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

35. Enemies Foreign and Domestic

Disclaimer: I do not, as ever, own the Teen Titans. Neither do I own my sanity at this point.

Author's Note: Hello everyone. It has been quite a long time.

As some of you have pointed out, in message and review, it has been a long time since I have published a chapter of this story. For that, I can only apologize. The list of blocks, misfortunes, and other disasters that conspired to keep me from this story is sufficiently long as to warrant a chapter of its own, and of interest to nobody. I will therefore say instead that there has not been a single day since I was last able to upload to this story that has gone by wherein I did not either work on this chapter or try to do so.

The chapter below is a weighty one, in verbiage and content, and given the time it has been since last we met, any who are disposed to try and read further in this enormous story are well-encouraged, I think, to go back to the previous chapter, and read it over once again. We are in the endgame of this tale, and the chapters are no longer as self-contained and episodic as they previously were able to be. I make no demands of those who have paid me the inestimable complement of reading this story. To have anyone willing to read this, even after all this time, is gift enough. But should a notion strike your fancy, a comment come to mind either positive or negative as to what I inevitably did wrong, or perhaps, through chance and great effort, even did right, please do not hesitate to let me know in the form of a review. I have made it my policy to answer every review I receive in person, with whatever thoughts come to mind concerning the subject in question, and it is by these reviews alone that improvement can proceed.

No more words from me, for there are plenty of them below, save that I am, once again, terribly sorry for the time it took to finish this brutal chapter, and that I will move heaven and earth to finish the next one in a much more timely fashion. Thank you all once more, even if you read no further than this sentence. And as always, dear readers, may you find success in every endeavor.

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Chapter 35: Enemies Foreign and Domestic

"Helplessness induces hopelessness, and history attests that loss of hope and not loss of lives is what decides the issue of war."

- B. H. Lidell Hart

O-O-O

I had seen them fight before. In training, on video, even in person, from hiding. It never occurred to me that anything was wrong.

"Devastator."

The man in the coat did not react to the name, one hand resting lightly on the handle of his walking stick of varnished hardwood, the other gently holding the cigarette that smoldered in the flame-flecked darkness, a thin trickle of smoke rising past his black, mirrored glasses. His eyes invisible, he breathed slowly, puffs of condensation trailing out into the flame-lit sky. He moved, when he moved, with poise and ease and total disconcern, as though he had all the time in the world, and nothing whatsoever to command his haste.

"Hello, Nightwing," he said at last, his voice an elevated whisper, barely audible above the crackling flames.

Nightwing said nothing. Cyborg and Raven and Beast Boy said nothing. The wide-eyed boy hiding behind the T-car said nothing. Before buildings in ruin and streets in flames and bodies piled in their hundreds, what was there to say?

The man called Devastator did not hurry them, pulling softly on his cigarette and tapping the metal-shod tip of his wooden cane on the ground in time to some beat only he could discern. Only after a lengthy time had passed did he discard the stub of his cigarette, flicking it into the gutter and carefully extinguishing it with the heel of his boot, ignoring the bonfires that raged about him. Having concluded his immediate business to his satisfaction, only then did he raise his head, a disarming smile on his face, and speak.

"So," he said, "here we are."

Still none of the Titans moved, save for Nightwing, who for the first time, took his eyes off Devastator for the split second he needed to sweep his gaze across the fire and death that surrounded him. Devastator did not react, and when the Titans' leader turned back to him, it was with a single, bitter, anguished question.

"Why?"

The question seemed to amuse the man in the coat. "Why?" he asked with a wry grin. "Isn't that obvious?"

"You didn't need this to get our attention!" snapped back Nightwing, his staff trembling as he gripped it tighter and tighter. "If it's us you wanted, you knew where to find - "

"And walk into the Lion's den alone to face whatever traps you've set for anyone fool enough to attack your little Tower?" asked Devastator, his voice as calm as a still pond, "I don't think so. I prefer it this way."

Not, that is, until Raven spoke.

"What do you want from us?" she asked. And there was nothing at all untoward about the question, a perfectly valid one when confronted by a mass-murdering metahuman, yet Starfire's breath caught as she heard them. There was nothing obviously wrong, and yet the tone was clipped and shortened, the words forced through her teeth, so subtle as to be almost imperceptible, yet enough that she noticed, and Beast Boy noticed, his eyes turning to her automatically. They both had heard the same thing.

Raven was afraid.

I'd never heard fear in Raven's voice before. I never would again.

"I want your blood," said Devastator, as simply and calmly as though discussing the weather. "I want your souls. I want your heads mounted on spikes, displayed for the cameras on the parapet of your little Tower." He leaned against his cane, planting it on the rubble-strewn asphalt. "I want you all dead," he said. "And I'm here, today, to collect the things I want."

It was no different than a thousand speaches Starfire had heard before, justifications, bravado, proclamations of defeat that every would-be criminal mastermind from Slade to Mad Mod to Brother Blood would recite at the drop of a hat. She had learned, through long experience, to simply ignore such lectures of impending doom as the rantings of the mad. The Titans of the future, having had many more years' exposure to such things, should have been even less likely to give them credence.

Yet they did.

And so did she.

"Who's payin' you for this?" asked Cyborg, and his voice was like a ringing bell, snapping Starfire and the others out of their own fears, driving them back into the present. "Luthor? Immortus? Some kind of - "

The man began to laugh.

Somehow the laugh made it worse, for it wasn't the laugh of the mad, some far-fetched cackle of a mind long-past the realms of sanity. It was a polite, calm laugh, that of a sane man amused by the antics of a clown. Though the David she knew had not been given to laughter for its own sake, Starfire had heard enough of it to recognize the cadence, and she felt a pang in her stomach as the man responded.

"I had targets here," he said, sweeping his hand around to gesture at the piles of dead bodies heaped among the nearby ruins and piled before the burning building. "Six of them, to be precise. The rest just got in the way. But you four..." he smiled again, a wistful smile, like a sommelier savoring the taste of a fine wine. "You four are another matter."

"What, you couldn't find any buyers?" asked Cyborg.

"Quite the opposite. You wouldn't believe how many people of want the four of you dead. I could scarcely believe it. Presidents, dictators, CEOs, retired villains, I even had a Sultan make an offer. But that's really all beside the point." He popped his cane up and grabbed it by the neck, letting it swing out behind him lightly as he began to approach the four Titans.

"You really think you can take us all?" asked Nightwing as the Titans spread out, moving to surround the man, an action he took no measures to prevent, content to watch them do so.

"Yes," he said with perfect assurance, "and so do you."

Perhaps he was right, for none of the four responded immediately, Beast Boy looking to Raven who looked to Cyborg who looked to Nightwing, who stared, inscrutable as ever, at the man with the coat and cane. Nightwing did not move a muscle, gave nothing away, and yet...

"It doesn't have to go this way," said Nightwing, and his voice only hinted at the terrible depths represented by that phrase.

The man merely shook his head. "Yes it does," he said. "You know that. I just killed four hundred people. I could give you reasons, or letters of marque, but none of those things matter to you. You're an idealist, Nightwing. And idealism requires a certain myopia. You simply aren't permitted any other option."

The man smiled and fingered the neck of his cane. "And as for me," he said, "don't get me wrong, I'm not turning down the payoff. Money or otherwise, it's astronomical." He took a deep breath, and his voice distorted slightly, a feral edge entering his otherwise calm demeanor. "But to be perfectly honest, Nightwing," he said, planting his cane back on the ground, "the truth is, I'd gladly kill you for free."

None of the Titans replied. One by one, their eyes turned to Nightwing, who remained as still as a statue, sizing up his opponent, as his grip on the staff in his hand imperceptibly began to tighten.

The man either did not notice, or did not care, and after a lengthy pause for decency, he smiled one more time, as though recalling an old joke. "So what do you say, Titans," he asked, lifting the cane slowly and sliding his hand down it to the midway point. A bare moment later, malevolently red flames ignited along its entire length, flickering in the fire-lit darkness as they licked at his bare hand. "Shall we?"

"Titans," said Nightwing, his voice clipped and dry. "Go."

Years might have passed, yet time had not slowed the Titans' reactions. In a split second, in the blink of an eye, Nightwing leaped from the ground, and Cyborg raised his cannon. Beast Boy erupted in size and Raven wove her magic. It was like the explosion of a flashbulb, a burst of activity from absolute inaction that was dizzying to behold, and yet it was not fast enough. For before any of them could complete the actions they had begun, the man with the burning cane inclined his instrument downwards just a fraction, touching the tip of it to the ground, and then everything went black.

O-O-O

"No..."

It couldn't be. It had to be a mistake. A trick. Some multi-layered plot of Trigon's or Warp's. It was some sort of cruel joke perpetrated by evil men. A twisted mockery of reality designed to cause him to suffer. A hallucination, a construct, a simulacrum. It wasn't real.

"No..."

It couldn't be real.

"It's good to meet you at last," said the man, and it was his own voice. Deep and gravelly, scarred by years of abuse and smoke, but still recognizably, obviously, patently his own voice, the same cadence, the same rhythm, belying all denial. He watched mutely as the man smiled, his face weathered by time and God-knew what else, but the gestures were his own, unconscious and unintended, the twitch at the corner of his mouth, the way he brushed his open coat aside with his right hand, and held it behind his back, the posture of his calm stance, there was no question, no minute dissonance to lay hopes upon. He was staring at himself.

"No."

"I admit, it's been a while," said the man, with just the vaguest hint of a wry smirk, "but I'm pretty sure that at your age, I knew more words than that."

David gave no evidence that this was so. Indeed he gave no evidence that he could even understand what was being said. He stared in dumbstruck shock, hands trembling at his sides, mouth agape, looking for all the world like he had just been frozen in place, like his mind had just experienced a segmentation fault, and could not determine how to compute the data being fed to it.

The man in the coat said nothing, did nothing to indicate that he was surprised at this reaction. Indeed he smiled, like a trainer amused by the antics of a small dog, and passed it over without so much as a word.

"And you must be Terra," he said, turning his head to the other teenager, his manner calm and collected. He planted the cane's tip on the asphalt with practiced ease, looking for all the world like a schoolteacher or civil servant asking after a student or case file.

Surprised though she might have been, Terra was not staring at herself, and retained sufficient lucidity to speak. Doing her best to at least mitigate her astonishment, she tried to answer with equanimity. "Have we met?"

If anything, this seemed to amuse the man. "No," he said, breaking a disturbingly familiar smile. "Not originally at least. But I've heard a great deal about you."

Right now, what he had heard of her, and from whom, was the last possible thing on her mind. Yet before she could ask another question, David recovered enough of his powers of speech to ask a question.

"What are you?"

That one did not amuse. "Please don't play stupid," said the man, "you know perfectly well who I am."

"I didn't ask who you - "

"Yes you did," said the man. "It's the same question, and you know the answer in both cases." He paused, looking David over for a second with a discriminating eye. "You'd still be going by 'David Foster' at this point, wouldn't you?"

David was visibly oscillating between horror, shock, and anger. "What are you talking - "

"It's just that it's been quite a while since I went by that name," said the man evenly. "We both know that you just made it up. So did I."

Several seconds passed in silence, Terra not daring to venture a word, the man choosing not to, and David seemingly incapable of doing so. Yet when finally the silence broke, it was David who broke it, his very voice wavering with the implications of the simple sentence he conjured forth.

"You're... me."

But the man simply shook his head. "No," he said, "not the way you mean it."

"I don't understand. You're... you said you - "

"My name is David Foster," said the man, "among many other titles. "The question is, who are you?"

If anything, David looked even more confused. "I'm... I'm David - "

"Really?"

The question was like a gunshot, barked in a tone entirely different than that of the previous civil conversation. It echoed down the silent street, making Terra jump from the sheer unexpectedness of it. David fell silent, as the man who called himself by the same name stared at him with eyes like jellied fire. All pleasantries were forgotten.

"Just look at yourself," said the man, and it was not a polite suggestion, it was an order. Almost reflexively, both Terra and David obeyed it, their eyes flicking to David's ash-gray skin and hair and uniform, and to the burning red coals that sat where his eyes should have been.

"It's the mark of a Doppleganger," said the man, "or whatever Trigon calls these little metaphorical playthings of his. A conceit to theatricality, he's full of those. It's a symbol of the fact that you're not supposed to exist."

"What are you talking about?"

"I'm saying that you're not supposed to be here," said the man, wrinkling his brow. "You're not supposed to be involved."

"I know that!"

"No you don't know that. You say you do, but you haven't thought it through. If you had, you wouldn't be anywhere near here, and you certainly would be wearing that ridiculous getup."

Addled by shock, fear, and a thousand other things, David was plainly having trouble keeping up. "My... my uniform?"

"That's not a uniform," said the man, "it's a costume. Uniforms are meant to be uniform with other things. Costumes are intended to stand out. And it's not about what you're wearing, it's why you're wearing it."

"You know why I'm wearing this."

"No, David, I'm afraid I don't," said the man in an exasperated tone, spreading his arms wide as though inviting an answer. "I'm an intelligent man. I'm capable of accepting that there are a wide range of appropriate behaviors among similarly intelligent people. But I cannot, for the life of me, figure out what would possess you to spend the last year in that Tower with those... lunatics. I can't figure out why you've been willingly placing yourself in a position to get killed, and ignoring clear signs that doing so would lead to the end of the world."

The man took several steps forward, his expression and voice becoming more and more animated. "You've been engaging in extra-curricular fights with bank robbers and terrorists for no reason, inserting yourself in a situation which should rightly have nothing to do with you, not to mention associating with, of all people, the Teen Titans. So please, tell me, David, for the love of God, what in the fuck are you doing here?"

David tried to answer, tried to say anything, but his tongue was cloven to the roof of his mouth, his nerves deadened by this final, ultimate shock. He stared at himself, his own face, his own voice, angry and bitter, changed but yet clearly the same, and all words fled before the sight.

"Leave him alone."

He snapped out of his daze to find, of all things, that Terra had stepped forward, hands aglow with yellow light, staring his older self down. Surprised (as indeed seemed the older man), he could only blink and watch as the man who called himself Devastator regarded her with what looked like annoyance.

"Ms. Markov," he said, and David saw Terra flinch at the name, "I'm afraid I don't see how this concerns you at all." He lifted his cane lightly and stepped forward. "I'll be with you in just a moment if you - "

"I said STOP!" shouted Terra, punctuating her command with a peal of thunder as the ground split in front of Devastator's feet. And for a second, he did stop, but only for a second. Glancing at the small crack as he would the antics of a small child, he lightly jumped over it, landing with ease on the other side, before lifting his head to Terra once more and smiling.

"I will not," he said. "Kill me."

So nonchalant, so light and yet serious was that command, that Terra hesitated. "What?"

"You told me to stop. Your implication being that if I didn't, you would make use of those kinetic powers of yours. I have not stopped. Now you have to attack."

"I'm warning - "

"Warning me," interrupted Devastator, altering neither his pace nor his voice in the slightest, "is a waste of time designed to cover the fact that you don't know what to do. You're here, I'm here, the rocks are here, what exactly are you waiting for?" He strode forward, cane tapping in time with his footsteps, as Terra stepped back a pace, then another. "Maybe you know you haven't got a chance. Maybe you're afraid to try. Maybe you're just slow. Either way, if you can't act, then what's the point of making empty - "

"That's enough," shouted someone, and it was a moment or two before David realized that that someone was him. Before he even knew what he was doing, David was suddenly standing in front of Terra, hands balled into fists at his sides.

"Why are you here?" asked David. "For me?"

He stopped. "Yes."

David willed his voice to remain even. "To kill me?"

"I suppose so."

"Then what are you waiting for?"

No answer. Not for a few seconds. And then slowly, a smile grew across the man's face. "Now that's a bit more like it," he said.

"That's not an answer."

"No, it's not." The smile died as the man slowly began to circle the two teenagers, walking carefully, no hurry or rush to his movements, as though he was carefully considering what course of action was best. "I suppose it's morbid curiosity," he said. "I needed to see for myself."

"See what?"

"You. I needed to see what happened to you. What they did to you."

"They didn't do anything to me."

"Well you sure as hell didn't come up with this teenaged hero crap by yourself," said the man. "I would know, wouldn't I?"

David didn't answer. He simply watched, turning in step as the man circled around him and Terra. He said nothing, but plainly he had no need to.

"You're surprised." said the man.

"No," responded David.

"Yes you are," said the man. "I can see it on you. You know you shouldn't be surprised, but you are. It's not that you didn't know. It's that you let yourself think you'd been wrong. You let them talk you into thinking you were one of them. And how you could do that, is entirely beyond me."

His throat seemed to seize, his eyes blurring with tears or denial or just directionless rage, and all he could do was stare wordlessly at the man circling him, like a truant child caught red-handed in some offense.

"What was the first thing you told the Titans when you first met?" asked the man.

"I don't... I don't remember," he said.

"Bullshit," said the man sharply, and he stopped, and stepped towards David, his eyes like power drills. "Don't lie to me David, I know you better than anyone else in the world. You know exactly what you told them, it's been thundering inside your head ever since you saw me. What was it?"

Conscious of Terra watching him out of the corner of his eye, David could only stammer out his answer. "I... told them I wasn't a hero."

"And did they believe you?"

"Yes," he choked out.

"So I'll ask you again, given that you know you're not one of them, and given that they know it, why exactly are you surprised to see me?"

His tongue wouldn't work. His brain wouldn't form the necessary words, and yet the man said nothing, waiting for him to answer, until finally he managed to cough it up.

"You're... you're a supervillain."

"Oh good God," the man exclaimed, his tone exasperated, and he turned away, agitated, swishing his cane through the air like a riding crop. "A supervillain?" he exclaimed, turning back, "Jesus Christ, David, what the hell did they do to you?"

"What?"

"Am I wearing a purple cape?" demanded the man, spreading his arms wide. "Am I in pinstripes? A gladiator costume? Do you see me dancing on top of a pyramid made of skulls while singing my own theme music?" He turned his head to Terra. "You've turned in those circles. How many people do you know who actually call themselves supervillains and aren't trying to be funny?"

Terra and David spared a glance at one another, but neither said anything.

"No, David," said the man. "The Joker is a supervillain. Brainiac is a supervillain. Maniacs who obsess over some costumed vigilante with an overdeveloped occipital lobe are supervillains. Whatever you think about me, David, try to divorce yourself from this childish stupidity and see things for what they are. I am not a supervillain." He planted the cane down once more and shook his head. "I am a contractor."

"You're a mass murderer."

The man rolled his eyes, but this, at least, did not seem to offend him. "Always with the dramatic," he said. "I remind you that if I'm a mass murderer, so are you."

"I've never killed anybody."

"But you will," said the man. "Or rather you would have, had you not succeeded in destroying the universe and getting yourself killed instead. That's rich, by the way, calling me a mass murderer. I certainly never wiped out humanity, nor delivered reality itself into the keeping of the Devil."

"You're working for the Devil!"

"And how exactly does that excuse your actions?" demanded the man, and suddenly he sounded angry, raising his cane in one hand and holding it by the neck. "Are you seriously so desperate to prove that you're not responsible for all this that you'll bandy excuses about what I did, ignoring the fact that you just destroyed the fucking world?"

Nothing happened, no fireworks or peals of thunder, yet none was necessary. David's breath caught, and he fell back a pace as though he'd just been struck, wilting before the man's anger. His head swam, he felt like he was going to faint, even as the man unleashed a torrent of bilous wrath.

