingers so that they covered the acrobat's carotid artery. There was a pause before the Tamaranian gasped. Her feet slowly rose from the floor.
"Oh, this is most wonderful!" Starfire squealed. The alien pivoted in the air and darted to Raven's side, eager to apologize for her hasty and unwarranted reaction. "Robin is not dead. If what Beast Boy says is true then you have saved Robin." Before Raven could act to protect herself she was scooped off the ground and seized in an iron embrace.
Cyborg moved to the monitors and turned them back on. The same flat line dominated the display. He checked his arm to find the same result. But when the metallic Titan placed his fingers on Robin's neck his system simulated the sensation of a pulse under his hand.
"The antivenins were making him worse?" Cyborg whispered. The eldest Titan scratched his head. "This is so weird. Nothing's ever fooled my systems like that before."
"Dude, don't sound so disappointed. Robin's alive," Beast Boy said. Cyborg nodded.
"Your systems have never been tested by a G– an Entity before," Raven added. The empath's voice was flat and devoid of affect, and her face was covered by a mask of indifference. She'd been terrified, and she was ashamed of that fear. Glancing around the room, Raven caught Beast Boy's eye, and she knew the former changeling knew exactly how shaken she was. His heightened senses were a mixed blessing: without them, they would all think Robin was dead and Starfire would be beating her senseless; because of them, Raven was exposed. Animals could smell fear just as easily as Raven could sense it.
"I apologize most profusely, friend Raven. I should have not become so angry with you," Starfire said. The poor girl was feeling so much guilt. The emotion poured off her and saturated the air with its sickly presence. Raven could feel a headache coming on.
"It's okay, Starfire. I guessed," Raven droned. "I could have easily killed Robin. Your anger was a natural reaction."
Beast Boy interrupted the exchange. "You guessed? You guessed based off some idiotic thing I said?" A mixture of pride, shock, and horror swirled around Beast Boy. Horror and shock were the predominant factors.
"You said it yourself, Beast Boy. You have a brain – you just don't use it much," Raven responded. "We didn't have enough time to be certain, and Cyborg didn't think he had the appropriate drugs to combat the hemotoxin. It was the only available course of action that could potentially yield a positive result."
All three Titans blinked and shared bewildered glances. Doing something so reckless sounded very unlike Raven, but the logic sounded like Raven's, and the pure objectivity could never be mistaken. The distantness could, however, be feared, and Raven felt the stab of her friend's emotions like hot steel.
Cyborg tapped the console built into his arm repetitively, frowning at the readout. His systems didn't usually run into bugs or limitations, and Raven could already tell that such a huge failure in his technological parts was getting to her friend.
"I need to meditate," Raven said, falling back on her age old excuse without thinking. The empath swept out of the room before her friends could stop her. Her legs shook with every step.
Raven collapsed once in the sanctuary of her room. Robin was alive, but he was alive because of a fifty-fifty guess. Her mind felt foggy and her emotions were in turmoil. Sleep would help fix both problems. She was having a hard time getting off the ground. Just as the sorceress decided to sleep on the floor, her door opened. Beast Boy stepped into the room.
"Star wanted me to make sure you were okay," the green boy said. "She really is sorry." He crouched down and slung Raven's arm over his back. The empath slowly got to her feet and allowed Beast Boy to lead her to her bed. The mattress never felt more inviting to Raven. She wanted to sink down into it and know nothing but the soft embrace of sleep.
"Do you want to talk?" Beast Boy asked after he'd lowered Raven onto the mattress. She leveled an apathetic stare on the boy. He nodded.
"Good," Beast Boy said before sitting at the foot of the bed. "Why did you do that if you weren't sure it would work?"
"It was the most efficient course of action at the time, given all available information," Raven whispered. She had no interest in the conversation, and the fact was clear in her inflection. Even by Raven's usual standards she sounded androgynous.
"Drop the act, Rae!" Beast Boy snapped. "I might not be able to feel what you feel, but you weren't detached and rational in there. What made you do that? Robin could be dead right now."
"But he isn't. He'll make a full recovery and it will be because of what you thought," Raven responded. She closed her eyes, hoping that Beast Boy would leave. She was disappointed.
"Or he could be dead because of me. I don't want that responsibility."
"You're in the wrong line of work." Raven felt Beast Boy stiffen at her casual reference to his former status as a superhero, but the worst part was the backlash of pain. Beast Boy didn't speak for a while. When he did, his voice was crisp and sharp as flint.
