The Measure of a Titan

by General Havoc

With Terra's betrayal still haunting them, the Titans rescue a young kineticist in need of a home from certain death. But after their loss, can they extend their trust to an outsider again, especially one being hunted by an unknown enemy? BBxRae, RobxStar

26. Manifest Destiny

Disclaimer: Reports of my death are somewhat exaggerated, as are reports that I own the Teen Titans

Author's Note: I am alive.

It has been far too long since I updated this story, and the reason for that is that I have been utterly unable to work on it for quite some time, due to a very serious illness that laid me low for three weeks last month. I was therefore not able to write anything for a long period of time, and this chapter was quite heavily delayed. I humbly beg the pardon of my patient readers, and hope that this new chapter (another long one) will suffice to assuage them. As always, if it does or does not meet with your approval, I beg and plead that you will let me know by means of the review feature, such that I can deliver to you next time a chapter that is more to your liking and of higher overall quality. I am, as always, deeply grateful to all those willing to read such an enormous chapter or story as this has become, and hope to see you all very soon for Chapter 27.

Thank you once again.

---

Chapter 26: Manifest Destiny

"A person often meets his destiny on the road he took to avoid it."

- Jean de la Fontaine

O-O-O

The nightmare was always the same.

Flames and lava and rivers of blood that coursed through the streets of a wrecked city like arteries. Smoldering ruins, charred skeletons, the bitter taste of smoke in the air. None of these things were surprising anymore. Some nights, she had no idea where she was, just some nameless city burning forever in the sunless dark. Some nights she could pinpoint a landmark she recognized, a statue or bridge or monument that identifies the particular city on fire.

Most nights, she was in Jump.

The flames she was used to, the smell of smoke no longer bothered her. Raven was not some delicate flower to blanche and faint at the first sign of unpleasantness. Her dreams were usually filled with these kinds of imagery, and she'd seen enough bloodshed and death over the last couple years to send hardened warriors screaming into the night. Flickering firelight and twisted ruins had been her companion since as early as she could remember. She may not have been immune to fear, but she didn't scare easily. What scared her tonight was not the imagery, it was the company...

"Tick-tock, Raven. Time is running out."

"I'm not afraid of you!" she shouted defiantly, but it was a lie, and he knew it. He knew everything about her, somehow, his one eye boring right through her like a laser drill, laying bare all of her secrets without twitching an eyelid. He vanished and materialized at will. In dreams, you can never evade your enemies, no matter how far you run.

"Silly girl," says Slade. "I'm not the one to be afraid of. You know that."

She was standing on the ruins of the Jump City Community Center, now half-collapsed, its metal roof reduced to slag. She could feel the heat of the ruined building through the soles of her boots, hot enough to set her on fire if this were real. She knew it wasn't. It didn't help.

"What you have concealed, you shall become!"

A swarm of meteors screamed in from nowhere, and reflexively, she conjured up her shield. Explosions pummeled the building to rubble around her, fanning the flames that burned higher and higher, needing no fuel to scorch the very skies.

She threw the shield down like it was a physical object, screaming defiance back at the figments of her own imagination. "It's a lie!" she shouted. "I won't let this happen! I'll find a way!"

"Your optimism is really adorable," came the reply, calm as the sea before a storm, and she turned around as Slade appeared through the crackling fire. She could almost picture the leering smile concealed behind his unchanging mask. "But you're forgetting one thing. This is what you were born to do. You were sent here to destroy the Earth."

The flames loomed up around Slade, consuming her world in fire, and then a moment later they parted again, revealing the Tower. Distinctive even in death, it leaned to one side like a melting wax sculpture, all alone in a sea of magma. The curtains closed and opened once more, and then her friends appeared, turned to statues and swarmed by indescribable foes, dead as stones, their final agonies frozen forever on their lifeless faces.

"Your destiny will be fulfilled! The portal must be opened!"

The voice was not Slade's. It was deeper and ringed with thunder, a voice she had never heard in person but knew better than she did her own, and she took a step back in surprise as the world faded into a purple mist, save for two pairs of blood-red eyes that fixed on her like homing missiles. She couldn't look away from them, she couldn't run or teleport or phase through the walls. She could only stare into them as they swelled and grew and filled her vision, drawing her in deeper and deeper until...

She woke up with a gasp.

Raven was sitting cross-legged in her room, in the center of a meditation and protection circle she drew several hours ago. The circle was one of the most powerful rituals she knew, a barrier against telepathic, empathic, and all magical contact. Ten thousand warrior-monks of Azarath could have beaten their spells and weapons against this circle for a century without so much as disturbing the air within it.

It had kept Slade out for three seconds.

Slowly she calmed down, breathed, remembered where she was, what she was doing here, reached out empathically and found the five other presences within the tower, some of the clumped up in the common room, others scattered throughout the living sectors. Their very presence took the edge off the shock of waking up, and she chanted her mantra to herself once or twice more to calm herself down, but when she closed her eyes, she still saw four eyes like burning coals staring back at her, and her startled cry melded seamlessly with a soft beep from her communicator, indicating that at least one of those five presences wanted to see her.

She knew which one without having to check.

She considered ignoring it, feigning sleep or some such, but before she had made her mind up to do so or not, she was already sliding her books aside and blowing the candles out. Something to do, something other than trying and failing to meditate, might just be what she needed right now, and accordingly she stepped out of her useless protection circle with a sigh, taking a moment to adopt the proper expression of slightly annoyed disconcern before opening the door and proceeding down the hallway and up the stairs towards the common room.

All five of the others were there already, and apparently had been there for some time, to judge by the way Beast Boy was draped over his chair like a melted wax figure, the very personification of boredom. Cyborg and Robin were standing in front of the main screen, their backs to the door, staring at a frozen image of Slade, taken from one of the bottling plant's video-recorders. Starfire was off to one side, paying no mind to the others, looking down at a computer-generated printout of the fiery mark that had been emblazoned on Slade's forehead, while David (he didn't seem to resent them using his 'real' name, even now) sat on the edge of one of the couches, vaguely watching the proceedings with an empty, glazed look that indicated either terminal disinterest or shell shock. Given David, it was a tossup.

She sat down wordlessly on the opposite side of the couch, wishing she had brought a book with her, but true to form, Robin had known she was here without her having to announce herself. "Take a look at this," he said without further ado, "and tell me if you can identify anything."

Beast Boy yawned as he pressed a button on the remote control, rewinding the footage back a few moments, before playing it back. On the video screen, Slade stepped forward confidently, delivering one of his monotone messages, though with the volume muted, it was impossible to determine which one. The camera zoomed in as Slade walked nonchalantly towards it, focusing on his mask, and on the red rune burnt into his forehead like a brand.

"Freeze!" said Robin. Beast Boy obliged with a click of the remote, splaying the mark all over the screen.

"We've been trying to figure out what this mark is," said Robin at his most no-nonsense. "We think its the key to Slade's new abilities. So far, we've got nothing."

"I cross referenced it against every database on the planet," said Cyborg, sounding more than a mite annoyed. "Nothin' came up. Whatever this thing is, it's not from Earth."

"And I have been unable to identify the symbol either," chimed in Starfire. "It is not Tamaranean in origin, nor does it fit with my understanding of other races in the galaxy."

Raven drew her hood up over her head and shut her eyes for a moment as she desperately tried to think of something to say. Merely glancing at that horrible symbol was enough to send icicles stabbing through her heart, and her breath caught involuntarily. "I don't recognize it," she said quickly, trying to keep the hesitation out of her words, as well as keep a lid on that voice in her head that was screaming that she had to tell them all the truth, right here, right now.

The prospect of doing that was horrible enough to make it easy to ignore.

Clearly her discomfiture had not gone unnoticed, as when she opened her eyes again, even Beast Boy was eying her quizzically, and Robin had walked over and put what was no doubt supposed to be a comforting hand on her shoulder. "We will figure out why Slade's targeting you," he said, supremely confident as always. It might have worked, had that very prospect not filled her with almost as much dread as Slade himself.

"Slade doesn't concern me," she said, and it was the truth, after all. She managed to make it sound enough like her usual monotone that Beast Boy relaxed, and Robin nodded and turned back to the recording. He and Cyborg began discussing new avenues of research, as Beast Boy occasionally weighed in with a smart remark that helped very little and Starfire continued to examine the printout, periodically talking to herself in untranslated Tamaranean.

None of this concerned Raven enormously, for she was busy trying to determine what the hell she should do now. She had told the others that she was researching the mysterious mark on Slade's forehead, but her real goal in pouring over her books and tomes was considerably different. Her personal library, part her own, part 'inherited' from Malchior, was one of the most comprehensive in the galaxy, at least in the subjects of sorcery, demonology, and the occult. And yet no matter how many books she tore through, no matter what avenues she researched, she kept running straight into the same dead end. The same foregone conclusion.

On the other side of the couch, David suddenly inhaled sharply and seemed to wake up. Raven had been so occupied in her own thoughts that she hadn't even noticed him dozing. She glanced over at him, and then paused. What she had taken to be shell shock or disinterest, from a closer look, was something else entirely. David's eyes were only half-open, his head hanging, periodically jerking up as he roused himself. He looked beyond exhausted, like he was under the effects of some kind of sedative. None of the others seemed to be paying the slightest mind to him, but Raven raised an eyebrow. "You all right?" she asked.

David blinked several times, having apparently not even noticed Raven sitting down. "Y.. yeah..." he stammered out, coughing lightly. "I'm okay..."

"You don't look it," said Raven. Normally she let things like this go, but this was just weird. Besides, she needed something else to think about.

"I just haven't been sleeping great," he said, mumbling his words a bit. By the looks of things, that was an understatement, but it explained why the others were leaving him be. She was about to turn away when he added an offhand comment. "... nightmares."

She stopped.

"Nightmares?"

He shrugged. "Yeah... just... just a bad dream here and there..."

"Since when?"

There was an edge to her voice, but in his fatigued state, David plainly didn't notice. "Er... not sure," he said. "Since... since all that stuff happened?" He gestured vaguely at the screen, where Robin was playing back footage of Slade laying waste to the bottling plant.

Six different things came to mind at once, none of them pleasant, and Raven felt a apprehension beginning to wrap around her like a cold blanket, even if she couldn't identify the source just yet. "What... kind of nightmares?" she asked.

It was strange enough for her to be asking after such things that this time even David noticed, and raised an eyebrow weakly. "I don't... don't remember really. Just... bits and pieces of it. Why?"

She made up a reason. She even made it sound convincing. "We all get them once in a while. It's part of the job. I can show you ways to get rid of them if you tell me what they're about."

David seemed satisfied with that answer, either that or he was too tired to argue. "I was... in some kind of tower," he said, "with a bunch of people I don't recognize, aliens or something. They looked like big... lizards. And then... there was a man... a big man with a red beard. He was... saying something. Some kinda... I dunno... poem? I don't remember it..."

Raven exhaled slowly, her taut nerves relaxing somewhat. David's nightmare was weird, but despite her fears, it clearly bore no relation to the blood-drenched scenes she saw every time she tried to meditate. Likely it was meaningless, a sub-conscious reaction to stress and confusion, like most nightmares. One thing at least that wasn't related to her impending annihilation of the Earth.

"Do you... think you can help?" he asked.

It was something to do. "Just relax," she said. "I'll try a mind-calming spell. It was a simple cantrip, one she had learned long ago and used on all of the others at one point or another, designed to send the subject into a deep, and usually dreamless, sleep. Focusing on her energies and whispering her mantra to herself wasn't as good as meditating, but under the circumstances, it was the best she could do. David obligingly shut his eyes, and she gently placed a hand about six inches over his head, releasing a small ball of bluish energy into him. Instantly his entire form relaxed, and his head fell sideways onto his shoulder. Maintaining the spell took little concentration, and as she repeated the words to herself over and over, she took a minute to think this through. There had to be a line of research she hadn't considered, something oblique to the subject. All she needed was to find it. After all, it wasn't like there was any shortage of writings on the end of -

"The gem was born of evil's fire..."

Raven's eyes burst open like cannons discharging, her heart froze in her chest, and every muscle locked at once. Her throat seized up, cutting off her windpipe, choking her breath off in a gasp.