"What are you thinking? That I'm some twisted version of you? Tortured into insanity? Beaten until the breaking point? I can see you grasping at the straws. 'No! It can't be true! What could possibly have gone wrong?' Can you imagine, David, that looking at you, I ask myself the exact same question?"

"No..."

"Repeating that word does not transform the nature of the universe, boy. What have they been feeding you in that Tower of theirs?"

"Leave him alone," said Terra, pitching her voice at its most menacing, fists clenched once more. "He doesn't need your - "

"Interrupt me again, girl, and you will lose all means of interruption forever," said the man without even a glance in Terra's direction. He stepped forward, walking slowly, yet evenly, like an unstoppable force advancing in spite of all denial or opposition, and before his level gaze, David's mind simply wilted.

"I did not suffer some horrid trauma at the hands of evil men. I was not abused, or beaten, or driven mad. I suffered my fair share of life's unpleasantries, no more, no less. What I am, what we are, was the product of rational, calm reflection."

"You... you killed them," said David weakly.

"Yes I did," said the man, approaching still closer, not even needing to ask to whom David was referring. "I killed them all. I've killed a great many people. I've lain waste to entire ideologies. I've broken governments and thrown nations down in fire. I'm the most effective contractor in history. Men who command the worshipful obedience of a billion souls beg for my services at any conceivable price. I have a hundred different aliases, and seven legal names, including David Foster. But by and large, they call me the Devastator."

He was right in front of him now, close enough to reach out and touch if need be, yet David did not recoil, did not even move. He stood rooted to the spot, and could only watch, as the man stopped in front of him, and planted his cane calmly at his side.

"So why don't we just stop bullshitting one another, and you can tell me, given that you knew what you were, and what you were not, what in the name of God made you think, for one instant, that you were meant to be a superhero."

David said nothing. He could not even remember how.

The man merely smiled. "You asked me before about that little discoloration problem," he said, gesturing at David's ash-gray skin and ember-red eyes. "It's not a side effect or curse. It's a symbol. Trigon likes to conjure up the dark sides of his victims. Dress up their bitter natures in that sort of livery and make them fight themselves. But... simply put, that's not what I am. I'm not some evil alternate version of you, I am you as you were supposed to be." He slowly folded his arms, fixing his gaze like a headmaster staring at a truant pupil. "You look like that, David, because I'm not your evil twin. You're mine."

Had his older self produced a weapon then and there to kill him, David would have stared helplessly at it as it descended towards his face. He had lost all sense of action, all capacity to move or speak or even think. His eyes wide, his mouth hung in mute horror, he could do nothing but stand and watch the end.

It was therefore fortunate that there remained someone present for whom the shock of the situation had not resulted in such total paralysis.

There was a loud BOOM, like thunder from directly overhead, and suddenly David was jerked off his feet as something grabbed him from behind and hurled him backwards, away from his older self. He landed on the ground on his back, and the impact knocked his head clear, at least enough to see what was happening.

Terra stood between him and the man with the cane, and around her floated volcanic stones the size of medicine balls, orbiting her body like a moon around a planet. Her fists were closed and sheathed in gold, and her posture was the same one David remembered from a time not that long ago, when, as now, she had faced David Foster with powers on-hand and intent to kill.

"That's enough!" she spat. "I don't care what version of him you are. Leave us both alone and go back to Trigon, or I'll smear you all over the street."

The man regarded Terra with what looked like a tired gaze. "I told you not to interrupt - "

Terra opened her hand.

Two massive blocks of limestone flew at the man's head like speeding meteors. The first was poorly aimed, and missed by several feet, but the second was on target, and would no doubt have taken the man's head off had he not acted precipitously and ducked out of the way. Both stones flew on another thirty feet, before shattering against the asphalt, even as Terra stepped back and lowered her hands, and the ground shook as she prepared to call up more.

Yet, strangely, the man did not counterattack, nor brandish weapons and powers. Instead he turned his head to watch the blocks land, and then, carefully, reached into his pocket, and produced once more his packet of cigarettes.

It was an oddly innocuous thing to do, and David didn't know what to make of it. Neither, it appeared, did Terra. Rather than continue the attack, she stopped, and backed up a couple paces, and helped David back up, even as the man slowly turned back to face them, fishing a single cigarette out of his packet.

"Leave us alone," she repeated. "Whatever you and Trigon want now, we don't want any part of it. Go back and ask him whose fault this all is. Nobody here cares what you think."

"I don't believe that's entirely accurate," said the man.

"I don't care what you believe!" shouted Terra, "and I don't care who you've killed. I took David out once. I'm happy to do the same to you."

No laughter. No mad cackling. No denials. The man simply stood, watching, before slowly bringing the cigarette up to his mouth. He had no lighter, yet the cigarette burst into flame of its own accord, before smoldering down to an ember. Only once it was lit and emitting a fine trail of smoke did he answer her.

"Really?"

Terra narrowed her eyes. "I once killed all of the Titans," she said. "Just like you." The man said nothing, drawing a long pull on his cigarette, and holding it in, lifting his head as though savoring the taste of a fine wine as wisps of smoke leaked from his nose and the corners of his mouth. He said nothing, and she made bold to continue. "I don't care how important you think you are or how much you don't approve of all this, get away from us or I'll smear you all over the - "

The man lowered his head, fixed his shaded eyes on Terra, and exhaled his lungful of smoke.

And then a skyscraper exploded.

Far in the distance, behind the man, loomed the shadowy ruin of one of Jump City's tallest buildings. The Transpacific Tower, a seventy-four story monolith of glass and black stone, home to the west coast headquarters of several of the largest multi-national corporations in the world. Ruined like the rest of Jump City, it stood nonetheless, vaguely visible through the scorched skies, a landmark in a world turned upside down.

The top story exploded first, blossoming into flames like a match being struck, blowing off the roof and casting flaming debris off of itself like a volcano. Though nearly a mile away, the blast was plainly visible, and rumbled like a living thing, the force of it parting the smoke and ash and giving the two stunned teenagers a full view of the awesome destruction. A bare moment later, and the next floor down erupted into flames, just as the previous one had, and then the next, and the next, the entire structure going up story by story like a Roman candle. The man gave no sign that he knew what was happening, save for a soft twitch of the hand that held his cane as each successive floor detonated. In barely thirty seconds, the entire building was blown apart, flames and pieces of debris as large as tractor trailers raining down indiscriminately on the city below, as a roiling cloud of smoke boiled forth sweeping over the empty city, before overtaking the two teenagers and the man with the cane, and then they could see no more.

Hand over his eyes, coughing, peering through the smoke, David saw a soft red ember glow, like the end of the lit cigarette writ large, which resolved gradually as the smoke began to clear and the dust to settle. And as his vision cleared, David saw the silver-tipped cane, now lit with flames of dull red, held gently in the bespectacled man's hand as he calmly beheld the two teenagers, who stood stunned, at last, into mutual silence.

"I'm sorry," said the man calmly as he took the cigarette from his mouth and dropped it to the ground, turning the red-sheathed cane in his offhand. "You were saying ...?"

O-O-O

And just like that, it was over.

In the blink of an eye, the demons were gone, even the broken bodies of the ones that had been destroyed, vanished into nothingness as though they had never existed. In a split second, the world went from a roaring maelstrom of noise and frenetic action to the soft background hiss of the river of lava. In an instant, what had been a nerve-pounding battle, without pause to think or breath, was suddenly concluded, and the greyscale double of Beast Boy that had just tried to murder him was simply gone.

He was in the form of a spider monkey, hanging from one of the carven lava spigots by his tail, and below him, he saw Slade balanced on a slab of stone the size of a sedan in the middle of the lava river, brandishing the boat pole like a quarterstaff, seeking more foes, and not finding them.

A shift to cormorant, a quick beat of wings, then back to his humanoid form, and Beast Boy landed on the other side of the rock island, as Slade turned back to face him.

"What was that?"

Slade took a moment to sweep his gaze across the flame river in search of further enemies before he bothered to reply.

"Demons," said Slade. "Bits of rock and sulfur animated by a minor spirit. Functionally innumerable."

"Not those," said Beast Boy. "That... me!"

"Ah yes." Slade stepped back and crossed his arms, his single eye betraying the barest hint of a smile. "That one's special."

"Slade..."

"Raven, as it happens, was not the only one who had a dark side," said Slade. "That was a manifestation of yours."

Beast Boy blinked. He was sure he'd seen this in a Star Trek episode somewhere. "You mean it's... like my evil twin?"

"I suppose that fits," said Slade. "It's certainly equally annoying."

Beast Boy let that one pass. "But why would he want an evil copy of me?"

"It's how Trigon operates," said Slade, and he turned away, searching for some means of proceeding forward. "It's not enough for him to kill his enemies. He has to see their wills broken."

"Pft," said Beast Boy, crossing his arms. "He didn't break much."

"He wasn't trying to," replied Slade. "That was just a warning. If you choose to continue, you'll find much worse where that came from."

Small wonder that Slade had to work alone if he was always this cheery. But rather than articulate that particular thought, Beast Boy asked a question.

"So if that's my bad side, where's yours? Trigon can't be too happy with you either."

"You see it standing before you," said Slade casually. "Or were you under the impression I had a good side?"

With a groan, Beast Boy simply gave up. "Whatever, dude, let's just go."

"Indeed," said Slade, and he used the boat pole to vault from rock to rock, even as Beast Boy shifted to a hawk and followed him. It was barely a half dozen bounds before they came to a small path, perhaps a dozen feet wide, carved into the living rock of the crevasse wall thirty feet above the lava river. Slade vaulted up onto it as Beast Boy touched down and resumed humanoid form.

They moved down the road in silence, Beast Boy too preoccupied to question what this new trail was or who had carved it. Slade, as usual, ventured no comment on this or any other topic. If Slade considered Beast Boy's silence to be strange, he gave no sign of it, and indeed, when the silence finally broke, it was Slade who broke it.

"The way ahead forks left and right," said Slade. "Raven can be found along the rightmost path, if you take it to the end."

Beast Boy didn't answer, indeed he stopped where he was, looking down at the ground with a blank expression. Slade continued on for a few paces before he noticed that the changeling was no longer pacing him, and stopped as well, turning back to Beast Boy with his boat pole held like a walking stick.

"Having second thoughts?" asked Slade.

Beast Boy didn't explode or deny the matter in loud rhetoric, but instead answered with a question that seemed completely out of place.

"Why are you even here?"

Slade narrowed his eye. "I thought we covered this."

"No, why are you here. With me."

"Certainly not for the company," said Slade. "Now come on, we have to keep - "

"You don't think I can find her, do you?"

Slade took the accusation in stride. "Not in a hundred million years, no," he said. "You're far too weak in every sense."

"So then why would you agree to come down here with me?" he asked. "If all I'm gonna do is fail, what are you getting out of this?"

"Like your friend Cyborg said, I don't exactly have a great deal else to do."

"Sure you do," said Beast Boy. "You could be up there helping Cy fight Trigon off, or helping Starfire find Robin. But you came with me."

"Perhaps you need the most assistance, being the weakest of the three of you."

It was an obvious bait, and Beast Boy ignored it. "You want something else," he said. "Something from down here. Something you need me to help you get, or else you'd have left me behind."

Slade was silent for a few moments, which to Beast Boy served as all the confirmation he needed. "Perhaps so," said the villain finally. "Shall we go?"

"Well what is it?" demanded Beast Boy, ignoring the question.

"What exactly does it matter at this stage?" asked Slade. "I agreed to help you find Raven. I will do so. What else I require along the way is my business."

Beast Boy crossed his arms. "Not if I say it isn't. How do I know you're not just gonna turn on me or something?"

"You don't," was Slade's less-than encouraging answer. "Would you prefer to proceed by yourself?"

Annoyed, Beast Boy fired back. "What's the deal, dude? What are you afraid of?"

"The things I am afraid of would melt your brain, changeling," replied Slade. "I told you that my reasons were my own. Leave them there."

"So I'm just supposed to trust that you're not out to betray me with this secret side-mission of yours?"

Slade didn't answer in words.

Without a sound, without a hint of prior intent, Slade whirled around, and in a split second, Beast Boy was up against the wall. Slade was looming over him, towering like a one-eyed colossus, and when he spoke, his voice was clipped and deep and fierce.

"What are you doing here?"

It was not the question he expected, but Beast Boy responded in kind, drawing himself up as much as he could. "You know why I'm here," he said. "I'm here to find Raven."

"Why?" demanded Slade.

"What do you mean why?"

"I mean exactly what I just said. Why? Why go search for her quixotically? Why not stay with your living friends and die with them, rather than down here in some pit."

"We're not gonna die."

"Then you are as delusional as you are stupid. You are all going to die. Whether or not you find Raven."

Beast Boy refused to be intimidated. "We've heard that from you before," he said. "Didn't work so well for you, remember?"

"I am not Trigon, boy. Trigon holds Devastator. As long as that is the case, even Raven at the height of her powers is no match for him. Finding Raven will not save the world, and it will not save your lives. You know this. I told you before we left. So what are you doing here?"

Beast Boy leaned forward, keeping a mental grip on his powers. "I'm here to find Raven."

"So that you can have the privilege of dying together? How many times do you need it repeated to you? She cannot help you now."

"That's not why I want to find her."

"Then what is?"

Silence. Slade stared down at him, his eye like a searchlight, until finally Beast Boy looked away, expecting yet another rant about focus and will and all that crap that supervillains loved to go on and on about. Yet instead of all that, Slade let him go, and stepped back.

"Do you not know?" asked Slade, "or do you not know how to put it in words?"

He looked up again, to see Slade standing with his arms crossed, looking, of all things, amused. "I want her back," was all he would say. "Whatever it takes."

"And you can't, or won't, tell me why?"

"I could."

Slade smirked. "Then we have something else in common, don't we, changeling."

He turned away without another word, walking away in the obvious expectation that Beast Boy would follow. Beast Boy watched him go, as arrogant as ever, and then finally sighed and shook his head before, as was inevitable he supposed, following Slade.

But he only got a few steps before something jumped Slade.

There was a gray blur, a flash, faster than the conscious mind could process, and something smashed into Slade from above with the force of an avalanche. Chips of stone flew at Beast Boy like bullets, and he instinctively shifted to the form of a marmot, scurrying to the side to take cover from the flying debris. Moments later, he peaked out from behind the rock, and emitted a startled squeak before he could stop himself.

Slade lay on the ground, facedown, and above him was crouched Beast Boy himself, or rather the evil version of him, one hand on the back of Slade's head, the other on his back, forcing him to stay on the ground as his red eyes leered down at the supervillain.

Beast Boy shifted back to human form, kicking the stone fragments aside, but his double paid him no mind, shoving Slade's face in the dirt effortlessly, as Slade struggled to shake him off.

"You want to know what he's after?" asked the double mockingly without looking up, each word punctuated by another hard shove into the dirt. "He wants his flesh and blood back."

Slade convulsed violently, bucking the Beast Boy double back and leaping to his feet with a loud roar. Yet before he could lay so much as a finger on the duplicate, it shifted into the form of an anaconda, twisting a coil around Slade's fist and slamming him back to the ground on his hands and knees. Before Slade could react, the double was bent over him once again in human form, and had grabbed him around the neck in a headlock.

"What's the matter, Slade, didn't want to talk about it?"

Novel, and admittedly enjoyable, as it was to watch Slade being humiliated by someone who looked just like him, Beast Boy was here for more important reasons than personal fun. He rushed at the double, shifting on the go into a giant condor and lunging at him with his talons, but the double simply turned into a Tyrannosaur, pinning Slade down with one foot while lunging upward with foot-long teeth. Beast Boy evaded the lunge by switching to the form of a hummingbird and diving towards the ground, then taking on that of a rhinoceros and charging the T-rex directly. The double switched to a mosquito, flying up and back as Slade got back to his feet and Beast Boy ground to a halt and shifted back to human, before landing some dozen yards away and doing the same.

"Awww, what's the matter?" asked the double. "I thought you wanted to know what he was here for."

Beast Boy glanced up at Slade before he could catch himself. "What do you mean flesh and blood?" he asked, leaving it open as to who he was talking to.

It was the double that answered. "Slade's dead, dude," he said, grinning widely. "Dead as a doornail. Terra cooked him. He's just an empty shell now. Thinks his life is down here somewhere waiting for him."

"What?" Beast Boy turned back to Slade, who was standing very still all of a sudden. "Dead?"

"He got tossed into an active volcano," said the double. "You were watching, remember? Or did you forget that night already?" The double raised the back of one hand to his forehead and staggered dramatically. "I know how hard it was."

Beast Boy snarled and might have lunged for the Double had not Slade done so first, lashing out with fist held high. Yet the double barely seemed to break a sweat as he slipped with practiced ease into a kangaroo, bounding into the air before turning into a giant squid. A suckered tentacle snatched at Slade's ankle and upended him, and seconds later, the double landed atop him in human form, posing like a big game hunter with his beaten prey.

"Don't believe me?" asked the double. "See for yourself." He bent down and grabbed Slade by the neck once again, and before Slade could so much as resist, he twisted the supervillain's head right, then left, at a sickening angle, moments before there was a loud 'pop'. A second later, the double sprang up, brandishing Slade's one-eyed facemask in his hand.

Beast Boy gasped.

Slade's face was a rictus skull, a burnt, withered ember of black ash and white bone, with two searing red eyes set within the empty sockets like live coals. His ghoulish, toothed grin, with no lips or skin to cover it, bored into Beast Boy like a laser drill. He fell back a pace without thinking of it, horrified, his evil twin temporarily forgotten.

"What the..."

"Aww, you're not afraid of a bunch of old bones are you?" asked the double mockingly from a perch overhead. "I just thought you'd like to know that he's just using you to try and get himself brought back."

Slade spun on the ground and lunged upwards, missing by inches as the double sprang back and tossed his faceplate aside. Rather than attack however, the double stepped back, crossing his arms and smirking, though who he was laughing at was unclear.

"A couple of gutless wimps," said the double. "You really think you're gonna find anything down here?"

Neither Beast Boy nor Slade responded, and the Double laughed, waving his hands around him in a circle as another horde of flame demons emerged silently from the walls, behind and before, above and below, ringing them all in a fence of flame and sulfur.

"I didn't think so," said the Double with an evil grin. "Let's see how you guys handle this..."

O-O-O

There was light, plenty of light, flashes of crimson, violet and cerullean, fused with the red flames of wrath, so much that it overloaded her senses, and she could not see. There was sound, plenty of sound, deep guttural roars like the throated eruptions of live volcanos, high pitched whines of machinery and protesting steel, and the filled-in punctuations of cries and screams in any comparatively silent moment, so much that her ears were filled with indistinguishable din, and she could not hear. She had been in battles a-plenty before, fights with hundreds of assailants, crossfires between gangs of armed men and companies of police, close-quarters melees of frenetic violence, she was no stranger to the chaos of battle.

But this was something else entirely.

She could see nothing, find no-one, determine nothing of what was happening. Smoke thick enough to be grasped boiled forth from seemingly everywhere simultaneously, while the din and clatter of collapsing buildings and gyrating asphalt roared in her ears and blotted out all else. Flashing lights, source indeterminable, burst before her eyes every second, nearly rendering her senseless. Bad enough as it was for her, Starfire could scarcely imagine how any of the actual participants in this re-enactment could possibly be determining what was going on.

But Warp. Warp she could hear just fine.

'I watched the world explode.'