"Starfire wants you to get some rest." The door slammed shut behind the boy's retreating form, but his pain lingered in the room and swam lackadaisically through the air, a lingering testament to how furious the former changeling was. Raven stayed awake in bed, tossing and turning until the emotion diluted.
Raven was just beginning to settle into an uncomfortable sleep when a cascade of siren calls trilled through her room. Brilliant red light flashed from the walls, and the intrusive color was visible even from behind her closed eyelids. The demoness opened her eyes reluctantly, feeling more tired in that instant than she had in the past three days. She didn't want to do anything about the alarms; she wanted to stay in her room and let the world pass her by. But she was still the Teen Titan's leader, though fortunately not for much longer. She flipped her communicator open and sat up.
"Cyborg, what do we have?"
"You're not going to like it," the metallic Titan responded while simultaneously hammering away at the computer terminal in the living room. Raven waited.
"It's one of those fire demons from… earlier."
Raven's blood went cold. Those flame demons were Trigon's minions. There was absolutely no way they could be in this dimension after how badly Trigon had been beaten. The root of all evil wasn't dead, Raven knew that, but he should have been too weak to exert this kind of influence. Raven's drowsiness evaporated in a cloud of hissing rage, and for a moment fear and rage dueled in the demoness' mind for control. An apathetic mask fell over the empath's face, and her voice lost all semblance of emotion.
"We need to make this quick," she droned. The dark girl sunk into the floor and reemerged behind Cyborg in the living room. Beast Boy was in the room, but the green boy left upon Raven's entry. Starfire was nowhere to be seen.
"Where is it?" Raven snapped curtly. Cyborg told her. Before the words even left his mouth, Cyborg and Raven were cocooned in frigid black magic. The two heroes melted into the floor before black magic erupted through the carpet. The obsidian light twisted and morphed into a giant raven before shooting through the roof and sailing across the bay.
The magical bird swooped over the waves, each flap of its marvelous wings producing not a single sound or ripple. The bird's eyes were fixed on the horizon, its beak opened slightly in a yet to be articulated cry. Power hummed around the magical manifestation of Raven's soul as it flew into the city, passing through solid buildings and gaining speed.
The fire demon was easy enough to find; smoke rose behind the hellish incarnation in curling tails. Houses were burning on both sides of the street. Hungry flames lapped at gentle white fences and greedily consumed the flowers in window boxes. Thriving blossoms and daisies thrashed in the intense heat before shriveling into themselves, charred skeletons of ruined vegetation.
Civilians were running and screaming through the streets in search of their loved ones or an escape route. A little girl cried out for her Snowflake while her older brother kept her from rushing headlong into the flaming corpse of her former home. Somewhere, a dog yelped. Cars gunned to life and sped away while fire sirens got closer and closer.
The raven disappeared with a mighty screech, and Raven and Cyborg emerged on the scene. Smoke hung heavily in the air and the flames, unnaturally hot for this dimension, threw off waves of heat that caused Cyborg to stagger. Raven simply narrowed her eyes.
"We do this quickly," she said to Cyborg as she rose into the air. The cybernetic boy nodded.
"I'm right behind you, Rae."
The demon itself had paid no attention to the heroes' arrival. It was a hulking creature of molten rock with a strangely humanoid physiology, but there wasn't a single organ under its molten flesh – it was sustained by death and fear, evil and hatred. The demon threw one of its arms away from it, and the fiery appendage stretched like a rubber band to lick at another house before the arm drew back.
Raven focused her powers on a Sedan burning nearby. Before its arson, the car had real leather seats. Raven could smell it. The vehicle was surrounded by black magic before rising rapidly from the ground. With a tremendous burst of mental energy, Raven hurled the car at her target. The flaming car crashed into the demon and exploded. Molten shrapnel and flaming oil rained down onto the asphalt. The demon turned.
A jet of water rushed forward and hit the demon in what passed for its face. The liquid evaporated upon contact with the creature, but it was having some effect: the demon was screeching an unearthly cry that made Raven shiver. Cyborg kept blasting the demon with water, having temporarily converted his left and right arms into a hose. The cybernetic teen was plugged into a fire hydrant.