"... the gem shall be his portal..."

Slowly, with infinite care, she turned her head towards David, her eyes glistening with fear. It couldn't be. It couldn't be! Nobody on Earth knew that verse except..."

"... he comes to claim, he comes to sire..."

David was fast asleep, his face composed, and yet it was his voice speaking, his lips moving, barely audible even to her, just a whisper. Asleep or not, David was whispering words that no living being save Slade could have known, before her very eyes.

"... the end of all things - "

"NO!!"

Everyone in the room froze.

Before Raven could stop herself, she was on the other side of the room, backed up against the counter like a cornered animal. David, like everyone else, was wide awake, for the spell had ended the instant Raven had moved, phasing through the couch before she could stop herself. Slade's frozen face still leered from the video screen, but nobody was watching it. All eyes were on her, reflecting fear, concern, surprise, and confusion.

For a few seconds, nobody said anything. And then everyone spoke at once.

"Raven?"

"Friend?"

"Dude!"

"Whoa..."

"What?"

She warded off the questions already forming. "Sorry..." she said, mastering her emotions once more. "I thought I..."

"Raven, are you okay?" asked Beast Boy, giving her one of those looks of worried concern that almost hurt to see. "You don't look so good."

"Yeah," chimed in Cyborg. "You look kinda..."

"Pale?" suggested Robin.

"Well... paler," said Cyborg.

"I'm fine," said Raven. "I just... haven't been able to meditate recently."

It was perhaps saying something that they all seemed to accept this explanation, albeit not without some more questions she desperately didn't want to deal with right now.

"Is there... some way in which we might assist you?" asked Starfire. "Perhaps the mind-cleansing properties of the - "

Whatever Starfire had in mind was not something Raven was prepared to entertain. "I'll be fine," she snapped. "Stop worrying."

She had meant to say 'don't worry'.

"Look uh..." said Robin, the way he always did when trying to phrase something delicately, "we're gonna be at this a while. If you need to... get some rest or something?"

Right now, there was nothing she wanted more, and nothing she was less likely to be able to do, not that she could explain that to Robin. "... right," she said, unable to conjure up the words to express anything further. "I'll... do that..."

Robin nodded slowly, though his and the others' concerned expressions became no easier to bear. "David," he said, without even looking at the psychokinetic. "You should probably go too. Try and get some sleep. You're both on patrol tomorrow."

"Sure," said David. He also had not removed eyes from Raven, surprise having shaken off fatigue for the time being. "I'll try." David stood up slowly, and walked towards the door, casting the occasional glance back at Raven. Raven waited only a bit longer before taking her own leave, wanting to get out of here and back to her room before the others could start asking her the questions she could see forming in their minds already. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Beast Boy make a move to follow her, only to be stopped by Cyborg, who set a hand on the changeling's shoulder and shook his head no.

She moved quickly to the door, through it, and down the hallway, taking a different route down than David so as to avoid everyone. The instant she was out of sight of the others, she broke into a flat run, racing back to her room, panic bubbling up in her chest as she did so. She reached the door to her sanctuary, and phased through it without even bothering to open the door. As soon as she was inside, she stopped, falling back against the door and clutching the sides of her head as she slid down it onto the ground, her breath coming in short gasps, eyes clenched shut.

The gem was born of evil's fire...

She screamed.

The walls and door were close to soundproof, and nobody could hear her unless they were right outside her door, so she didn't stop herself, but screamed formlessly in rage and frustration for a good ten seconds. It helped a little bit. Slowly her heart rate dropped, she calmed down, and the frustration and anger she had been feeling were replaced with fear and dread. Her constant companions ever since her birthday.

By all the Gods, what now?

She'd asked herself that on her birthday. She'd asked herself that the day she found that thing inside David's mind. And the closer it got to judgment day, the more and more she demanded answers from the ether, and heard nothing. The people she knew she ought to be turning to for help were the very people she couldn't tell. Some things she could tell them, but not this. If they knew...

Did they know?

The others didn't but... Great Azar, David had been reciting the prophecy! THE prophecy! Did he even know what he was saying? Had he known he was saying anything at all? And what did that mean? If he knew, then he would tell the others. He'd been quick enough to tell Beast Boy about Terra after all and this was way beyond that. If they found out...

She shut her eyes again, tight, and forced herself to calm down. No, he didn't know. They didn't know. Not yet at least. She still had time to find a way out, but all her research had failed, and she had no idea where to turn. She opened her eyes again, and they fell on the piles of books scattered liberally around the room. Ten thousand volumes on every demon, monster, and occult nightmare in existence, and none of them had given her the solution she desperately needed. She needed answers. She needed help. Someone who she could talk to. Someone connected to all this. Someone who might have the answer she sought...

Her eyes opened wide.

No... No that... that was... she couldn't!

She... she couldn't... there had to be another...

One look around her room, at the sum total of the knowledge of ancient Azarath... and the absolute certainty of what she knew she was about to do landed on her like a six-ton weight.

Slowly, without even thinking about it, Raven stood back up. For a second she didn't move, and then mechanically, robotically, she turned around, walked over to her front door, and slid it aside with the touch of a button. She glanced up and down the silent hallway, stepped out into it, and let the door slide closed behind her.

It sounded like prison bars slamming shut.

O-O-O

This was wrong.

Raven stood in front of the unadorned metal door, still as a statue, waiting for... well for Azar-knew-what. For divine inspiration, for all she knew. Just waiting. And as she waited, the reminder kept popping back up.

This was wrong.

Raven had a very strong sense of what was right and wrong, partly innate, partly from training. One did not live amongst pacifist monks for all of one's childhood without picking up some sense of ethics. That she herself was a product of pure evil only served to help. Like recognized like.

And this, this thing here, this action she was about to take, was wrong.

It wasn't like there were laws about this sort of thing. Superpowers were rare enough across the galaxy that they didn't come with such things, hence why a good half of those with superpowers used them to commit crimes. Superpowers set one apart, above the limits imposed on normal society. Even the most stalwart of heroes got away with things no normal law enforcement agency in the world could. Superpowers gave one the ability to do things no legal scholar had ever thought of, even on alien worlds where such things were more common. What Raven was about to do was perfectly legal.

It was still wrong. And she knew it.

The stakes were more enormous than anyone but her knew, and she owed it to the others to try and stop what was coming, without burdening them with the weight of the terrible fate she had brought into their lives. She knew it sounded like an excuse, a cop-out, but it was true. And how many small little crimes had they permitted or even committed in order to perform a greater good? When Cyborg threw a car into a supervillain threatening the city, did he stop to ask permission of the owner? When Starfire snatched a pedestrian out of the way of gunfire, did she give them a choice in the matter? This was no different.

Except, of course, that it was completely different, not to mention wrong.

She sighed. In the end, what choice was there? She could not tell them. For better or worse, she couldn't risk it. She simply couldn't face their horrified stares, their angry shouts, their unanswerable demands as to why she had not warned them of the mind-numbing horror that they had let into their midst when she first arrived on Earth. Maybe that made her a coward. She didn't know. All she knew was that she could not tell them. She had to solve this on her own.

And so she phased through the door.

The room was sparsely furnished, in fact it didn't look much different from when it had just been a guest room. Neither the catastrophic mess of Beast Boy's nest, nor the obsessively-ordered neatness of Robin's cave, it, like its resident, was something of a middle ground. The desk on the right wall had several pages written in a shaky hand, weighted down by a stainless steel baton. A poster sat above the desk, a composite of all five of the original Titans, clearly one dating back at least a few months. Despite the anachronism, Raven wasn't surprised that it hadn't been replaced with one of the more modern versions that the souvenir shops around Jump were already selling.

A handful of books lined the shelves along the left wall, not enough to fill them, half of which were her own volumes, lent out for this or that reason. Next to that sat a pair of large, framed pictures, but puzzlingly, they were blank, slate grey like the rest of the wall. It was only upon approaching that Raven realized they weren't pictures at all, but some kind of tactile composite, an invisible mosaic of patterns and materials that looked identical to her, but no doubt stood out quite vividly to someone who could see via means other than light. She wondered for a second where he'd gotten it, then remembered the insane things people often sent her for no reason whatsoever, and only then did she remind herself that time was a factor here, and that putting the deed off made it no easier to stomach.

David lay on the far side of the room, in his bed, asleep, or close enough. She didn't have to approach to see that he was having another vivid dream, possibly another nightmare. His head twitched every so often, and his eyes were moving beneath his eyelids. Any second now, he might suddenly wake, an eventuality she would need to avoid in order to pull this off. As silently as a field mouse, she approached the bed until she was standing next to it, and she extended one hand and gently laid it on the blanket, whispering her mantra as quietly as she physically could.

"Azarath, Metrion, Zinthos..."

A soft blue glow enveloped the bed and the sleeper within it, as Raven released a spell into him. David went rigid for a moment, then slowly relaxed, his breathing slowing to a steady pace, his head falling over to one side. Raven maintained the spell for a few more moments, then drew her hand back and took a deep breath. The spell was a variant of a healing ritual she had once been taught, one that placed the subject into a deep, rapid, regenerative trance. Even if he only received ten minutes of actual rest, David would wake up feeling completely refreshed and alert.

But more importantly for Raven's purposes here, he would also, baring a massive sensory intrusion, be absolutely comatose for the next eight hours,

The voice of Azar came back to her as she gently slid a chair over to the side of the bed, and sat down in it, calming herself, steadying herself for what she was about to do.

"It is anathema to enter an unwilling mind..."

The words were practically burnt into Raven's head, a lesson repeated over and over by the monks of Azarath. No amount of excuse-making or moral relativism could change it. This thing she was doing was forbidden. It was criminal. It was wrong.

And worst of all, she knew the others would agree if she asked them.

The last time she had entered David's mind, she had done so with an astral projection, entering a psychic trance and leaving her body behind momentarily as she deployed her consciousness into his mindscape. That sufficed for simple investigations, certainly, and carried next-to-no risk, save that of being evicted rudely back into one's own body, but that was not what she intended to do here. She knew that whatever was in there would resent her intrusion, would resist a simple mind connection. She would have to do it... 'properly'.

She reached into her cloak, and drew out a small object...

"Azarath, Metrion, Zinthos."

"Azarath, Metrion, Zinthos."

"Azarath, Metrion, Zinthos..."

O-O-O

The mindscape was not as it had been.

Floating above the forest, Raven saw instantly that something drastic had changed here. Anyone could have. The trees still sat quietly in the still air, no sound of bird or beast disturbing them. The golden hemisphere that twinkled in the midst of the forest still shone as brilliantly as she remembered it, but there was something else here too. Five towers as tall as skyscrapers loomed over the canopy, each one massive enough to serve as the centerpiece of the Jump City Skyline. The five towers were scattered randomly across the forest, but they somehow did not look foreign, despite the setting, their bases merging seamlessly into the foliage, as though they had grown naturally out of the ground somehow. Each of the towers was comprised of a different material. One tower was made of polished steel, another of varnished wood, a third of shining crystal. The one nearest to her was made of a black stone that looked like volcanic pumice, and the last one seemed to be comprised of rubber. What these towers were, where they had come from, what they represented, all these were questions she could not answer now. There was one reason, and one reason alone she was here, and it lay within that golden dome.

She floated over the the canopy, giving the towers a wide berth, moving to the border of the hemispherical golden dome, within which lay the answers she sought, for better or worse. She paused at the border, collected herself, readied the small arsenal of spells she had a feeling she was about to need. And with everything ready, she stepped through.

It was as she remembered, a featureless black moonscape of cold ash, like the aftermath of an asteroid strike or a nuclear war, enveloping her the instant she stepped through the golden dome without limit or barrier visible from horizon to horizon. Unlike last time, however, she appeared to be alone. She had half-expected to see whatever-it-was sitting here, in its ash-dusted satin armchair, waiting for her to return, but instead the bleak terrain stretched on without break or pause, revealing nothing but more of the same.

She turned a complete circle, carefully surveying the surroundings for any threat or sign of life. Other than the charred skeletons of what might have once been steel girders, there was nothing nearby. She wasn't sure what she had anticipated coming in here, a discussion, an argument, a fight, but she certainly hadn't planned on being ignored.