Suddenly she saw Warp, child-Warp, the stowaway who had snuck out to watch the Titans fight, and how he could make heads or tails of the frenetic maelstrom was beyond her, but he managed somehow to pick his way through the rubble to what she found herself hoping, despite everything, was safe ground. Behind him the T-car exploded into fragments and ruin, walls collapsed, the ground itself up-heaving like a living, angry God, knocking him off his feet time and time again, as rocks larger than his body flew past or burst into fragments at seemingly random intervals. Desperately he ran, crawled, stumbled and scrambled up again to run some more, finally finding cover of a sort, if cover meant anything in a whirling death-zone such as this, behind a pile of rubble that had, moments before, been a towering edifice of masonry and steel. He vaulted over the crest of the rubble and threw himself down as an entire tractor-trailer, container, wheels, and all, pinwheeled overhead like a child's toy, and crashed to earth some hundred yards away, erupting into flames with a bone-shaking roar moments before the general calamity covered all once more.

'I hid. I hid like they'd taught me to hide, but I had come all this way to watch them fight, and so I turned back.'

The chaos did not decrease, indeed it seemed to intensify, yet the boy-Warp turned, and crawled gingerly back to the top of the rubble pile. Starfire watched as he peered over the lip, an expression of awe and fear mixed on his face, as he watched the convulsions of air and smoke and fire that cloaked whatever violent disasters were underway beneath the opaque shroud. What sense he could make of all this was beyond Starfire. He peered into the dark storm, as though trying to discern what might be transpiring within it, as enormous objects, cars, vans, chunks of building ripped forth as though by a giant scoop, were hurled about or blown to shreds by side effects of the massive power on display. The very sky seemed writ in red, slashed by lightning and torn by firestorm winds, and he had to duck and cover his head every few seconds as another convulsion cast debris or shock waves about like the playthings of a mad god.

'All this, and I still thought that what I was watching was normal. They were the Titans. Invulnerable. Indestructable. Conquerors of Devils and Armies and Aliens from outer space. I could not conceive of anything capable of besting them. For all the violence of the battle, I had nothing to compare it to to warn me that anything was amiss.

But then...'

Suddenly, there was a deafening blast, an explosion which, even by the standards of before, was simply enormous. The shockwave it created was visible, boiling up from within the stew of smoke and dust like a living thing, and sweeping them aside. Starfire saw Warp duck reflexively as the shockwave passed over him, shaking the very ground violently enough to bounce the boy a foot in the air. And when he had landed, and recovered his equilibrium, and looked up, suddenly he could see again, and by extension, so could Starfire.

David stood in the midst of ruin, but it was not the David that Starfire knew. It was not even the one that had moments ago stood calmly and quietly, telling the Titans that he was here to murder them and place their heads on pikes. This David stood atop the piled debris, his coat open and flapping in the artificial winds, and in his hand, he held a staff made not of wood or metal but flame. Fire coursed from it like an oil-soaked torch, and he brandished it aloft like a holy symbol. It spun in his hand as he raised and lowered it and twirled it about himself, hand over hand, grasping it now by the handle, now by the tip, now by the center like the axle of a wheel. And with every gyration, every sweep, every dance of the fiery cane, the world around him exploded, flinging debris and flames and sprays of rock or shrapnel in any direction he chose, again and again and again, as though the battle were all a mad dance, and he the conductor.

Of Cyborg and Nightwing, Starfire saw no sign, yet Beast Boy was present, the focus of David's violent and unrelenting assault. He was shifting from form to form at lightning speed, bird, dinosaur, rodent, octopus, dragonfly, rhinoceros, and back again, ducking in and around the debris hurled his way, trying desperately to avoid the relentless explosions that clove the air from all directions. Beside him was Raven, floating in mid-air, shields of darkness raised against the barrage of missiles, and she returned every shot with one just as great, seizing cars and parking meters and hunks of rock and hurling them at David with waves of her hand. Yet none of her hurled shots came close to the mark, for each was blotted out of existence by a flick of David's hand or cane, shattered or thrown off course or even hurled back in Raven's face by the dozen.

Suddenly David half-turned, sweeping the cane around in a broad arc, up and over his head before bringing it down like a pick-axe, and instantly, the ground beneath Beast Boy and Raven was torn open, vomiting flames and stone up and at them. Beast Boy was caught mid-transformation and hurled up and back, smashing headlong into a brick wall and tumbling down it. Without missing a beat, before Raven could even turn around, David swept the cane back upwards, spun it around his head, and swung it like a tennis racket. An instant later, every brick in the wall exploded at once.

The concussive wave nearly bowled Raven over, even David staggered before it, but in an instant, Raven was back on the ground, kneeling over the pile of shattered bricks. There was no sign of Beast Boy, but Raven raised her hands, cloaking the entire rubble pile in black before hurling the smashed bricks away in every direction. Several dozen flew at David, and he spun his cane like a propeller, blowing them all to dust. But Raven ignored him, concentrating instead on rubble, hurling tons of it aside with a flick of her wrist to finally reveal Beast Boy, laying unconscious and half-buried, unmoving, with rivulets of blood running down the side of his head.

'That was when I first began to feel fear.'

For once, David did not attack immediately. He stood calmly behind Raven, his fiery cane held contemptuously at ease, watching the scene with evident interest. And in the ensuing quiet, the first for many minutes, Starfire could hear his casual comment.

"Hm," he said, leaning back slightly, planting the tip of his cane on the ground once more, even as Raven half-turned to face him. "It's funny... I always assumed he bled green."

The comment produced the inevitable result.

Raven growled, deep and demonic, her eyes flaring red, and she raised her hand and fired a beam of pure darkness at David, but David threw his hand forward and detonated the ground beneath her feet, hurling both her and Beast Boy back and throwing off her aim. She landed hard and rolled, coming back up on one knee to fire again, yet everything she threw was beaten out of the air by David's relentless explosions, and he blew them both back again, Beast Boy fetching up against a broken wall, Raven sliding to a stop beside him.

Looking pleased with his handiwork, David calmly approached them, not even batting an eye as, to his left, a massive pile of rubble was suddenly shunted off, revealing Cyborg, broken and battered but still very much in the fight. With a cry of wordless anger, Cyborg leveled his sonic cannon at David, but David did not so much as turn his head, contemptuously waving his hand at the half-metal Titan. Moments later, there was a thunderous explosion, and Cyborg let out a howl of surprise, pain, and shock as his entire arm was blown apart, the cannon's pent up energies backfeeding and blasting him off his feet. David did not even turn, walking calmly over the piled ruins towards Raven, giving Cyborg no further thought.

Raven lay prone next to Beast Boy, struggling to rise once again. She grabbed onto the side of the ruined wall, pulling herself back to her feet, as she half-turned to David and hissed.

"Back off."

Starfire's breath caught. Nevermind that it was decades in the future, she knew that voice, the quiet, fearsome snarl that seemed conjured out of the depths of Raven's soul. She had heard it before, rarely, but always on occasions that stamped it indelibly into her memory. She knew what it meant.

And plainly, David did not.

He laughed, once again not in madness but mere amusement, and shook his head, obviously taking the words for nothing but another toothless threat. "No," he said simply, and he walked on, stepping over rubble towards Beast Boy and Raven, gripping his cane by its neck and raising it up. Starfire watched as Raven backed up a pace, then another, until she was standing above Beast Boy's broken form, and then David crossed some invisible boundary around them both, and Starfire instantly knew what was going to happen.

It did.

"I said BACK OFF!" shouted Raven, and her voice distorted into a full throated roar, instants before she erupted off the ground like a whirlwind. Before Starfire's eyes, before Warp's, before David's, Raven's cloak fused together into a shroud and she exploded into the air, swelling up, up, up, like a living Tower of vengeance and destruction, four cinder-red eyes glaring down at David like a vengeful God. An unearthly roar, a scream of outraged air and matter, howled across the battlefield as hurricane winds whipped at the flames and smoke, spiraling them up and away from the raging demon that had suddenly manifested.

'This was when the fear became terror.'

David fell back, visibly stunned, his apparent control over the situation shattered, the burning cane in his hand clutched unconsciously like a religious icon. For the first time since this scene had begun, Starfire recognized his expression, even through the sunglasses, one of bewilderment, awe, and thunderstruck astonishment, mixed liberally with what had to be fear. His identity had never been in question, but this was the first time she could actually see something of the David she knew reflected in the casual murderer who stood before her. For the first time since this had all begun, something had happened that was quite plainly not part of the plan.

"Mother of God!" he exclaimed, speaking to nobody in particular, and he scrambled back, raising his staff and blasting smashed cars and bits of asphalt and masonry at Raven, yet it was as hurling pebbles at a stone castle. The howling winds sheathing Raven tore his projectiles to bits, even when he blasted an entire delivery van into the air before hurling it at her with a rocket-propelled explosion.

Raven roared, roared like a caged demon unleashed, and lightning crashed overhead and blew divots in the ground even as the living storm tore entire buildings from their foundations, catapulting them into the air before hurling them down at David like flaming meteors. Abandoning his attempts to pound Raven into submission, he brandished his cane like a priest brandishing a cross before hellspawn, falling back, back, ever further back as he sought to beat back the hail of flaming debris, yet his resistance only served, if possible, to enrage the storm further. Like a living spectre of destruction, Raven advanced, scouring the very earth beneath her towering form like a tornado, raining hailstones of fire and bolts of forked lightning down on the previously confident Metahuman. Shot after shot he deflected, tearing buildings to pieces and casting the debris about like a raging animal, yet plainly even his awesome power was not up to the task of containing Raven, and inevitably he faltered, and missed one, and a blast of living flame blew him off his feet and back into a wall.

She pursued him, slowly shrinking back down to normal size even as the storm overhead intensified further and further, raining flames down indiscriminately. "No more!" she roared, her voice amplified by all the throats of Hell. "No more! Don't you dare touch them! You think you know Hell, Devastator? I'll show you Hell!"

"You first!" snapped David back, and there was fury in his words too, bitter anger from sources unknown. He scrambled to his feet, but rather than retreat, he reached into his coat with his free hand and pulled out, of all things, a handgun, which he pointed at Raven and fired. The shots rang out one after another, rapid, blooming thunderclaps that lit the night up with flashes, yet the shots had no effect, consumed by the raging storm system that cloaked Raven. Shouting in frustration, David threw the empty gun at her, detonating it when it drew close, yet this too did nothing, and neither did the barrage of stones, bricks, and pieces of pipe that followed as he fired them at her with gyrations of his flaming cane.

'It was like nothing I'd ever seen before,' came Warp's voice, 'I couldn't help but watch.'And Starfire saw him then, staring out from behind the rubble pile, fear and awe and every other thing written on his child's features. 'I wanted to turn away, but couldn't make myself, and so I watched...'

Back and forth the powers flew, Raven and David both hurling everything they had at one another, but it was visibly an unequal contest, for there was nothing that David could detonate, nothing he could destroy or throw, that made even the slightest dent in Raven's berserk powers. He lasted some fifteen seconds, smashing down everything she threw at him, before finally she seized a motorcycle and hurled it at him along with seemingly everything else. He detonated it in mid-air, but was a fraction of a second too late, and the full gasoline tank caught and went off like a bomb. The shock wave slammed into him and hurled him back into a shattered wall, knocking the wind out of him, leaving him open for further strikes. Raven struck, firing a barrage of projectiles, which he batted aside with difficulty, closing the distance to point blank range, before one of the pieces of debris leaked through his defenses and smashed him square in the chest. He staggered, willing himself not to fall, catching himself on his cane as his concentration abandoned him and the flames that sheathed it went out. And then finally, sensing at last the final opening, Raven stepped up to within five feet of the teetering supervillain, threw out both her hands, and unloaded.

Raven was, by most measures, the most powerful of the Titans, demon-child, mystic, practitioner of magic and sorcery, and this was the strongest blow Starfire had ever seen her unleash.

The blast manifested in a wave of pure darkness, parting the air, disintegrating the ground and walls and debris, a blast of pure energy that made Warp duck and cringe, even at the distance he was at. Everything went into the shot, the storm abating, the lightning and fierce winds dispersing at a glance, everything Raven had, all her anger and pain and fear weaponized and conjured forth, and it was all David could do to throw his hands up in a paltry defense before the black wave struck him dead on and then everything vanished.

Far to one side, Warp lay behind a of a pile of rubble, curled into a ball, cringing at the display of awesome power, until finally the sound echoed off, and the debris ceased to rain down. And then, hesitantly, he peeked back over the lip of the rubblepile, and peered into the smoky darkness, at Raven, powers now spent, nearly doubled over with the effort of having struck Devastator with a blast nothing in this world could possibly have survived.

'And then... right then... I saw the seed from whence this all progressed. The first hint of what I was truly witnessing. I had seen the fantastic.'

The smoke parted, and Starfire gasped.

'Now I saw the impossible.'

David stood where he had a moment before, and he was untouched. Smoke wafted from his skin and clothing and from the cane clutched in his left hand, his arms still crossed, his head turned away, as if in anticipation of what should have been his total destruction. About him there was nothing, not even ruins, for the piles of rubble that ringed him in had simply been vaporized with the force of the energy blast down to the bedrock. Latent electricity crackled on the scorched ground, residue of an enormous static charge, yet to all appearances, David himself, the target of this act of incalculable violence, was utterly unaffected by it.

"... Devastator," whispered Starfire.

'Yes,' responded Warp. 'But we didn't know that. Not then. All we knew was that something had gone terribly wrong.'

It was some time, a second or two perhaps, before David slowly lowered his arms. He seemed dazed, stunned to near motionlessness, as he turned his hands over, looking down at himself as though unable to believe that he was still alive. Raven stared at him in equal disbelief, her mouth agape, shocked as Starfire had never seen her shocked before. Behind her, Starfire saw Beast Boy, who had apparently come round in the interim, watching silently from the heap of ruins he was laying upon, and he too looked stunned, as stunned perhaps as David himself, who slowly lifted his head to look Raven straight in the eye. Neither of them said a word, staring in silence at one another, enmity temporarily forgotten in the aftermath of this occurance that by all standards, even the warped ones that governed metahumans, should have been impossible.

But only for a moment.

Perhaps it was Warp's recollection that was... well... warped, or perhaps Starfire's own perceptions slowed down, but in what seemed to be slow motion, David reached over with his free hand towards the head of his cane.

'I knew what was going to happen next before it did. And yet I couldn't do anything except watch it happen.'

He gripped the cane's handle with his right hand, clenched his fingers around it, and twisted. There was a soft click that might well have been imaginary, and then suddenly the handle came loose from the body of the cane, and attached to it, hidden within the cane's body, was a thin ribbon of razor steel thirty inches long. In one, fluid motion, David drew the entire length of the blade free of its wooden sheath, yet there seemed to be plenty of time to watch the firelight glinting off of its polished blade before he turned to his right, and as part of the same stroke, slashed the sword through the air at neck level.

Raven didn't move.

The sword swept down to David's side and stayed there, and for an endless moment, neither of the two of them moved. But then, as if by magic, a thin red line appeared on Raven's throat. Blood slowly ran down from it, staining the fabric of her leotard red. Only then did she begin to move, trembling, rocking her head slowly back and forth, her hands clenching and unclenching at invisible objects at her throat. Her eyes unfocused, staring up into the dark skies, and David watched her, carefully shifting his shaded gaze from Raven to Beast Boy, who was still laying broken on the ground, eyes wide with dumbstruck horror.

And then, as David met Beast Boy's thunderstruck gaze, he stepped forward, brought his right hand around, and without so much as a word, drove all three feet of the sword into Raven's chest.

There were screams, incoherant screams, from Beast Boy perhaps, or the others, Starfire couldn't tell. She was watching David and Raven, as David drove the sword into Raven up to the hilt, until the last foot or so was sticking out of her back. And as he did so, the sword burst into red flames, even as Raven emitted a soft gasp, hung for a moment, and then went limp. David held her up for a fraction of a second more, and then he stepped back, pulling the sword back out of her, and let Raven crumple to the ground in a pool of her own blood.

He stepped back anew, sweeping the sword around, casting droplets of dark blood about him, and leveled it once again, aiming his sight down the length of the blade at Beast Boy. And as the changeling's broken form shifted once more, this time into something wholly bestial, Starfire saw David smile.

'I thought it was the end of the world,' said Warp. 'But it was only the beginning...'

O-O-O

"Some say that we are what we choose to be. Others think that we are what we're made to be. But if you ask me, then I'd say it's obvious..."

The man stood in the street, his cane held in the middle, dripping flames and ruin on the street. Carefully he lifted it to waist height, crouching slightly, his offhand held behind his back, as he looked over the lip of his glasses at the two frightened children who were even now slowly backing away.

"We are," he said, "only what we will to be."

The storefronts on either side of David and Terra exploded simultaneously, sending a hail of shattered glass spinning towards them like an ocean wave. David yelped and dove to the ground, but Terra merely raised both her hands, and two walls of packed earth erupted from the ground on either side of them, absorbing the rain of glass with a series of wet thumps.

David looked up in time to see the man smile.

Terra threw her arms forward, and both walls compressed themselves into massive boulders studded with glass and were hurled at the man as though fired from a cannon. Yet the man simply spun his cane like a baton, lifting it into the air, and both boulders were blown to pieces dozens of yards away, raining bits of stone, dirt, and glass down all over the street.

"Will is everything," he said, slowly walking towards the two teenagers. "Will moves mountains and alters rivers. Will starts wars and ends them. The will to be. The will to decide. And the will to act."

He raised his hand behind him, and four parked cars were summarily blown into the air, spinning and pirouetting hundreds of feet into the air above. The man waited until they were at their apexes before bringing his hand down towards the two teenagers as though throwing something at them. Instantly, four more explosions sent the cars hurtling towards them like flaming meteors.

This time Terra dove too.

They leaped to either side as quickly as they could as the first two cars smashed into the center of the street and exploded like bombs, the shock waves hitting them in mid-dive and throwing them to the sidewalks on either side of the street. Yet plainly, the man had anticipated that they might do something like this, for the other two cars were aimed at the sides of the street, and blew up barely a dozen feet in front of them, tossing them into the air like rag dolls and hurling them back down the street. Terra managed to keep her head long enough to catch herself with an uprooted pile of fine dirt. David was not so lucky, and was smashed into the windshield of a minivan, before rolling limply off of it and down onto the street.

The man advanced nonchalantly towards David as he moaned softly and tried to scramble back to his feet, expecting any second for the van or the ground to explode around him. Yet the man seemed content to let him struggle, dismissively shattering Terra's barrage of thrown rocks with nothing more than a wave of his hand.

"Devastator is commanded by will alone," said the man as David rose to his hands and knees. "That's what he told Raven, isn't it? Will is the key. Will is all he's missing. Will is what lets mortals like us command the powers of Gods. Will, David, is why Trigon has Devastator now, and why you're lying there in front of me without the slightest hope of defending yourself."

David gave a shout in reply, and from beneath a pile of crushed masonry, he pulled a foot-long section of iron rebar, springing up at the man with all the force he could muster. It was not fast enough. The man raised his cane, knocking the clumsy stroke aside, seconds before the rebar exploded.

Had the parry not knocked the rebar out of his grip first, the explosion would have simply blown his hand off. As it was, it whipped him back and to the side, spinning him around and dumping him unceremoniously on the ground. Desperately, he tried to rise again, but before he could so much as move, the section of the street he was laying on was blown into the air, spun lazily end over end, and then exploded, hurling him like down and into the side of the pile of dirt that Terra was disentagling herself from. He hit it hard enough to overturn it, sending both of them collapsing onto the sidewalk in a heap of dry soil.