The tortured fire creature swung its arms out blindly. The molten columns of rock shot at Cyborg, and the eldest Titan diverted his aqueous attack to block the lava flying at him. The demon's arms hissed and sputtered when they hit the water. The creature withdrew its arms with a shriek.
Raven drew her arm back and prepared to throw a punch. Her hand was wrapped in ebony magic and talons slowly formed around the demoness' hand. Razor-sharp talons tipped each of Raven's fingernails before she thrust her arm forward. The talons flew forth, dragging a thick column of magic behind them as an avian claw sped through the air.
The obsidian arm smashed into the flame demon's chest and the talons sunk in deeply. The creature shrieked again and turned its deadly attention to Raven. The empath drew back her other hand and thrust forward a second taloned fist. This one sunk its serrated edges in what passed for the creature's eyes.
"Raven! Now!" Cyborg yelled.
The demoness yanked up forcefully and the demon was airborne. Raven released her hold and withdrew her powers. A concentrated burst of water slammed into the creature and propelled it further upward.
"Azarath! Metrion! Zinthos!"
Raven's eyes poured forth brilliant white light, and her body vanished, replaced by the avian form of her soul. The black raven flapped its wings and took flight with a shrill cry. The bird caught its prey and beat its wings as quickly as it could toward the ocean. Once Raven reached the bay she released her father's flaming minion and watched it drop into the salty water. There was a tremendous burst of superheated steam, but when the evaporated liquid dispersed there was no demon to be seen. Raven returned to Cyborg and both of them assisted the fire department in putting out the unnaturally hot flames.
Cyborg sighed heavily and sunk down to the sidewalk. There were carbon scars along its surface. The human portion of Cyborg's face was covered in sweat, and his entire body was covered in soot from when he ran into a flaming building to get a three-year-old the babysitter had abandoned in his panic. The little girl was currently on her way to the nearest hospital. The babysitter had called the girl's parents.
Raven sat down next to her friend and quietly contemplated the ruined block around her. These had been nice houses once upon a time; now they were just withered constructs. They had once been magnificent homes and shelters; now all they sheltered were the carcasses of the American Dream.
The empath stood abruptly. "I'm going to make sure this doesn't happen again. Get back to the tower and make sure the others are alright," Raven said before she flew into the air.
Trigon couldn't be strong enough to tear through the dimensional fabric so soon after his defeat. That demon had caused a lot of damage, but it was one of Trigon's runts. There had to be a residual window somewhere, a tear that she hadn't completely mended when banishing Trigon from her home. Raven flew back and forth across the city in a grid pattern, searching for the telltale flames of her father's realm.
ooooo
Temple had been tempted to ignore her orderly urges after her conversation with Seth, but the petite woman found herself standing before the Basin again with her book of equations and her golden amicus. What Seth was doing was predictably Seth, and it was so convoluted that the disastrous web of events barely resembled the product of an intelligent mind.
There was an aggravated shout as Morana popped into existence in the Observation Room. Temple didn't look up from her calculations. The Asian woman was fuming, and she stopped to glare at the white expanse around her before beginning to vent her frustration in a tirade of angry shouts. Temple listened with half an ear.
"I can't believe that back-stabbing bastard! He helped that demon girl save the boy."
"You trusted him to let the boy die?" Temple asked while jotting down a quick line of math. She had been working on this new set of equations for some time, but the petite woman felt confident that she was making progress.
"Why wouldn't he?" Morana spat. "Seth doesn't need death, but we've worked together before. He's never actively tried to hamper me."
Temple hummed thoughtfully.
"He was trying to establish a pattern," she said. "Misinformation is a powerful tool for Seth."
The Basin swirled with color and stopped on an image of Jump City. A blue clad girl could be seen flying over the city below, crisscrossing the sky in an infallible grid. Temple frowned and focused her attention on a particular portion of the sky. It was directly above some yellow construction equipment, glinting in the sun. The area around the construction equipment was decimated beyond belief, fractured and powdered until nothing but rubble remained. There was a window in the sky, and it was getting gradually larger.
"Did Seth mention that he made a window?"
Morana didn't answer.
Temple sighed and rubbed her hands together. Tan sand started to spill down to the Basin's surface, entering the colored liquid without the tinniest ripple. The Entity of Order almost never exercised her powers, but she'd been working the math long enough to be confident in her actions. Morana blinked once Temple had finished.
