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

37. The Apes and the Angels

Disclaimer: Even after all that, I still don't own anything.

Author's Note: I imagine that many if not most of you assumed that I was dead, or had forgotten this story, or given up on it entirely. Several of you all sent me messages with those very suppositions. Given the time it took to finish this chapter, I can't exactly blame anyone, and yet the truth is that, while I wasn't able to finish this chapter quickly, I never intended to abandon it. The list of reasons and excuses for why it took so long to finish is boring and unimportant. My life has undergone several fundamental changes over the last year, and I have had many other duties I could not ignore. And yet this chapter, and the story it belongs to never left my mind. I can only ask the pardon of those who hoped to see it come out earlier, and pray that the result is to your liking.

I do not know if anyone will still be interested in reading this story. After all this time, I can hardly lay claim to anyone's continued attention. But for those who do cross its path, I assure you that any feedback you offer me will be used as best I can to improve the story. As always, I do not make any claims to quality in the paragraphs below, but I live in the hope that improvement is always possible.

No more words from me. I hope against hope that you will enjoy this offering. Thank you so much for all your patience.

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Chapter 37: The Apes and the Angels

It is an ancient Mariner,
And he stoppeth one of three.
'By thy long beard and glittering eye,
Now wherefore stopp'st thou me ?

The Bridegroom's doors are opened wide,
And I am next of kin ;
The guests are met, the feast is set :
May'st hear the merry din.'

O-O-O

The boy and the girl and the man stood apart from one another, surrounded by ruin and red flame and the ambient noise of the pyre that had once been a city. They stood where they were, looking at the same thing, all three expecting reality to return to its regular programming at any moment.

But the staff in the boy's hand burned red with silent, heatless flames. And whatever the expectations of those watching, it showed no signs of ceasing to do so.

For what might have been a full minute, David stared down at the staff in his hand, his arm and body absolutely motionless, not daring even to breathe, as though the slightest thing might dispel what had to be some kind of illusion or hallucination. He could hear his own heart thundering in his ears, loud enough to drown out everything else around him, and with each beat, he felt the staff in his fingers pulse warm and cold, as though it were a living thing with a heartbeat attuned to his own. Only after an eternity had passed did David raise his head and turn it back up the road towards his alter ego, who was standing in the middle of the street staring at him with an expression of confusion.

"That's impossible," said the man.

No scream, no protest, simply words, uttered to himself perhaps, for he seemed to have forgotten that anyone else was present. The anger from before, the threats and icy rage were gone, their place usurped by simple disbelief.

David stood up slowly, keeping his eyes locked on his counterpart, half-afraid that looking back down at the flames on the staff in his hand would cause them to extinguish. The man made no move to stop him, his own cane burning quietly in his hand, forgotten for the moment like everything else.

"You don't have Devastator," said the man, though who he was addressing was an open question. "You don't have anything." He began to walk, pacing back and forth, his lifeless eyes never leaving David's own, seemingly oblivious to whatever else might be occurring. He appeared to be on the cusp of saying more several times, before he suddenly stopped where he was.

"There's no way..." he said rather cryptically, and then extended his hand back behind himself.

There was a deafening blast, shattering the relative silence, and the burnt-out husk of a car suddenly vaulted into the air on a cushion of fire as if the ground had suddenly decided to eject it into the sky. It lofted up, spinning in place and shedding pieces of itself as it flew, before Devastator swept his hand forward, and another rocket-propelled explosion hurled the car ahead and down, directly at David himself.

All this happened in a fraction of a second, a series of moves so sudden that David could not react consciously. Had his mind not been addled by everything that had happened, had this been a normal situation or one remotely resembling it, he might have dodged to one side, or ducked, or done something smart. But as it was, his brain could not fire the proper synapses in time, and instead of doing those things, his higher functions froze, allowing muscle memory and months of rote training to take over in their stead. All of its own volition, without central control, David's eyes took in the spectacle of the flying, burning car, his fingers tightened around the staff in his hand, his arm raised the staff towards the object hurtling down towards him, and in the same manner that an amputee might order his missing legs to walk, David's lower mind pushed in a manner indescribable against the edges of a hollow void deep inside him that stood in the place of something that had once been there.

And there was fire.

A great fireball, blossoming in orange and yellow and vibrant red, erupted into being and consumed the car like a ravenous beast. A peal of thunder tore through the air, sending bits of debris and pebbles scurrying for cover as streaks of flaming rubber and gasoline rained down and the echoes of the blast gave way to the pitter-patter of metallic hail. Dense, boiling smoke billowed forth from the annihilated car, but the stiff wind caught it and swept it aside, as the fire faded and the street reverted once more to near-silence.

And as the rain of metal faded, and the last wisps of smoke were whisked away, all of a sudden, David's mind remembered how to control the movements of his body, and he exhaled, and breathed in again, and lowered the hand that held Robin's staff to his side, and his eyes until they sat upon his counterpart.

His counterpart had not moved. His counterpart had not, it seemed, even breathed. Indeed, for the first time, his counterpart was visibly, recognizably David. Weathered and scarred though the face was, with eyes as blank as billiard balls, the expression was one that was instantly recognizable. It was the one that David himself had been wearing seconds ago, the same delicately blank look that represented astonishment and wonder and awe and fear all at once, the product of a mind that had suffered a computational fault and left all physical business in abeyance as it tried to recover. The cane hung from his fingertips, flickering with fire, but the man did not raise it to conjure forth more destruction. He seemed to have forgotten its existence. It was many, many seconds before he finally contrived to retrieve himself, and to speak, his voice hollow and empty of bombast.

"You clever little bastard..."

David said nothing. Instead he took one step forward, and swung his staff underhand, forwards and up like a polo mallet.

Always before it had been a matter of conscious, or at least semi-conscious will. A target selected, molecules categorized and acted upon, energy contained, re-routed, twisted upon itself to produce the proper effect. Not the artistic choreography of a magical spell, not the raw, elemental emotional outburst of kinetics or psychic power, using Devastator was as mechanical as laying pipe, a matter of formulaic repetition, work of the ego rather than the id. Raging emotion impeded Devastator. It did not enhance it.

And perhaps that was all still true. Perhaps the rote training and repetition of the last nine months had simply cemented the necessary steps so deeply in the back of David's mind that he could no longer discern the specific mental motions involved in conjuring them up. Or perhaps something else was acting here, some impenetrable explanation related to Trigon, to Hell, to the end of the world, or to the process of resurrection by stone. Perhaps it was a matter of great importance, and perhaps it didn't matter at all. Ultimately, all that David ever knew was that he raised his staff, and called for destruction, and received it.

The ground midway between David and his counterpart exploded, as though an artillery shell had just landed, throwing up dust and dirt and debris but doing very little else. Less than a fraction of a second later however, another explosion five feet in front of the last burst into being, and another before that, and another and another. A walking series of detonations advancing down the street at the speed of a racehorse, throwing asphalt and streetcar rails aside, aimed straight at the man with the fiery cane.

The man in question watched with equanimity the advancing line of explosions, his face tight and guarded, each blast exploding closer than the one before. At long last, as the explosions closed to within twenty feet or less, he raised his burning cane by the neck like a priest brandishing a holy cross, and thrust it forward towards the advancing pillars of fire.

The explosions stopped.

Slowly this time, the smoke cleared away, as though the wind itself could not decide on a proper course of action. As the shroud of dust and flame wafted aside, David saw the man once more, his cane still held up as though he were warding off vampires. Slowly he lowered it, though he did not act further, did not move or run or strike out with his own powers, his body trembling slightly, though why this might be was impossible to tell. He seemed to be waiting for David to say or do something, but David did nothing, standing still as a statue, watching his flesh-toned counterpart with his searing red eyes cutting through the ashen air like smoldering coals.

"So is this it then?" asked the man at length. "We kill each other here, at the end of the world, all because of your little friends?"

"I won't let you hurt them," said David, largely the only thing he could think of to say.

"You can't stop me," said the man. "Not even with Devastator or whatever parlor trick that was. You know that."

"Then try it," said David, "and watch me."

A flash of anger, clearly visible, passed over Devastator's face. "I will," he spat from between clenched teeth. "I'll watch you scream when I mount their heads on pikes. I did not come back from death just to let someone like you get in - "

"SHUT! UP!"

There was a loud crack like a peal of thunder, and the ground split, asphalt and concrete cracking as in an earthquake, sending thin, jagged rents spider-webbing across the street and sidewalk from about David's feet, even as nearby buildings groaned and swayed, shaking dust and ash from their fire-scored walls.

"I don't care what you threaten me with!" shouted David, oblivious to the damage, brandishing his broken staff like a flaming torch as it stabbed the air with it in Devastator's direction. "I don't care what you think of me! Who the hell are you? You're just a re-animated corpse brought back to torture me! What did Trigon offer you to make you come back and do this?"

"Have you ever been dead?" demanded Devastator. "Your soul on fire, twisting in agony for all eternity? Try it some time, and tell me what you wouldn't agree to in exchange for clemency." He sneered. "Besides, the chance to kill the people responsible wasn't a hard sell."

"The Titans weren't responsible for what happened to you."

"And just how the hell would you know what they were and weren't responsible for?"

"Because I know them."

"Not half as well as you think you do," said Devastator. "I've known them for much longer than you ever did.

"All you did was try to murder them," said David.