"Will, it happens, is the most powerful force in the universe," said the man. "And it's precisely what you have none of."

Clawing her way back to her feet, Terra raised a shower of volcanic stones from the fire channels coursing deep beneath the city, sending them bursting through the ground in a hundred different locations. The man stepped back, brandishing his cane, blotting the dozen nearest stones out of existance, but the others flew to Terra and began to orbit her like electrons around a nucleus. David, lying half crumpled on the ground, lifted his head to watch as Terra clenched both fists, sheathing all of the stones in a golden light. Faster and faster they spun, as Terra gritted her teeth and concentrated, before finally throwing both of her hands forward and sending the entire barrage hurtling at the older version of David.

Or rather... she would have, save that the instant she tried to do so, the man raised his hand, and every single rock exploded at once.

The blasts were small, relatively speaking, but there were dozens of them, and instantly, David lost sight of Terra behind a cloud of dust. The accumulated blasts flipped him over and bounced him unceremoniously down the street, where he slid to a halt. He barely had time to register where he had landed when something landed on the asphalt next to him. He knew who it was before he even rolled over to look.

Terra lay stunned on her back, eyes wide and unblinking, staring up at the scorched sky with dirt smeared across her face and a cross between disbelief and awe written on her face. For a second, he thought she might actually be dead, before she coughed and her eyes slowly, grudgingly, focused once more.

"C'mon," he said, scrambling up as best he could and grabbing her by the wrist. "We've gotta - "

"Got to what?"

David turned around to see his older self standing nonchalantly in the middle of the street some two dozen yards away, arms crossed, a smirk on his face. He froze, expecting the ground beneath him to detonate, yet the man only laughed.

"Let me ask you something, David," said the man, sounding like nothing more than a patient schoolteacher. "Do you know what the core principle of Devastator is?" David didn't reply, watching like a deer in headlights as the man smiled and continued. "It's not explosions. Explosions are just a side effect. Destruction, as embodied by Devastator, comes down to the transfer of energy. Energy is everywhere. Devastator merely gives us the capacity to manipulate it."

David neither knew nor was interested in finding out where his older self was going with this. He turned back to Terra and knelt down, grabbing her arm and trying to help her up, but she was barely conscious, unable to assist in her own locomotion, and given his own condition, the best he could do was get her sitting up before a nearby explosion served to focus his attention back on his other self.

"I know you think you know all this," said the man. "You've played around with Devastator before, and you're not a complete idiot. The colored dots, the vibrations? You know what that is, don't you?" The man waited for David to answer, and when he did not, blew up another section of street, closer this time. David gulped, and answered.

"Cyborg..." his throat seized and he coughed, trying to force words out. "He called it thermo-kinetic energy,"

"Did he?" asked the man. "Well I suppose that will do as a definition. It's the thermal energy of molecules in any object. It causes them to vibrate, shake their bonds. Enough of it, and they break them completely. They come loose from their rigid structures, liquify, even vaporize. But even as solid objects, the energy is still there, waiting to be harnessed. Devastator simply permits us to do so, shift the thermal energy into kinetic, store it up deep within, and then unleash it all at once."

"I know how it works!"

"No, you don't. You make up definitions that suffice for your purposes and then live on in ignorance. You've played with solid objects. Maybe even a simple liquid or two? Water? Gasoline?"

David didn't answer.

The man smiled. "Solid molecules are locked into rigid lattices," he said, "barely mobile at all. Liquids can't even overcome their own surface tension. No wonder you couldn't stop this. You never learned how to deal in really potent substances."

"Gasoline and water worked just fine for me," spat David.

"If you've no ambitions beyond throwing a motorcycle at someone, I'm sure it does," said the man with the tone of one speaking to a tiresome child. "But I'm talking about the fundamental principles of matter, David. The stuff of reality. To unlock real power, you can't merely content yourself with the vestigial heat from solids or liquids. You need something richer.

The man drew himself up and slowly extended one hand, palm open and upwards, fingers splayed out as though holding an invisible object. He smiled as he spread his fingers wide. "You need gasses."

David's heart stopped.

The man's shaded gaze turned from David slowly to his open hand, as he slowly turned it over, letting the smoky wind ply through his fingers. "Do you have any idea how difficult it is to manipulate a gas?" he asked. "How much energy courses through it? Molecules four hundred degrees above their condensation point, flying in every direction like meteors?" He was no longer looking at David, speaking half to himself, as David watched in mounting horror. "Did you ever stop to just watch them go? Watch them dance around you like fireflies? Did you ever imagine..." he turned his palm back upwards and locked it rigid, "what it would take to harness them?"

"Oh god..."

David turned and grabbed Terra's wrist, hoisting her to her feet by main force. She responded weakly, head hanging to one side limply, and he threw one of her arms over his shoulders and struggled to walk, even as he glanced back at the man.

"A hundred trillion molecules," said the man, wistfully, "just to fill the volume of a marble. And each one requiring its own effort. Fewer by volume of course than any solid, but they're so eager to mix... diffuse, transfer energy from one to another. You wind up playing a billion games of table tennis mentally just to get them started."

Slowly, David noticed the air around the man's hand was beginning to darken, as though a cloud were starting to condense in his hand. A soft whistling sound began to emit from all directions as the wind began to pick up.

"Terra, come on, we've gotta go!"

"Wha... what's going..."

"He's gonna - "

The wind suddenly increased from a whistle to a scream, as streams of smoke and air lashed at them, galvanizing Terra back to her senses and nearly knocking David off his feet. Bits of ash and debris stung their faces, forcing them to turn sideways to the wind, as David looked back at his older self, who seemed entirely unconcerned.

Around the man's hand swirled a whirlwind of air, violent, dark air that seemed to spiral inwards towards an tiny, central point. Though the air seemed leaden and filled with smoke, the center was white, gleaming white, floating an inch above the man's outstretched hand. And very slowly, it began to grow.

"Nitrogen freezes," said the man, staring intently at the small speck, "at sixty-three degrees Kelvin. Oxygen at fifty-four. That's four hundred degrees below room temperature. Can you even conceive of that? You need to bleed off 80% of the thermal energy in every single molecule, at once. And then, you need to contain it, deep inside, because all that energy just wants to do one thing..."

The small speck became a pebble, then a rock, then a round sphere the size of a tennis ball, white ice dusted with grey ash and sprinkled with black soot. David redoubled his efforts, clawing his way through what was now a wind of nearly hurricane force, hurling debris at him, trying to drag him off his feet. Something hit his leg and he stumbled, falling to his hands and knees, desperately trying to drag himself and Terra forward, step by agonizing step.

And then suddenly the wind stopped.

It stopped instantly, sending David and Terra crashing forward headfirst onto the ground as the wind resistance died away. David rolled over onto his back, lifting his head, and saw the man turn sideways to him, the now fist-sized ball of glinting ice still floating several inches above his outstretched hand. Slowly, the man lifted the cane in his other hand, before turning his head to David.

"The universe is full of energy, David," said the man. "And if we only can find the will to bend it to our own ends... " He brought his cane-hand back as he lightly tossed the frozen ball into the air, before turning his head just enough to look straight into David's eyes.

"Then we are free."

The man swung his cane like a tennis racket, and struck the frozen ball with the handle, sending it flying directly towards the two teenagers. David opened his mouth to shout a warning, but before he could make a sound, a blinding flash burst before his eyes like the radiance of the sun. He had just enough time to see Terra throw up her hands sheathed in gold, and then the very earth convulsed, and the air caught fire, and he saw and heard no more.

O-O-O

Not even the demons were expecting it.

There were too many. Far too many. Hundreds at the lowest, he couldn't take the time to calculate. And while his evil twin was busy fighting Slade, Beast Boy had found himself battling a horde of demons without limit, for more and more streamed out of the very walls with each successive moment.

He had taken to the air in the form of everything from a giant condor to a mosquito, dodging swarms of demon tendrils hurled his way every fraction of a second, striking back whenever he could find a free moment. Two demons seized his talons in swallow form with flame tendrils, but he simply turned into a pleisiosaur in midair and tore them from the walls, grinding them to paste against the rocks below before taking on a flying form once again. Another seized him around the neck, only to find itself grasping an enraged gorilla, which seized it in both hands and dashed its sulfuric ichor out against the far wall. Yet no sooner had he done so than several hundred more demons lunged at him from nowhere, burying him beneath an avalanche of living flame. He shifted once more, this time to an armored dinosaur, and flung a dozen of them off to be smashed to bits against the opposite wall, but five more took the place of every one he shed, and before long he was forced to the ground. They beat at his armored back and clawed at his flanks, and he ran his mind trying to think of what to do before the demons simply tore him to bits.

And then something wholly unexpected occurred.

The ground gave a heave, a sharp jolt, like an earthquake of enormous magnitude, bouncing all eight tons of his and the demons' weight into the air like a rubber ball and sending them tumbling off of him like the pieces of a board game with the table overturned. He bounced twice, landing on his back, and shifted semi-consciously into his human form, only to open his eyes and gape.

Far, far above, towering over the yawning heights of the deep chasm he was in, there loomed a cloud, but no ordinary cloud, not even the perpetual smoldering thunderhead of Trigon's damned realm. This was a living cloud of flame and smoke, boiling up from some unseen source into the all-too familiar shape of a giant mushroom, towering a thousand feet above ground level. A deep, rumbling roar built and built and finally brimmed over, echoing down the chasm in crashing and rolling thunder, as though mountains were being bowled. Behind the sound came a pressure wave so violent as to be visible, tearing rocks from the walls and ripping the lava spigots to pieces, amplified by the confines of the narrow chasm. Beast Boy rolled back onto his stomach, and, in pure instinct, shifted into the form of a cockroach, crawling underneath a pile of debris and ducking down moments before the shockwave hit.

The debris pile simply exploded, ripped apart like an anthill in a tornado, as Beast Boy's ears, or rather his tactile antennae, were flooded with a boundless roar like the howling of a mad God. A blast front like the fist of some enraged giant smashed him against the ground over and over and over again. He heard demons howling against the wind, and a sound like bugs hitting a windshield, or crockery thrown against a wall, as it sent them flying off to be smashed to paste against the walls or the fire river below.

Had he been in any other form, likely he would have been blown to pieces as well, the pressure wave popping him like a ripe balloon. But one of Mento's first lessons long back in the day had been how to survive something like this, which form was properly equipped with the gelatin structure and compartmentalized pockets that enabled it to survive, just for a moment, gyrating atmospheric pressures of a dozen atmospheres striking against his body like tidal waves.

He had no idea where this tremendous outpouring of destructive power had originated from, and for a second, he worried about whichever of his friends it might have been intended for. But the second it passed, he was on his feet as a human once again, brushing the smoke from his face as he surveyed what opposition remained. Most of the demons had been blown away, or simply torn to pieces where they stood, but a good thirty remained, saved by one trick or another from the violence of the mighty explosion. Scattered and distracted, the demons hesitated, turning to one another as though to seek instruction. Whatever had just happened had rendered even these monsters capable of astonishment.

But not Beast Boy.

Before they could recollect themselves, before they could even determine what was going on, Beast Boy set upon the nearest two demons in the form of a bighorn sheep, tossing both of them over the edge of the cliff they stood near, before half-turning, shifting to a horse, and kicking with his back hooves, caving a third demon in like a glass sculpture. A fourth lashed at his neck and caught nothing but air as Beast Boy collapsed into a coiled anaconda, before lashing out with his tail, encircling the demon with his coils and flinging it towards his head. By the time the demon arrived however, Beast Boy was a rhinoceros, and he impaled the demon on his keratin horn. He dropped his head, letting its lifeless body slide to the ground, and then suddenly he was a field mouse, and the flurry of fiery whiplashes struck nothing but air in his wake.

The demons crowded around from every direction, and he let them do so before suddenly assuming the form of a Tyrannosaur, bursting upwards with a sudden change in volume, casting demons off of himself left and right. Two wound up before his snout, and he tasted the bitter and burning sulfur on his tongue as he crushed both of them to steaming jelly in his powerful jaws. Another demon looped its burning tendril around his neck and squeezed, hoping to choke him to death or lop off his head, but he lost his volume as quickly as he had gained it, shrinking down, not to some mincing field creature, but a Velociraptor, eight feet tall and hissing, and the burning lasso closed around empty space. Before the demon could recover, he leaped onto it, striking downwards with his four-inch razorclaws, splitting it from head to abdomen like a battle axe through a straw effigy. And even as he landed, he twisted his neck to the left to avoid the blow of yet another demon and turned his head around to sever the offending tendril with his teeth, and when they proved inadequate, shifted on the fly into a tiger shark.

He had scarcely hit the ground before he was a grasshopper, bounding into the air to evade the attacks he knew were already coming. With a quick shift to swordfish, he bucked in mid-air and dove, driving all eleven hundred pounds of his body headfirst into the largest demon he could find. The sword at the end of his nose ripped through the demon like a projectile, moments before Beast Boy's weight drove both him and the demon over the edge of the cliff. Shifting to turkey vulture, he withdrew his head from the dying demon and pushed off of its body, selecting the form of a gyrfalcon to accelerate upwards and prepare his next move.

He was not afforded the opportunity. Three demons leaped from the cliff towards him, howling like the damned, their fiery limbs beating the air as they slashed towards him. Without missing a beat, Beast Boy turned a clumsy somersault, the purpose of which was unclear until, a moment later, he became a massive stegosaurus, his tail whiplashing down and bludgeoning all three demons out of the air as though they had been struck by a wrecking ball. And then he was a dragonfly, re-orienting himself and flying back up to the level of the rocky ledge. The remaining demons hung back, trying to discern how best to attack the gyrating shape shifter, but before they could come to a decision, Beast Boy turned into a golden eagle, and dove.

The demon he had selected was unready, and he staved its head in with his claws, already switching to a pterodactyl, lashing the air with his enormous wings and hurling himself backwards. With a sickening rip, the demon was torn in half, the bottom half collapsing as the top was hurled into the air. Beast Boy turned a complete flip, changing to kangaroo and smashing into another demon feet-first, splattering it against the wall before springing away, turning over in mid-air and torpedoing another demon in the torso, this time in the form of a bison. The demon exploded as two thousand pounds of angry ungulate collided with it at twenty miles an hour, and Beast Boy managed to catch yet another demon with his rear hooves in a bucking kick, seconds before he turned back into a human at last, his uniform and hair creased with burn marks and splattered with liquid sulfur, staring down the handful of demons that remained, surrounded by the broken and crushed bodies of their fellows.

For just a moment, the demons stared at the agent of this massacre, the skinny green changeling whom their master had commanded them to slay, the weakest by far of all of the Titans by every reckoning known, the prankster and weak-willed joker who hid behind his fellows. They stared at Beast Boy, the feeble organs that served as minds for their fiery bodies spinning in circles, and all of them, as one, froze.

It was the last thing they did.

Beast Boy became an elephant, nine tons and eleven feet tall, and he let loose a roar, not a trumpet but a deep, angry roar, and charged. The demons leaped and scattered to avoid him, but he seized one with his trunk and beat it against the ground, gouging another with his tusks. One enterprising demon vaulted up onto his back and brought its fiery arms around to plunge them into the back of his neck. But before the demon could do so, Beast Boy was a giant tortoise, and his thick shell repelled the blow without so much as a divot. A second later, he was a raging mountain gorilla, and he reached back with his long arms, seizing the demon and slamming him against the wall before using him as a bludgeon to smash two more demons. He became a flea as another demon tried to decapitate him with a whipping strike, and from there a wolf, leaping into the demon's chest and bowling it over. By the time they struck the earth, Beast Boy was a Gray Whale, and he barely felt the demon's splattered corpse as he crushed it beneath his blubbery hide.

And then silence.

Beast Boy held his breath, laying prone on the ground as the bubbling sulfur oozed out from under his enormous bulk, before finally shifting back into a human and getting up. Stepping around the quivering pieces of the slaughtered demons, he raced back down the path towards where Slade and his evil twin had been fighting.

Too late.

The slate gray version of Beast Boy stood leering over Slade, grinning from ear to pointed ear, with one foot planted atop Slade's back, like a triumphant hunter posing with his slain prey. Slade lay on his stomach like a puppet whose strings had been severed, prone and unmoving, and there were jagged rents torn in his side like knife slashes through paper mache.

Slade's armored hide had stood up to literally everything that the Titans had thrown at it for the last three weeks, from railguns to rhino horn, sonic projectors to starbolts, dark energy to demolitions. Even the sub-nuclear detonation that David had used in desperation, powerful enough to blow Slade's entire army to steam and tear twenty thousand tons of bedrock to rubble and dust, even that had done nothing to Slade. Yet here he lay, and the evil twin bent down over him, sneering as he hissed in Slade's ear.

"Now who doesn't have any friends?"

What Slade might have said to this went unheard, for a second later, a three hundred pound ostrich slammed into the evil twin at forty five miles an hour.

For the first time, Beast Boy's clone let out a cry of pain as he was hurled against the far wall. He sprang back from it, spinning back around, but Beast Boy was already back in human form, sulfuric sludge smeared all over his uniform, standing warily between the broken form of Slade and his own twin. Beast Boy didn't move, anticipating that his clone would attack, yet rather than doing so, the clone seemed to hesitate, before smiling evilly, and folding up his arms once again.

"You think he's leading you to Raven?" asked the smirking changeling.

Beast Boy closed his hands into fists, glaring at his evil twin with an unblinking stare. "I think you wouldn't be trying to stop us if he wasn't."

There was a fractional hesitation, a split second of indecision that leaked through the evil twin's mask of disdain and indifference, so quick as to be imperceptible to anyone but Beast Boy himself. And then it was gone, and the gray changeling sneered once more.

"You're gonna wish Trigon had killed you," he spat, and then he was gone, transformed into something too small to be seen, and all that remained was Beast Boy, Slade, and the turgid fire.

O-O-O

I don't know how long it was before I could see anything.

The fires were calmer now, starved down to embers from lack of fuel. The thunder of the explosions had receded into distant echoes. Even the smoke was beginning to thin at long last. But it scarcely mattered anymore. There was nothing left to see.

The destruction was total. The very rubble had been reduced to rubble, with no distinction given any longer between buildings and open space. All was covered in indistinct heaps of ruin, studded periodically with larger pieces, a broken car, a crushed sculpture, or a vent of flame that might well have been channeled direct from Hell for all anyone could tell. The extent of the destruction was hard to discern, enough smoke continued to vent into the air to preclude seeing anything beyond a hundred yards. All that Starfire could make out at this stage besides the undifferentiated ruin, were two men who stood amidst the devastation. One standing. One on hands and knees.

The flaming sword that had once been a cane, in the hand of the man standing, indicated which was which.

The wind blew cape and coat off to one side, yet neither man moved, the standing figure holding the sword down at an angle, letting a soft red liquid, whether blood or some other fluid dyed by the flickering firelight, she could not tell, drip from its tip to the ground below. He watched his counterpart with shaded eyes, as though waiting for some inevitable action.

Nightwing seemed to be in no hurry to accommodate his expectations. His head was lowered to the ground, one hand resting on his metal staff, broken at one end. He seemed to sway back and forth in the wind, as though barely able to keep upright, yet David did not approach him or make any move to press the attack, waiting for Nightwing to strike, as strike he inevitably must.

"You're not fooling anyone," said David, eyes invisible behind the mirrored glasses. "I can literally see right through you. Get up and try it."

"Raven..." said Nightwing, and his voice was pained. "You..."

"She's dead," said David, with a chilling calmness that reminded Starfire, for an instant, of Slade. "So are Cyborg and the changeling. All dead. The universe's only constant."