"Seth said you put the dimension on lock-down…"
"Not a bad idea," the short mathematician giggled before throwing another handful of sand into the Basin. With that Temple grabbed her book and amicus and vanished – one second she was there; the next Morana was left alone in the Observation Room, fuming at a dimension that refused her every attempt at manipulation or entry. Seth had played her.
ooooo
Raven found the dimensional tear after hours of searching. It was nothing spectacular to look at, just a square swath of sky that pulsed a burning red that bounced off a nearby collection of friendly looking clouds. Raven could feel the heat as she approached. The tortured screams of the damned drifted from the window like a long forgotten sound beyond the edge of memory, but the pain was fresh. It always was.
The demoness hovered in the air before the threshold to her father's realm. It was four feet on all sides, barely enough for anything to slip through, but Raven knew the window would grow in time. But something was bothering Raven; she'd banished Trigon from this dimension, and she had been both firm and thorough as she slammed the door in Trigon's face. This window wasn't supposed to exist.
Black energy encased the heroine's hands and she reached out for the window. The second her powers brushed against the dimensional tear, Raven felt an overwhelming nausea wash over her. Her senses temporarily abandoned her in favor of a gale of chaos and pain. Raven withdrew quickly, venting a startled hiss as she was assaulted by the now familiar signature of Chaos' influence.
When Raven regained control of her powers and emotions she was falling from the sky. The sorceress righted herself and flew back to the burning patch of sky. Raven summoned her powers and wrapped the frigid magic around the dimensional tear, this time prepared for the onslaught of chaos. It would be a simple matter to force the fabric closed, she'd done it once before. Raven began to push, pouring her essence into the task.
Despite her best efforts, Raven couldn't see a measurable change in the window's size. It seemed to be fighting actively against her. And the opposing force was only getting stronger. Raven released the window and drew a desperate breath. She felt drained from the exertion. The window winked at Raven and a stray tendril of flame licked at its perimeter. Raven's heart jarred in her chest.
She didn't try to close the window again, that had been ineffective. Raven doubted it was even possible to close the thing. Seth's clue floated unbidden into Raven's mind, and the empath was seized by sudden inspiration. There was no reason to believe that the same logic that cured Robin couldn't close this dimensional tear. The last place she would look to cure a disease would be to the disease itself; the last way she would try to close a window would be opening it.
Raven smirked at the window and reached out again with her magic. The empath grabbed the edges of the window and tore them viciously apart, trying to widen the gap as quickly as possible. There was a brief moment of resistance and then, like a rubber band snapping, the seams of the window flew apart. Less than a millisecond passed before the widened window collapsed on itself, closing with a loud bang. Raven almost laughed.
The smile died on her lips when the air around the recently sealed window bubbled. The air was boiling, and Raven's eyes widened as the sky darkened. At first it was nothing but a splotch of crimson sky, but the color spread rapidly, bleeding into the troposphere and spreading like a plaque. The clouds vanished in a puff of superheated liquid. Raven didn't have enough time to think about what had happened or why. She turned and fled.
The towering skyscrapers of Jump City hissed in the heat; glass from large office buildings fell to the street in molten rain. Steel groaned and sagged. Raven put on an extra burst of speed and dove to the ground.
The empath reached out with her powers and seized civilians with her mind. Many of them were unaware of the danger rushing toward them, and they released startled yelps and angry shouts at the demoness. Those quickly turned to shrieks of true terror as flame and heat invaded the world. Raven couldn't carry everyone, and in her rush to get away she missed a few sad souls.
Raven risked a glimpse behind her and watched as the people she'd missed fell to the ground grabbing their heads and screaming. She knew unequivocally that they were undergoing the same process that had destroyed the three prisoners she'd encountered. Raven flew faster.
"Raven calling all Titans!" she shouted into her communicator. She grabbed an abandoned stroller and hoisted it into the air beside her. The infant inside did not appreciate the freezing touch of her magical energies.
"Raven calling all Titans!" she repeated when no one answered. "Do not get caught by the spreading… phenomena." She really had no clue what to call the massive curtain of red that was descending on the world. It looked like Trigon's work, but there was a fundamental difference. This encroaching crimson world wasn't born of evil. It was born of madness.
"I repeat: do not let it touch you. Cyborg, it's the same thing that robbed those prisoners of their minds and destroyed their souls. Raven calling all Titans! Do not get caught. Save everybody you can, but be careful. Anyone who's been exposed to it will be dangerous."