... no, strike that. She wasn't being ignored. The area was too still, too quiet, too nondescript even for somewhere like this. She could feel her empathy prickling in the back of her mind. There was something out there, watching her, waiting for her to let her guard down.

"Come out," she said in as calm a voice as she could. "I just want to talk."

A babble of responses greeted her, coming in from all directions, and she snapped her head around back and forth, hoping to catch a glimpse of what was making the noise, but there was nothing visible. Disjointed words, bits of thirty different languages with no uniformity and no single voice, male or female, human or alien, echoed around her as though shouted by an invisible chorus. An angry one. None of the words were English, but there were a few human ones among them, Latin, Sumerian, something she guessed to be Chinese, lost among a hundred other tongues, some too alien for a human to even pronounce.

She kept circling, kept watching, kept her spells ready on the tip of her brain for instant deployment. "I'm not leaving until you answer me!" she shouted over the cacophony of noise, trying to sound resolute and determined. Perhaps it worked, for the voices stopped like someone had thrown a switch, leaving her listening to the soft sounds of her own footsteps, and then there came another voice, one deep and sharpened, its tone as cold as ice.

"I told you to leave this one alone..."

A shimmer in the unlit sky, a trembling of the air, and a figure coalesced out of the darkness. Indistinct, indescribable, it was tall and short and thin and broad and dark and light by turns, humanoid and otherwise in succession. It could not be described with any regularity, it simply was, but whether it had two eyes or fifty or none at all, it was staring straight at her with a savage gaze that could have struck a man dead at a hundred paces. She steeled herself, and stared right back at it.

"Who are you?" she asked.

"He is not for your filth!" screamed the being venomously as it walked, slithered, and floated towards her, its form shifting so frequently and fluidly that it was dizzying to watch. The only constant was the venomous hate pouring from it like a stench, lighting her empathic senses afire, sending a warning screaming through her head a second before the creature lifted its arm/tentacle/appendage, and brought forth fire.

Fire, roiling, nuclear fire, obliterated everything in sight and plunged the world into an undifferentiated riot of red and orange, enclosing her like an ocean, blotting out the very ground she stood upon. As before, the only defense she had was her shield, a barrier of pure will, one that had failed her last time, forcing her to retreat into her own body once again.

But this time was different.

With one hand, she manifested her shield, and whereas last time it had shattered beneath the flaming barrage, this time it held, held strong and firm as the flames of rage battered against it, and with her other hand she conjured forth psychic energies and mystical powers unnameable in human tongues, and clenched her fist like a boxer, and brought it around, and commanded the fire to be gone.

And it went.

Flames potent enough to consume a planet and burn stars to ash were extinguished at her command, swept aside like leaves before a hurricane, and when they were gone, they revealed the same ashen moonscape, the same space-dark sky, the same monstrous figure standing before her, rage and hatred mollified perhaps by what she took to be shock, that it's powerful toys had availed not to drive the intruder back.

"I didn't ask you if he was for my 'filth'!" snapped Raven, darkly, her voice locked in the no-nonsense tone she took with recalcitrant supervillains. "I asked what you are! Answer me!"

The creature did not reply, though its shifting features began to slow, devolving down into a small humanoid, one she knew she was going to recognize before she recognized it. One she had been expecting to see. David.

But it wasn't David. It couldn't be David. As before, the expression was too direct, too out of character, for it to be anything of the sort. Whether expression of some subconscious facet of his personality or something else altogether, it now stood before her looking surprised. Astonished. Even scared.

"What have you done... ?"

There was such apprehension in that voice that Raven nearly hesitated, but caught herself as she stepped forward, her shield falling to be replaced by a swirling network of energy that kicked up dust about her feet.

"I'm not some amateur psychic you can just push around," she said to the thing that wore David's expression. "And I'm not leaving until you answer me!"

"Dear God... you... you've... manifested?"

David, or whatever it was, recoiled a full pace and a half at this realization, and there was no mistaking the fear, the near-panic in his voice as he said it. He brought his hands around again, and tongues of flame and fire burst from them, as raging and potent as before. Yet with a single extended palm, she conjured forth a shield strong enough to repel them, advancing at an even pace, parting the fire before her with an outstretched hand.

"You can't get rid of me with mind-tricks," she insisted, brushing aside further bursts of flame and raw energy, the creature that resembled David retreating as she approached, blasting away at her with what she hoped was everything it had. The ground warped and twisted, the sky burnt and buckled and collapsed inward, the air itself combusted around her, but nothing could David inflict upon her that she could not counter. She had spent the necessary time in preparation, hanging spells on the edge of her brain, preparing her mental disciplines for the contest she knew would result. She was not merely projecting some image of her own mind into this place. She was here, physically and mentally, in a form Euclidian physics was not equipped to describe. In psychic terms, it was called a "manifestation".

No matter how desperate 'David' was, no matter what world-shattering powers he called upon, against Raven, such powers were not enough, and she swatted them aside, willing herself forward, teleporting directly in front of him and grabbing him by the shirt, hoisting the smaller figure up as she did so. "Tell me what you are!" she shouted in his face. And as she did this, she saw a spirit-shriveling fear flash in the thing's eyes, and then all of a sudden it was gone.

For a second, Raven stood there, blinking at her empty hands, alone once again in the dark landscape. She looked left and right, unsure of where he could possibly have gone, until it occurred to her that they were on this thing's home ground, and it was unlikely to have just moved a few virtual feet, not when it exhibited such mortal terror.

She suddenly realized what she needed to do.

"Azarath, Metrion, Zinthos," she chanted quietly, channeling her energy into a powerful breaching spell, and she extended one finger, which began to spark a pale blue, like a live wire severed and brandished in the air.

"Azarath, Metrion, Zinthos," she repeated, and the sparks grew in intensity with each word. "Carazon, Rakashas, Endere. Vaserix Endrien Animadus! Azarath, Metrion, Zinthos!"

Reality tore.

Slowly, painfully, she dragged her sparking finger down like a butter knife, ripping open a gash in the very fabric of her present location. Only once a massive rip had been torn, six feet tall and spilling light like a cracked windowshade, only then did she dispel the magic with a sigh of relief, and stepped through.

And as she did so, she swore that just for a second she could hear the sound of bells...

O-O-O

Before becoming a Titan, he had not thought it was possible to actually hate an alarm.

One second he was blissfully asleep, unconscious, unaware of the world, and the next, the room flashed red, and an klaxon suitable to raise the dead was blaring in his ears. Had someone walked into his room with a cannon and discharged it next to his head, he could not possibly have been more rapidly woken up.

It was not the most pleasant way to greet the morning.

No... strike that, it wasn't the morning yet. In fact it wasn't even close. The clock showed 9:27 PM. He was fairly certain that he'd only gotten to bed somewhere around 9. He'd been asleep for less than half an hour, or at least he thought it had been that. Honestly, he had not stopped to check the clock when he reached his room, collapsing in his bed without bothering to draw back the covers or change out of his uniform. He hadn't even taken off his belt, a fact he now regretted, as the buckle had dug into his stomach as he slept. Yet... weirdly... he no longer felt tired. Indeed he felt miles better than he had before collapsing, like he had slept for twenty hours rather than twenty minutes. Maybe he was finally starting to adjust to the Titans' weird semi-nocturnal schedule, as Robin kept insisting he eventually would. Either way, it was hardly something to complain about...

He reached over and hit the acknowledge button on the far wall, which mercifully cut off the klaxon, and sat up on the bed to try and find his communicator. As he did, he noticed something else odd. His chair, normally sitting way over by his desk, was right next to his bed, sitting upright and empty, facing him. And sitting on top of the chair was a small purple hand mirror.

The sight was so incongruous that David did a double-take. The chair he might have moved while stumbling about his room in a half-comatose stupor, but he was almost certain that he had never seen the mirror here before. Granted, a mirror was hardly the most menacing of objects, but he felt a chill of unease run down his spine as he looked at it, and slowly reached over to pick it up...

"Robin to Devastator."

Jolted out of his musings on household objects, David withdrew his hand and seized the communicator on his dresser.

"Devastator here," he said.

"We've got a situation. Meet us in the common room."

"Got it." David clipped the communicator and baton onto his belt, and got back up, sliding the chair back over to his desk and absentmindedly dropping the mirror on top of the letter he had been writing back to one of the kids from the DCS. And a moment later he was out the door, the mirror already forgotten, as the old, familiar tightness in his stomach that accompanied any alert began to re-assert itself, as it always did. As he realized by now, it probably always would.

This was not the time...

He rode the elevator up to the common room, trying to steady his nerves and quiet the voice in his head that was screaming that this time, surely this time he was going to go out there and get pounded into jelly by whateverthehell they were going after. It was when he stepped through the doors into the room itself that he realized that this time, that voice might not be so wrong this time...

The viewscreen was covered with pictures of Slade, as it had been before, but rather than old recordings, the symbol in the upper right of the screen showed that this was new footage, live footage, filled with the same scenes of fire and destruction that the old ones had been. It did not take a leap of genius to determine what the emergency was. Slade had decided to make a typically 'theatrical' re-appearance.

The knot tightened.

" - still not answerin'," said Cyborg as David entered. "And the sensors are sayin' she's not in the Tower."

"She is not within her room," said Starfire, entering behind David with a look of concern on her face, having apparently taken the stairs up. I can find nothing to indicate where she may have gone."

By process of elimination, they were talking about Raven.

Robin looked singularly unamused, but said nothing immediately, as Beast Boy looked from one Titan to the other. "Well, we gotta go looking for her, don't we?" he asked, clearly deeming it a self-evident fact.

"We can't," said Robin. "Slade's tearing half the city apart. The police have called in a Code 1."

Cyborg whistled and David winced. Code 1 was bad news. It meant that the civic authorities were abandoning the entire area pending the Titans dealing with the issue. Faced with something like the newly re-energized Slade, David supposed he couldn't blame them, but time had not softened his reaction to having been appointed one of the solutions of last resort for an entire city. And the last fight they had had with Slade had... not gone well...

That Raven had gone missing just as Slade had chosen to show up again made things even worse.

Still, the situation was bad enough that even Beast Boy didn't protest, at least not after a quick glance showed him that Cyborg was clearly behind Robin this time. The only remaining question was dealt with quickly.

"Can you go?"

It took David a second to realize that the question was aimed at him. "Er... yeah... yeah, I'm okay," he said.

He was surprised when that didn't suffice immediately. Starfire and Beast Boy exchanged looks and Robin narrowed his eyes. "You sure?" he asked. "You were pretty out of it earlier."

"Got some sleep, I guess," said David. "I feel a lot better." Not that he was eager to go racing off to face Slade, but he physically felt up to it, at least. Scared as he usually was, he wasn't going to lie about it...

Based on the way Robin was looking at him, David guessed that had the situation been any less urgent, he would have ordered him to stay behind. To be frank, David didn't really understand it himself, but there were plainly more important mysteries to pursue right now, and so at Robin's order, they were soon headed for the T-car, David bringing up the rear, whispering a prayer to whoever might be listening that the situation be not quite as bad as had made it out to be.

O-O-O

Whoever was listening had a perverse sense of humor. It wasn't just as bad as it looked. It was far worse.

David knew that they were in for trouble when they passed the first burning minivan. It was lying on its roof, wheels still spinning as the burning tires cast thick black smoke into the air. Starfire had gone pale at the sight, Robin and Cyborg fallen silent as Cyborg's grip on the steering wheel tightened visibly. Even if Beast Boy hadn't stopped trying to call Raven, there was a subtle shift in his increasingly desperate calls over the communicator, an edge in his voice that augured nothing good. David by now knew how to read the signs of the cold fury that all of them felt when faced with things like this, and had it been anyone but Slade waiting for them, he would have rated the villain's chances slim to none.

As it was, he was sitting in the backseat trying to convince himself that it had there had been nothing inside the driver's seat of the minivan but skeletal-shaped shadows and figments of his imagination...

The area looked like a bomb had been dropped on it. Buildings lay in gutted ruin, vehicles torn to pieces and scattered over the area. Bodies lay ostentatiously in the streets, some burnt down to skeletons, some still adorned in their clothing and uniforms. Two cops lay scorched to death beside their blackened police cruiser, their useless guns still held in their hands. Beyond them were scattered a half dozen other corpses, most burnt beyond recognition, several of whom were on their backs, their hands held up in front of them defensively, as though they had tried to ward off whatever had killed them.