Nightwing raised his head, and his mask was missing, torn off by some unfathomable force. He set his teeth and spat defiance back at the man in the long coat. "You sick, twisted - "

"Don't patronize me," said David. "I'm no crazier than you, and you know it."

"You're a murderer."

"We're all murderers. All of us would-be gods, you included. By act or omission, we kill every day. We're the Valkyries, Nightwing. We choose who lives and dies. The only difference between us is that I don't lie to myself about it."

"The difference between us is that you're a sadist," spat Robin.

David seemed to freeze, as though this, at last, had surprised him. "A sadist?" he asked, incredulously, and his voice was bubbling with anger. "That's rich, coming from you. But even if I am a sadist, what are you? A legalistic anachronism who thinks that he has the right to impose his will on all the world. Nevermind what people need or want, you know best, don't you?"

"Shut up!"

"Or what?" roared David, brandishing his flaming sword in the air, fire dancing from it like a living thing. "What will you do?" He swung the sword down, cleaving the ground apart between him and Nightwing with a series of massive explosions. "What do you have left to threaten me with that I haven't already seen? Will you break my arm? Smash me through a wall? Beat my head against the pavement until the blood flows? What have you got planned for today? Another arrest warrant?"

"Not this time."

Starfire choked back a gasp, so cold was Nightwing's voice, a chilly hiss like an arctic wind, one that presaged nothing but ruthless violence.

David too seemed to notice, but he was not impressed. "Is that anger I detect?" he asked, voice dripping with sarcasm. "My God, he can react. I'm stunned. Please, Nightwing, elaborate. Are you actually preparing to kill me? And here I thought we'd have tea and discuss old times."

Nightwing sprang to his feet, faster than the blink of an eye. And like a blur, a barrage of explosive birdarangs shot at David like bullets. But David was ready and equally fast, and every one exploded ten feet from his body, moments before another explosion sent Nightwing tumbling backwards to the ground.

"You think yourself put upon?" demanded David, striding forward, sword in hand. "Am I being unfair to the stalwart defender of Jump City? What a terrible notion! How will I live with myself?"

From the place where he had landed, Nightwing groaned weakly, rolling over and clawing back to his feet before turning around to face David. David did not hinder him, watching Nightwing carefully, as though waiting for some inevitable attack.

"Still laconic as ever?" asked David. "And here I thought your tongue might be loosened at last."

"I don't have anything to say to you," said Robin, voice clipped. "You're a mass murderer, you're insane, and it's time someone stopped you for good."

"Well lord knows you've tried," said David darkly. "And with such effect. Tell me, do you remember Ceylon? Do you remember Minsk? Or how about Uganda?"

"I remember them."

"You're lying," said David. "Oh you remember what happened, I'm sure. But not the way I do. Not the way you made certain that I would, now do you?"

"You tried to murder innocent people. We stopped you. That's all there is to remember."

"Well that's funny, because I managed to remember something else. I remember the Great Nightwing, who never kills his enemies. Because that would be uncivilized. He just cripples them, leaves them broken and helpless in his wake, and then makes them thank him for the mercy of having spared their lives."

To Starfire's astonishment, David's voice began to shake, through anger or sheer emotion, she could not tell. "I remember lying in a pool of my own blood as your little brute squad made jokes. I remember being beaten so badly that I couldn't walk for six months. I remember what it feels like when a martial artist breaks your arm in four places, and then kicks you into the mud." David's sword flared like a torch. "I remember that very well."

From the looks of it, Nightwing was having none of it. "You know what I remember?" he asked. "I remember you blowing up a loaded passenger bus. I remember you trying to assassinate the President of Ethiopia. I remember you derailing a train off a cliff and then murdering the survivors with a landslide."

"But you don't remember why I did those things, now do you?"

"I don't need to know why."

David smiled. "No. You don't. Because it doesn't matter to you that the President of Ethiopia was a bloody murderer who deserved to die painfully every day that he drew breath."

"You killed eighty people along with him. People who never did anything. Peasants, bystanders, women and children. And even if you hadn't, you don't get to decide who lives and dies."

"No," said David. "That's your job, isn't it? You made that decision, and then you came after me because I had the temerity to challenge it, didn't you? There's people out there with body counts eight times mine. Most are in politics. But I usurped your authority. And we just couldn't allow that, now could we?"

"You played God with the lives of thousands of people. You murdered most of them. You murdered my friends. I don't care how you justify doing that."

Slowly, David lowered his sword, until the point was resting on the ground. He seemed to smile almost wistfully as he inclined his head at Nightwing.

"If you ask me, Nightwing," said David. "You couldn't ask for a better epitaph."

From within Nightwing's cape, he drew a metal cylinder, extending it with the flick of his wrist into a new staff four feet long. He leaped into the air, avoiding the treacherous ground, flying towards David with all the speed he could muster, and Starfire could tell that neither time nor injury had slowed his reactions by as much as a milisecond. He gave no indication that he was going to move, no shout, no expression, not so much as a twitch.

But for all that speed and subtlety, he had to leap, and charge, and swing, whereas all David had to do was flick his wrist.

The staff exploded like a firecracker, and Nightwing was blown out of the air like a bird hit with a shotgun. Starfire heard the splinter of bone and the painful cry that stabbed right through her heart over the echoing explosion, as Nightwing fell, crumpling to the ground like a broken toy. David simply watched, his expression confident and calm, as Nightwing struggled to rise again, but failed. And then, slowly, David reached back into his coat, and produced a gun. He regarded it for a few moments, and then, without another word, draw back on the slide, released it, and aimed the business end straight at Robin's forehead.

"Goodbye, Nightwing."

"FREEZE!"

The shouted command could not have been more surprising if it had been delivered from by a winged angel descending from on high amidst halos and light. As it was, Starfire jumped in surprise, and both Nightwing and David started visibly. Both of them turned their heads to see who had just intruded on the situation, as did Starfire. And when they did, the eyes of all three onlookers widened in surprise.

Warp stood a dozen yards away, a gun several sizes too large for a child his age held shakily in both hands, but aimed squarely and clearly at David.

I don't know what possessed me to move. I don't even remember where I found the gun. I didn't know how to use one beyond what I'd seen on television. But I remember staring into those black lenses like it was yesterday.

David stared at the eight year old child who had just materialized from nowhere, armed with a weapon and threatening him, his expression approaching disbelief. For a moment, he seemed lost for words, his entire equilibrium thrown off by this most unexpected of interruptions. And then, finally, he asked what was, perhaps, the obvious question.

"What the hell is this?"

"Don't move!" shouted Warp, plainly terrified, but equally plainly not backing down. He drew back the hammer on his gun, aiming it straight at David's chest. "Put it down!"

David did no such thing. He didn't even seem overly concerned at the prospect of the weapon presently pointed at him. Instead he looked rather like he was trying to puzzle out a particularly difficult riddle. Shaking his head, he half-turned to the frightened child, keeping his gun trained on Nightwing. "Who are you?" he asked, his voice calm but confused.

Warp hesitated before answering. "I'm Warp," he said. "I'm a Titan."

Instantly, David's expression changed. He froze in place, features turning from puzzlement to something approaching horror, and he slowly turned back to Nightwing. "I don't believe it," he said, and his tone was that of shock, subdued and legitimately stunned. "You didn't!"

"Warp, get out of here, now!" shouted Nightwing in his most stentorian tone, but Warp did not move.

If anything, this seemed to shock David yet further. "You brought a child into this? Are you out of your mind?"

"He followed us here," said Nightwing rapidly. "He's not part of this, let him go!"

"Not this, you idiot!" shouted David, brandishing gun and sword at the surrounding desolation. "Warp's not a given name. That's a superhero handle! You inducted a child into the superhero business? What is wrong with you?"

David had been angry before, but now he was visibly furious. He seemed to have forgotten Warp completely, consumed with shouting at Nightwing.

"What, were you trying to follow in Batman's footsteps? Do what was done to you? I knew you were capable of any sort of rationalization, Nightwing, but this - ."

"Warp, LEAVE!" roared Nightwing, cutting David off. "Blink out of here, now!"

"Leave him alone!" shouted Warp

"Go back to your Tower, boy," said David without turning his head. "This is not your business." He shook his head, looking down at Nightwing with contempt written all over his face. "How you can call me insane, after what you've done in the name of your obsessions, is entirely beyond me."

"STOP IT!" shouted Warp, and it might have been desperation, or it might have been mere accident, but in that instant, his finger clenched the trigger of his gun.

Click.

The sound was soft, but it shut David up instantly. He turned his head to the boy with the gun, as though unsure of what he had just heard, and Starfire saw Warp staring wide-eyed at the browncoated man he had just tried, and failed, to shoot.

Slowly, David shook his head. "Such a waste," he said.

The words seemed to galvanize Warp back to life, and he stepped back, pulling the trigger once more, this time clearly with deliberation, yet once more it refused to fire. Again and again he pulled it, but each pull was rewarded with the same soft click, and no result.

"Don't bother," said David. "It won't work."

Warp blinked, lowering the gun slowly as his mouth tried to force out words. "Wha -"

David smiled. "I don't know what Nightwing and the others told you about me, boy," he said. "But I'm not that stupid. I broke your firing pin the moment I saw the gun."

Warp said nothing, but his eyes darted to the gun, his face going pale as it fell from his hands. David's grin broadened as he shook his head. "Next time," he said, "don't give warning by shouting demands. Just shoot."

And then Nightwing tackled him.

Both David and Starfire's attention had been directed away from Nightwing, and in that split-second, Nightwing had acted, lunging at David like a noiseless phantom, and the first warning David had was when Nightwing collided with him at full speed. Sword and gun went flying, as David let out a shout of surprise, and Nightwing one of pure rage. They struggled for a moment, no fancy maneuvers or martial arts, for one was plainly untrained in close quarters combat, and the other badly wounded. Grappling with one another, they twisted and turned, and then lurched to one side, and went spilling down the heap of debris that David had been standing atop, rolling over one another down into a small depression in the rubble.

As one, they scrambled back to their feet, David racing up the side of the shallow depression towards where his weapons had landed, Nightwing pursuing him. Despite his injuries, Nightwing was still faster, and he leaped onto David's back with a razor-sharp birdarang in his hand. David screamed like a stuck pig as the birdarang plunged into his leg, moments before Robin tore him off of the slope and threw him back down into the depression. He pursued, slashing at David once more, but David seized a broken rock from the ground where he had fallen, and clubbed Nightwing across the temple with it hard enough to shatter it in his hand. As Robin staggered back, David moved to follow up, but Nightwing knocked his arm aside, and elbowed him in the chest before hitting him in the chin with a two-handed axe-blow that threw David off his feet and onto his back onto the ground.

Above, Warp crept up tentatively to the lip of the depression as David and Nightwing struggled within it, no powers, no explosions, no martial arts or fancy gadgets. There was no room or time for any of these. Nightwing was plainly the superior fighter, but he was sapped by injury and fatigue, his lightning skills degraded to the point where it was simply a matter of bloody slogging. And for David to use his matchless powers of destruction at this close of a range without blowing himself apart required time and concentration that Nightwing was plainly intent on not affording him. All weapons material or supernatural denied them, David and Nightwing were reduced to rocks, broken bits of metal, and the birdarangs still hanging from Nightwing's belt. The only sounds were shouts, cries, and the sound of fist striking bone, or body flung against broken rock.

Back and forth the two men struggled, grappling and beating one another bloody by every means on hand, before David seized a broken lead pipe from within the rubble and swung it at Nightwing's head. Nightwing simply ducked the awkward slash, hit David in the stomach with his open palm, and then clubbed him in the back of the head as hard as he could with his fist, sending him crashing to the ground like an inanimate object.

Bleeding, bloody, and badly injured, Robin took a few moments to catch his breath, a bloody birdarang still clutched in one hand. Carefully, he removed three more from his belt, adjusting and then sliding them together with a series of soft clicks, until he was holding a makeshift sword fashioned from the razor-sharp blades of each handheld throwing star. Only then did he approach David's crumpled form once more, kneel down, and roll him over onto his back before placing the tip of his sword against the demolitionist's throat.

"Don't. Move."

For once, David seemed inclined to obey. His glasses had been lost or broken in the tumult, and his eyes were unfocused, staring up at Nightwing, teeth clenched against pain or anger or both. For several seconds, neither he nor Nightwing said a word, until finally David spoke.

"Well, Mr. Grayson?" he hissed, voice shaky but firm. "What exactly are you waiting for?"

"This is what you wanted, isn't it?" asked Nightwing, the tip of his sword resting against David's throat. "Everything destroyed, everyone dead. You wanted it to end like this."

"What do you take me for, a nihilist?" spat back David. "I wanted to kill you and everyone around you. All this," he gestured weakly up and around at the ruins of the city, "is just window dressing. And you give me half a chance, that's exactly what I'll do."

"I feel any ice on this sword or see any red, and I'll cut your throat."

"Then what the hell are you waiting for?" demanded David. "Are you still trying to take me prisoner? There's no jails left in this city, and there's none on the planet that could hold me anyway. I just killed four hundred people including your so-called friends and you've got me at swordpoint, so shut up and do the job."

Still Nightwing didn't move.

"You think you're being noble? You'll kill eight million people by omission, but you won't kill me in a standup fight? You think that makes you honorable?"

"So now you want to die?"

"What I want doesn't matter. You've got the sword. If you can't use it to get what you want, then you might as well hand it to me."

Nightwing said nothing for a moment, but then slowly stood up, the point of his sword still aimed straight at David's throat, but withdrawn several inches.

"I'm not killing you," he said with finality. "You're going away."

Of all things, David seemed to regard this as funny. He shook his head slowly. "Away?" he asked, like a teacher terminally disappointed with a truant student.

"I'm going to find somewhere to stick you where you can't hurt anyone anymore. I don't care what it takes or where I have to go. I won't be you."

"You're out of your mind," said David. "There is no facility in existence that can restrain me perpetually, and you know it."

"Then I'll find one outside existence," said Nightwing. "Another dimension, another universe, it doesn't matter. Whatever it takes to make it happen, you're gonna rot in a prison for the rest of your - "

Nightwing froze in mid-word.

Starfire wasn't sure what had just happened. Nightwing simply stopped, like television program paused in mid-frame. David did not move either, and for several seconds, they simply stared at one another, before slowly, a smile spread across David's face.

"I don't think so..."

Nightwing shook in place, twitching, convulsing, his shakes becoming stronger and stronger, as though he were being shook by the hand of an invisible giant. The sword fell from his hand and clattered to the ground, as David slowly, painfully, climbed back to his feet.

"The human body is 60% water," he said, carefully picking himself up off the ground, nursing his broken arm and bleeding temple. "And water is one of the easiest elements of all." He dusted himself off slowly with his remaining good arm, wincing with pain as he did so, one hand clutched over his stomach, as Nightwing stood and watched. "You didn't have a chance anyway," he said. "The brain itself has no sensory nerves. By the time you felt anything, it was too late."

Starfire could see Nightwing trying desperately to move, to speak, to act, but he was unable to do so much as breathe in or out. David steadied himself, walking over to Nightwing, and looking him straight in the eye.

"You asked me before if this here was what I always wanted? Well the answer is no. I didn't always want this. I wasn't raised by a madman in a bat costume. I didn't grow up in the same metahuman madhouse you did. In fact, there was a time when all I wanted was to have nothing whatsoever to do with you and all your kind."

He reached up and laid one hand gently on Nightwing's forehead.

"I came to want all this, Nightwing, because you convinced me to."

He pushed lightly against Nightwing's head, and as though his very touch were toxic, Nightwing instantly collapsed. David stood in the bottom of the rubble depression, and watched as Nightwing landed on the ground like a lifeless doll, twitched several times, and then moved no more.

"Goodnight, sweet prince," said David. And then he turned and walked away.

But he didn't get far.

All of a sudden, there was a flash of light from behind David, and suddenly, standing where there had been nobody a moment ago, there now stood a child holding a thin sword, retrieved from where David had dropped it bare minutes ago. The flash alerted David, and reflexively, he turned around to see what had just happened, yet he was too late. Before he could complete his turn, before his eyes could identify what it was that had appeared behind him, the child lunged forward, and without a second's hesitation, drove all three feet of the razor sharp sword directly into David's chest.

There was a shout, not of pain but of shock and surprise, and a loud crack as the blade broke off at the hilt, knocking Warp back and onto the ground, but David scarcely seemed to see him. He staggered back, tripping and falling back against the shallow slope of the depression wall. The sword sticking through him prevented him from landing flat, and he rolled, crumpling down onto the scorched ruin, landing on his stomach like a boned fish, his head raised and mouth working, but no sound emerging. Eyes wide and breath coming in scared gasps, Warp scrambled back, away from the stricken murderer, but he needn't have bothered. David groped blindly for the end of the sword, failing to find it, and with his other hand he reached towards Warp, staring in wordless shock at the architect of this sudden reversal of fortune. But before he could say a word, or do whatever it was he had purposed to do, his hand stiffened and fell limp. He coughed, took one last gasping breath, and then slowly, lowered his head to the ground, blood leaking from the side of his mouth and from the rent in his stomach to feed a growing pile on the floor. There was one final shudder, and then silence.

Starfire watched, barely daring to breathe. And only once silence had fallen once more over the tapestry of violence and death, did she contribute a word.

"You... you killed him," she said.

"No," came the adult Warp's voice in reply. "I only thought that I had. The true agent responsible for this was beyond my capacity to kill."

Starfire looked around, as though expecting yet another surprise attack by some unseen figure. "I don't understand," she said.

"Neither did I, at first."

And suddenly, there was light.

Not a flash, but a gradual glow that began to emit from the fallen form of David, a cherry-red halo so intense that Starfire thought for a moment that his body had caught fire. But this glow was not of flames, nor of any other visible source. It seemed to emit by its own accord, framing David's body in crimson light. And then, before Starfire and the child Warp's astonished eyes, it began to rise.

It lifted from David's body like a wisp of cloud, twisting and turning as though alive, to a rhythm all its own. A second later, and it had detached itself from David entirely, leaving him behind as it slowly rose into the air. Starfire saw Warp get up, staring wide-eyed at the red cloud as it danced into the air, now rising faster and faster, and so stunned was Starfire by all that she had seen that it took some time before she suddenly realized what she was looking at.

"Devastator," she said.

"I didn't know it's name at the time," came the Adult-Warp's voice, as the Child-Warp watched the red mist flying off into the air, eyes blazing with a mixture of tears and impotent rage. "I was just a child. I didn't know anything of demons or energy parasites. All I knew was that I was watching some part of the person who had just murdered everyone I ever knew, escaping. And with God as my witness, I swore then and there that one day I would find that part, and destroy it once and for all.

O-O-O

Darkness.

Pitch darkness, darkness so profound as to negate the possibility of light. He could feel nothing, as though his nerves had shut themselves down. No sound. No sensations. No scents to the air. He wasn't even sure if he was breathing.

Was he dead?

Did death exist in this place?

The last thing he could remember was a flash of light so intense that he saw it through his clenched eyes, that he saw it even now, dancing before him. A flash that hurt to even think about, and then, instantly, a profound darkness, the transition so stark that it had stunned his brain to silence. And then there was nothing, and maybe there never would be again.

"David?"

A whisper, so quiet, yet it shocked his entire system back to life, and he felt his heart beating, and the breath flowing in and out of his mouth and nose, and realized all of a sudden that he was laying on his back, and that all around him was weight. Not pressing against him, just a sense of weight, of enormous pressure, held at bay by means unknown, enveloping him like a cocoon. He did not dare to guess where he was.