"Oh, you'd be surprised how well you get to know someone when they're on your hit list for as long as the Titans were," said Devastator. "Besides, that hardly matters now, does it? I don't need to know them to kill them, now do I?"

"You won't get that chance."

"Oh really?" scoffed Devastator. "Says who?"

"Says me," said David evenly. "You won't get near enough to hurt them. Not by five miles. You won't lay a finger on one of them."

Devastator groaned, shaking his head. "Son, I've tolerated this crap long enough. I'm not gonna stand here and debate morality with a child when – "

"I'm not your son and I'm not a child," said David coldly. "I'm the chosen host of the Lord of Destruction." He lowered his staff until the tip touched the ground, the flames flaring up as his fingers tightened around it. "I will not let you hurt the others. Not ever."

Devastator's already unreadable face went almost completely blank. "Is that so?" he asked at length.

David raised the staff slowly, gripping it with both hands, his fingers automatically finding the shallow grooves worn into the metal by another pair of gloved hands. "It is."

Devastator took a long, deep breath, and released it slowly, his fingers drumming silently on the silver handle of his walking cane.

"Fine," he said simply, "have it your way." And with a movement so fluid and fast that David scarcely had time to even blink, Devastator reached into his coat, withdrew a walnut-gripped semi-automatic handgun, aimed it at David, and fired.

Tensed like a coiled spring though David was, the gesture was so unexpected that his mind did not have time to process an appropriate response, and he saw the gun rise almost in slow motion, staring straight down the barrel, before the burst of flame from within it augured the end.

But the bullet never arrived.

There was a crunch of something unyielding being ruptured and suddenly a slab of stone and loose earth eight feet tall simply appeared right in front of David, shooting up from the ground like a geyser. David heard a wet 'thwack' as the bullet buried itself in the dirt pile and stopped, leaving him and Devastator to stare blankly at the unexpected obstacle interposed between them as if by magic.

It was Devastator who realized first what had just happened.

"God dammit!" snapped Devastator, and he whirled around in place, handgun extended towards the target that both he and David had momentarily forgotten existed. He was almost too late. A stone the size of a medicine ball nearly ripped his head off, missing by the barest of millimeters, and he was forced to detonate the one behind it so close to himself that he was almost knocked off his feet by his own explosion. It was only now, belatedly, that David's stunned mind caught up with the situation, and he scrambled around the shield of earth and stone to see what he could see.

Terra stood behind Devastator, fists closed and sheathed in gold, her eyes fixed on the man with the scarred eyes and red cane. How she had traversed the wall of fire that had cut her off from them was unclear, yet here she was, undaunted, and it was perhaps a testament to her overall bearing that Devastator did not attempt witty banter or a wry remark, but simply narrowed his lifeless eyes, raised the gun once more towards her, and fired again.

The gunshots were like thunderclaps, booming though the empty street as fire blossomed from the muzzle of the gun, but Terra raised one hand, tearing from the ground another shield of earth and rock, into which the bullets thudded with no effect. This time, however, Devastator was expecting this reaction. With an angry snarl he raised his cane to the air, and the rock shield exploded like a bomb, casting up a cloud of dust which blew swiftly away to reveal –

Nothing.

Both Devastator and David blinked in equal confusion as the smoke cleared to find that Terra had vanished like a ghost. For a second or two they stood as though transfixed, but as before, it was Devastator who made the obvious leap first.

"Alright then," he growled, sounding put upon, and holstering his pistol once more, he spun his cane through the air and drove the tip down into the ground. Instantly the ground heaved as though something was trying to hammer its way to the surface, bouncing everything from pebbles to cars into the air, and a two foot wide section of the street first lurched upwards, then collapsed back to form a deep pothole. Again and again he lifted the cane and drove it downwards, and each time another pothole fell into the street as explosions deep within the earth pulverized the bedrock and substrata like depth charges beneath the sea.

David, left momentarily forgotten as Devastator tried to smoke Terra out from her underground hiding place, did not make the mistake of trying to think things through. His brain still running only at its most basic level, he did not stop to try and analyze how it was possible for him to be channeling the very powers that Trigon had ripped out, nor any of the other ten thousand questions that needed only a second's inattention to spring to mind. Seeing Devastator trying to crush Terra with underground shockwaves, he responded immediately as he would have if nothing else odd were going on.

And given everything, this, probably, was the only thing that let him get away with what happened next.

Explosions, from Devastator, were a matter of energy. The larger an object, the more energy had to be corralled to detonate it. More energy meant more time, time that David had, through prodigious effort, managed to reduce to a minimum, but time that was still appreciable nonetheless. Hard enough as it was to destroy something with Devastator on-hand, he now had no choice but to simply go through the motions and hope that somehow, whatever had happened to give him the ability to destroy once more, would do the rest. Had he tried to detonate something huge, a truck, a building, even the street on which his counterpart stood, it would have taken time. Time for his counterpart to retaliate or block him or simply get off one more subterranean explosion. Time that he didn't have.

But whether it was because of Robin's endless lessons about creativity, or simply because he had Terra on his mind, David's target was not something huge. Indeed, it was the most mundane of objects, something so common, so simple, that he could have detonated it in his sleep.

And as Devastator raised his cane again, right behind him, a parking meter exploded.

There was the waspish sound of flying metal, as a thousand coins of various denominations flew in every direction like the shrapnel of a fragmentation bomb, and a second later, Devastator let out a howl of pain as a hundred such coins slammed into him. He staggered forward, nearly dropping the cane, whose flames instantly extinguished as the will commanding them into being evaporated like smoke. Stumbling, Devastator lashed out clumsily, but even such an offhand gesture sent a broken piece of pavement the size of a wall safe hurtling at David's head with the speed of a cannonball. Reacting on instinct, David swung his staff like a baseball bat, and the pavement chunk exploded into a million pieces, forcing him to cover his eyes with his arm to deflect the fragments.

There was a loud crack to David's left, and he tensed up automatically, dropping his arm and turning his head with his staff ready to deflect whatever Devastator had thrown at him from this new direction. But instead of a projectile, David saw the asphalt beside him shattering like glass, revealing the broken ground beneath. A second later, and Terra suddenly appeared from within the loose dirt, leaping up onto the street in a cloud of dust, the dirt rolling off her like water off a duck. Her fists were sheathed in gold, and small stones orbited her body in every which way like electrons around an atom. Though she said nothing, she did turn her head David's way, her eyes asking all the questions necessary.

"You two clearly do not know what you are dealing with..."

The voice was practically a hiss, a snarl layered with contempt and anger, so cold that it seemed to chill the very air. Both David and Terra turned to see Devastator standing back up, his long coat torn with dozens of small holes from the flying coins. The staff in his hand burned brightly once more, like a blazing torch, and he held it by the neck, before reaching over, twisting the handle, and drawing forth the sword concealed within. Both blade and sheathe burned brightly, like the damned city around them, and the light of their fires cast crimson shadows across the scarred countenance of the enraged metahuman who stood before them.

From the corner of his eye, David saw Terra start to take a step back, saw her hesitate, think better of it, and force herself to stand her ground. David might have done the same had he not been rooted where he was, watching his double with trepidation.

"You want to be heroes?" asked Devastator, slowly lowering both sword and cane. "Well this is what happens to heroes." Taking a single, heavy step forward, he swung both implements back and around and upwards, crossing them in front of his chest as he did so, and half an instant later, a volcano erupted in front of him.

The street was already pockmarked by the aftereffects of explosions, thrown vehicles, and subterranean detonations, but this was to them as a fusion bomb was to a firecracker. The entire street, from sidewalk to sidewalk, lurched and split and blew a solid piece of pavement a hundred yards long and thirty wide, into the air like the lid of a pressure cooker. Shedding debris and cars as it rose, the thousand-ton block of bedrock and asphalt rose on the wings of a fiery explosion that shattered what little glass remained within a mile and knocked both David and Terra back like bowling pins struck by a cannonball. David landed on his side, Terra on her back, and both of them slid to a painful stop a hundred feet from where they had stood. His head spinning, David managed to prop himself up on one arm, and turned his head back up the street in time to see Devastator swing both his weapons down towards them, and another explosion hurled the entire block at them like a meteor.

There was a crack to his left, as Terra summoned a pillar of rock right through the asphalt, using it to push herself back to her feet faster than she could stand herself. Still swaying on her feet, she nonetheless threw both hands out, releasing a beam of golden light that stretched out and struck the front of the flying block of stone and roadway. The light wrapped itself around the block as Terra leaned forward as though pressing against an invisible wall, her eyes closed and teeth clenched. The block's flight slowed, its trajectory wobbling, but that much mass and momentum would not be arrested so easily, and the block flew on regardless.

Staggering to his feet at Terra's side, David aimed the staff at the approaching block, balancing it on his wrist and shoving it forward like a pool cue. Instantly, the entire front facing of the block exploded in fiery ruin, slowing its approach yet further, but not enough. Again and again he jabbed the staff forward, each successive jab blossoming forth new fire from the broken face of the stone block, as Terra dug her feet in and shoved forward, and the golden glow redoubled in brilliance. Wobbling despite its immense momentum, the block dipped and its leading edge struck the ground like the blade of an enormous bulldozer, dredging up a wave of asphalt and dirt. Desperately, David redoubled his efforts, explosions peppering his face and shirt with red-hot bits of stone and pavement, as the wave and the block slid towards them inexorably. Terra screamed, whether from fright or the mere effort of channelling her kinetic powers, David couldn't tell, and he closed his eyes and fired one more explosion at danger-close range, the backblast strong enough to nearly knock him off his feet. The explosion rang in his ears, drowning out everything else. But as it faded out, it was replaced, not with more crashing or cacophony, but with silence.