"We split up to find Slade and take him down," said Robin in a voice that was barely controlled, "whatever it takes!" Nobody responded in words, certainly not David, whose finely tuned sense of when he was in over his head was screaming like it never had before, yet in the face of this... this atrocity, what else could be done? Even from a half-civilian? Nobody else said a word, but David didn't have to look at them to know that they were all ready to subject Slade's new invulnerability powers to a very rigorous test.

And then suddenly, Slade was there.

He was standing next to what had once been an abandoned storefront, now a smoldering wreck, his arms crossed, staring down at his handiwork with evident pleasure, watching as the T-car screamed towards the building, screeched to a halt, and disgorged all five Titans at once.

"I do love my job..." said Slade, just within the range of hearing, and he raised his hand to summon more fire just as Cyborg planted a full-power blast of his sonic cannon straight into his back. The shot would have torn a hole through tank armor, but sufficed only to stagger Slade, and extinguish his flames, and he turned around to face the Titans almost resignedly, like this was nothing more than an inconvenience on his time.

"Mass murder?!" said Robin, his voice seething with outraged anger. "Vandalism?! This is low even for you, Slade!"

"The Teen Titans..." said Slade, preternaturally calm, as always. "So nice of you to drop by, but... as you can see, I'm in the middle of something. I'll deal with you in a few minutes."

Slade's cavalier attitude seemed to only antagonize Robin further. "No!" he said. "We'll deal with you now!"

"You can't always have what you want, Robin..." said Slade, and before anyone could so much as blink, he slammed his fist into the ground, shattering the pavement, and throwing David and all the others off their feet. In the time it took to scramble back up, Slade had vanished again, leaping up onto a roof nearby and out of sight.

Robin didn't hesitate. "Titans!" He shouted. "Go!"

They went, Starfire and Beast Boy flung themselves upwards after Slade, Robin pursuing them with piton guns and grappling launchers to propel himself up. Cyborg could not do so, and neither could David, but Cyborg had no intention of being left behind, and to be honest, neither did David, for many different reasons. Both of them took off on foot, over and through the debris that choked the alleys and streets they raced down. Cyborg had enough weight and mass to smash his way straight through most of the blockades in his path, and anything he could not simply shove aside, either he or David blew to pieces without pausing, lest Slade get out of their sight.

Still, they could not catch up with the aerial battle already begining to rage overhead as Robin hurled birdarangs, Starfire's blasts lit the entire area up in green, and Beast Boy slashed at Slade in form of osprey, eagle, or vampire bat. Cyborg bellowed in frustration as he shunted yet another fallen girder aside after David helpfully blew it in half. "It just don't make sense!" he exclaimed, though David wasn't sure he was talking to him. "This whole place is getting demolished in a couple weeks! If he wanted it gone, there just wasn't no call to come in and... and..." Cyborg couldn't even finish his sentence, opting instead to finish off with a roar, and a low percentage shot at Slade with his sonic cannon that missed by a dozen yards. David had to content himself with chasing after Cyborg, and waiting for an opportunity to make himself useful.

A child's scream provided it.

As it was designed to evolutionarily, the sound pierced right through everything that was happening and found Cyborg and David on the ground, though not well enough to pinpoint where it was coming from. Nevertheless, neither David nor Cyborg paused to listen for it to repeat itself, but simultaneously stopped, turned, and raced towards what seemed to be the most likely group of burning buildings, Cyborg rushing towards the one on the right as he signaled for David to take the leftmost one.

The doors were closed and burning, but doors had long-since ceased to be a barrier to David, and he snatched the baton from his waist as he ran, and swung it vaguely at the entrance as he approached it, blowing both doors to bits with scarcely a thought. A moment later he was inside, wordlessly praying that the building wasn't about to collapse on his head. Wordless prayer had become a far larger part of his life in recent months...

For the moment, his luck held, and the building remained standing. He ground to a halt, listening for anything, and heard it soon after, a little girl's shriek, unintelligible, but likely a call for help, given the circumstances. He spotted a stairwell and bounded up it as quickly as he could, a mistake, as the top step collapsed under his footfall, and nearly sent him plunging down two stories into the basement. He managed to catch himself on the edge of the stair, and scrambled back up on top of it, thankful as never before that his uniform was fireproof, and tore down the hallway, shattering anything in his path with swings of his baton and bursts of his powers, until he finally reached the end of the hallway, blasted both hinges off the final door in his way, and entered.

The room was choked with smoke, so much so that he nearly fainted. He could see nothing whatsoever, and so dispensed with light and switched to his molecular vision, but the vaporized carbon made that no better, and he switched back and simply ducked down. Two children, one a baby, one a little girl of barely four or five years lay crouched on the ground next to a younger boy, two at the most, David guessed. The girl was frantically tugging at the toddler's arm, but a falling beam had apparently landed atop him and either killed him or knocked him out. The beam itself had broken... indeed it almost looked as if it was bitten in half, covered in something resembling bite marks, but David had no time to worry about that. The smoke would fill the room completely in a moment, and the building might collapse at any time.

The windows were made of shatterproof glass. David nonetheless shattered them with a thought, sending glass cascading down into the alley below, and crawled over to the three children. The toddler was breathing, coughing in fact, and both of the other children were crying, but David didn't have time to worry about that either. He scooped the fallen toddler up without a word, and thanked what little luck he had when the little girl, instead of screaming her head off or going catatonic, picked the baby up herself and extended one hand tearfully to David. Grabbing her hand with his own, and holding the toddler as best he could with the other, he scrambled out the window onto the fire escape, helped the little girl over the navigate the windowsill by simply blowing it out of the wall, and was trying to figure out how they would all get down the fire ladders when something hit the fire escape and tore it apart.

He fell a full story down onto the ground, landing on his back atop the shattered safety-glass, which might not have been so annoying had the toddler he was holding not landed on top of him an instant later. Once again his uniform saved him, as the titanium polymer threads withstood the sharp fragments far better than his skin would have, and other than a few bruises and a splitting headache, he was by and large all right. A glance around revealed that the girl had hit an awning before falling onto the ground alongside the still-crying baby, and was weakly trying to say something. David caught the name 'Bobby'. Probably one of the boys' names. He got up gingerly, reaching down for his communicator to call someone down to help him get these kids out of the danger zone, but his hand fell to his side as he realized, all of a sudden, that he was not going to get that far...

Slade stood in the alleyway, blocking the exit onto the street, his fists closed and wreathed in flame. His single eye was trained on David like a laser, but he did not move, not immediately, waiting as David's face lost what color remained in it, and while the little girl picked herself and the baby up, and crept up behind David, peering out from behind him at the armored cyclops in their path.

"I have to say," said Slade. "You weren't the one I was expecting to meet here."

David tried to swallow the enormous lump forming in his throat as he glanced around in vain for the other Titans. Slade had somehow given them the slip, and he could not do the same in return without guaranteeing the deaths of all three kids, or worse. The knot in his stomach tightened so much that he could barely breathe, and Slade smirked and slowly walked towards them.

"Wh... what do you want?" asked David.

"What any messenger wants," said Slade simply. "For their message to be heard. Unfortunately, that requires the recipient to be present, and she seems to have declined my invitation."

"You mean Raven?"

Slade laughed. "It's not Raven I'd be worried about right now if I were you, Devastator. And in any case, I've a message for you too..."

Scared or not, David's next actions were essentially automatic. He pressed the panic button on his communicator, and drew his baton once again, all in the same motion, falling back half a step, the most he could while still remaining between the kids and Slade. With a thought, he sheathed the baton in its red aura. The pulsating warmth of the baton was a slight comfort, but only a slight one.

Slade looked amused. "Are you joking, boy?" he asked. "What do you intend to do with that?"

"Take another step and you'll find out," spat back David, trying to mask his apprehension with little success. "They'll be peeling you off the walls with a spatula."

"You're going to blow me up then?" asked Slade, spreading his arms wide. "By all means try." There was the barest hint of a smile as Slade ostentatiously took another step, pausing momentarily to offer the opportunity to detonate him. "But you already know that's not going to work, don't you?"

If anything, molecular vision was even more terrifying than the normal reality. Against the backdrop of gas, liquid, and solid molecules that ringed him, Slade stood out only by his absence. In normal vision, he was a walking, armored figure, but in molecular terms, he was nothing, a black hole in reality, a stable vacuum displacing everything normal. Slade was right. David could neither manipulate nor even detect the elements Slade was comprised of, could not determine what they were, could not determine if they were.

Somehow this made everything several orders of magnitude more terrifying than before.

Slade read the astonished fear on David's face like he was a book printed in block letters. "I thought so..." he said, and resumed walking. "Honestly, child, do you even know who I am?"

Desperately forcing himself not to turn and run, David managed to stammer a reply, all attempts to appear unafraid abandoned. "Y... yes," he said, tightening his grip on his baton. "But..."

"But what?"

David shut his eyes and took a ragged breath. "But I also know something you don't..."

"Really?" asked Slade with an amused laugh. "And what's that?"

David set his teeth, braced himself, and cracked his eyes open. "The exact chemical composition of asphalt."

It took Slade just a moment, a brief hesitation to figure out what David was talking about, and just as he did,the street exploded underneath his feet.

The blast was raw and powerful, as strong as an anti-tank mine, and it blasted Slade up like a rocket, an ascent aborted a second later when he slammed headfirst into an overhanging streetlight built into the side of one of the buildings. The light shattered on impact in a cascade of sparks, and Slade plunged back down to the alley floor, only to be met by another blast, this aimed both up and outwards, which threw him back towards the entrance to the alley.

Maybe the explosions had hurt Slade and maybe they had not, but they bought seconds, and David didn't even try to determine what had happened to Slade before he turned on the brick wall of the building next to the one he had escaped from. A wave of his magic wand, and an eight foot hole was torn through it like lacework struck with a cannonball. Waving the smoke out of his face, he half dragged, half shoved the little girl through the hole, laying the stirring toddler down next to her, and shouted over the echoes of the blasts for her and her siblings to run like hell. He had to hope that the blasts hadn't deafened them, or if they had, that she'd have the sense to run anyway while he tried to hold Slade long enough for the others to...

Something grabbed him from behind and pulled him up, off his feet, and before he knew what was happening, he was dangling forty feet in the air. He squirmed and twisted reflexively, not even considering what would happen if he did break free, but it mattered not in the end, for a second later he was spun around and hauled over a metal railing and onto another fire escape, face to face with Slade.

They had plainly not hurt him.

"Was that supposed to be clever?" asked Slade, looming over him, pressing him up against the railing of the fire escape so hard that he would have pitched over backwards had Slade not been holding him by the shoulders. He tried to bring up his baton, But Slade contemptuously swatted it out of his grasp. "Did you think I came here to watch your little fireworks display? Do you think this is all a game? Are you such a fool as to ignore the message I bore you?"

Even in the midst of panic, there was a kernel of logic left to David that recoiled at this. Something made no sense here. "You... you killed a dozen people to deliver a message?"

Slade laughed. "I already delivered you the message. I killed a dozen people to make you pay attention to it."

"What are... what are you talking about?!" shouted David, making a renewed effort to break free and damn the fall, but Slade's hands were like steel vices, and in a flash, he remembered laying on the pavement of another street somewhere in the city, watching Slade hold Raven in a similar trap.

"I am talking about Armageddon!" snarled Slade, and he spun around, throwing David down onto the floor of the fire escape. "I am talking about the end of the world. Skies burning, oceans boiling, fire from the heavens. It is all coming about."

"You're insane!"

"Oh I'm very much in control of my faculties, David," said Slade, crossing his arms and watching as David picked himself up. "Come now, you always knew it was going to end this way, didn't you?"

"End what way?"

"With you destroying the Titans?"

David froze. "... what?!"

"Oh perhaps you didn't think it was quite that dramatic," said Slade. "But I know you've always suspected that there was something wrong with you... those powers you're so afraid of... even now... the ones any sane superhero would already have turned to instead of standing there staring at me like a gape-mouthed child..."