"David?" came the whisper again, the same quiet urgency, but this time he knew who it was. Where Terra was, he couldn't even guess at, but he heard her as though she was right next to him. Maybe she was.

He didn't answer her, too afraid to even whisper back, but somehow she seemed to sense that he was awake.

"On your right," she said. "By your hand." And for the first time, he became aware that his hand was there, and intact. He reached out, millimeters at most, and his fingers closed around something cold and rough and metallic.

"I'm gonna draw him in," she whispered to him. "Distract him. You have to take him by surprise. You'll only have one chance."

And then suddenly, the world seemed to convulse.

He felt himself moving, though how or by what means, he couldn't tell. His ears were full of sound, a roaring, crushing sound like a raging landslide, but one that refused to stop. He felt himself buffeted about, by what he could not tell, and he clenched his hand reflexively about whatever metal object he had found there, until some time later, seconds, minutes, it was impossible to tell, it stopped.

And then, suddenly, he felt hot air on his face, and opened his eyes, and to his astonishment, he saw light, red light, blurry still, but slowly moving into focus. And as his addled brain began to process the images that it was being shown, he realized what he was looking at, and accordingly, where he was.

He was laying on his side, nearly entirely buried by a pile of dirt and rock, save for an opening around his face. Before him stretched an expanse of empty terrain so barren and cracked that, for a time, he did not even recognize that he was still in Jump City. And in the middle of it all stood the man with the cane, his back to David, facing down the street with one hand on the handle, and the other tucked into a pocket and held behind his back. He seemed to take no notice of David, if even he knew that David was there. And after a few moments, he began to walk.

The man walked through a city street scourged, first by fire, and then by the wrath of some angry god. There was no rubble or heaped debris, for everything mobile or semi-mobile had simply been blown away, cast aside in a wave of rock and ash and vanished into the gloom. The streets and sidewalks had been swept bare, streetlights, mailboxes, and parked vehicles hurled off into the distance, and the buildings that lined either side of the road had suffered varying fates. The sturdier ones, built of concrete and iron, manacled together by the strongest bonds men could devise, these still stood, huddled together like refugees on a cold night crowding around a fire. All had lost their facings, some their interiors and roofs, and others stood reduced to skeletons of twisted steel. Between them yawned empty gaps studded with plumbing fixtures and foundations, or sometimes with nothing at all, scorched spots on bare ground marking where other, weaker buildings of wood, masonry, or brick had once stood. There was no sound, save the soft rustling of the wind, no smoke save that of the ambient fires scattered far away, for all flames nearby had been summarily extinguished, along with anything that might have produced noise.

Across the magnificent desolation walked David's older self, pace unhurried, demeanor unconcerned. He might have whistled for all he acknowledged the lifelessness of his surroundings, as he slowly approached the one distinguishing feature that remained within this blasted heath.

In the middle of the street loomed a hemisphere of stone, caked with what had once been loose dirt, now reduced to blackened cinder painted across its pitted surface. The entire front section had been crushed, as though beaten into the ground with a giant hammer, and the remainder of the rock and packed-earth structure was twisted and riven with cracks. Considering the magnitude of what it had just withstood, it was a wonder that it was still existent at all.

The man considered the broken edifice for a moment, and then slowly walked towards it. But he hadn't taken more than a dozen steps before it erupted.

There was no explosion, no venting of white-hot gases and kinetic pressure waves. The pile of stone did not fly to pieces but erupted, like a volcano stirred once more to life. A column of earth and rock flew into the air and whiplashed back and forth like a loose fire hose, writhing in the hazy air, before the column collapsed, parting in two as it did so and landing in two smaller heaps on either side of the street.

And between them, Terra.

She was covered in loose dirt, which ran from her arms and face like water, painting her in a uniform shade of brown. Her hair was matted with blood, to which the dirt stuck in dark clumps on her forehead and down the sides of her face. Yet her eyes were washed out in golden light, and her closed fists sheathed in it, as the wind whipped about her, kicking dust up around her feet and billowing it back behind her like an unfolding cloak.

Standing some dozen yards away, his back turned to David, the man regarded Terra and folded his arms. "Very impressive," he said, unconvincingly. "Where is he?"

"He's safe," she said. "Safe from you."

The man seemed to find this funny. He sighed, chuckling, shaking his head and rubbing his eyes behind his glasses. "Is that right?" he asked, patronizingly. "And while he's off being safe, what exactly do you propose to do?"

Terra narrowed her eyes, pulling her arms in closer to her body, as the rocks around her stirred at her unspoken command, clashing together like castanets, sending peals of thunder rolling about the empty ruins. Faster and faster the rocks spun, the tumult rising to a deafening crescendo, yet what purpose she could have for them was unclear, for the man with the cane was plainly neither impressed nor intimidated. Yet finally, at the climax of the display, David felt the weight of the debris and dirt that buried him shift violently and drain away, as the dirt above him slid back into the ground, leaving him laying alone on the bare ground, save for a heavy, lead pipe, clutched in his right hand.

"I'm gonna break you."

Terra's voice was distorted, perhaps by the whirlwind of stones or some other trick of the air, but the man she addressed simply sighed and shook his head in disappointment.

"It's like I'm speaking to a wall sometimes," he said, and then he blew the rocks up.

They all went off at once, bursting like firecrackers in the smoky sky, but this, at least, Terra had anticipated, and she threw them away in every direction at best possible speed. Still, the blasts lifted her off her feet and dumped her on the ground on her back, knocking the wind out of her lungs as the man carefully stepped towards her.

"You know what the problem is with kineticists?" he asked her as he advanced. "You, all of them?" He paused, as if to give her a chance to answer. "There's no discipline."

Terra rocketed back to her feet, pulling stones from the ground as she did so and hurling them at the man with the cane, who batted them aside almost offhandedly, as he reached behind himself with his free hand without looking. "Kinetics are all emotion-based," he said, "all about how much you feel. No study, no training, just random chance. And you know what that does?"

Three dozen yards from where David still lay, a block of bedrock the size of an ambulance was blasted out of the ground fifty feet into the air, where it began to slow to a stop.

"It makes you lazy," said the man, and then he threw his hand forward, and another titanic explosion sent the block of stone hurtling towards Terra like a jet engine.

Terra shouted, throwing her hands out, encasing the rock in a sheath of golden light, planting her feet against the ground and gritting her teeth as she leaned forward, as though into a tremendous headwind. The flying stone block shook and corkscrewed, plowing into the ground and sliding towards her as she fought to bring it under control. She squeezed her eyes shut, her entire body glowing with light, as the rock bucked, and groaned, and heaved, and finally slid to a stop bare inches from Terra's hands.

And then the man with the cane opened his hand, and the rock exploded.

The blast was deafening, sending a visible shockwave wafting out that nearly bowled the man over and temporarily blinded David. The smoke took a few moments to clear, and when it did, David saw Terra laying crumpled on her side some thirty yards back, moving only weakly, surrounded by the fragments of the enormous stone bomb.

"You don't have to work for Kinetics," said the man. "You don't have to train for them, earn them through years of effort. At best, you might make the concession of learning how to keep them under control, but they come to you as naturally as breathing." He stepped forward, using his cane to pick his way through the shrapnel as he continued to lecture. "All I have to work with are explosions. Omnidirectional, thermokinetic explosions, triggered by parasynaptic rote. You want to move a rock, you simply will it to move. I have to will Devastator to perform an unspeakably complex series of properly calibrated micro-detonations in an exact sequence, with perfect timing, to accomplish the same goal." He shook his head. "Can you even conceive of the difficulty of such a task, of the years of practice and refinement that need to go into it?"

Terra did not appear to be listening to him, raising herself up weakly on her forearms as she rolled over onto her back, her eyes once more their normal color. She looked back up the street, past the man with the cane, straight into David's eyes, as he lay still on the pavement, fifty yards behind. She said nothing, gave no sign, save for what could be read into her frightened, pained expression.

"Of course not," said the man, who either did not notice that she was looking right through him, or did not think anything of it. "You don't know anything about control, do you? All you know how to do is rage."

It might have been David's imagination, or simply his eyes playing tricks on him, but he could have sworn that at the man's last comment, he saw Terra's mouth curl ever so slightly into a soft smile. And then her eyes went gold again, and she scrambled back to her feet to face him down once more.

In that instant, he understood.

He picked himself up unsteadily, for his balance was still recovering from the subterranean trip, his heart still pounding in his throat like a battering ram, and he held the pipe, heavy as it was, like his own baton, low and to his side, as he began to creep towards the two combatants.

Terra pulled a wedge of stone into the air, sheered it to a razor edge, and hurled it like a whip at the man, who blew it aside almost contemptuously, advancing towards her with an even gait as she conjured and hurled ever-larger, ever-deadlier stones and hurled them at him at breakneck pace. Not one came closer than twenty feet, blasted off course, blown to fragments and steam, even aborted before they could be carved from the ground.

"Spoiled children, throwing tantrums because they can't get their way," said the man, as he clubbed down a dozen more hurled projectiles. "No finesse, no responsibility, no understanding of what you're doing. Just raging anger, crudely beaten into a weapon and hurled out into the world."

Terra fell back again, and sent a tremor through the earth, ripping spikes of stone out of the ground in rhythm with what David belatedly realized were his own footsteps, her washed-out, gold-glowing eyes rendering it impossible to determine what she was actually looking at. He moved as quickly as he dared, fearful that his alter-ego would somehow sense him approaching even through the cover of the explosions and the fire. Yet as he moved, he found to his amazement that with every step, the ground seemed to warp beneath his feet like rubber, the earth itself muffling any sound of his approach, as Terra slowed her retreat and increased her attacks, bringing her adversary to a stop, temporary though it might be.

He didn't question how it was possible that she was simultaneously flinging so much material at the man with the cane, and taking care to conceal, by every artifice in her repertoire, the sound of David's approach from behind. He could only trust to her capacities, and break into a run.

The man took no notice of anything amiss, mechanically blasting each spike into dust as it was raised, his voice growing more and more contemptuous. "Go on," he spat at her. "Rage at me, Terra. Throw your worst tantrum. Cut loose. Watch where it gets you."

She certainly seemed to try. A geyser of loose stone and rock exploded from between her and the man, rocketing a hundred feet into the air, before snaking around and spraying like a firehose towards him. But the geyser was slightly off-center, and the man stepped briskly to the side of it, not realizing that in doing so, he was lining himself up perfectly with David, now approaching at a dead run. He planted his feet and counterattacked, hurling a series of explosions down the street and blowing Terra off her feet, but no sooner had she struck the ground than she rose again and threw rocks anew.

David could feel Terra's influence slipping as she fought to maintain control of a hundred different objects at once. He felt the ground firming up beneath him as she lost her grip on it, and plainly she did too, cutting everything loose in a violent maelstrom of stone and rock, trying desperately to bury any sound of David's approach under a barrage of raw sound. Only a few more seconds...

Suddenly, the man shot his cane forward, and a tremendous blast turned one of Terra's rocks into flames and flying debris, all of which were blown back into her chest like a shotgun blast. She gave a stunned cry, and was lifted off her feet and hurled back a dozen yards to the ground, where she lay like a boned fish, gasping for air, curled automatically into a ball on the floor.

"You can only get by on rage for so long," said the man, as the echo of the explosion was fading out across the ruined city, "before you encounter something impervious to your anger." He raised his cane, but before he could bring it down to do whatever it was he had planned, he froze.

And by the time he had spun around, half a second later, it was too late.

David had given no sign, and Terra was past the point of being able to, but as the last echos of the most recent explosion faded out, the sound of David's footsteps had at long last become discernable. Had the man reacted the instant he heard them, he might have managed to pre-empt David, but the split-second's hesitation was unavoidable, and he could not turn in time to prevent David from bringing the pipe down at his head.

It was not, however, too late for him to try to block, and with an action borne from reflex as much as any thought, he brought his silver-handled cane up to parry the blow. The ringing sound of metal on metal morphed into a savage "crunch" as David's overhand swing collided with the cane and forced it back down into the bridge of the man's nose, smashing into his sunglasses and crushing them before knocking the man back with a stifled cry of surprise and pain.

Thrown off-balance by his clumsy swing, David struggled to recover, and slashed at the man's head again, but this time the man managed to grab David's arm, wrenching him around before slamming the head of his cane into David's stomach like a pool queue, doubling him over. But when he withdrew to repeat the blow, David grabbed the cane with his free hand, locking them both together as they struggled and twisted for the upper hand. Smaller than his older counterpart, driven by adrenaline and pure fear, David could only hang on for dear life, aware in some reptillian sense that he was only safe for so long as he remained too close to his adult self for him to safely employ his explosions.

Back and forth they wrestled, each trying to wrench the weapons from the hands of the other, scrambling and stumbling on the uneven ground. No matter how much he shoved or pulled, the adult David's mass was not so much greater than his younger self that he could simply manhandle his way out of the teenager's grip. Then suddenly he lurched backwards, slipping perhaps, or overcompensating for some shove of David's, and lost his footing, and fell to the ground. His brain operating on autopilot, David lunged after him, desperately trying to keep close, but apparently his older self's tolerance for risk was tighter than he thought, for no sooner had the man landed on the ground, than the pipe in David's hand exploded.

He felt the frost forming on it, and reflexively let go, and that alone was what saved him from having his hand blown off. The shock wave aborted his lunge and blew him off his feet, sending him bouncing and sliding down the street to a stop up against the curb. It did damn near the same to his older self however, cracking the asphalt he lay upon and sending him rolling away several feet, for he had been given no time to mitigate the explosion or channel it away from himself.

Fighting back tears from his wounded hand, not even daring to look at it, for fear of finding it a mangled stump. He scrambled uneasily back up, and turned to find the man doing the same...

... and gasped in horror.

The man's glasses were shattered, and lay in fragments on the ground, permitting David, for the first time, to see his face. His own face.

But...

"You... you're blind."

He couldn't stop himself from staring, nor from speaking, and indeed, blind was just the beginning. The man's eyes were wholly opaque, like marbles, indeed they might well have been marbles, given everything else. A horrid, flaming scar was carved across his face at eyelevel, crossing from temple to temple through both eye sockets and the bridge of the nose. Yet no sooner had David spoken up, than the man lifted his head towards him, and with perfect assurance of sight, raised his cane and blew the ground out from under him.

It was a short blast, scarcely enough to knock him over, but the man used the opportunity to rise once again. Yet despite everything, he seemed almost amused.

"I can see as well as you can," he said, brushing the dust off of himself. "Better in fact, given your present circumstances."

"But how - "

The man merely smiled and tapped one finger to the side of his head. "The same way you used to," he said. "Devastator provides, after all."

"What... what happened?"

"Your little friends happened. Along with a lesson on the fundamentals of life." He popped his cane up with one hand, and the red flames cloaked it once more as he rolled it up and down his fingers.

"In the end," said the man, "nothing matters except who's left standing."

"Couldn't agree more," came a voice from the side.

The ground shook violently and tore apart, throwing both David and his counterpart off their feet, as a chasm opened between them venting a massive wave of loose earth and stone into the air. Before either of them could react, the wave split, sweeping both of them off their feet. David was washed down the street, fetching up on the sidewalk like a beached fish, while the man with the cane was spun head over heels back, as the wave carried him into and through the front of a small building.

Before David could even figure out what just happened, Terra grabbed him by the wrist, jerking him back to his feet. He was half-pulled, half-ran a dozen steps down the street, before Terra pulled a slab of rock from the ground as cover, and shoved him behind it.

He slid to the ground, next to Terra, and it took a moment or two before he recognized just how spent she looked. Blood, matting the dirt that liberally covered her, framed her entire face and ran down one arm. One hand was clutched over her stomach, where her shirt was stained black with mud kept wet by what had to be yet more blood. She collapsed next to him, breathing heavily, leaning against the stone she had just conjured up.

David waited for her to speak, and when she did not, ventured a comment of his own. "Are you all right?" he asked, trusting that she knew what he meant.

"I'll be fine," she said, hissing the words through her teeth. But before he could ask another question, she raised her head, staring him straight in the eye. "You have to get out of here."

Had she asked him to jump into a pool of magma, he would scarcely have been more surprised. "What?" he asked. "What do you - "

"There's no time to argue," she said quickly. "That wave won't hold him for long. Just get up and run! I'll cover you."

"If you want to run, let's both go, come on!"

"He'll just follow us, somebody has to stop him, and I'm the one who still has powers. You can make it if you leave right now."

Fire flared upwards from somewhere deep inside his stomach. "I'm not just leaving you to - "

A tremendous explosion from down the street interrupted both of them, and they peered over the edge of the rock shelter in time to watch the entire building that the man with the cane had been hurled into exploding. Flaming pieces of debris flew a hundred yards into the air to rain down in every direction, as a shadow began to form within the flames that raged inside it.

Terra was the first one to act.

She grabbed David by the collar, pulling him back down behind the rock and forcing him to look her in the eye.

"You have to go," she said. "You're the only one left."

He blinked. "What are you talking about."

"You're the only Titan left," she said. "Trigon killed the others, and now he's trying to kill you. That's why he sent that double of yours. He needs you all dead."

"He's trying to kill both of us," said David.

"He wants me because I betrayed him, just like Slade. He wants you because he knows that the Titans beat him the first time, and as long as there's still one of you alive, he's vulnerable. That's why you have to get out of here."

"But," stammered David, still barely able to even credit what she was suggesting, "but I don't... I don't have Devastator! How am I supposed to - "

"I don't know!" shouted Terra. "I don't know how this is supposed to end. None of this was even supposed to happen. But it did happen. And the only people who can still set it right are the Titans."

David didn't know what to say, but Terra didn't wait for him to figure it out. "Go," she said, standing back up. "I'll hold him here."

"T... Terra..."

"Run!"

She whipped her hand out, and David was hurled back by a convulsion of the earth, moments before another wave of living earth picked him up and brushed him down the street like an insect caught in a gust of wind. Over and over he rolled, until finally he reached the end of the street, and saw Terra turning back towards the scene of the action, her body cloaked in a golden halo, before the smoke closed between them, and he saw no more.

Back up the street, Terra turned back towards where the man in the cane had last been, and gasped, as she saw the man in question standing not a dozen yards in front of her, leaning on his flaming cane, watching her with equanimity, staring into her soul with his lifeless, blank eyes. She took a step back, clenching her fists and raising fresh stones with which to do battle, but the man did not advance to the attack.

"So tell me," he asked her, his tone calm and curious, "why did you really want him to run?"

She hesitated. "To get away from you," she said.

"And why should you care whether he gets away from me?" asked the man. "Surely you don't actually believe that he's going to run off and single-handedly kill Trigon?"

She took a deep breath, and let it out slowly. What use now in lying?

"Because I wiped the Titans out once," she said, "or I thought I had. I thought it was what I wanted to do. And after I'd done it, I just wanted to die." She paused, letting the stones spin around her like heavenly bodies. "I won't let Trigon, or you, or anyone else wipe them all out again."

"That may not be up to you."

"I say it is up to me," she said, and she dropped back into a ready position. "You wanna say otherwise?"

The man simply nodded, picking his cane up idly and looking it over, as though expecting it to bloom in his hand. Then with a single, fluid motion, he grasped the top of his cane and turned the handle. There was a soft click, and suddenly the handle came off entirely, and from within the cane came a ribbon of bright steel, razor sharp and glistening in the unearthly twilight. In one motion, he raised the handle and sword into the air, letting it ring as it vibrated in the breeze. And then at once, the entire sword burst into heatless flame.