One second. Two. And David opened his eyes to a smoldering wall of stone and burnt asphalt, sitting motionless some six inches from his face. For a moment he simply stared at it, half-expecting it to rise up and lunge at him once again. And then slowly he flicked his eyes over to his left, where Terra was holding her breath, her hands trembling at her sides, staring as he was at the immense block.

And then the block exploded.

Had the entire thing detonated at once, it would have disintegrated David and Terra down to the molecular level. That it did not was evidence of the rushed nature of the explosion, Devastator not bothering with a complete energy transference in favor of speed and surprise. Only a relatively small portion of the block, that directly facing the two teenagers, actually exploded, shattering the rest like so much glass. But at point blank range, it was more than enough. David felt only an tremendous impact, then weightlessness, and then nothing at all.

O-O-O

He holds him with his glittering eye-
The Wedding-Guest stood still,
And listens like a three years' child :
The Mariner hath his will.

O-O-O

"If you do not learn this lesson and well, you will destroy everything and everyone you ever come to love."

It was quiet now. Quieter than before. The shrieking and howling had gone, fading slowly into sobs that quieted in their turn and finally stopped altogether. It was quiet enough to hear the dripping of water and the groaning of the ice that surrounded her. Yet the silence was not quite absolute, for every so often, she heard a noise that was clearly no product of ice or water, some awful, grinding, gurgling sound, that conjured to mind every nightmare she had ever had, and sent her shivering back down into the recesses of her cloak.

Everything from before this point was flashes, violent flashes of green and white and red, always red, as blood spilled over the ice and melted it into a vile, steaming mess. Screams of abject horror and pain mingled with sounds of rending, of claws and teeth on yielding flesh. Sounds of ripping, and tearing, and mutilation, horrified cries drowned in gushing blood, death-rattles and the splintering of bone. Hot wind on her arms and legs imbued with awful smells. All of it waiting to consume her, devour her, searching for her with every waking instant. No place was there to hide, no chance of evasion, no escape. Where before she had screamed without hearing her own voice, so awful was the noise, now she no longer dared to even breathe, for fear that it would contrive to find her. Expecting it to at every second.

She could not remember what had transpired to bring her to this place, this cave of ice in the middle of a frozen world, surrounded by waxy, ghostly figures and objects buried in the walls. How she had come to be here, and why, were entirely forgotten. Her whole life had been spent here, for reasons that were important, if somewhat indistinct. Something Azar had said. Something she had warned about.

"We do not do this to you as punishment. We do this because there is no other choice."

"Azarath, Metrion, Zinthos. Azarath, Metrion, Zinthos..."

No magic burst forth at these words, none of the eruptions of power that she remembered someone else performing. She did not expect it to, for the words weren't meant as a spell. They were a charm, a blanket, just something for her ears to hear that wasn't screams and slavering. Something she remembered from a time that wasn't this one, neither before nor after, but other. She recited the words over and over, like half-remembered prayers called forth at the moment of need, faster and faster, stumbling over the words in her haste to get them out.

Something wet touched her knee, and she screamed.

In a heartbeat, her muscles moved of their own accord, and she reared up and back, slipping on the slick ice and falling onto her back with a wet splat. Thick, goopy liquid splattered over her, sticky and lukewarm. She tried to scramble back, away from whatever was in front of her, but her feet and hands could get no purchase on the ice, until, in her impotent flailings, her hand found something solid, and grabbed it, and swung it around.

It was a piece of wood, still burning at one end like a torch, and as she brought it around, the light it cast filled the cavern of ice, revealing -

She stopped.

- nothing.

The walls were coated in blood. Blood and... other things. It ran down them in rivulets, hissing as the residual heat melted the underlying ice. It dripped from the ceiling like a light rain, plinking against the sodden floor with hollow strikes that resonated throughout the crystal cavern like invisible bells. Yet the looming monster she was so certain that she would see was not there, and the empty space where it should have been taunted her more than its presence would have. Her eyes darted back and forth and back again, catching glimpses of it from the corner of her vision, imagined or real, she couldn't tell and dared not assume. Around and around and around she spun, hunting for something she did not even know the sight of, more certain at each second that the next would see her come face to face with it, until the her balance finally gave way entirely, and she fell once more.

Only this time, she did not land on ice. Or blood. This time she landed on something that cried.

A horrid, warbling cry, like a wounded animal, froze her where she was, long enough for her to feel wet fabric against her cheek. Only when the sound subsided did she open her eyes once more, and find that she was laying half-draped atop something. Someone.

Someone green.

And through the haze that was her reality now, she remembered a name. A title really. One said thousands of times before. One she now interrupted her chant to repeat.

"Beast Boy?"

The previous magic words had done nothing, but these did. The sodden cloth she lay upon heaved weakly, up and down again, and shook as the person she had fallen upon tried to lift themselves, but did not succeed. For an instant, she thought it was her own weight, slight though it was, and she slid off of him, expecting him to rise, but he did not, and it was only when she sat back and raised the torch once more that she saw why.

Beast Boy lay on his stomach, his head on one side, eyes closed and fangs clenched tightly together, his chest rising and falling slowly as air whistled through his teeth. He was soaked in blood, covered in it until his purple uniform was dyed black with the stuff, so much that it seemed impossible for it all to have come from inside of him. Heaped about and over him, lay wet clumps of organic matter, unidentifiable by sight, which was probably a kindness, all things considered. Midway down his back, his uniform was torn open, a gash eight inches long ripped down it, yet beneath the tear, she saw only Beast Boy's green skin, whole and unblemished, save for the blood liberally splattered over it. Given that this rent in Beast Boy's uniform had been caused by him being impaled on a narwhal spike not ten minutes earlier, this was not something that could be explained. Yet there it was.

One more mystery in this frozen wonderland hardly merited notice.

Beast Boy's eyes remained tightly closed, but he continued to try to rise, sliding his hands palms-down onto the ice to push himself up. Unsuccessful in this effort, he finally managed, at length, to roll himself over onto one side, the hissing breath that escaped his lips as he did so revealing what the cost to do this much was. Only after he had turned, and rested, and waited for the pain to go back down, only then did he open his eyes, search for a moment, and then find Raven, still kneeling not five feet away, the torch still held in her trembling hand.

Slowly, incredibly, a broad grin crossed Beast Boy's blood and viscera-stained face. "Hey, there" he said, as though this were the most normal circumstance in the world. Gingerly, he extended a gloved hand towards Raven. "I gotcha."

In retrospect, that was probably not the wisest way to have phrased matters.

Exactly what transpired in the following couple of seconds, Raven could not possibly have described. It was all a blur of shouting and crashing and the grinding of ice against ice. When finally it all subsided, Raven was laying on her back, propped up on her elbows and staring at the sheer wall of ice a foot thick that had slid down into place between her and Beast Boy like a portcullis, slamming shut with a booming echo, and then silence.

For several moments, Raven simply lay there in shock, unable to process what had just happened. The wall of ice separating her from Beast Boy was transparent, or near enough, and she saw him on his feet, staring slack-jawed at this new obstacle that had just appeared. Slowly, Raven mirrored him, trying to understand what was going on and failing. Had she done this, her demon powers reacting in a moment's thoughtlessness? Had someone else?

"An instant's lack of focus is all it takes to lose everything."

She wished that they would leave her alone, just this once.

Behind the ice, Beast Boy was on his feet, his pain apparently forgotten, studying the barrier that had just manifested itself. He said something, or at least his lips moved, but the barrier blocked all sound, and she couldn't figure out what it was. Carefully, she approached the ice, eyes oscillating between Beast Boy and the ceiling that had voided the sheet onto them. Fingers outstretched, she touched it as gently as she could. It felt cold of course, but also wet and slippery, and this close, she could see rivulets of water running down it onto the floor. Uncomprehendingly, she touched one of the rivulets, letting the clear water wash over her fingertip trying to determine what this could possibly mean.

There was a loud noise.

It was like the groaning of some enormous bulkhead or ocean liner, a deep, low, melodic sound, like a foghorn muffled by an arctic storm. Judging by his reaction, Beast Boy had heard it too, but the sound had unquestionably emanated from somewhere behind her. Cautiously she turned her head, looking over her shoulder, half-expecting to see some fresh monster looming up behind her. But instead she saw only the back wall of the cavern, dark and imposing as ever, the ghostly images of buried objects hidden within its milky depths. Eyes searching the remotest corner for any sign of what could have caused the sound, she raised her makeshift torch and slowly walked towards the far wall, peering into it, as more sounds, albeit softer ones, began to emanate from it.

And then something in the wall moved.

She jumped, screamed actually, as a shadow crossed before her eyes, so quickly that she couldn't tell what it was or where it had gone. She staggered back, searching desperately for the culprit, and not finding it. The sound repeated, closer now, more urgent, an angry groan, like the restless dead conjured to life, yet still she could see nothing.

But then, by chance, her eye fell upon a large object, a car maybe, or a sidewalk kiosk, it was hard to say at this distance. And at the precise instant she happened to glance at it, the groaning sound repeated itself, louder than before, and the object seemed to shimmer, and twist, and blur, and then vanish entirely.