"I couldn't destroy the others, even if I wanted to!" shouted David back at Slade, not bothering to ask himself when it was he had decided to take this line of discussion seriously.

"Relying on your own weakness as a defense?" asked Slade with an amused tone, and he strolled over towards David as though he was on holiday. "Face it, David, you haven't got the first idea what you are and aren't capable. But you've always known that whatever these powers were augured no good, haven't you? You knew that if you made use of these abilities of yours, you'd one day wind up on the opposite side of propriety... that's why you hid them for so long, never turned to them, never dared even think about them. You knew that if you ever started to use them, it wouldn't be as a hero..."

David blinked. This was... he'd...

"You've been spying on us!"

"We're all being watched," said Slade. "You and I have something in common in that regard. But both your conscience and my message gave you the same warning, one you've chosen to ignore. I brought you all here to bear witness to the consequences."

David's anger was boiling over by this point. "I don't know what the hell you are talking about! I'm not going to destroy anyone except you!"

"Oh, but you are, David," replied Slade. "You are going to destroy someone else. In fact, you're going to destroy all of them. Whether you like it or not, whether you deny it or not, it doesn't matter in the slightest. You are the catalyst for the annihilation of the Teen Titans."

David could barely speak, but as Slade simply stood there, watching him, a voice of defiance welled up in his throat. "No!" he snapped. "No, that's a lie!"

"Oh is it?"

"You told Raven the exact same thing!" said David, pointing a finger at Slade accusingly. "You stood there in the street and told her that she was gonna end the world. Flesh to stone, blood from the skies, I remember all that! And now all of a sudden I'm the one who's supposed to kill everybody? At least keep your lies straight!"

Slade chuckled darkly. "I told Raven she was destined to destroy the world. You on the other hand... are not merely prophesied to annihilate humanity. You're the cancer that will bring your friends down from within."

"That's not true!"

"I assure you - "

"I don't care what you assure me of! It's not happening! Not ever! Not to Raven, not to me, not to anyone!"

Slade laughed, a long, roaring, belly laugh. "David, don't you see? You've already done it."

"... what?"

"It's already happened. It happened long ago in fact. You've already struck the blow that will destroy your friends. You just don't realize it yet." Slade inclined his head almost mockingly. "Raven does though. On some level, she's always known it would come about, hasn't she? And do you want to know the best part?"

Slade stepped over and leaned in. David was in no position or mindset to stop him. "The best part is," whispered Slade almost conspiratorially, "unlike her, you still have a chance to stop it. Even now, you could still undo the damage you've done, reverse it, save your friends. You could do it... but you won't. Even if you knew how, you wouldn't, because you've addicted yourself. Because it's become more important than you dare acknowledge, even to yourself. And so you're going to sit back and watch your world burn, rather than lift a finger to put the fire out..."

Slade stood back up, slowly, taking a step or two back as he flexed his hands and fingers, summoning fresh flames to dance over his unblemished armor, as David stared mutely at him.

"So no matter how much you or your little friends squirm and cry," said Slade. "You are going to be the agent of their annihilation, and there is nothing anyone else can do to stop it..."

"How 'bout this?!"

Both Slade and David turned their heads upward in search of whoever had spoken that last question, an instant before it dissolved into a formless war cry as Cyborg suddenly plunged out of nowhere.

Slade had only enough time to blink as a half-ton of titanium and circuitry landed on his head at a hundred miles an hour, all focussed on Cyborg's fist, which he slammed into Slade's faceplate so hard that the fire escape collapsed under the blow, as did the three beneath it. David found himself falling towards the ground, but suddenly there was Starfire, grabbing him around his chest and pulling up hard for a second, before setting him down gently on the trash-littered alley floor. It was all so fast that David barely had a chance to blink before he was standing on the ground, and Starfire was handing him his baton, which had landed nearby.

"Are you unharmed?"

He had no idea how to answer that question, but one way or another, he was not required to, for a moment after Starfire asked, there was a massive explosion from further down the alley, and both of them turned in time to see Cyborg blasted bodily into the air by a huge gout of flame, which parted to reveal Slade, unperturbed as ever, standing in the center of a shallow crater surrounded by the wreckage of several fire escapes.

Starfire gave a shout and unleashed a beam of green energy from her eyes, but Slade absorbed it like a sponge, and released flames from his fingertips that forced both Starfire and David to dive to the ground to avoid being incinerated. David brought his baton around and fired a half dozen bricks at Slade from the wall behind him, but as they had the last time he tried such a stunt, the bricks merely shattered against his armored hide, doing nothing whatsoever, even when he commanded them to detonate on impact with all the power he could muster. Starfire had no better luck. Her blasts of energy were worse than useless, for Slade caught one of the starbolts and hurled it back, blowing both of them aside and cloaking the entire area in smoke.

And when the smoke cleared, Slade was gone.

David and Starfire both assumed it was a trick, and both immediately scrambled back to their feet, watching to see when Slade would re-appear. But despite their assumptions, Slade did not show himself, and only slowly did it occur to them that this time he might not be returning.

Their communicators crackled to life at once, and David pulled his off his belt to see Cyborg standing on the roof he had been blasted onto. "I can't see anybody," said Cyborg. "Are y'all out there?"

"We're here," said David, as Starfire lifted off the ground to continue searching either for Slade, the others, or other survivors. David glanced over at the hole he'd blown in the wall, but there was no sign of the three children he had told to run. He'd have to go looking as soon as he called it in. "Slade's... gone, I think."

"I doubt that," chimed Robin in over the communicator. "Can anyone else see him?"

"Uh... no..." came the voice of Beast Boy. "But uh... I can see something else..."

"What is it?" asked Robin.

"Um... dude... you know that symbol of Slade's... ?"

O-O-O

The floor was made of marble.

On Earth, marble was associated with antiquity, with Ancient Rome and temples to forgotten gods. People thought of it as a fancy, polished, civilized-looking stone, and used it to line the floors and walls of office buildings, hotel lobbies, or government buildings. It was associated with culture and respectability.

Alien cultures, on the other hand, understood what marble was really for...

Raven crouched on the side of the round atrium, one hand on the polished marble floor. The stone was white, pure white, no imperfections or 'marbling' to color it, save for in the very center of the room, where a circle of black stone had been inscribed into it, with seven rays extending from it equidistantly. Each ray was a different color, purple, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange, and red, set against the white marble surrounding them in a stark and striking pattern. Raven poured her mind into the marble surface, feeling the currents of magic pulsing through them, using the natural conductivity of marble in regards to all things sorcerous to distribute immense power throughout the room.

Or at least the simulation of it.

She had sliced through every misdirection and layer of obfuscation to get here, and stopped. She could not explain why she had stopped in words, but there was a sixth-sense to these things, one she had long ago learned was your best friend in mind-travel. Particularly within your own, but often times even within other people's.

She stood back up, surveying the atrium, a riot of arched alcoves, open to the elements on the sides, the roof carved in mahogany and other exotic woods, save for in the center above the black inlaid circle, where an open oculus admitted the sky. Above shone no sun, and glimmered no moon, but instead sat an alien sky full of planets and stars near enough to resolve. The atrium was perched atop an immense tower of ivory or limestone, and down below it lay a vast city, but the city was on fire, glowing red and orange in the shallow half-light, smoke vaguely shimmering in the distance. The air was still now, but once in a while it would pick up, and carry with it the faintest echo of distant cries.

Painful cries.

Not even in the wildest conspiracy fantasies she had indulged in, did she ever imagine that David had ever laid eyes on a scene like this one, which of course meant only that she wasn't viewing a memory, but a mental construct. Why his mind, or whoever's mind this really was, had decided to erect this scene was a question best left to psychologists. She had work to do.

There was something here, something hidden, and she had to find it, for she suspected she knew what it was. She closed her eyes and floated up into the middle of the atrium, her cloak wrapped around her, repeating her mantra to herself as she reached out with her mind, a recursive scan of this mind-space she had entered laying bare its foundations and feeling for the patterns of thought that formed its skeleton, isolating the most powerful ones, homing in mentally until she could...

"Curse you!" came a shout from right behind her. "Have you not done enough?! Curse you and all that bears your touch!"

Raven opened her eyes and turned, and saw a horror.

A writhing mass of tentacles sat in the middle of the atrium, some capped with fanged mouths, some with octopus suckers, and some with lidless, bloodshot eyes. Agitated and angry, the tentacles snapped their jaws and beat the air and floor, extending and retracting around a pulsating central body quivering with a raw malevolence so thick she could smell it.

"You invade our home!" shouted the monster, though no specific mouth was doing the talking, the voice originating from somewhere inside the core. "You assail our very thoughts! And you demand answers from us?! Curse you! We shall lay your mind bare to be devoured, and spare the universe your tainted filth!"

Raven had been called worse things than this by many a villain, and the threats did not phase her. "You're not in charge here," she said. "Tell me what I want to know."

"We will tell you nothing!" shouted the slithering horror. "You have performed a final sacrilege, and you shall suffer for it!"

Several tentacles snapped at her, but she raised her shield and blocked each assault as it came, gathering energy of her own and encasing the writhing mass in a black sphere, lifting it bodily off the ground and keeping it hovering in mid-air.

"This isn't some memory-scape," she said to the screaming, twisting mass of alien flesh. "David didn't invent this. You did."

"We are one and the same, and you defile us both!"

"No you're not," said Raven, forcing herself to remain in control. "You know things he doesn't. You know what I am. You know about my father."

The tentacles all froze, the unblinking eyes locked on her like lasers. The voice, when it spoke next, was raspy and quiet, but contained a core of shocked revulsion that could not have been fake, not this deep inside the mind...

"Your... father?!"

It didn't know?

Suddenly the tentacle monster disappeared, popped out of existence like a burst balloon, and Raven was once more alone in the atrium, or rather she appeared to be. Carefully, she reached out empathically, looking for something out of the ordinary, and had just begin isolating the patterns of thought around her when the entire scene shifted.

The ground beneath her feet turned from marble to some other kind of stone, and she found herself standing atop a flat-cropped pyramid. Another city was arrayed before her feet, but this one was not on fire, indeed it was gleaming and polished, sparkling in the twin suns overhead. Throngs of people surrounded the enormous structure, all staring up at the platform Raven was standing on, but not at her.

A dozen feet away, there stood a young woman dressed in white. Though the figures filling the courtyards and plazas below were armored and armed with a variety of lethal weapons, the woman herself wore no armor, nor held any weapons save one, a gleaming scepter of gold and brass, atop which was set a crimson ruby the size of a pineapple. Cries and cheers wafted up from the crowd below, cries of victory or acclamation, who could tell, but as Raven watched, the young woman smiled, and raised the scepter high above her head, and before everyone's eyes, the golden instrument caught fire, flames ringing it like a halo, and yet the young woman's hand was unburnt...

The sight of the flames sent the crowd into a delirium of cheers and trumpet-calls, but Raven heard none of them, her eyes fixed on the flaming scepter, as the young woman lowered it slowly to her side, letting the flames lick at her skirt without scorching the fabric or shimmering the air. Fire without heat had many metaphorical or psychological interpretations... but all she could think of was the literal one she knew all too well.

"What are you?"

Raven whirled around and found a facsimile of David staring back at her, a red-sheathed baton in hand, to her eye, infinitely more dangerous than the real thing. Its eyes were blazing like bonfires, and its demeanor unquestionably malevolent, albeit cautious.

She decided on honesty. "You know what I am."

"Daughter of Trigon, why are you here?" asked David, baton held menacingly forward.

"I need to know what you know," said Raven carefully, "about what's happening."

David's eyes narrowed. "Why?" he asked.

"Because I need to know how to stop it."

Her counterpart seemed to consider this for a moment, and then, disconcertingly, began to laugh, the laugh building and building until it was uproarious, and the figure that was either some extreme manifestation of a buried side of David's personality, or something completely different, was shaking with booming, thunderous laughter.

"You pathetic, idiot, demon!" he shouted back at her. "How great of a fool do you think I am?!"

"It's not a trick!" insisted Raven, "and I'm not joking! You know what's going to happen, don't you?!"

"Of course I know," said David, winding his laughter down. "You are the gem. You're going to bring about the end of the world."