Terra took a deep breath, trying to still her heart rate, as the man slowly lowered his flaming sword, looked her in the eye once more, and smiled.

"I knew a man once who had a saying for occasions like this," he said. "Tell me, Terra, would you like to know how I got these scars?"

O-O-O

If there was a God, he had a sick sense of humor.

Beast Boy wanted nothing more than to race off, take to the air, to the ground, whatever he had to do. He had the unavoidable sense that time was slipping through his fingers while he loitered here. But rather than do what he wished to, and run after where he thought Raven was at full speed, he was stuck here, moving at a pace a snail would have described as a dawdle, practically carrying someone he would ordinarily have spared no effort to reduce to a state such as this.

Slade was barely mobile, unable to maintain his own weight. He would not even have been able to move had Beast Boy not been supporting him. Sickly yellow ichor leaked from the slashes in his side, oozing like mucus down his side and dripping onto the ground, where it bubbled and hissed, etching the very stone. Beast Boy didn't ask what it was, nor how his duplicate had managed to rip through Slade as he had. Even if Slade had been willing to tell him, he was pretty sure he wouldn't understand the answers.

He was almost equally sure he didn't want to know.

Slade said nothing, save for a persistent groan that seemed to emanate from some indistinct point within himself. It sounded like dying machinery, like the groan of a gnarled tree as it shifted in the wind. Every time he made his mind up to ask if Slade was all right, he managed to think better of it. All he could do was help him along, and trust that he was doing the right thing here. For all he might have hated him, Slade was the only one who seemed to know what this place was.

At long last, they rounded a corner. Ahead, the boiling river turned sharply to the right, and bore away into further fathomless depths. The path that they were following, running along it some twenty yards above the surface of the lava, split here, one branch wrapping right along the cliff wall, bearing gently upwards before being lost to sight. The other fork turned away, towards a tunnel carved into the living stone, vanishing almost instantly into darkness, but not before plunging down a further set of carven stairs.

Step by shambling step, they made their way onwards, Beast Boy not even asking which way they were to go, assuming that Slade would make his intentions clear in good time. Yet when finally they came to the fork in the road, the last step seemed too much, and Slade's body suddenly went rigid, and then limp, moments before he collapsed to the ground on his hands and knees. He remained there for a moment, teetering on the brink of total collapse, until finally his limbs seemed to give out beneath him, and he fell, utterly spent, on his front, and moved no more.

Beast Boy thought for a moment Slade might be dead, until he reminded himself that Slade was dead, and that death didn't seem to mean what it previously had.

Kneeling down carefully, Beast Boy tried to roll Slade over, but to no avail. Whatever Slade was now made of, his weight was such that he might as well have been carved from solid lead. It wasn't until Beast Boy resorted to using himself as a makeshift auto-jack, shifting to a tiny form, sliding underneath Slade, and then progressively adopting larger and larger forms, that he managed to budge Slade at all.

Once he had gotten Slade onto his back, he resumed normal form, and bent down over him. Slade's rictus-skull looked, somehow, even worse than it had before, the flame-red lights where his eyes should have been, staring unfocused upwards at the towering heights above. He raised his hand weakly, and seemed to grasp at things that were not there, even as the ichor continued to leach from his injuries, if they could be called that. He gave no sign that he could even tell that Beast Boy was there.

"Slade?"

Slade's eyes brightened, then dulled once more. He stirred slightly, looking as though he was seeking for something. It was several seconds before he managed to find Beast Boy, kneeling directly overhead.

"Slade, are you... "

Beast Boy stopped himself from asking the question he had meant to. Slade was dead. Whatever lies his evil twin had or would tell, that much he believed. He tried again.

"What... what are you?"

The question seemed to galvanize what life remained in Slade. His eyes brightened, he focused on Beast Boy, and emitted a sound that might have been a laugh.

"A son of Perdition," he said, his voice fading in and out.. "Adversary's adversary." He coughed, or seemed to. "Petulance or stubbornness. Too much hate to die forever."

None of it made sense. Beast Boy left it off. "Which way do we go now?"

"Nowhere."

Beast Boy fought off the urge to drive his fist into that grinning skull. "You said you'd bring me to Raven," he said, not bothering to conceal his anger. "Where is she?"

Slade fixed his eyes, or what passed for them, on Beast Boy. "You'll find her in Tartarus," he said, "rolling boulders up a hill. Frozen in Cocytus. The darkest Hell is reserved for traitors."

Instantly, Beast Boy forgot where he was or who he was talking to. His vision clouded over in red, and before he even knew what he was doing, he had lifted Slade, lead weight or not, half-off the ground, and was staring down into his face in a form he would not have been able to describe, had he been asked.

"Raven is not a traitor!" he practically roared into Slade's ashen face. Slade simply seemed to laugh.

"She came here of free will. Joined a team meant to save the world. Wound up destroying - "

"This wasn't her fault!" By now, Beast Boy wasn't even sure if he was still speaking English, or howling in some guttural animal-tongue. Slade seemed to understand him, either way.

"Fault?" asked Slade. "Never anyone's fault. That's the problem these days... a culture of buck-passing. Nobody takes pride in their work."

Beast Boy leaned down over Slade, pressing him back against the ground. "Tell me where Raven is," he said through clenched teeth, "or I'll make you wish Trigon left you dead."

Something galvanized deep inside Slade, and he slowly raised his head and shoulders, propping himself up carefully. He forced words out, his tone clearing slightly, his entire body shaking with the effort required to maintain even this level.

"Nothing..." he said. "Nothing... you can do... to threaten me now... boy. Your worst nightmares... rages... nothing close. Not a fraction of what Trigon could... in your place."

"Don't bet on that," said Beast Boy, but he didn't even believe himself, and slowly, he felt his rage drain away. Slade wasn't important now. He had to move on.

"If you won't tell me where she is," he said finally, "then I'll find her myself. I don't care what I have to do. I'll find her, and I'll bring her - "

From nowhere, Slade's hand shot out like a piston, and grabbed Beast Boy by the throat in a grip of iron, and suddenly Slade was right in his face, sitting upright, his soulless red eyes boring into Beast Boy's from bare inches away.

"Convince me," hissed Slade, with a voice like grated glass.

The sudden reversal cost Beast Boy both his train of thought and his equilibrium. He shifted to a tiny insect, slipping through Slade's fingers before he could tighten his fist and re-appearing a foot away. Bereft of support, Slade collapsed back once more, a sick wheezing sound emitting from his skeletal face, as Beast Boy approached warily.

"Convince you of what?" asked Beast Boy.

Slade didn't answer, not when Beast Boy repeated his question, not even when he shouted it. Cautiously, the shapeshifter knelt down over Slade once again. Slade might well do anything, grab him again or even attack, but he simply had to know what Slade knew if it was possible to know.

"Slade?" he asked, letting some of his desperation creep into his voice, and tentatively he reached out and took the armored cyclops' shoulder, half expecting Slade to bolt upright again, but Slade barely reacted, and to his surprise, Slade's armored skin was hot to the touch, even through Beast Boy's thick gloves.

"Slade?" asked Beast Boy again, louder this time, even as the heat under his fingers increased to the point where the surface of his gloves started to scorch. He withdrew his hand, sliding back as the air above Slade began to shimmer with the radiating heat. "Slade?"

A soft hiss of what might have been breath, and Slade twitched, though he did not rise or seek for something to grasp. Gurgled sounds from deep within his form resolved slowly into indistinct words.

"Boil forever in the river. Till Phlegethon runs dry."

Beast Boy blinked. It wasn't that he had the first idea what Slade was talking about, not specifically, but...

"You are dead, aren't you?"

"Dead..." said Slade, and he didn't seem to be talking to Beast Boy so much as himself. "Dead and burnt."

"Then how are you here?" asked Beast Boy. "What happened to you?"

Slade's eyes seemed to clear, not that Beast Boy could easily tell, and his voice became slightly stronger. "Promised... promised to serve. For power. Liberation." His armored skin began to glow a faint, cherry red, as the heat wafting off his body became more and more palpable. He snarled, spitting the words out by force of will. "Lied. Betrayed the Devil... all for... guesswork."

"Guesswork?"

"Can't... stop Trigon," said Slade, his words clipped, boiling with barely suppressed agony. "Nothing... nothing can stop... not Raven. Not you."

"Then why did you come all this way? Did you think I was going to find your body for you or something?"

Slade laughed, a horrible, hollow, pained laugh. "Never much hope... for that..." he said. "Came to see... if Raven... would let you find her..."

"All you care about is yourself," said Beast Boy, but he found that he couldn't infuse the words with his usual scorn. They were simple statements. "What do you care if I found Raven?"

Slade's head lolled over to one side, as flames began to flicker around his skeletal face. And yet despite that, his withered features slowly twisted into a smile.

"You should have died... in the fire..." he stammered. "In the ambush... in Yosemite. Should have killed David with Cinderblock. Should have been turned to Trigon-stone. You all... should have been killed... so many times before... Brother Blood. Terra. Me..."

Beast Boy hesitated, staring down into Slade's face. "What... what are you saying?"

Slade's head drooped, as he visibly fought to stay awake. "Trigon... indestructable. Raven... dead. Devastator... gone. Situation... utterly... totally... hopless." He gathered his breath, forcing the flames to subside slightly, looked back up at Beast Boy, and seemed to smirk. "You people... make a habit... of those sorts of situations."

Despite everything, Beast Boy felt a soft smile coming to his face, the first since this whole nightmare had started. "You do think we can stop him, don't you?"

"No," croaked Slade, "I know you can't. But... I think you Titans..." he strained to force out the last few words, "you enjoy making me look... stupid."

Deep inside himself, Beast Boy felt something wake up, something he couldn't describe nor identify, but recognized nonetheless. He smiled once again, this time in earnest, and crossed his arms.

"Well guess what, Slade," he said, "you're about to look stupider than ever."

Maybe it was the light playing tricks, but he thought he saw Slade's rictus-face twist into a smile.

Suddenly there was a roar of flame, and Slade's armor began glowing bright, cherry red. Fire wreathed his head, and shot several feet into the air from every crack and opening in his boiling armor, and Slade emitted a sound like a raging gorilla, writhing on the ground, even as Beast Boy scrambled back from the withering heat. He raised his arm to his face, peering through his fingers at the burning supervillain, trying to think of something to do to beat the flames out, when Slade's voice roared out, above the flames, a loud, keening wail, like that of an evil spirit conjured up from the dark pits of the earth.

"Prove it!" he roared, the words repeating over and over like a neverending echo.

"Where... where is she?" shouted Beast Boy, not even sure what to look at anymore. He stood back up, backing away from the roaring pyre that now encased Slade. "Tell me where she is!"

"Ascend," came the reply, barely discernable through the howling flames. "Keep going, no matter what. Find her."

"Where?"

"The halls of lamentation. The depths of your own guilt. Find her in your own fears. Whereever you go, there she will be..."

"I don't - "

The flames exploded a hundredfold, driving Beast Boy back against the wall, his hands thrown up to protect his face, as gouts of fire shot in every direction, and Slade's voice became a horrid scream. For a moment, he thought he saw a looming shadow burst out of Slade's body, boiling up like a wraith of darkness to cloak the world in ruin. And then it dissipated, along with the scream, trailing away into the far distance, and all that was left was a glowing husk of iron, crackling and burning with orange flame.

Slowly, Beast Boy lowered his hands, staring at the burning pyre, looking for any signs of movement, but there was nothing there. He hesitated only a few moments, watching as the flames continued to dance over Slade's surface. And then, finally, Beast Boy turned back to the fork in the path, selected the rightmost path, the one that climbed out of the crevasse, took one, long, deep breath, and slowly walked away.

O-O-O

And then there was nothing at all.

Starfire took a breath, held it, exhaled, and still there was nothing. The world had shut off completely, all light, all sound removed, save for the sound of her own heartbeat and breathing. But just as she was beginning to wonder if Warp had somehow contrived to banish her to some nether dimension, suddenly the darkness disapated with a soundless flash, and she was standing in the ruined castle once more, staring up at Warp, who stood before the small fountain, the glow from which was beginning to subside.

Warp stared at her expectantly, but said nothing, waiting patiently, as Starfire slowly re-acclimatized herself to her surroundings, and faced him once more, before finally, she offered a comment.

"You... you did all this," she said, "all this death and destruction. You betrayed an entire world, your world, killed Robin, and delivered the Earth to Trigon, all to take revenge on David?"

"No," said Warp. "Not on David."

Lightly, Warp stepped off the dais, walking slowly around Starfire, towards a small wooden chest propped against the back wall, speaking as he walked.

"I killed David, but I had seen something else escape. I thought it was some part of David, an astral projection, a consciousness transfer... a ghost perhaps. I didn't know anything. But I knew that some element of the person who had slaughtered the only family I had ever known had escaped. And I knew that I had to find it."

Starfire followed Warp with her eyes, turning to keep him in sight as he moved around her. "How did you discover what it was?"

Warp reached the chest and crouched over it. Starfire briefly considered shooting him where he stood, but before she could do so, he popped the latch on the chest, and reached into it, even as he turned his head back to her and smiled.

"Time," he said. "Persistance. And my inheritance."

He pulled something out of the chest, a large bundle wrapped in sackcloth, which he held to his chest as he turned around.

"I knew that once the word escaped that the Titans were dead, that their enemies would congregate in Jump City and ransack the Tower. I had only bare moments to escape with what I would. But fortunately, I knew exactly what item I required to find what I needed."

Warp undid the sackcloth wrapped around the bundle and removed it, and in his hands, he held a large book, bound in black and violet and clasped shut by golden fixtures and hinges. Sigils of an unknown language were inscribed on its cover in threads of woven silver, and the entire codex seemed to glow with a soft purple light, and trembled in Warp's hands like a living thing.

Starfire's eyes popped. She let out a gasp, and took a step back. "Raven's book!" she exclaimed.

"The Book of Azar," corrected Warp. "The collected wisdom of the monks of Azarath. A very useful tool for one who wished to kill something he did not understand."

Starfire bit her lip and clenched her teeth. "You had no right to take that!" she snarled at Warp. "That belongs to Raven."

"Raven was dead," snapped Warp back. "So were all the other Titans. I was the only one left. If I hadn't taken it, then one of her enemies would have. It was mine by right. And if you disagree with that, then I'll remind you, princess, you put me in that Tower with them."

"She would not have wished for you to use that book to destroy the Earth!"

"Then perhaps she should not have died," said Warp coldly.

Starfire shook her head, lowering it, before another thought came to her, and she raised it once more.

"But... Raven attempted to determine what David's powers were with that book as well. She was unable to discover anything about them."

Warp frowned. "Raven didn't have the time I had," he said, "and she didn't know what I knew."

Starfire fell silent, and Warp continued.

"I had nothing to go on," he said. "Nothing but what I had seen. But I remembered that David had somehow contrived to resist Raven's powers at their most extreme. He didn't even appear to know how he had done it, meaning somehow he had managed to nullify the most powerful weapons Raven had at her command, by accident."

Warp opened the book with a touch, the clasps undoing themselves before the book flipped open, and the pages began to turn of their own seeming accord.

"You see," said Warp, "I didn't have the advantage of a regiment of learned monks at my beck and call, nor anyone to teach me how to even read Azarathian. And with the Titans dead... well... I had to make my own way. Something none of you ever understood the necessity of."

Something in Warp's voice stuck out. "What... happened to you?"

Warp didn't answer immediately, looking down at the pages of the book as they flashed by. "I survived," he said finally. "And moreover I learned. It took me years to decrypt what was in that book. Years of drudgery and degradation and scraping by in a dystopian nightmare world." He raised his head again, looking into Starfire's eyes with fire dancing behind his own. "Every day, I was taught once more the full price that you extracted from me for my crimes. Every day, I was made to suffer indignities the likes of which you never even imagined. All because you condemned me to a life sentence in Hell."

Starfire did not answer, and finally Warp looked back down at the book. "But I survived," he said. "And I learned. I travelled all around the world, looking for scraps of arcane lore, ancient temples, anything that might shed light on what I'd seen. I became an expert in Metahuman physiology and paraphysics. And eventually... I was able to gather enough to finally break the code. And when I finally was able to translate the book into English... then I found the key."

"You discovered what David was?"

Warp smiled. "No," he said. "Far better. I learned of Trigon."

He began to pace back and forth, the book's pages flipping as though in a windstorm, as his voice became more excited. "Trigon was an obsession of Azar's. She knew he would return, and she poured all her lore and all her knowledge into this book, hoping to find a solution. I learned everything, what Trigon was, why he had come, how he had been defeated in the past, and best of all... theories as to how he might be beaten, once he returned."

"Devastator."

"Of course," said Warp. "Raven had never heard of Devastator, but Azar had, and she hid the information deep within the book, mired in riddles and rumors. A complete description of the entity called Devastator, one that matched what I'd seen that night in Jump perfectly."

"If you discovered all this from the Book of Azar," asked Starfire. "Why did Raven not find the answer when she sought for the identity of Devastator?"

"Raven searched for mere weeks," said Warp. "I had decades to unravel the mysteries of this lovely tome. The secrets of Azarath do not reveal themselves lightly. I found more in here than she learned in her entire lifetime."

The implication of that statement was frightening enough that Starfire felt a shiver run up her spine. Somehow, Warp seemed to notice, and he smiled darkly before slamming the book shut with a loud clap like a peal of thunder.

"Once I learned of Devastator," said Warp, "then I realized what I had to do. For my own sake, for the sufferings I was put through, and for all those murdered by Devastator I would take my revenge in two parts. One against you. The other... against Devastator itself."

Starfire felt another chill. "You did all this to revenge yourself against Devastator?"

Warp smiled a half-smile. "Devastator destroyed my life. Destroyed what little support I had left after you cast me into the midst of Hell itself. Devastator removed everything from me that I had come to care for. What passed for my family, for my entire world, was ripped from me in an instant because Devastator empowered a madman to slaughter them all."

"So to avenge your family, you went back in time to kill them all again?" exclaimed Starfire in horror.

The smile faded from Warp's face. "The Titans of this planet were not my family," he said. "These were adolescent children from another dimension who happened to share their names. I returned the punishment done to me onto the world that inflicted it," he said. "It was the only way to ensure that Devastator paid for its crimes... and that you did."

Her eyes wide with horror, Starfire could only stammer a reply. "If it was your wish to kill me, why did you not simply do so? Why did you need to destroy our world?"

"Because that was not my wish," said Warp. "If I wanted you dead, Starfire, you would already be as dead as Robin. I wanted you to know what you had wrought, to understand what your actions set in motion. And above that, I wanted to take my revenge, not just on you, but on Devastator itself."

"Then why not do so? Why arange to bring back Trigon?"

"Because in my world, David was dead. Devastator had already chosen a new host, and I had no means of finding it, let alone of taking action against Devastator itself even if I had. Devastator exists outside time and space. It's an energy parasite. Strike down a host, and it simply finds another. I needed something permanent. I needed something capable of destroying a cosmic entity, something capable of killing a being that was not even fully alive by our definitions of the term. In short, I needed Trigon."

"So you returned to our time."

"Of course I did," said Warp. "Trigon was already dead in mine. I came back, and contrived to contact Trigon directly. I offered him everything he wanted, the world, the universe, Devastator, his daughter. I told him of how the Titans had slain him, how Robin had found Raven's spirit, rescued it, and gave her the opportunity to strike him down. And then I told him that I knew how to give him victory." Warp smiled, lowering the book in one hand, and stepping forward. "And all I asked in return, was that he grant me this opportunity."