And suddenly, Raven understood what she was looking at, and why the shadow from before had vanished. The sound wasn't being caused by an object moving in the ice. The sound was being caused by the ice itself moving.

There was an ear-splitting explosion.

Raven jumped. So did Beast Boy. So did the multi-ton sheet of ice that separated them, so loud and powerful was the cannon-shot that exploded in the room, ricocheting around it until Raven thought that all the guns in all the world were discharging around her. She staggered back, hands cupped over her ears, eyes wide, as she saw large cracks spider-webbing across the wall of ice that formed the back of the cavern. And before she had a chance to process this new development, there was a tremendous rending howl, the sound of something giving way before unfathomable pressure, and then suddenly something dowsed her in freezing water.

It was as though a firehose had just been turned on her. Instantly, she was swept off her feet, buffeted to the ground, coughing and sputtering as a stream of water like a horizontal geyser blasted her. Gasping for air, she crawled through freezing water on her hands and knees until she was out of the direct line of fire, and able to stand up without being knocked off her feet again. Only then did she turn, and see that the back wall had ruptured, splintering and cracking like a glass windshield, and through the foot-wide hole that was left, an entire ocean of water was pouring in.

"If you persist in warring against yourself, nobody will be able to save you from the consequences."

CRASH.

Yet another booming sound, quieter than the previous one, yet still enough to make Raven jump, and she turned to the sheet of ice that separated her from Beast Boy. But instead of Beast Boy, there stood a bighorn ram, green of fur and white of eye, its horns pressed up against the shuddering ice sheet. As she watched, the ram backed away and lunged forward, smashing its horns into the sheet of ice. The blow sounded and looked hard enough to simply crush any thickness of ice, yet it shivered and shook and somehow held against it.

Dropping the sodden and useless torch into the swirling water, Raven tried to stay on her feet as it rushed and roiled around her, rising up her legs, past her waist, past her stomach, rising ever-higher as it poured into the cavern. She felt the chill of it like knives being driven into her body, a chill she had never before experienced or even imagined, colder somehow than the ice around it, colder than death, a liquid cold, not merely devoid of heat, but devouring it, swallowing every erg of energy in her body as it rose inexorably upwards.

The blows against the ice sheet came faster and faster, harder and harder, as the ram shifted and shook and suddenly exploded into a rhinoceros, then a bull elephant, and then a full scale stegosaurus so large that it could barely fit within the truncated cavern, slamming its spiked, armored tail against the ice with blows that could have staved in a steel blast door, and yet did not suffice to even chip the sheet that imprisoned her.

"You can't rely on anyone else to fight your battles for you. This evil was brought into the universe by your creation. You will be responsible alone for what becomes of it."

The water was up to her chest now, so cold that it seemed to tighten around her like a straitjacket, squeezing the air out. She gasped for air, her throat refusing to open to admit it, the roar of the water all but drowning the insistent, earth-shattering impacts from Beast Boy's ever-more desperate attempts to punch through the intervening ice. It topped her shoulders, swirled around her neck, whiplashing currents beneath the surface threatening to sweep her off her feet. She raised her head as far as she could gasping for air, moments before the water closed over her head entirely.

Quiet descended like a thick blanket, all sound gone save for the eternal rushing of the streaming water. Her cloak hung around her neck like an anchor, dragging her down as she struggled to unclasp it, her numb fingers refusing to work as commanded. Desperately, she pawed at the water, trying to force her way to the receding surface, but the cold seemed to suck the very life from her body, and she could generate no force. The chill tightened around her like a vice, wiping away the world outside. Even the currents seemed to die. And when at last she could no longer hold it, she barely felt the air leaving her lungs, watching it instead as it bubbled towards a non-existent surface, vanishing into a descending black fog.

But at that moment, something happened that even the cold could not suppress.

What it was, she could only determine in hindsight, for all she felt was a sudden, powerful jerk, as though the entire world had been violently turned on its side, or lifted into the air and shaken. Swept from her feet, she spun underwater in three dimensions, chunks of ice the size of water coolers striking her and bouncing away again. Stunned and caught by surprise, she inhaled reflexively, water cold as death itself pouring into her throat. She coughed, retched, bright lights flashing before her eyes, so cold and disoriented that all sense of where she was vanished into the wind. And as the last vestiges of Raven's dwindling strength finally deserted her, her eyes slid shut as she opened her mouth and inhaled one final time.

And found air.

Warm air.

The air flooded into her like nectar, displacing what seemed like gallons of icewater, which she coughed and spat up for an indeterminable amount of time. And once that was more or less done, she simply breathed the heavy, warm air that was miraculously all around her, her entire consciousness, her entire essence focused only on the mechanical miracle of being able to breathe. It could well have been hours before she finally became aware that she was no longer suspended within an endless void, but laying on her stomach on something soft, wet, and quite clearly alive.

She opened her eyes, not that this did any good, for her surroundings were pitch black. Gently, she raised herself onto her hands and knees, feeling the surface beneath her. It felt spongy, with a rough but giving surface that kept it from being slick, and it seemed to not merely tremble but pulsate beneath her. The hot, heavy air swirled around her in what seemed like every direction simultaneously, accompanied by deep, atonal sounds, like a badly-tuned pipe organ played by an epileptic. Only now did she notice that the air had a strong scent to it, an unpleasant, bacterial smell that would ordinarily have set her to coughing, but her lungs had not yet recovered enough to be discriminating. Feeling around with her hands and feet, she found that she was on a small, elevated island, surrounded on all sides by water which was still cold to the touch, but warming rapidly as the hot air washed over it.

Her equilibrium returning, albeit slowly, Raven chanced a thought for where, in all the universe, she could possibly be. Shivering violently, despite the warm air, she drew her dripping wet cloak tightly around her shoulders, and chanced a sound.

"B-... Beast... Boy?"

There was an immediate reaction, though not the one she had hoped for. A loud, blaring, foghorn-like sound rent the air, a toneless groan like the creaking of giant icebergs, and suddenly she was thrown to the side, and back again, as whatever she was kneeling upon lurched this way and that. Vague sounds of some distant cataclysm, heavily filtered as though by distance or some other separation, floated through the air. Things crashing to the ground in ruin, shattering before some irresistible force, all of it muted like an avalanche heard from a great distance. And then suddenly there was light, dim but visible, coming from somewhere to the right. Tinted green, filtered as it was through a thickly opaque membrane, it barely served to illuminate Raven's immediate surroundings. Yet it was enough for her to see that the spongy island she sat upon was also green, dark and emerald in color, and so was the ridged roof of the cavern. Indeed, the only thing in this place that wasn't green proved to be several enormous plates of white bone, each nearly a dozen feet long, attached to each of which were entire forests of long, fine bristles.

And then, with a sudden flash, Raven realized where she was.

Gradually, the sound of collapsing ice faded into nothingness, replaced by the same low groans that had been present before, but this time more understated, rhythmic, in time with the air currents that ebbed and flowed around her. Huddled in the gloomy cavern, she waited expectantly for something to transpire, but nothing did, and it was some time before she realized why.

"Can I... can I come out?" she asked aloud.

The response was immediate, as from somewhere before her, the cavern split wide open, admitting both dazzling light and a cold wind that whistled through the brush-like bristles. Beneath her, the spongy island she sat on shifted and moved, the water around it draining away, enabling her to stand and gingerly walk forward, stepping out of the cavern onto the open ice beyond, before turning around to face the entrance.

But of course what she saw was no cavern, natural or otherwise. And though it was more or less exactly what she expected to see, that made the sight no less astonishing.

Before her, half-embedded within the wall of sheer ice, was the largest living thing Raven had ever seen. Of this she was absolutely certain, even if her memory of times before her imprisonment in this frozen hell was fragmentary and painful to dredge up. A hundred and thirty feet long and twenty tall, it loomed above her like an ocean liner, its watermelon-sized eye staring down at her as a fluke that could have carried a mid-sized car gently slid back and forth over the empty ice. But unlike any whale Raven had ever heard of, this one was green, not solid but painted in fantastic patterns and subtle shades, its back and head a deep evergreen, while its underside was the color of fern leaves, while streaks of everything from teal to neon ran down its body in stripes broad or narrow.

Ignoring the cold, Raven stared up unabashedly at the half-million pound whale wedged securely within what she had thought a large cave in the ice. The cave was no longer there, for large though it was, it could not accommodate a whale this size, whole or in part. Looking at the ice face that ran round the whale's circumference, formerly solid, now riven with cracks and missing chunks, Raven understood. She did not know with what force Beast Boy's sudden changes in size, shape, and mass were accomplished. Perhaps he did not either. But whatever the force was, it had been sufficient to rip the entire cave apart, sending chunks of ice the size of power boats avalanching down onto the plain around her. Enormous gashes, large enough for her to have climbed inside, were torn in Beast Boy's head and back and the few parts of his tail she could see, but he did not seem to writhe in pain or even notice them, simply looking down at her expectantly, if whales could express such sentiments with their eyes.

Exactly what he was expecting, she had no idea, but bereft of any other notion of what to do, she fell back on his name, once more.

"Beast Boy?"