"Then you have to tell me how to stop it!" said Raven almost desperately.

"Stop it?" asked David. "Stop the destiny of the gem of Trigon the Terrible? Are you mad? There is no stopping it! You know that!"

"That's not true!" shouted Raven, sending tremors through the pyramid they stood upon. "It can't be true!"

"And why can it not be true?" asked David, unphased by her anger. "You know the prophecy do you not? The promise of the gem, of your birth, if you are his daughter, is absolute."

Even now, she could not bring herself to believe it. "You can't be sure of that! There has to be something I can do to stop it!"

"There. Is. Nothing!" said David, punctuating each word with a finality that felt like a door slamming shut in her face. "There is nothing you or any other living thing can do to prevent Trigon's return. Do you understand me, girl?! NOTHING! Not with all the powers of the universe can you or anyone else stand against Trigon, a fact you yourself would know if you weren't busy deluding yourself into imagining you are anything but a vessel for the annihilation of your entire species!"

"That's not true!" repeated Raven, practically screaming now, her psychic restraints blasted away

"Isn't it?!" shouted back David. "You're the one who slashed your way in here demanding answers from me! Think, demon! How many generations of scholars and mystics have sought what you are seeking? How many civilizations have tried to stand against Trigon the Terrible? How many warriors of virtue and light has he left broken on the ground to feed the carrion birds? Not with every spell ever invented could you prevent this! I know. And whether or not you believe me is no concern of mine."

It was like someone had reached in and torn her guts out. Raven clutched the side of her head and clenched her teeth and tried to force down the urge to scream, which in this place might cause anything to happen. All of her efforts, all of her research, all of her attempts to find an answer, some way out of the fate creeping up on her... all for nothing...

What was she supposed to do now?

"I have given you your answers," said David, his voice darkening once more to an augury of violence. "Now get out."

The command crystalized Raven's attention, and she raised her head sharply.

"No."

David looked almost surprised, and a strong current of fear wafted off of him, quickly masked, but no less indicative for it. "No?"

"Not until you tell me who you are."

"And why should I tell the gem of Trigon anything at all about myself?!" demanded David.

"Because I'm not leaving until you tell me who you are! If you say there's no hope, then I want to know who's saying so! For all I know you're trying to trick me or working for my father! Answer me!"

David shook his head, almost incredulously, as he slowly raised his baton up. Raven could feel the concentrations of power forming within it, feel the very decision being made within the empathically nebulous figure to use it. "Is it somehow not plain enough to you what I am?"

In truth it was, but Raven wanted, needed to hear it from his own mouth. "Who are you?" she repeated quietly for what she already knew would be the last time.

"Demonspawn," said David quietly with a shake of his head. "I am the Devastator."

And then the baton twitched, and everything burned.

O-O-O

"You sure you're all right?"

David grimaced and massaged his temple. "Cy, I'm fine. Really. I just got knocked around a little." He wished to God they'd shut off those damned sirens. Every howl was like another blow to the snare drum pounding in his head.

"Hey, I'm just checkin' man."

David sighed. "I know," he said. "Sorry. Just got a headache is all..." A glance at Cyborg's surprised expression made him realize what the next question would be, and he headed it off. "Not... like those. Just a normal one."

"Look, if you're not feelin' up to - "

"It's not," David insisted. "It's just a normal headache. Trust me." Honestly he wasn't sure what it was, but it was manifestly not one of the massive pain spikes that had laid him low during his fight with Terra. For one thing it felt entirely different. For another thing, if it had been one of those, he would not have been able to speak.

Knowing that didn't make it any less unpleasant. His head felt like something was beating against the inside of his skull with a pipe wrench, but he gritted his teeth and tried to erase the signs of it, reasonably certain that it would calm down as soon as the police cars shut their sirens off. And besides, he knew that this time he didn't want to just head home, not without any idea what had happened here, not after what Slade had said...

... not that he believed Slade, but...

Cyborg shrugged. "You know best, man," he said. "Just don't try to push it. We don't need you collapsin' on us again."

"I won't," said David. "Just... do me a favor... don't tell Robin."

Cyborg stopped short, and turned his head back with a look of surprise so acute that David instantly thought he'd made some sort of terrible mistake, only to relax again as Cyborg broke into a broad grin.

"My man," said Cyborg, laying a heavy hand on David's shoulder and shaking his head. "I never thought I'd see the day..."

David had no idea what Cyborg was talking about, but as it happened, Starfire landed a moment later, and he didn't get a chance to ask.

"I have searched the entire area," said Starfire. "There is... no sign of any children."

David grimaced, half from another surge of pain that pulsed through his head, half from the Starfire's revelation. Expected or not, it was not what he wanted to hear.

"They were right there," he said, a bit sharper than he meant to, pointing with his baton towards the hole in the brick wall. "I put them there and told them to run."

"Then maybe they did," suggested Cyborg. "You said Slade came after you, right? Could be they got away."

"Yeah, and maybe they got buried by a collapsing building or something," replied David, his head hurting too much, and spinning too much, to realize how uncharacteristically forward he was being. "We've got to look for them at least, don't we?"

"We are lookin' for them," said Cyborg, just a bit more forcefully, enough for David to notice, but probably not enough for Star to. "Robin's got the cops and EMTs on the way. They'll be pourin' all over the place in a couple minutes."

David forced himself to stop and take a deep breath, and the pain in his head lessened a bit as the sirens finally cut off, but only a bit. Footsteps pounding over the rubble testified to the arrival of emergency crews. He glanced sheepishly up at Cyborg, who simply nodded, and gestured for him to follow as all three of them moved off to regroup with Beast Boy and Robin.

They found Robin talking with one of the police officers, and he no sooner saw them than he signaled he would be just a minute. Cyborg closed with him to join in whatever the conversation was, but David neither knew what he would say to a policeman, nor had any illusions that whatever strategy was being plotted was within his capacity to understand. Beast Boy on the other hand was further away, perched on top of a toppled chimney, curled up in the crouched posture that David by now knew was a signal of nothing good. Accordingly, while Robin, Cyborg, and Starfire conferred with the cops, he made his way over.

"Beast Boy?"

Beast Boy half-turned back to see who it was, and David saw that his communicator was in his hand, open and with a screen full of static. Beast Boy's face was so full of worry that David forgot about his headache, and even about Slade for a moment. "You... you all right?" asked David.

Beast Boy glanced down at the communicator for a second, as if the screen might resolve to something any moment. "She's not answering," he said, and there was no need to ask who. What with everything that had just happened, David had completely forgotten about Raven's disappearance, but plainly Beast Boy had not. The green changeling was plainly worried, tapping the signal button on his communicator every few seconds.

"Maybe she's just busy," suggested David, not really sure what else he could say. Raven kept her own council in all things after all. "Meditating or something. She was kinda wound up earlier..."

"Yeah, but there was an alert dude. She never misses those. You think something's happened?"

The thought had not occurred to him. "I'm... I'm sure she's just..." he was not sure of anything of course, and finally gave up trying to come up with a proper platitude. "I don't know... but whatever she's doing, she'll be all right, and if she's not, she'll let us know, won't she?"

Beast Boy didn't sound particularly convinced. To be honest, David wasn't either, but thinking straight with his head aching like this was far harder than it should have been. Beast Boy shook his head. "I really think we oughta be trying to find - "

Robin interrupted him, calling them over from where the others were standing. "Beast Boy? David?"

David glanced at Robin, then turned back to Beast Boy, extending a hand. "She's Raven," he said. "Whatever it is, she can handle it, right?"

Beast Boy considered that for a moment and nodded. "Yeah..." he said, noncommittally, but he took David's hand to get up and even managed a nervous grin. "Yeah, I guess she can."

O-O-O

Minutes later, they had rejoined Robin in front of a massive stone building, one that the police were giving a wide berth for the simple reason that Robin had asked them to. Why he had done this was obvious, even to David, but as usual, Robin explained his reasoning anyway.

"Everything in a three-block radius has been destroyed," said Robin, facing the imposing stone structure, "except this. Slade left it standing for a reason."

The building was made of granite and shaped concrete, and David was willing to guess that Slade had left it standing because of the fact that it would have taken a lot more firepower than even he had been deploying to bring it down. Robin sounded convinced however, and Robin knew better...

"According to the city's master plan," said Cyborg, "this is the original town library. But it's been abandoned for decades."

"No wonder," commented Beast Boy. "This place is a dump." He proceeded to prove it by lightly kicking one of the columns, the base of which shattered, sending sixteen tons of rock slamming to the ground an inch away from crushing him into a fine green paste. Starfire yelped, Cyborg jumped forward, and Robin was about to berate him for being careless, save that all of their attentions were drawn by a curious mark carved into the now-revealed lintel above where the column had once stood.

"The Mark of Scath."

David glanced at Robin with a raised eyebrow, but his question was answered before he asked it. "Slade told me the name," said Robin without glancing back, and he stepped up to the solid oak doors, glancing at Starfire as he did so. Chained shut and sealed by years of abandon though they were, Starfire threw them open like the doors to a dollhouse, sending a cloud of disturbed dust wafting out and into the air above.

As soon as the dust cleared, Robin entered, followed one by one by the others. Something in the back of David's neck twitched as he entered, and he quietly slid the baton off of his belt and into his hand, and coated it with a soft red aura, letting the warmth pulse through his fingers. By now it was almost normal.

"Dudes," said Beast Boy, "even without the creepy librarians... I'm not digging this place."

It wasn't like one would expect to see something different than this in an abandoned library, but David nonetheless agreed. The stacks were coated with dust and cobwebs, some bare, some with a few moth-eaten books still on the shelves. The power was off, and the only illumination came from their various powers or lights, and from faint moonlight glimmering in through the opaque windows.

They hadn't gone more than fifty feet or so before they reached the end of the room, and were forced to stop. "Dead end..." said Robin, allowing just a hint of frustration to enter his voice, and turned away to give instructions for a search of the room when David stopped him.

"No it's not..." said David, and the others turned to him, but he wasn't watching them. He was staring straight at the wall, not as a wall but as a mass of rock molecules.

"That section there," he said, pointing at it with his baton. "It's hollow."

Cyborg and Beast Boy glanced at one another and walked over to the section of wall that David had indicated. No sooner had Beast Boy touched it than brilliant shafts of white light stabbed through the air in the outline of a door, and the wall crumbled to dust. Beast Boy yelped and jumped back behind. "Uh..." he said. "I mean... secret passage! Cool! You go first."

Cyborg extended a floodlight from his shoulder and illuminated the stairs down, and the Titans descended single-file, all five of them as silent as their surroundings. David couldn't speak for the others, but he was almost glad for the silence. His head was begining to hurt worse, to the point where he had to stop every couple dozen yards to rub his temples, and then quickly catch back up with the others. Cyborg and Starfire gave him a few concerned looks, but he waved them off. All of them had better things to be worrying about. He certainly did...

They marched on in silence, but for footfalls and the soft click of Beast Boy's communicator as he kept trying to reach Raven, before finally the stairs spilled out into a large open room lined with statues. One look was enough to tell David that this was not a place he wanted to be. The statues were of robed, skeletal figures, carved in exquisite detail from pure obsidian.

Robin and Cyborg's lights reflected off the shining figures and the dust-covered ceiling and walls, even as the nearest statues twinkled in green and red from Starfire and David's own powers.

Starfire was the first one to say anything. "I did not realize your libraries housed such unpleasant sculptures."

"They don't," said Cyborg, retracting his flashlight and consulting his forearm computer. "This part of the building is old. I mean old old." He looked back up, panning his head around slowly, as though hardly able to believe what he was seeing. "Like... before the city was built."

"But... the city's two hundred years old..." said David hesitantly. "How's that even possible?"

"Radio-dating says this stuff was carved even before that," said Cyborg, shaking his head. "You tell me man, I just work here..."

Another jolt of pain shot through David's head, strong enough to make him hiss and shudder, holding the side of his head with one hand as his baton extinguished by itself. "David, are you all right?" asked Robin, sounding as all-business as ever.

David waited a second for the pain to fade and nodded, but clearly Robin wasn't as easily convinced as Cyborg was. He quickly approached and looked David over with a practiced eye. "Your head again?" he asked. David was forced to nod, not without a wince first, and that appeared to be all the evidence Robin needed.