"And what opportunity is this?"

"The opportunity, princess, to stand in front of you, and see your face when you learned that through your actions, you caused the death of Robin, the incineration of this world, and the sentencing of your friends to damnation and death. I wanted to watch as you realized that for months now, you have lived in the company of the very same madman who slaughtered all your friends simply because they were in his way. I even permitted you to think him your friend. And I wanted you to know that I did all of these things, and was only in a position to do them, because you placed me there."

Quivering now, with anger and perhaps even fear, Starfire spoke slowly, as to as to emphesize each word.

"I am not responsible for your crimes."

Warp only smiled. "You are wholly responsible for everything I am, and everything I did. As much as Devastator was, if not more. Devastator was created to fight Trigon. For its sins, I enabled Trigon to devour Devastator whole. You swore, on your arrival here, to protect the people of this world, and those who accepted you. For your sins, I have sentenced you know what your actions have wrought, before you join all those whose deaths are on your hands."

Starfire shot him.

Anger boiled within her like a seething cauldron, and she raised her hands and fired a starbolt comprised of white-hot rage. It split the air at nine times the speed of sound, exploding with a flash of green light that temporarily cloaked all else, moments before another starbolt followed in its wake, and another, and another, a barrage of energy blasts that sundered stone and shattered the wall and blew the wooden chest at Warp's feet to splinters and vapor. Into them, Starfire poured her fury, righteous or otherwise, deluging him in the searing fire that was the mark of a Tamaranean scorned.

And it was all in vain. Warp lifted his hand, and a shield of animate blackness materialized around him, warding off the onslaught effortlessly, the shield barely quivering as Starfire flung her rage against it. Only when she had spent her fury against it did he lower his hand once more, smiling broadly.

"Like I said," said Warp, grinning at the wide-eyed Tamaranean. "I had more time to study this book than Raven ever did..."

Fear began to replace anger, as Starfire slowly stepped back from Warp, who made no move to follow. Instead he lowered the book in one hand, and with the other, began to trace designs in the air with his fingers, which hung in soft purple light and floated around him like planetary bodies around a star.

"You came here," he said, "seeking for Robin. You came in the hope that he might somehow be restored to life, and brought back to you." He raised his free hand, and the symbols congregated around it, spinning around his wrists, their glow increasing in radiance to that of sparkling jewels. "Never let it be said that I did not give those who call on me precisely what they want."

The symbols flashed as one and vanished, and then all of a sudden, there was Robin.

But it wasn't Robin.

The distinction wasn't subtle in the least, for the figure standing before Starfire resembled Robin's corpse more than it did Robin himself. His skin was gray, like volcanic ash or powdered concrete, a leached, colorless monochrome that extended even to his uniform, which should have been red and yellow and green. He stood with his head lowered, like a somber statue, not moving a hair, not even to breathe.

"I'm going to give you a gift, Princess," said Warp, as he slowly lowered his free hand. "One that very few people ever receive. I'm going to let you die with a perfect understanding as to why this has happened to you.

Robin, or whatever this corpse-pallor simulacrum was, raised his head, revealing two glowing red eyes, which seared like burning coals. His expression blank, his motions robotic and precise, Robin slid one hand to his belt, removed a small metal cylinder, and extended it into a steel battle staff.

"Kill her," said Warp, his arms folded atop the Book of Azar, "and bring me her head."

O-O-O

The path curved upwards, ever upwards, snaking back and forth along the towering heights above, blocked periodically by fallen rocks or cascades of magma, yet always moving on and on and on some more. Beast Boy ran, shifting forms as the terrain required it, not knowing where he was going or if it was the right way, but running regardless. He refused to let himself think of the possibility that there was anything else to do, and no matter what pace he set, it seemed to him not fast enough.

Only once did anything try to get in his way. A quartet of fire demons lunged out of the wall by surprise, snatching at him with their tendrils, hissing like steam vents as they came. He shifted imperturbably into the form of a grizzly bear, reared up on his hind legs, and smashed two of them to paste with swipes of his heavy claws before the demons even had a chance to determine what was happening. The other two had ducked his slashes and seized him by the throat, trying to manhandle him off the cliff. He'd become a mosquito then, slipping through their grasp, then a bighorn sheep, whereupon he butted one of the demons off the cliff, and dashed the other's innards out beneath his hooves. A second later, he was a tiger, sprinting and bounding up the trail once more, the encounter already forgotten, save for his nagging worry that he had lost still more time, and that now every second was precious.

Beyond that one interruption, there had been nothing, and while he didn't resent the lack of intrusions, it worried him that the demons seemed to have given up trying to stop him beyond a purely incidental skirmish. He wasn't so much afraid that this meant they were preparing something special for him, as he was that it meant he was going the wrong way.

But then again, what other way was there to go?

He ran on, faster and faster, heedless of fatigue or what forms he had to take, as he climbed up higher and higher and higher still, until the flame river was a distant ribbon of red below, half-hidden by the smoke and haze. The cliff towered above as enormously as ever, and so he refused to look at it, racing against a clock he couldn't see, couldn't read, and yet could feel like the pounding of drums deep inside his chest.

He was practically ready to try leaping off the cliff in the hopes of finding something, when the smoke began to thin, and the air to clear, and he turned another corner and saw the path running up and on and into an enormous building.

A monastery perhaps, or a cathedral, it towered over the stony landscape around it. Ruined, it still stood out, angular of architecture, built of black stone that gleamed in the firelight, festooned with buttresses, crenelations, and towering spires. The roof was gone, the walls worn down as though with the passing of centuries, yet the path that ran towards it was as clear as daylight.

He raced ahead, turning to a swallow on the run and flying at top speed towards the cathedral's entrance, heedless of anything that might seek to prevent his passing. Enormous stone statues, human and bestial, lined the route, but they stood mute and cold, watching silently as Beast Boy passed them by. He soared through the tangle of conflicting air currents, driven up by the boiling lava miles below, and landed before the stone double-doors of the ruined cathedral. He was about to shift into a rhinoceros to batter them open, save that the instant he landed, the doors opened of their own accord, inviting him in, as it were. He switched to human form, and stepped through.

And then something truly strange happened.

In the blink of an eye, his entire surroundings, the cathedral, the fire-scorched sky, the statues, the cliff, everything was gone, and in its place was an open plain of ice, across which whirled a raging blizzard. The ice was perfectly level and utterly featureless, sparkling blue beneath clouds of white snow, driven this way and that by gusts of howling, bone-chilling wind. He stopped, stunned, looked behind himself for the door he had just stepped through, but it was gone. He stood alone.

Was this some new trick? Had Trigon laid a trap for him or something? The Cathedral had... it had felt right, familiar in some way that couldn't be put in words. And this place... well this place did too somehow, though he was absolutely stone-certain he had never seen it before. Either way, there was nothing for it now. He shifted forms into a Polar Bear as defense against the biting cold, and slowly lumbered ahead.

He hadn't gone more than a dozen paces before he began to notice shadows under the ice.

The light here seemed to come from nowhere in particular, but dimly, underneath the ice, there were shapes visible, twisted shapes bent into strange configurations. Some were barely discernible, buried deep within the frozen ground. Others were nearer to the surface, and could be recognized for what they were.

Bodies.

Human, alien, even some that defied description. The bodies of creatures lay scattered beneath the ice like frozen action figures, motionless, indeterminate as to whether they were living or dead. They made no move to rise up and attack him, nor to otherwise bar his passage, their frozen eyes watching him as he padded slowly over the ice. Searching.

"Looking for Raven?"

His own voice, borne on the winds from some indeterminate location, biting and sarcastic. He knew who it was.

"Where is she?" he called out to the winds, shifting back to human form in order to speak, clutching his arms around himself as his body lost the protection of his warm fur.

"She's here," came the reply, the voice mockingly dancing around him. "She's waiting for you."

He turned in circles, peering into the storm, trying to find the speaker, but he could see nothing but indistinct shadows darting this way and that. There might have been a thousand of them, or one, or none at all.

"Come and see," came the voice, and suddenly the storm ahead of him parted like a hallway, revealing a path that led up to the foot of a stone altar. The altar was carved from obsidian, covered in drifting snow and carven sigils of pentagrams and goat-heads. And laying atop it was...

"Raven!" Beast Boy instantly forgot everything else, racing down the path towards the altar, bounding up the steps that ringed it four at a time, before skidding to a halt at the top.

"Raven? What..."

Raven lay upon the altar, eyes open, skin like white porcelain and cold to the touch. She was dressed in her leotard and cloak, as always, but both were pure white, dazzlingly so. Her cloak lay unfastened, draping over the altar, providing no protection whatsoever, and Beast Boy couldn't initially tell if she was alive or frozen solid.

But those weren't the most surprising things. The most surprising thing was that she was nine.

Though Beast Boy had found Raven's birthdate out for her party all those endless weeks ago, Beast Boy actually wasn't sure how old Raven had been, fifteen or sixteen, he'd guessed. She was clearly no longer so. Whether she was nine or eight or ten, she was a little girl, dressed in the same uniform sized downwards, staring blindly up at the swirling clouds. She did not react when he touched her forehead (ice-cold), not even when he shook her, calling her name as loudly as he could. Pushing the question of what had happened aside, he pulled one of his gloves and held it in front of her mouth and nose, and felt, to his infinite relief, a very very weak breath, even as he found an almost imperceptible pulse at her neck.

"Raven, it's me! Can you hear me?" he asked, shaking her shoulder, totally unsure as to what to do now. The storm still swirled around in unbroken strength, and she looked to be suffering from advanced hypothermia, to say nothing of whatever had de-aged her. He tried to remember what first aid lessons Robin had forced him to learn, what he should do, but couldn't recall anything about what to do when you found a child-version of a half-demon girl laying unresponsive and frozen in the middle of a supernatural version of Antarctica. That one must have been in the advanced session.

He fell back on instinct.

"Raven, c'mon, wake up," he said, and gently lifted her off the altar. Her normal form was taller than he was, but like this, she weighed next to nothing. He crouched down behind the altar, forming a sort of ersatz shelter between the altar and his own huddled body, which managed, at least, to block much of the wind, even as he shook the snow out of her cloak and wrapped it tightly around her. The cloak wasn't much, frankly neither was the shelter, but it seemed to work. Very slowly, her breathing became more distinct, her eyes blinked and slowly came into focus, and she began to shiver, first almost imperceptibly, then violently, teeth chattering and hands trembling like a palsy victim.

She still gave no indication that she knew where she was, or who Beast Boy was, or that he was even there, but he chose to take it as an encouraging sign, and grinned despite himself. "There you go," he said as she coughed and shook and then moved, curling up into a tight ball inside her cloak. "Come on, we'll find a way out of - "

"Now why would you want to do that?"

The storm stopped instantly, like light being switched off, and in the eerie silence, Beast Boy heard his own voice addressing him from behind. Raven heard it too, and it seemed to wake her up. She opened her eyes, blinking as she looked around, up at Beast Boy, and past him, behind him, at something else.

Beast Boy knew who it was before he turned around.

His double stood with arms crossed, smirking at him from twenty yards' distance. "We made this place specially for you, after all," said the double. "It'd be a shame if you didn't at least try it out."

Beast Boy frowned. "We're leaving here," he said, trying to sound intimidating. "Both of us. We're going home."

"You are home," said the double. "Both of you." He spread his arms wide to encompass the frozen wasteland. "Can't you tell where you are?" he asked mockingly. "This is where the traitors live..."

"She's not a traitor!" shouted Beast Boy, blood boiling. It was everything he could do not to leap at the double's throat for even suggesting it, but the double seemed unimpressed, laughing as he responded.

"Of course she is," he said, "and so are you."

He'd had it with this. Beast Boy turned around and picked Raven up, holding her with both arms as she continued to blink and look around in confusion and fear. Turning back once again to his double, who still stood staring, a smarmy grin plastered to his face, he growled at him.

"You can't hurt her anymore," he said. "Get out of our way."

"But can you?" asked the double? "Or is that why you're taking her?"

Beast Boy felt Raven tense up in his arms, which tore the answer from him faster than his brain could have.

"I'd never hurt Raven!" he shouted.

The answer came, but not from the double.

"Oh really?"

Beast Boy froze.

It had nothing to do with the chill in the air or the ice underfoot. His blood turned instantly to icewater, his limbs froze solid, and his lungs seized, as though he'd just been switched off, the only part of his body still capable of movement, his heart, which began thundering somewhere in his ears as he recognized the voice who had spoken in the double's stead.

Footsteps, approaching softly, unhurriedly, from behind. Beast Boy very slowly turned around to face the person whose footsteps they were, but he already knew who it was going to be before he did so.

She stopped a dozen feet from the altar, her hiking boots crunching the snow beneath them, arms folded in front of her, the wind teasing the hair beneath the blue goggles mounted on her forehead. Her skin was slate gray, like that of Beast Boy's double, and she had the same burning red eyes, without pupils or irises. Yet none of these things in any way prevented him from recognizing her instantly. Beast Boy would have recognized her blindfolded, from the sound of her heartbeat alone.

"Terra..." he whispered.

Behind him, his evil twin laughed, as he walked slowly into view, circling around the altar until he was standing next to Terra. Terra herself said nothing, simply watched him in silence, but then she didn't need to.

"She's been waiting for you a long time," said his twin, as he grinned at Beast Boy. "We've all been."

Beast Boy could say nothing, could do nothing, and in his arms, Raven looked at him, and at Terra, and back again, and he could feel her fear like a cold finger running up his spine. His twin simply turned to Terra, and nodded.

"Kill him," said the twin, folding his arms, "and bring me his head."

O-O-O

David ran.

He ran for a countless interval. He ran forever. He ran without direction or purpose or hope of ever being allowed to stop. Down streets filled with the silent dead and lined by unchanging ruin, over heaps of wrecked vehicles and overturned newspaper kiosks he ran, tripping and stumbling and falling over himself and scrambling back to his feet to run some more. He ran with the sound of explosions and violent upheavals in his ears, emanating always from some indistinct point behind him. He did not look back.

He just ran.

He might have run for hours, for days even. He ran so far that he knew intrinsically he should have run into some geographic obstacle, a mountain or ridgeline or flaming, lava-filled bay, one of the landmarks that ringed Jump City and that he would inevitably have to encounter, yet he did not. He ran for as long as his legs would carry him and his lungs draw breath, and when finally they would no longer do either, he collapsed.

He landed on the ground like a boned fish, his burning lungs gasping for air. Breathing painfully, he managed only to crawl to the side of the street before his muscles gave out entirely. For another interminable time, he simply lay in the gutter, forcing air into and out of his lungs, his hands trembling, his guts on fire.

He wasn't sure when it was that he started crying.

No sobs, no sound, nothing but the tears, that simply began to flow like a dammed stream finally loosed. He didn't even realize that he was crying until the tears began to drip from his face, splashing ground so parched that the very asphalt absorbed them instantly, leaving no trace that they had ever been.

Somehow, that seemed appropriate.

Every attempt to move just resulted in more violent tremors, as though the various parts of his body were no longer able to face the task of working in concert. It took only a few moments before he simply stopped trying to move at all. There was, after all, nowhere to go. The entire world was nothing but an extension of the flame-scorched gutter in which he lay, stalked by the twisted phantoms of his own mind, one of which was assuredly in the process of killing Terra, if hadn't managed to finish doing so by now.

Perhaps he had run far enough for the sounds of the battle to be lost, or perhaps the leaden air dampened them more effectively than they otherwise would have, but try as he might, he could hear nothing of the fight that had to be transpiring. The air was still and quiet, save for the omnipresent low roar of the accumulated fires, volcanic vents, and other manifested miseries with which Trigon had cloaked the doomed planet.

He lay in misery and motionlessness, curled in a ball in the gutter, his ash-grey skin coated with ash-grey dust, his red eyes leeching tears onto the thirsty ground, the last bits of moisture remaining within the scope of the planet. There was no one discrete source for the tears, nothing specific that leapt to his mind. It was leaden fatigue, crushing despair, paralysing fear, and soul-wilting shame all rolled into one. The senses of loss, culpability, and utter hopelessness were so overwhelming that they got in one another's way, leaving it impossible to focus on any one element. He saw the faces of the other Titans flashing by incomprehensibly quickly, saw Trigon looming up from the ruins of the library, saw himself standing in a field of rubble with a burning cane in his hand, casting fire down on his enemies. His friends. His...

He convulsed, clutched his hands to his head, and screamed.

There was nobody to hear him scream, but scream he did regardless. Painfully, his throat burning from the effort, yet the screams tore themselves out of him like living things, and after each one he collapsed once more, to lay useless and motionless in the dust once again. He gritted his teeth against them, knotting his fingers into his hair, and yet he could not stop the screams any more than he could the tears. Again and again, for a minute, perhaps two, perhaps an hour, perhaps a year, he screamed and cried and cursed himself, willing death and ruin upon himself, on Trigon, on his unknown parents, on Terra, on even the other Titans by turns, yet always it came back to his own wretched self. Terra had told him to run so that he could somehow fight Trigon or preserve the Titans in form and memory. He knew himself capable of neither, indeed of nothing. Everything had gone wrong. Every decision, every choice, every possible shift of events had failed utterly. All there was left to do was to lay here, alone, broken, and wait for someone, Trigon or Warp or Cinderblock or perhaps himself, to come along, and finish the job.

"David?"

David's eyes opened.

For a moment, he wasn't sure if he had imagined hearing something. He raised his head slightly, fear already beginning to cloud out the rest of his emotions, and slowly he turned his head back and forth and back again, but could find nothing waiting for him. Likely enough his broken mind was playing yet further tricks on him, but he continued to peer off forlornly into the darkness, though for what he could not say. If anything yet lived in this horrid place, it could not be sympathetic to one that Trigon had named his enemy.

"David."

He started this time, his breath catching, yet the voice was not hostile or mocking. It was soft, barely a whisper, and both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. It came from no particular source, no direction, no location around him that he could identify. And yet despite that, he knew, immediately, where the speaker was located.

Slowly, David turned around, wiping the tears from his blood-red eyes, not rising to his feet, but remaining seated in the gutter, half-turned behind him to see who it was that had addressed him. And there, standing five or six paces away, stood a small, slight figure, a boy of perhaps fourteen, with light brown hair and matching eyes, wearing a costume of fire-red laminated mylar that tapered to yellow-orange at the sleeves and pant legs. About his waist was a belt of brass, to which was clipped a retractable police baton of stainless steel, and a small, palm-sized communicator, a black T emblazoned on its golden cover.

David said nothing, did not react, not even in surprise, for those circuits were no longer functioning within his brain. He sat in the gutter, and looked at himself as he had once been, watching as the boy stood and watched him back, arms at his sides, face expressionless save for a slight melancholy that might well have been his own imagination.

"Hello, David," said the boy at last, his voice a whisper, but easily understood, as though the sound were being transmitted directly into David's head.

David said nothing immediately, watching his counterpart as though he could somehow distill understanding from simple observation.

"Who are you?" asked David at last.

The boy's eyes flickered downwards for a moment before he answered.

"My name's Devastator," he said. "And... I was hoping we could talk."

---

Author's Note: Chapter 36 is already underway, and I hope to have it for you all as soon as possible. In the meanwhile, I can offer only my thanks for those who have read this far, and my plea, once more, that any notions you have as to what you liked and disliked, be encapsulated in the form of a review. Until next time, my inestimable readers, farewell.