There was another formless rumble, strong enough to shake the ice beneath Raven's feet, and suddenly Beast Boy shrank prodigiously, sending an avalanche of loose, suddenly-unsupported ice crashing down from the now-empty whale-shaped cave. For a second, he was lost from view behind a cloud of ice particulates and falling hail. But by the time she had brushed these away from her face and looked again, he was climbing back to his feet, the enormous lacerations from before reduced to little more than scratches on his scalp or his black and purple uniform. And then, stepping around massive chunks of ice he had effortlessly held aloft seconds before, Beast Boy walked up to Raven, knelt down in front of her so as to look her in the eye, and... somehow... managed to smile.

"Hey," he asked with a beaming grin, "are you all right?"

It was the tone that did it, really. Beast Boy could have asked that question in a thousand ways. He could have asked it quizzically, perfunctorily, even with real concern and fear that she had been injured, but he did not choose any of those. The way he asked it, with a grin on his face and a sparkle in his eye, was like a joke. As though the notion of her being anything besides all right was farcical.

She blinked. Twice. And then when his grin didn't go away, something simply popped inside of Raven, all strength spontaneously left her limbs, and like a puppet with her strings cut, she simply fell.

But she didn't hit the ground. And for once, she knew that she wouldn't.

Beast Boy caught her effortlessly, not even needing to transform for the occasion. He said something, something soothing, or maybe funny, or even completely idiotic, she had no idea, for she didn't hear him. It wasn't that she didn't care to pay attention, or that her ears had stopped working. It was that for the first time in... essentially forever, she no longer felt afraid. And like a weary pilgrim come home after years in exile, all she could do was lay there as the world, for once, did not seek to chase her down.

How long it was before Beast Boy stood up, lifting her up with him, she had no idea. But at some point, she became aware that he was carrying her at shoulder height, and opened her eyes to see him standing before the endless wall of ice that loomed before them.

"You can trust nobody. None who are not bred to understand the unfathomable evil you represent will be prepared to accept the risks you entail. They will fear, hate, and reject you forever."

"So," asked Beast Boy with a grin, "you feel like going for a climb?"

O-O-O

'And now the STORM-BLAST came, and he
Was tyrannous and strong :
He struck with his o'ertaking wings,
And chased us south along.

O-O-O

Someone was shouting his name. Someone close by.

There was an awful lot of noise, general noise, the sound of bricks shattering and wood splintering, fires roaring and rocks clashing against one another. But those sounds had occupied his entire world for long enough that it no longer was surprising, nor even worth notice. What was worth notice, what he was trying his damnedest to keep his mind on, was a familiar voice calling his name, and the inexplicable feeling of something rough scraping against his back.

"David! Wake up!"

It was the desperation in the words that made him open his eyes. It was the sight he saw with them that made him pay attention.

Terra was crouched over him, one hand grasping the back of his collar, the other held up like a ward against what appeared to be a nuclear firestorm emanating from somewhere in front of them both. Great sheets of earth and stone burst from the ground at her command, shields against the nuclear fires that boiled and churned just yards away, but each shield in turn was blasted to pieces almost contemptuously, shredded like tissue paper by gouts of flame that seemed to burst forth from every surface at once. Desperately, Terra dragged him backwards over the broken ground, while simultaneously trying to ward off the flames with one hand and half her mind. It was a battle she was plainly losing. And as soon as she saw David's eyes flicker open, she released his shirt and grabbed his shoulder, pulling him up as hard as she could while literally screaming a command down at him.

"Move!"

David moved.

His head still reeling, David managed with Terra's assistance to clamber to his feet and keep them, staggering like a drunk as he ran from the fires behind, the broken staff still clenched in one hand. The street behind them destroyed, they ran now through a parking lot of some sort, surrounded by the ruined forms of vehicles large and small. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw nothing but a whirling vortex of flames obscuring everything beyond it save for a single faint shadow in the shape of a man, brandishing two thin spires of living fire.

"Look out!"

Another tremendous blast, this time from somewhere in front of them, sent a ruined taxicab pinwheeling their way. Facing the wrong way, David turned back without enough time to react, but Terra grabbed him by both shoulders as she dove to the ground, dragging him down with her as the taxi passed overhead. David landed on his side and glanced back in time to see Devastator step out of the roaring flames, deflecting the taxi he had just thrown at them with a wave of his sword.

To their right, a small stone wall lined the side of the parking lot, and it was to this that Terra extended her arm, clenching a fist before sweeping her arm towards Devastator. Instantly, fifty of the largest stones burst out of the wall at her command, hurtling towards Devastator like the pellets from an enormous shotgun. Devastator whirled in place, spinning sword and cane alike back and forth across himself, and a dozen of them exploded, scattering the others like so much debris, but the deflection cost him time, and Terra used it to struggle to her feet. She reached down and pulled upwards as though lifting an invisible weight, and dredged up two more boulders right through the tarmac. Rather than throw them directly, she clapped her hands together, and both stones shattered into a thousand pieces, before a frontal shove sent the entire mass of fragments hurtling at Devastator, a mass of shattered stone that, surely, even he could not destroy.

Yet destroy it he did. Without missing a beat, Devastator stepped forward and lifted his sword like a magician's wand, and twisted it, and the entire mass of stone simply disintegrated in a hail of explosions so rapid that they sounded like a single roar. What fragments were not blasted apart were thrown every which way by the concussive shocks of the others, and not a single pebble got within ten feet. Smiling, he raised his other hand, the one holding the cane-sheathe for his flaming sword, and performed his favorite trick, blowing a car from behind him into the air before sweeping his hand forward and hurling it at the two teens with a rocket-propelled explosion.

But not this time. This time, David had ideas of his own.

The explosion went off all right, but instead of sending the car flying at Terra and David, it dropped it like a meteor directly at Devastator's head. Devastator had only bare instants to abort his own explosion and throw himself backward, before two tons of steel slammed into the ground he had just occupied, missing him by inches. Lest that seem like a reprieve however, before Devastator could possibly recover, David stretched his staff and mind out towards the car, found the keypoint within it, and blew the entire thing to pieces.

The smoke and flames cloaked whatever effect the explosion might have had, but neither David nor Terra were prepared to wait. Without hesitation, Terra pivoted, reaching behind her and tearing stones out of the ground the size of shopping carts, hurling them indiscriminately at Devastator's position, while David, scrambling back to his feet, reached to one side and blew a car of his own into the air before launching it at Devastator like a cruise missile, not even stopping to see what effect it might have had before turning and seizing another one. Cars and boulders alike smashed into the area Devastator had occupied, detonating either of their own accord or at David's command. Neither David nor Terra was willing to cease fire, and they deluged Devastator's position with projectile after projectile, until the parking lot was empty of cars, and the ground cratered like a moonscape from the rocks ripped out of it. Only then, with adrenaline failing and exhaustion returning, and with no ammunition left to fling, did David and Terra stop.

Breathless, doubled over with the effort, David half-stood, half-knelt on the ground, his head raised towards the scene of incomparable annihilation into which he and Terra had just deployed enough fire to destroy a battleship, an area at the edge of the parking lot choked with flames and smoke and the smashed remnants of two dozen cars, motorcycles, and minivans, covered in a layer of shattered stone and earth three feet thick. Beside him stood Terra, hands on her knees, watching for the same signs of life that David was sure he would see any second now, too exhausted to do anything but stare. She chanced a glance at him, wordlessly, but he did not say anything. There was nothing to say. And for an eternity, five seconds, eight, ten, twelve, they waited and watched and dared, perhaps, to hope.

And then there was a dull boom.

The dullness was due to distance, for these new blasts were not direct attacks, but emanated from someplace reasonably far away, so far that neither David nor Terra reacted to them immediately. Slowly, David stood back up, as did Terra, and they peered into the shrouded air, and sought to see what could possibly have caused these new noises. Gradually, their eyes made out dim shapes floating in the distance, shapes that seemed to dance and twist and slowly to grow larger, oblong and rectangular shapes that David was sure he knew but could not immediately identify, not at least until they grew large enough to resolve, and, all at once, he realized what was happening. One of Devastator's favorite tricks was to blast cars into the air for use as ersatz missiles, but these objects were not cars.

"Oh my God..."

They were tractor-trailers.

Terra's reaction, as always, was more pragmatic.

"Run!"

The first truck, a sixty-ton gasoline tanker, landed thirty yards behind them and exploded like a bomb, but the blast was drowned out almost instantly by the impacts of its fellows as eighteen-wheel trucks rained down from the sky like javelins. Pulses of intense kinetic force buffeted them as they ran, hurling them off their feet again and again as pieces of debris sized from screws up to truck wheels flew in every direction like bullets. And as the trucks rained down, light posts and shattered walls and bits of the broken parking lot began exploding around them of their own accord. Terra's summoned walls of rock and earth, David tried desperately to ward off the nearest projectiles with explosives, but it was all in vain, barricades of sand to ward off a tsunami of violence, and all they could do was run.

Ahead loomed a huge building, a factory perhaps, or warehouse, made of brick and cement with no windows and enormous double doors of solid iron. No words did Terra and David exchange, yet they both ran for its tenuous shelter, whatever help that might provide against Devastator. They were within fifteen yards of the doors when an entire cement mixer landed directly behind them and detonated, and one of the cab doors hit Terra square in the back at automobile speeds, driving her into the brick wall of the factory like a bug on a windshield.