"All right," he said. "Go back upstairs and wait with the cops. We'll be back as soon as we've - "

"No..."

The sole indication of Robin's surprise was the mask over his eyes widening ever-so-slightly. "What?"

David shook his head, trying to force himself not to show how much it hurt to do so. "Slade... Slade said that... I was... I was gonna..."

Cyborg stepped in. "Slade was talkin' some of his crap before I jumped him," he said. "Nothin' important. Just some stuff about - "

David cut Cyborg off as well. "He said I was going to kill you all."

That one definitely surprised Robin. "What?" asked the Boy Wonder.

David could only lower his head. "He said... I was gonna destroy the Titans. That I was gonna... decide to destroy you guys, or something..."

Cyborg simply folded his arms, having overheard much of this from the rooftops before he had tackled Slade. Starfire and Beast Boy looked flatly astonished, but at least both of them looked more sympathetic than angry or afraid. In the end, everyone here knew that despite the leaps and bounds he had made, destroying even one of the Titans was well beyond David's capabilities, let alone destroying all of them.

At present, he was very glad of that fact.

"Like I said," said Cyborg. "Buncha crap. Don't pay no attention, man. Slade likes to play mind games."

"Maybe..." said Robin cryptically. "Do you have any idea what he meant."

David shook his head. "No," he said. "But... I'd really like to ask him."

Robin thought it over a moment. "Sorry," he said, "we can't take the risk that this might be another episode. You're gonna have to wait upstairs with the - "

"The Gem was born of evil's fire..."

Everyone froze, as Robin's instructions were cut off by a ghastly, hollow voice that was utterly bonechilling. As all five Titans spun around, they watched in horror as one by one, the eyes of the obsidian statues lining the vault began to glow a milky white, and one by one, ghostly spirits, hooded skeletons like the statues themselves, floated up off the statues into the center of the room, chanting the verses to a poem like a chorus of the damned...

"The Gem shall be his portal..."

Beast Boy took several steps back, jaw hanging open at this spectral sight. Starfire's fists glowed green with energy, and she too closed on the others, as if there was safety in numbers. Cyborg closed and opened his human eye slowly, unable to quite believe what he was seeing, while Robin, as he always did at the first sign of trouble, crouched low and reached for his telescoping staff.

"He comes to claim, he comes to sire..."

David watched the ghosts in abject horror, feeling like his lungs were seizing up. His head continued to throb, but he paid it no mind, as the words of the ghosts seemed to course through him, rattling and rolling about in his ears, like the sound of a car's backfire setting off the flashbacks of a war veteran, and he felt something stir up from within him, something familiar and alien all at once...

"The end of all things mortal."

And then all of a sudden, every eye in the room, ghostly and living alike, was fixed on David, for it had not been the ghosts that had spoken the last line... but David himself.

For a few seconds, nobody said anything. And then, as one, the ghosts vanished into nothingness, leaving behind only the five teens, and a host of questions without answers

"Um... dude?" asked Beast Boy.

"How did you know that?" asked Cyborg, looking at David like he could scarcely believe his eyes (or ears).

Would that he could answer coherently. "I've..." he stammered, "I've heard that poem before. I know it from somewhere."

"Where?" asked Robin. "How?"

But to that question, all David could give in reply was a confused and helpless shake of his head, and weak, almost plaintive words.

"I don't know..."

O-O-O

"A bunch of people I don't recognize, aliens or something. They looked like big... lizards."

Raven had to admit that the description was clinically accurate, if nothing else

She was back in the atrium again, the marble-floored, open-skied atrium that towered above a burning city, only this time it was not empty, but filled with people.

Lizard people to be precise.

Seven of them there were, standing around the room atop the various multicolored starbursts inlaid into the pure white marble floor. Tall, scaled, green, and adorned in flowing robes and carven symbols of power, they stood rigidly still, eyes shut, hands folded quietly over their chests, while in the center of the room stood an eighth figure. Just as the robes of the first seven lizards matched the colors of the symbols they stood upon, that of the one in the center was black, like the circle he stood on. Rivers of energy flowed about this central figure, as he spoke in tongues so alien that Raven had trouble identifying it as speech. It was clearly some sort of ritual, and judging from the signs, a very powerful one.

She had fended off assault after mental assault, and found her way back here again through the twisted jungle of meaningless symbolism that this thing had tried to lose her in. What she was viewing now was beyond her, but she paused to watch anyway, on the off-chance it would prove useful.

The chanting grew stronger, louder, more intensive, and the magical energies flying about the central figure gained in intensity apace. The marble beneath her feet began to quiver and fracture as powers of enormous potency flowed through them, and above all the oculus that opened up on the heavens began to glow with swirling forces beyond description or measurement. Even though this was only a mindscape, even though nothing here was real, Raven still took several steps back, just an instant before the figure in the center of the room burst into flame.

It wasn't like a normal combustion, it was far quicker. The lizard creature cried out in a terrible voice of mixed pain and ecstasy and went up in flames like a piece of paper in a blowtorch, reduced to ashes in but an instant. And yet the flames did not extinguish but twisted and danced in the center of the room, as all seven figures standing around them chanted louder and louder, crying out in full-throated roars as the magical energy pulsing through the building burst forth and brought down a river of light from the oculus above, a beam of pure whiteness that struck the flames and fractured as though broken by a prism into a kaleidoscope of rainbow colors that twisted and turned and shifted and finally came to settle, one beam of colored light shining directly upon each alien.

And then one by one, they threw back their heads and cried out in agony or joy or some mixture of the two.

And one by one, their cries were answered by a low and terrible roar, echoing up from somewhere below them, amidst the endlessly burning city. It was a nondescript roar, but it was deep and malevolent enough to turn Raven's blood to icewater.

"Do you imagine yourself to be clever?"

Raven spun around and found herself facing an enormous man, six and a half feet tall at least, big and bulky, with red hair and a broad beard. The man's clothes were a riot of colors, a thousand hues tossed together largely at random, but it was the three foot sword, polished and gleaming and burning with shimmering flames in the man's right hand, that really got Raven's attention.

"Waltzing in as though you own this place," said the man, walking slowly towards Raven, "slashing through anything inconvenient, demanding answers imperiously. Does this make you feel superior? Powerful? In control of your own destiny? To toy with others as though we are your anointed playthings? Are you amused?"

Sarcastic or not, there was nothing amused in the red-haired man's gaze. Raven fell back before the advancing swordsman, retreating into the center of the atrium, noting that the lizard-people had all apparently vanished as soon as this man had appeared.

"Tell me what you are," she said. "Tell me how you know who I am, and about the prophecy."

"That you might race off to tell your masters all that I say?" asked the man. "I think not, demon."

"Trigon isn't my master!"

"You lie!" screamed the other, and he swung his sword at Raven. Raven's shield appeared with a thought, but while her shield had sufficed to repel everything the denizens of this mystery realm had thrown at her so far, a single touch of the flaming sword shattered it like glass and threw her across the room, where she slid to a stop up against a column. "Even if I believed you," bellowed the large man, "you are the Gem! The Gem exists to serve the Master! There is no other way."

"And what do you exist for?" replied Raven, as she slowly got back up. Whatever was in that sword was several orders of magnitude more powerful than anything she had so far encountered, more powerful than anything she had ever seen in a mindscape before.

"I exist to repel monstrosities like yourself," said the man. "You have committed a heinous violation in coming here. I exist to ensure you suffer for it."

"Oh, bullshit!" she shouted back at the man. "You're not some subconscious emotion. You're not part of David at all! You're not even human!"

"Coming from one such as you, demon, that is quite a claim." said the man, circling around the room, eyes fixed on her with a blistering intensity.

Raven matched the man's movements as she tried to provoke some kind of confirmation. "What are you?" she repeated. "An alien? A ghost? A possessing spirit? Is that it?"

"Be silent!" snapped the man, spittle flying from his mouth like bullets.

Raven was not silent. "He's not a kinetic at all, is he? That's why his powers don't work the way they should... he gets them from you, from whatever you are, doesn't he?" She frowned at the man, glaring at him from under her cloak. "So where did you come from..."

"SILENCE!!"

The man swung his sword at Raven, and though she was 20 feet away, the distant slash picked her up and slammed her back into the column of marble hard enough to crack it, tearing a fissure in the featureless marble and shaking the entire atrium with the force of his blow. Raven scrambled back to her feet as the red-bearded man, screaming incoherently in thunderous rage, stomped towards her, his sword slashing back and forth through the air, cleaving columns and inlaid symbols apart with each swipe. The telekinetic blows slammed into her, knocking her back against the wall again and again and again. Desperately, she fired back with her own spells, powerful enough to send a subconscious screaming into the night, but the black beams and bolts bounced off of the charging swordsman like foam bullets off a tank.

"Get out!" screamed the swordsman. "Get out get out get out get out!" but Raven could not have gotten out even if she had wished to, not with that level of ease. Manifestations were not a matter of simply throwing a switch, something the man appeared to either be unaware of or past caring. Raven cast up another shield, fortifying it with all her might, the strongest protective barrier she knew how to produce, but with one blow, the swordsman cleaved it in half and threw her to the ground, looming overhead with his sword held high. Such rage poured off of him that he seemed almost framed in red, nightmarish rage, enough to match anything that she had ever conjured up within her own half-demon soul. And as he raised his sword for a final blow, Raven scrambled to find a spell or power that would ward him off, but the beams of black energy she flung into him from her hands were absorbed like water into a sponge.

An effect she remembered well...

And then, with a hell-raising cry, the red-bearded swordsman plunged his sword down towards her, and she opened her mouth to scream.

O-O-O

"David? David!"

David could not answer immediately, for a jolt of pain three times worse than any of the ones that had preceded it was burning through his skull like lightning. He staggered and stumbled and grabbed at the wall and missed, and would have fallen had Cyborg not caught him. He remained limp for a moment or two, face contorted in pain, until slowly the savage jolt began to fade away, and he was able to open his eyes.

"I'm okay..."

Nobody was convinced by that, not even David himself, but Robin did not once more insist that David return topside to wait with the police, though it clearly took physical effort not to. Shortly after the recital had stopped, Robin had spoken a few words with the others, and had permitted himself to be convinced that since whatever was going on here clearly had something to do with David, and since Slade had apparently chosen to target him in the absence of Raven, that David might well be in more danger if he went back without the others. Robin clearly didn't like it... to be honest neither did David... but there was nothing to be done about it. They would have to simply hope that what was happening was not one of David's crippling migraine-episodes.

So far, the results were not encouraging.

As soon as David could stand again, they continued on. Robin and Starfire were in the lead, trying to decode what the poem could possibly have meant.

"The gem shall be his portal," quoted Robin. "I think they mean this 'Scath' person. And this 'gem' is how he gets here. If we're going to stop him, we need to find it and destroy it."

"I have never heard of someone named 'Scath', said Starfire. "Do you believe the gem is located somewhere in this complex?"

"I don't know," admitted Robin, "but I'll bet Slade does. If we find him, we can make him give us some answers."

At this point, David wasn't sure if he wanted any more 'answers', especially since they all seemed to turn into more cryptic questions whenever they were found. Still, there was nothing for it now. At least his headache had died back down...

"You holdin' up?"

David looked up at Cyborg and nodded solemnly. "I think so," he said. "I... I wish I knew what was going on..."

"We'll figure it out, man, don't worry." said Cyborg, putting a twenty-pound hand on David's shoulder. "Whatever happens down here, we got your back."

The gesture helped. David took a long, deep breath, and let it out. "Thanks," he said.

"No problem," replied Cyborg. "And hey, don't worry 'bout what Slade said, okay?"

David laughed hollowly. "Little easier said than done, Cy..."

"I know, but Slade likes to mess with your head by sayin' things like that. You really didn't even have to tell everybody 'bout it. We all know how Slade is with this stuff."

"Yeah, I did," said David. "Even if it's nothing... I'll feel better if the rest of you all know about it."

Cyborg shrugged. "Your call," he said. "Just don't want you feelin' like you gotta clear everything through us. You're still pretty new to this thing, but you're gettin' the hang of it. You're gonna have to trust yourself one o' these days."