In her haste to end the transmission, Raven slammed her communicator onto her belt. The clip didn't catch, and the frantic empath didn't notice when the small yellow and black device fell to the ground below, shattering in a brilliant display of plastic and metal.
The red light splashed across the sky in brilliant strokes as if led by a painter's steady hand. The crimson flood covered everything it came in contact with, seeping into buildings and plants and people. Raven put on an extra burst of speed and continued to grab fleeing civilians with her powers. The sorceress was tiring, and her strained psyche cried out against the effort of flying and towing scores of people behind her.
A spike of sheer terror pierced through the disorganized mass of fear swirling through the city. Raven felt the stab of the creeping light and gasped: one of the people held in her powers had gotten caught by the chaotic intrusion. Raven felt the man's mind being ravaged; she felt his fear slowly melt into an indistinguishable blur of barely human emotion; and then the man Raven was carrying was gone, erased like an unwanted smudge. The shock was so great that Raven's concentration faltered, and the destroyed man was freed from Raven's ebony magic. He fell to the ground where his tortured existence was quickly ended in a splattering of fluids and splintering bones.
Raven didn't know where to go. The red light was spreading rapidly in all directions, and it seemed to be accelerating as it spread. The empath was beginning to doubt that it was possible to escape.
A black shape flew past Raven, and the startled demoness recognized the shade that had possessed Beast Boy. The shade ignored Raven and her cargo, zipping ahead, obviously just as desperate to get away from the encroaching red as everyone else was. Raven cast a quick glance toward Titan's Tower in a desperate attempt to summon her friends to her, unharmed for the moment, but the tower was already swarmed in red and beginning to show signs of deterioration as the mighty T structure drooped into the bay like a plant starved for light. Raven gulped.
There was a cacophony of sound in the city. Cries of the damned and the terrified melted together into one amorphous mass. Molten glass spilled to the ground; cars backfired; buildings groaned and collapsed; and there was an ever-present wailing. It sounded like a gale blowing through a forest, but there was barely a breath of wind.
Raven continued to snatch up what civilians she could, but the demoness was already overburdened. She was forced to make the unenviable choice of saving a few people and herself or being caught by the interdimensional invader. The empath's heart wrenched as betrayal lashed against her senses and a small child called her name. The betrayal lost its form soon after as the girl was claimed by madness.
"Azarath Metrion Zinthos!" Raven chanted, turning over to fly with her back parallel to the ground as she launched a magical blast at the parasitic light. The obsidian magic was easily absorbed by the red flood. Raven growled and put on an extra burst of speed. Before she turned back to her flying, the empath caught the expressions of the people seized in her freezing magic. It was like looking at corpses who had yet to expire, and the sight made Raven feel sick.
Raven turned back to her flight and saw a figure sprinting along the rooftops of buildings. For one blessed moment, the dark girl thought Robin had returned and was ready to lead the Teen Titans through yet another conflict with the impossible. The figure was tall and male, and he possessed a speed and grace Raven had only seen in a few humans. Red light reflected off the man's face, and Raven saw a visage of copper and ebony – Slade. The super villain was far too busy avoiding the deluge of chaos to pose a problem. He probably hadn't even seen Raven.
At that moment Slade turned his head, and Raven knew the man knew she was there. He kept running, leaping nimbly from rooftop to rooftop and leaving Raven to her own devices. The sorceress sped up when another one of her passengers was seized in crimson madness. Slade leapt from his rooftop and snagged the end of Raven's cloak. The demoness dropped a few feet before righting herself and flying onward. She didn't like Slade, but she wasn't going to leave him to the torturous existence promised by the pursuing light – not unless an innocent person was threatened because Slade's extra weight slowed her down. Either way, Raven didn't like thinking about it.
There was an explosion of light behind Raven, and the demoness felt Slade shift so he was facing the blast. For a brief moment the red light was laced with a rich sandy color. The sand started to fall from the sky, peppering the earth like snow. The first grains that hit Raven vanished instantly, effervescing briefly before sinking into the demoness' skin.
"About time," Slade chuckled. Raven didn't have enough time to think about what the criminal mastermind was talking about before his weight vanished. Raven twisted and watched as Slade plummeted from the sky, catching a flagpole on his way down and using it to slow his descent. The masked villain landed gracefully on the street and braced himself as red light washed over his body.