"Terra!" shouted David, and ducking under some new piece of bodywork-turned-shrapnel that hurtled his way, he skidded to a stop and raced over to where the door now leaned against the wall of the factory. Grabbing it with both hands, he shoved it off, revealing Terra laying motionless on the ground, her head hanging limp and eyes shut, blood running down her face. He grabbed her arm, shouted her name, but she did not respond.

For an instant, he despaired of moving her, thinking in some momentary fantasy that he might have to stay here and ward off the incoming debris with his own powers, but his rational brain had finally fought its way back to the forefront, and instantly dismissed this notion as lunacy. Whatever the risk, to remain here was suicide, and so he grabbed her arm once more, pulled it around his shoulders, and clumsily lifted her up, half-supporting, half-dragging her towards the entrance to the factory. The doors were shut, locked, and chained, but he blew the locks and chains off with a wave of his hand, shoved one of the doors open, and flung himself and Terra inside. The door slid shut behind them, and there was silence.

Not absolute silence, of course, but close enough, the sounds of world-ending destruction outside muted by thick brick and solid metal, and the difference was so stark as to be almost calming. For a moment, David paused, and still holding Terra up, took stock of his surroundings.

The building was some kind of factory, it seemed, but what was made here, he couldn't tell for sure. It looked like a smelting plant, or at least like pictures of what he assumed one would look like, with enormous steel basins designed to pour liquid metal into casting moulds below. The dark shapes of enormous machines, purpose indeterminate, lay scattered over the factory floor, and overhead were gigantic metal storage bunkers and cisterns for holding bulk freight of some sort.

A soft moan and a twitch from Terra brought him back to the immediate problem. He moved, limped really, deeper into the factory, still holding her up as she slowly came to and found her footing once more. He had no idea where they were going, but if the factory had a backdoor, or even a wall he could knock a hole through, they might be able to escape into the city and figure out...

"Oh no..."

Terra opened her eyes, and gasped.

The entire back half of the factory was missing. In its place, the factory floor simply ended at the lip of an enormous chasm filled with boiling lava, as though the earth had opened up underneath the factory and ripped it in half. The far side of the chasm was completely invisible behind the haze of smoke and ash, and might well have been a mile away for all either of them could tell. There was no escape.

Behind them, the doors to the factory exploded.

Both David and Terra jumped, and spun around in time to see the mangled remains of the doors fly over their heads and disappear into the chasm below. The maze of machinery blocked them from seeing all the way back to the doors, but neither one needed to ask who it was that had just entered.

Stepping back almost reflexively, until he was standing at the edge of the chasm, David tried to think of something, anything that he might do, some weapon he could use to ward of Devastator. But though the metal shapes of the machines about the factory beckoned, he knew they would do no good, no more than the cars had. Helplessly, he turned to look at Terra, but plainly she had drawn an equal blank. In perfect condition, Terra could have summoned a flying stone to bear them away, or solidified the lava behind them to form an escape route, but she was simply not up to any such thing any longer. Barely able to stay on her feet, exhausted and bleeding, her hands trembled at her sides as she tried to summon her powers once again, but while a few nearby pebbles trembled at her feet, nothing rose to her command. Terra was spent. And Devastator was coming.

"I... I can't," she whispered, more to herself perhaps than him. Gritting her teeth and squeezing her eyes closed, she managed to force a piece of coal next to her to lift into the air, but only for a few seconds. All at once, the coal fell back to the ground, followed moments later by Terra herself. She landed on the floor next to the lip of the chasm like a boned fish, unable to muster the strength even to stand.

Scarcely in better shape than Terra was, David considered nonetheless pulling her to her feet and trying to find another way out, but the unmistakable sound of approaching footsteps dissuaded him. He turned sharply back towards the entrance to the factory, too sharply, for he lost his balance and slipped, nearly plummeting off the edge of the chasm. Desperately, he waved his arms and managed to avoid falling, turning back as he did so in time to watch the piece of coal from before tumble over the edge, spinning down into the chasm and hitting the side of the chasm. The coal shattered on impact, exploding into a cloud of black dust which flitted down into the lava chasm and disappeared.

David suddenly froze.

Sitting helplessly at his side, Terra fought to recover her breath. "Where..." she stammered, "where can we... we've gotta hide... find somewhere to - "

"Terra," said David, suddenly. "Don't move."

Terra paused, blinking in confusion, but whether by David's command or because she was simply too tired to move anyway, she remained where she was, as David turned back towards the factory, took a deep breath, and lifted his broken staff.

There were two booming explosions, and then a deluge.

Above them, in the rafters, two gigantic storage bunkers burst like pinatas. One was a water cistern, designed to pour water down on the factory in case of runaway fire or other emergency. Sealed tight against the storm outside, it held some fifty thousand gallons of water, water which now voided down onto the factory like a biblical flood. Terra yelled as the water drenched her, then coughed and gagged as it poured into her throat, and grabbed onto anything nearby to avoid being swept over the side of the chasm by the flash flood. Beside her, David had grabbed hold of a steel support beam to prevent the same, as thousands of gallons of water rushed past them, flying over the side of the chasm before striking the lava and exploding back upwards in thick, billowing clouds of steam.

The other container was no cistern, but a storage bunker filled with coal, no doubt intended to feed the furnaces of the smelting plant. David's explosion blew it apart, dropping twenty tons of loose coal indiscriminately into the factory. Yet the effect was no avalanche, for the majority of the coal, packed into loose briquettes for easy burning, was shattered by the destruction of the bunker. Thus, just as the water began to drain away, Terra found herself enveloped in a cloud of thick coal dust, which boiled through the factory like a pyroclastic cloud, mingling with the steam to form a shroud of black smoke, and with the remaining water to form a deep black sludge.

Coughing uncontrollably, half-drowned by the water and half-suffocated by the coal dust, David and Terra ducked their heads and fought desperately for breath. Were the factory intact, they would assuredly have been smothered, but the open half allowed much of the smoke to vent away, and the steam suppressed enough of the rest for them to find a pocket of air. Beside him, David saw Terra wheezing and coughing, and he opened his mouth to explain why he had just done this. But then he heard footsteps right in front of them. And when he lifted his eyes, there was Devastator.

He loomed up out of the darkness of smoke and steam like an apparition summoned by some baleful sorcerer, his sword in one hand flickering with fire, the cane in the other shimmering with the same. The light of his powers twinkled in the inky twilight, framing him in red like a god of destruction. His coat was soaked at the fringes, his shoulders and hair sprinkled with coal dust, yet it seemed that none of these violent explosions had harmed him in the least. Standing now, less than ten feet away, he did not even seem to be having trouble breathing.

Glancing back at Terra, David saw within her frightened eyes some reptilian instinct awake, a portion of her psyche that cared nothing for pain or exhaustion, but that recognized this fire-bearing swordsman as Death incarnated, and which resolved, since escape was impossible, to sell her life as dearly as possible. It was a sight he had seen before, in the pit in the library when she had been unexpectedly confronted by himself and Raven both, and he knew what it augured. She tensed up, focusing her powers for one last effort, visibly preparing to strike a final, defiant blow.

But before she could, David reached out and grabbed her, holding her back, and when she turned her head, he simply stared at her wordlessly but with an intensity that could have melted lead. The message was perfectly clear, and he saw the instinct die in her eyes. And having seen it, he simply turned back to face Devastator, holding his breath against the smoke and steam.

And nothing happened.

The smoke and steam boiled around them like living things, thick, but not thick enough to obscure Devastator, who stood before them and did not act, his blank eyes staring into the roiling fumes like searchlights. He did not strike, he did not even move, save for turning his head slowly back and forth, his gaze passing right over them more than once. At any instant, he might have lunged forth and finished them both off, and yet instant after instant passed by, and he did no such thing. David's lungs pleaded for air, and yet he did not dare take a breath, for fear that it might dispel what little magic it was that was holding Devastator at bay..

And then, suddenly, Devastator began to laugh.

It was a short one, for no sooner did he begin than the smoke filled his lungs, and he coughed and retched and covered his nose and mouth with a gloved hand. Yet still he chuckled, smirking at some private joke that he did not appear to see fit to share with the rest of the world. Moving with absolute deliberation and care, he raised sword and sheathe and carefully slid the former back into the latter, locking it in place with a twist of the cane's handle. And then, spinning the cane around lazily before resting it on his shoulder, as though he were without a care in the world, Devastator turned away from Terra and David, and nonchalantly walked away, disappearing into the dust and smoke.

O-O-O

And through the drifts the snowy clifts
Did send a dismal sheen:
Nor shapes of men nor beasts we ken-
The ice was all between.

O-O-O

It was at least ten seconds after Devastator left before before Terra permitted herself to breathe again.

Next to her, David flopped down onto the ground like a puppet with its strings cut, as though Devastator's disappearance had drained all the strength remaining in him. He lay in a puddle of coal-dusted water, the smoke and steam still billowing around him, soaked to the skin and covered in thick coal gunk, as of course was Terra. For a time he simply breathed, looking like he might well pass out then and there on the edge of the lava pit.

Terra, frankly, might well have done the same, but exhausted as she was, she needed to know what had just happened. "Hey," she whispered, less from secrecy and more because it was all she could manage at present. "What was that?"

David wearily managed to lift his head, and even managed a small smile, a euphoric smile, like he was punch drunk. He might well have been. "Camouflage," he said.

Terra blinked. "Camouflage?"