Despite everything, the comment brought a smile to David's face. He glanced back up at Cyborg. "Maybe tomorrow, eh?"

Cyborg laughed. "Whatever you say, bomb squad..."

All further opportunities for discussion were curtailed immediately, as the hallway they were proceeding down came to an abrupt end at a massive vertical shaft, forty feet across and so deep that the bottom could not be discerned, not even with lights or molecular vision. A broad spiral staircase adorned the outer wall of the shaft, spinning down into the darkness.

Cyborg whistled. "How far do you think it goes...?"

"Only one way to find out," said Beast Boy, and before anyone could contradict him he hocked up an enormous loogie and spat it over the edge of the stairwell, letting it plummet down out of sight as he and the others all waited to hear the splat.

The silent drop lasted twelve seconds.

Cyborg stated the obvious. "That's... far..."

"Then we better get started," said Robin, turning to the stairs and beginning to descend them. "I'm willing to bet that gem is down there."

"Yeah," said Cyborg, "but what else is down there with it?"

Nobody cared to answer him, and all five Titans began to descend along with Robin. The stairs were wide enough to take three or four abreast, and they naturally grouped up fairly tightly, none of them confident that there wasn't some eldrich horror lurking in an unseen corner waiting to spring out and ambush them all. Fortunately, David's headache had begun to recede, and was now manageable enough that he could spare some thought for something else. He found himself wishing that he knew what had happened to those three kids... hoping that the cops had found them already. Slade hadn't been out of his sight long enough to target them, but then again who could tell what Slade was capable of now?

And where the hell was Raven?

Beast Boy was still fingering his communicator nervously, though for the moment he had given up on calling her. Every so often, Beast Boy glanced back at him, and he did his best to smile reassuringly back, though he probably wasn't too convincing. Raven missing, in trouble, or otherwise out of sorts made everyone nervous of course, even David (though perhaps for different reasons), but it seemed always to hit Beast Boy the hardest.

No points awarded for guessing why of course, but that was a subject for another day.

"Sounds like we've got company."

Of all the things Robin could possibly have said, that was the one David least wanted to hear, but an instant later he knew that Robin was right as a pale blue light emerged from further down in the shaft, and quickly rose up towards them. Everyone, David included, quickly adopted a combat position, ready for anything, even Slade.

But not for this.

What rose up from the depths of the darkened shaft sent cries of fright from Beast Boy's lips, and would have from David's had his throat been working properly. Starfire swore in Tamaranean, and Cyborg in English, while Robin, characteristically, simply gripped his staff tightly and set himself to receive the charge of the horde of armed ghosts that wafted up through the very stairs.

Not just ghosts. Monsters.

The skeletal spectres were hideous to look at, beaked, bat-winged, and festooned with rotting flesh and decayed skin, all translucent and glowing with an unearthly light. A terrible sound, a moan mixed with an anguished wail, emerged from all of them as they lifted scythes and swords and rusty blades of no description, and advanced on the Titans from all sides.

For once, Robin needed to give no orders.

Instantly, the Titans were submerged in a horde of the undead monsters, but rote training paid off, and all of them sprung away, dodging clumsy slashes and snatching claws to strike back as they could. Beast Boy became a kangaroo and leapt over one, kicking at another, while Robin simply dodged through five slashes and lashed out with his fist to catch one of the ghosts in the face. In both cases however, their feet and hands passed through the ethereal creatures with no effect whatsoever.

"I can't hit them!" shouted Robin, an instant before Starfire tried to vaporize two of the ghosts with her Starbolts, and succeeded only in disrupting them for a bare second. Cyborg punched at one, with the same result, and for his trouble was belted in the chest by the offended spirit hard enough to throw him back into the wall.

"Yeah, well they can hit us!" cried Cyborg, opening fire with his sonic cannon at point blank range. The disruption lasted longer this time, but no permanent effect was scored, and he quickly had to retreat to avoid getting sliced to pieces.

David had no idea what to do.

His baton was unlikely to have any better effect than Robin's fists had, and the ghosts were already swarming towards him. Desperately he fell back, switching into his molecular vision to try and gain some purchase on the spirit's physical bodies. To his horror, he found that in molecular vision the spirits were completely invisible. They had no physical bodies. Ergo there was nothing to destroy.

Desperately, he targeted a piece of the stairs themselves, hoping to catch the ghosts in the explosion, but the blast barely shook the spirits, even when set off inside their ethereal forms. One of the ghosts charged at him, and he stumbled backwards, narrowly avoiding the slash but winding up backed against the wall with a sea of ghosts all around him and nobody else in sight. The nearest ghost stepped towards him, and he swung at it with his baton, unsheathed and silent, to no effect at all, as the ghost casually pivoted around with an enormous sickle.

And then, before his very eyes, the spirit rammed all two feet of the blade straight through his chest.

O-O-O

The scream never came.

The sound of marble being rent, of metal screaming as it sliced through rock, sundered her ears and resonated inside her head, but Raven remained laying on the ground, and no corresponding spike of pain indicated where the red-haired swordsman had impaled her. And then slowly, she cracked her eyes open, and saw something she did not expect.

The swordsman was crouched over her, the sword driven straight down into the ground like a railroad spike, buried up to the hilt in the white marble floor. But rather than stabbing right through her, the sword had been driven into the ground an inch away from her head, close enough that its flames licked the side of her face, though like all flames here, they did not burn. And even more strangely, rather than drawing the sword back once more and striking home this time, the swordsman was sitting there motionless, watching her with a mixture of anger and fear in his eyes.

What the hell?

Raven blinked a few times to ensure that she was not hallucinating, and then quickly phased through the floor, re-appearing on the other side of the atrium with her powers crackling over her hands. The swordsman remained crouched where he was, following her with his eyes, and only after she had taken up her new position did he slowly stand back up, though he made no move to pursue her.

She should be dead. She knew that much. There was enough power in that metaphysical sword to kill her twenty times over, and she could not have mis-read the murderous rage flying off the swordsman empathically like a machine gun spraying bullets all over the room. He had wished to kill her. He had possessed the means to kill her. He had availed himself of the opportunity to kill her.

He had failed to kill her.

There was nothing she had done to prevent it, so what the hell was this?

The swordsman watched her like a mouse watching a snake. There was still anger there, but more fear now, more and more every second, though why he should suddenly become afraid was beyond her. Her powers, her most devastating mental combat abilities, had not served even to scratch his clothing.

"Why won't you just leave?" demanded the swordsman. His massive bulk shook and then suddenly shrank, resolving a moment later back into the form of David, his sword transforming back into David's baton. All this was strange, but stranger still was the tone in which the question had been asked. It was utterly bereft of command and confidence, a pleading tone that sounded thin and fearful.

What was she missing?

She left her defenses at the ready, but called upon another slew of powers entirely, and reached out empathically towards the figure standing there in the guise of David. He tried to resist her, tried to establish a mental block of some sort, but his skill at mental scan-blocking did not exceed her own, and she brushed aside his attempt. Of course he could always counterattack, reform his sword and lash out again, or blast her with some kind of mental feedback, but he did no such thing.

"Why didn't you kill me..." she asked him, vocally and psychically both, and on both counts she received no answer save more bursts of anger. Accordingly she searched. She was not trying to read his thoughts. Alien thoughts were almost impossible to read in any event. All she was looking for was something odd, anything out of the ordinary that might explain what she was dealing with. She felt the creature's emotions, felt its, confusion, anger, surprise, but above all its terrible fear, fear of her. The only conclusion she could come to was that he wanted to kill her. Badly.

But he had not.

... perhaps... he could not.

Why? Why could he not? He had means, motive, and opportunity. What was stopping him? What was going on here? Why wasn't he leaping at her throat this very instant to tear her apart. After all, as long as she was manifested inside him, then to slay her here would kill her entirely. If he wanted this 'demon' dead, why not take the opportunity to simply do away with...

By Azar...

"Leave," pleaded the thing resembling David. "In the name of all the Gods, please leave!" it sounded almost pathetic now, begging her to leave it be.

"You weren't trying to kill me," she said slowly, working it out herself at the same pace as she spoke it. "You were... trying to scare me into leaving, weren't you?"

"You have got to leave! Please!"

"You want to kill me. I can feel it from you even now. But you can't do it yourself... why not?"

"You don't understand!"

"Oh, I think I do..." said Raven, as a hollow pit opened up inside her stomach at that very prospect. "You've got the power to kill me outright, but something's stopping you. Something won't let you. It's can't be David stopping you, he doesn't even know I'm here. It's you."

"Damn you!" shrieked David, by now nearly in tears. "Damn you, get out!"

She built to her crescendo, her powers searching for the key, the missing part to the puzzle that was staring her in the face now that she knew what to look for. "You can't kill me! You can't hurt me at all, even though you have the power and you want to! In fact, you can't kill anybody, can you? You're not permitted to! You're not posessing David at all! David's possessing you!"

A hideous, baleful scream was all that the creature could reply with as the entire tower shook and twisted on its foundations, and the sky clouded over grey. A moment later, great fractures were torn in the firmament, and sinister-looking blades jutted in from them, bony and sharp and enormous, like the prows of gigantic ships. One emerged near to her, and she threw herself to the ground to avoid it, and landed hard, rolling over just in time to see the figure standing on the opposite side of the Atrium scream an anguished cry to the heavens.

"LEAVE THIS ONE ALONE!!"

O-O-O

He felt nothing.

For a second or two he was frozen in shock, aware only of the fact that there was an enormous ethereal sword sticking right through him, his brain telling him that any moment now he would feel the unfathomable pain of having been pinned to the wall like a beetle by this thing, and that shortly thereafter he would feel nothing at all, as a wound like this was certainly mortal.

A moment passed, and he still felt nothing.

Dimly he heard shouts, screams even, people shouting his name, and blue and green beams of energy flaying the air around him, but he could not piece together what that meant. All he could do was stare the ghost in its skeletal face, and wonder when he would feel it. A full second passed, another, another. Only then was he beginning to realize that no blood was streaming down his shirt, that no nerves were tingling with the pain of being severed, that no force was pinning him to the wall, that in short, the ghost's magical blade, one which had proven capable of physically striking every one of the other Titans, had passed through him like it was made of smoke, and done nothing at all.

And just as he was trying to figure out how that could possibly be, every single ghost assailing the five Titans blew up.

Like a bomb had gone off within it the ghost in front of him flew apart, its form destabilizing like a cloud scattered by wind. Nor was the explosion merely ethereal. The wall behind David cracked, the stairs below the ghost crumbled, and debris was blown off them into the deep well behind the ghost. And yet despite this, not a single bit of pressure did David feel, the blast wave that should have shattered his ribs and pulped his organs, warping around him as though it was he who was without physical form. And no sooner did this happen than the entire stairwell was filled with smoke and fire as every ghost without exception was instantly obliterated. All four of the other Titans were knocked sprawling, battered and thrown about by a mass of concordant pressure waves. Beast Boy was slammed into the wall, Starfire blown up into the air, Cyborg knocked face down onto the stairs, and Robin nearly pitched off the stairwell itself into the shaft.

But in the center of it all stood David, motionless, baton still held in his frozen hand, staring out like a shell-shock victim at the now-empty stairwell shaft, and at the four other Titans who stared wordlessly back at the architect of this impossible act. By no understanding of the ways that the world worked was this thing that had just occurred even possible, and yet here it was. And as Beast Boy and Cyborg and Starfire and Robin all simply stared, David stood like a statue, unable to move or act or even think beyond the fact that the mother of all inexplicable events had just occurred, far far beyond the relatively minor mysteries of before.

But that like before he had no goddamned idea what had just happened.

And before he or anyone else could consider what in God's name to do or say or ask now, the entire stairwell, weakened by the cumulative effects of two hundred simultaneous explosions, gave way all at once and collapsed, spilling all five Titans down into the impenetrable darkness of the underground shaft.

---

Author's Note: I apologize once more for how long it took to finish this chapter, and assure you I will do everything in my power to finish the next one in a timely fashion. Meanwhile I ask you please please please to drop a review, no matter how quick, such that I can determine what in the above chapter worked, and what did not. Thank you all once more, and may you find success in every endeavor.