Raven kept flying, but a small part of the heroine couldn't help but wonder what Slade knew that she didn't. She began to slow, and more and more people were stolen from her grasp by her pursuer. Raven cried out as a tendril of madness grazed her leg. She faltered. Long days without sleep and prolonged exposure to strong emotions took their toll on Raven, and the sorceress fell from the sky. In the few moments left to her, Raven drew the remaining civilians in her care close and summoned an obsidian bubble that encased the small group. They hit the ground hard and slid for a few meters before redness washed over them.
If Raven had been more aware she would have noticed that everybody was sparkling with tan light as the red madness pounded against them. The demoness felt small and cold. Barely distinguishable images and voices swirled around her, and the dark girl shrunk away from the barrage. Her skin felt too small for her body, and there was an internal, sickly heat that pulsed from her core and contrasted sharply with the frost threatening her extremities.
"I don't want to be alone."
"Feeling a little emotion, only every now and then, wouldn't be so bad. Would it?"
"How is it possible for Starfire to be so optimistic after everything she's been put through?"
"We all have a destiny."
"Cyborg is too hard on himself."
"What if I don't want to destroy the world?"
"Robin should let Starfire help him with his Slade research. It upsets her when I'm included and she isn't."
"There are some things that were never in my control to begin with."
"Beast Boy will never forgive himself."
"Robin could have died because of me."
"I killed a human being."
Every thought Raven ever had echoed in her head. They bounced off one another and vied for space in the confines of Raven's skull. The empath squeezed her eyes shut. She might have screamed. Emotions also bounced around, slamming into each other with such force that they shattered into tiny particles of disturbed dust. The empath rarely felt strong emotions, but she knew anyone who freely expressed emotions would be dealing with every emotion and every thought that ever occupied his or her mind simultaneously. For the first and only time, Raven was grateful for her numbness.
Raven was never aware of it, but her hand ventured into the pocket at her hip. Beast Boy's penny was clutched firmly in her hand and her nails were cutting into her palms.
"Make it stop," Raven whimpered. There was so much sensory input. It was overwhelming. The empath could imagine her mind creaking and bending under the pressure. "Azar, please, make it stop… let it end."
It didn't stop. Raven stayed curled up on the ground, her hands over her head and Beast Boy's penny in her clenched fist. Her throat grew raspy and sore, and the empath realized she'd been screaming. Probably very loudly. Unconsciousness was a blessing, and Raven fell gratefully into it, confident that she'd just experienced her last sane moments alive.
ooooo
Seth watched the scene unfold from the Observation Room. The rotund Entity couldn't control his mirth when Raven ripped open the dimensional tear and allowed his booby-trap to spill into the world. He laughed until tears sprung from his eyes when Raven chose to save herself and indiscriminately abandoned men, women, and children to the swarming madness. Seth's laughter died instantly when Slade Wilson willingly dropped from the sky and allowed the red light to wash over his frame.
Seth frowned and focused on his center, calling upon an ancient meditation technique dead to all but the immortal to break down his essence and examine its source and inputs. He wasn't gaining as much power from this as he should have.
"What's going on here?" the chaotic Entity growled, turning suddenly angry eyes on the Basin, as if the ornately carved stone could answer him.
"I followed your advice." Temple popped into existence in the Observation Room. Seth rounded on the petite woman with a snarl.
"What advice might that be?"
"Don't think about things, that's what you said. Don't think – just do. I decided I'd rather keep this dimension around for a little while."
Seth broke off his meditation and glared at the Basin. He could see his victims writhing in crimson madness, but their bodies were shimmering a distinctive tan color the Entity of Chaos had long ago learned to detest. The tan light was focused around the humans' heads, keeping his influence at bay.
"You love chaos, Seth. Chance. Well, some of them will go mad. Some of them will resist your power and be perfectly fine when they wake up. Isn't it exciting?" Temple giggled. She had already calculated who would likely retain their senses and their most likely course of action. Seth had no knowledge of that, however, and the obese man lunged at Temple. The woman vanished without a trace, leaving behind a mocking giggle that reverberated through the air long after Seth had finished cursing his counter.
In a few hours, Raven would awaken from her brush with madness. Then order could slowly be restored to the eleventh dimension. Temple's book of calculations held all the predictable answers. But those predictions were only as good as Temple's hurried calculations.
AN: Please take a moment to tell me what you think, and I hope to see you again next time.