"He's blind," said David softly. "He can only see us through Devastator. So... I thought maybe we could hide."

Terra shook her head. "But..." she protested weakly. "But he was... right there."

David nodded. "Yeah," he said. "But Devastator doesn't see with light. To Devastator we're not people. We're just... collections of molecules or particles. He sees things based on what they're made of. So... I thought maybe if I filled the air with coal dust and steam..."

She still didn't see. "Coal and steam?" she repeated.

"Carbon and water," said David with a smile. "Just like us. He couldn't tell us from the background. To him it probably looked like we got swept over the side. And even if it didn't, he can't find us in all this, he'll have to wait for it to clear."

Something, relief maybe, swept over Terra like a blanket, and heedless of the sticky mess that now coated the floor, she lowered her head to the ground, resting it on a soft pile of the same waterlogged coal dust that she was presently covered in. Her limbs felt like they were made of lead, and it was a fight just to keep her eyes open.

From where she lay, she couldn't see David, but she felt the need to whisper an explanation anyway. "I just need a minute," she said weakly, "and then we can go."

"No."

No explanation followed that soft declaration, and slowly, painfully, Terra lifted herself up on elbows to look over at David. "What?" she asked.

David was sitting up, straight up, staring into the impenetrable gloom where Devastator had disappeared. He looked like he might pitch over at any moment, his hands trembling, rocking gently back and forth as though having trouble maintaining an even keel. Yet he did not fall over, and he did not turn his head. For a moment, it looked like he hadn't heard the question. But just as Terra was about to repeat herself, he answered her.

"I'm not done here yet."

That tone. That tone was in his voice again, the one she'd heard that night in the catacombs of the Jump City library when she had pleaded with him to come with her to visit Slade. That tone, neither bombastic nor even loud, the one that came over him when he was past anger, his psyche burned down to a simple declaration, for all Terra could tell made as much from incoherent intransigence as any principle.

"What are you talking about?" asked Terra. "We have to get out of here, find the others, get away from him until we can come up with a plan."

He took his time replying, his red, glowing eyes cutting searchlights in the dusty air. And when he did answer, it was the same tone, dismissing everything she had just said with a single word.

"I'm not going anywhere," he said.

"Then what are you gonna do?" asked Terra, who had a sinking suspicion that she already knew.

"I'm gonna find him," said David, "and I'm gonna kill him."

"And how the hell are you gonna do that?" asked Terra, suddenly wide awake. "Walk up and hit him with that stick?"

"If I have to," replied David. "I don't really care how."

"You're out of your mind," said Terra. "You can't kill him. He's practically a cosmic being!"

"Devastator's a cosmic being," said David, still not turning his head. "But that guy's human, just like me. If I can die, then he can too."

"Not while he's got that kind of power," said Terra, and when David didn't answer, she put some force into her voice. "Look at me for a second."

David turned to her, his grey skin now covered in a layer of black mud, through which his red eyes burned holes like glowing coals. The effect was that of some kind of demon, an effect she studiously ignored.

"I'm more powerful than you," she said directly. "You know that. And he's way, way more powerful than me. I thought maybe I could hold him off for a little bit while you got away, but I couldn't. I only lasted as long as I did because he wasn't really trying. If you go up against him, he will kill you dead. You can't beat him."

"Then come with me," said David. "Help me take him down."

"I can't beat him either, David," said Terra, forgetting that they were supposed to be quiet. "Neither of us can, not even together. He's that powerful. You saw what he could do, the skyscraper, the trucks, that nuclear ball of ice. He killed four of the Titans at once." She took him by the shoulders, resisted the urge to shake some sense into him. "You have to trust me on this one," she said. "I've been doing this a lot longer than you have. I've fought all kinds of different people. He's the most powerful metahuman I've ever seen."

"Yes, he is," said David immediately. "And if we don't stop him now, what do you think he's gonna do? He told me he was going to hunt the other Titans down and kill them. They couldn't stop him all together as adults, what chance do they have of stopping him now? Separated, with Trigon's army all over them and no Robin? He'll cut them down like paper targets."

Terra hesitated. "Then... then let's go now. We can find the others before he does. Get them all together. Maybe with all of us, it might just be enough to - "

David shook his head violently, throwing off Terra's grip. "No!" he said. "Don't you see? That's why he's here. That's why Trigon brought him back! Not for me, for them. He's Trigon's trump card! His weapon of mass destruction."

"What do you mean?"

"Trigon lost before," said David. "The first time he woke up, before Warp changed the timeline, the Titans beat him. They got together, and they found a way to win. Trigon knows that. So this time, he brought back someone he knew could beat all of the Titans put together, an ace card, someone who could smash them all if they looked like they were gonna do what they did before. He didn't just do it to torture me. Trigon doesn't care about me. He did it to stop them. We get everyone together and try to fight Devastator like that, and he'll blow everyone away. He's done it before."

"But if he's actually that strong, David, how are we supposed to stop him?"

David didn't answer immediately, but he did not look like he was struggling for words. "I don't know," he said at last. "But I know someone who does."

Try as she might, Terra could not think of who David could possibly be referring to. "Who?" she asked.

David's demon-red eyes didn't shift a millimeter. "You."

Terra blinked. "What?"

"You know how to beat him," said David. "As far as I know, you're the only one who does."

"What are you talking about?" asked Terra, frustration welling up into her voice despite her best efforts. "I don't have any idea how to stop him. If I did, I would've done it."

"No, that's just it. You do know. Or at least you're the closest thing to someone who does."

Terra regarded David as though he had just asked her to swallow a moving van. "Are... you sure you're okay?" she asked.

David gave an annoyed groan and shook his head. "No, Terra, please. Listen to me. I know you're powerful, but Raven was stronger than you. Robin was stronger than you. But when you went up against them, you beat them both. Nearly killed them. I don't know how you did it, but I know it couldn't have been through brute force, because you don't have enough brute force to break Raven. Nobody does. So how did you do it?"

Terra closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and forced herself to remain calm. "I... did research," she said. "Slade and I both did research. We came up with a battle-plan based on what I knew about them. It took weeks."

David nodded. "So?"

A flash of frustrated anger shot through Terra. "So what?" she exploded. "I knew Raven, I knew Robin, I'd been living with them for months. I was a traitor, remember? I don't know thisguy at all, I've never seen even seen him before!"

"Yes you have," said David.

Terra's words died in her throat, her anger quenched as though someone had thrown water over it. She stared into David's shrouded face and blood-drenched eyes, and suddenly couldn't think of anything at all to say.

David spoke instead. "Slade sent you to kill me," he said. "You'd met me before. You saw me fight Cinderblock. But even with all that, you didn't know how powerful I was gonna be when you took me on. I didn't even know that. I know you were stronger than I was, but even so, you had to have a battle plan. You'd have been an idiot not to."

"It didn't work," said Terra.

"Trust me, it almost worked," said David. "If Raven hadn't stopped time, it would have." He leaned forward, reaching over and putting a hand on Terra's shoulder. It felt cold.

"Terra," he said, "you have to tell me what your plan was. How were you gonna kill me?"

Slowly, Terra lowered her, head, bringing her hand up to her face and rubbing her eyes. "You don't understand," she said at length. "It won't work here."

"It might," said David.

"No, it won't," said Terra sharply, looking back up. "You want to know what the plan was? The plan was to make you upset. Not just upset, panicked. Scared and desperate and unable to think."

"Why?"

"Because I'm a Kinetic, and you weren't one, and I knew that, even if you didn't. Kinetics like me, we explode when you make us that angry, we can't control ourselves, we start destroying everything around us. But when I saw you fight Cinderblock, there was none of that. No control problems, no random explosions, nothing. The only things that went off were the things you wanted to. Even Raven couldn't control herself that well, and she'd been trying since she was born. That's how I knew that you just worked different than everyone else. You needed concentration, calm in order to make your powers work. So I pushed you. That's why I kept talking while we were fighting. I wanted to push you over the edge. Force you into driving Devastator so hard that you couldn't maintain it." Terra exhaled and closed her eyes again. "And it worked. Sort of."

"So why wouldn't that work here?"

"Because you had something to be afraid of," said Terra. "I needed to push, really push, to get you to lose your focus. I knew you were too angry to be afraid of me, but I guessed you might still be afraid of what the others would think. That's why Slade and I set it up the way we did. We knew that you'd never..." her tongue caught, she saw the hesitation in David's eyes, but she forced herself to continue. "We knew you'd never... had anything like them before. And I knew how hard it was to think of them... hating you." Something sharp and cold stabbed through her stomach, but only for a moment, even as she felt David's hand tense up.

"That's why it won't work, David, not against him. I know you're the same person and everything, but... he never had that. If he's afraid of anything, I don't know what it is. It was hard enough to push you into losing control, but he's got thirty years' more experience with Devastator than you did. I don't even know if he can lose control. And even if he can, whatever his trigger is won't be the Titans. I know they're your friends, but they were his arch-enemies. I don't think he cares what they thought of him."

David didn't answer, at least not immediately, staring off into space as though he had temporarily forgotten that Terra was present. He remained silent for a space, five seconds, maybe ten, until finally, he looked back up, his expression hidden behind red light and black coal mud.

"Maybe not," he said, his voice hoarse, his searchlight eyes cutting beams through the darkness, but he sounded distracted, as though he had half-forgotten where he was, lost in his own head perhaps or somewhere else. And then, slowly, he stood up, and began to walk away.

"Hey!" called Terra, before she could stop herself. "What are... where are you going?"

"I'm gonna find out who's opinion he does care about," said David.

"Are you out of your mind?" replied Terra, not caring who heard her this time, scrambling to her feet as she called after him. "I just told you, it won't - "

"I heard what you said," said David, turning back sharply.

"Then what the hell are you doing? You can't talk him down. He's a mass-murderer!"

There was no expression on David's face as he answered. "So are you," he said softly, giving no reaction as Terra froze in place. "So am I."

They stared at one another for a time in the eternal twilight of the ruined factory.

"Go find the others," said David finally. "Help them. Get them all together again. They were able to stop Trigon once. Without me interfering, they can do it again, especially with your help."

"And what the hell are you gonna do?"

David took a deep breath, and slowly slid his hand down to the broken staff now clipped at his side. "I'm gonna make sure I don't interfere," he said.

"You can't - "

"I have to! I'm the catalyst. I'm what separates this time from last time. The Titans can beat Trigon, but not if some version of me gets in the way. And that's exactly what's gonna happen if I don't stop it." He paused, but Terra did not answer, the words falling out of her brain before they could be properly assembled. "You know I'm right," he said at length.

"How are you gonna stop it?" she asked.

"If Devastator can't find me, he'll find the Titans," said David. "So he has to find me."

A chill descended over the area, despite the open lava. And though no words were spoken, Terra knew immediately that it was hopeless to remonstrate further. As though to signal the same, David took a deep breath and sighed, before turning and walking away.

"Find the others," he said as he walked off. "Help them do what they did before. Help them win."

"David..." said Terra, lifting her head. "If you do this, he's just gonna kill you."

David stopped, holding where he was for just a moment. "Maybe," he said at last, turning his head back to Terra, the twin red beams from his eyes dowsing her in light, "but I'm not running away from myself anymore." And turning away one last time, David walked off into the darkened factory and disappeared.

O-O-O

And I had done an hellish thing,
And it would work 'em woe :
For all averred, I had killed the bird
That made the breeze to blow.

O-O-O

She stood on the battlements of the black fortress, surrounded by the bodies of her friends, a jagged spear still sticking into her chest, and stared her enemy in the eye with the pitiless gaze of an extraterrestrial warlord. And in the eyes of the man opposite her, she saw only shock, astonishment, and to no small degree, fear.

For one, fleeting moment, Starfire permitted herself the time to fix this moment, this scene, the sight and sound and scent of all that was transpiring here, locking it within her memory forever, as the moment when she knew, whatever else might happen, that Warp knew that all his plans were about to come undone.

"You wished for vengeance, Warp?" she asked him. "Let me show you what vengeance is."

And then she became someone else entirely.

In a single, fluid swoop, she lunged forward, energy pouring from her eyes and hands, energy so intense and hot that it appeared not green but solid white, scything the very air apart. The wave blocked Warp, the balustrade he stood before, indeed the entire castle from view, obliterating everything in a retina-scouring burst of dazzling light. But Starfire's retinas were not made of the same stuff as those of a human, and in a hundredth of a second, she saw through the blinding glare of her own incarnated rage, as Warp scrambled back, an opaque black shield manifested before his extended hands. Smoke rose from the shield as gigajoules of energy poured into it, setting it to shaking like a leaf in a hurricane, yet ultimately it sufficed, if barely, to hold the tide back.

But if Warp thought himself safe, he was rudely mistaken. The shield could contain Starfire's energy bolts, but right now, in this place, nothing alive could contain Starfire herself.

Not half a second after her energy beams drenched the entire area, before Warp could even think of some fresh conjuration, Starfire herself slammed into the shield fist-first like an artillery salvo. There was a fractional instant of resistance, a moment of harsh, electrical current coursing through her fist and up her arm. And then the shield simply shattered, flying apart like a pane of glass, and the last thing she saw was Warp's wide eyes and petrified countenance before she collided with him like a meteor, and then everything collapsed.

There was a hard shock, followed by several more, each heavier and thicker than the last, and the sound of stones clashing against one another. Starfire felt herself striking something hard and unyielding, and feeling it crack around her as she rolled and slid and finally ground to a stop, laying on her side, covered in flecks of pumice stone and obsidian. Behind her lay a carpet of black rock, the smashed remains of the castle wall she had just driven Warp through. And before her, off to one side, lay Warp, surrounded by the shattered remains of the balustrade he had been standing beside, swaying like a drunk as he sought to recover his balance and rise to his feet.

Starfire was no less shaken than Warp, but unlike Warp, she had experience with the gyrations of physical flight, a Tamaranean's solid sense of balance, and most importantly of all, all the fury of a howling storm to drive her on.

Kicking rocks the size of cannonballs off of herself, she rose to one knee and fired a starbolt at Warp, hot and powerful enough to melt through lead. Warp raised his hand, conjuring another shield, arm-sized this time, and it absorbed the shot, but as before, Starfire didn't wait to see it strike. The next bolt she threw was her own body, and this time Warp had no defence. She could not hit him as hard, but the half-charge, half shoulder-ram she dealt him slammed him into the far wall hard enough to knock chips of stone from it, leaving him to sway and stagger to retain his fragile balance.

"Is this not what you desired, Warp?" she asked, catching her breath and infusing herself with energy once more. "Did you not wish to see me in pain? To see me suffer and cry at what you had done? Did you imagine I would melt before your tortures, and beg for your twisted mercy?"

Growling in frustrated anger, Warp suddenly vanished in a flash of light. Yet rather than stand and blink and wonder where he might have gone, Starfire turned on one foot, reaching behind herself and catching Warp's fist with her open hand. His fist was shrouded in black energy, shaped by his will into the form of a cruel dagger, which sliced into her palm. Yet she did not blink, or flinch, or even hesitate, closing her hand around the psychic blade moments before she seized Warp by the collar, pivoted ninety degrees, and pitched him over her shoulder onto the floor of the chamber hard enough to crack the flagstones. The impact shook her like an earthquake, but she did not hesitate, dropping to one knee as she drove her fist down as hard as she could at Warp's frightened face.

Warp managed, barely, to roll to one side, evading the strike by bare inches, leaving Starfire to hammer an eight inch divot into the granite floor with her empowered fist. Yet as he rolled aside, he foolishly chose to arrest his motion and roll up to one knee, raising a laser from his wrist, aiming it in her general direction, and firing. The range was too short to miss, but Starfire did not care what he shot at her, and even as the laser burned into her shoulder, she retaliated with a shot of her own, a starbolt brimming with fire and rage, that blasted him clear across the room, and left him crumpled in a heap against the far wall.

Rising to her feet once more, Starfire reached over with her other hand and clasped her injured shoulder, feeling the heat and the burned flesh from it, willing back the pain by burying it in her own rage. On the other side of the room, Warp slowly crawled back to his feet, staggering like a drunk, his golden armor smoking and dented, his mouth smeared with red blood.

"Well here you have it, Warp," said Starfire, spitting out the words like a bad tasting liquid. "This is your victory. These are the fruits of your labors." Her eyes blazed with nuclear flames, a seething reactor of incandescent fury that seemed to set the very stones to tremble. "This is what it is to break a Tamaranean," she intoned, her voice distorting with rage. "This is what it is to break me. This is your reward."

Her hands engulfed in raging fire, Starfire clasped them together in front of her chest, extending them towards Warp like a cannon.

"I hope you enjoy it," she said. And then she let go.

The flash was blinding, even to her, and the roar of exploding energy, displaced air, and crumbling stone, was enough to force her back a pace or two. She raised her hands to her face to ward off the flying debris. And when she lowered them again, Warp was gone.

So was most of the wall.

Carefully, Starfire made her way towards the gaping, smoking hole in the wall. Beyond it, a lengthy corridor, broad and tall like the hall of some king or baron, loomed in the distance. Butressed by flying stoneworks and laden with rich tapestries, all bearing the Mark of Scath, the hallway echoed with every step she took. Starfire knew better than to assume that Warp's mere lack of presence meant anything concrete concerning his survival. And so she walked on, ears primed for any sound, eyes for any sight, of the elusive teleporting devil-servant. She reached the threshold, stepped over it, entered the hall, and then stopped as something caught her eye.

Down at the end of the hall, there sat a great altar of black stone, covered in a cloth of unmarked sable, atop which were various objects. Iron braziers were mounted in a semicircle around it, each burning with a sickly green flame, though the light scarcely sufficed to illuminate the black altar. Glancing this way and that, looking for the sudden sheen of gold springing upon her, Starfire approached the altar with caution, moving in close enough to identify the objects, until suddenly she stopped.

The objects were a motley lot, a chalice, brimming with a dark red liquid she could not identify. A set of what might have been embalming tools or even torture implements, laid out in a triangle within a circlet of gold. A book with an impossibly dark cover, that seemed to grow and recede as she stared at it, from which the faintest sound of whispering could be detected. But what stopped Starfire was none of these strange objects, but the one mounted in the center of them all, one that seemed oddly out of place in the midst of all of these tools of the occult and the damned. The object in question was a gun, a rifle of some sort, futuristic of look, polished chrome and blue steel. Pressurized tanks of some compressed substance, covered with condensation, were strapped to its sides, connected by tubes to the center of its mass. The barrel was topped with a telescopic sight, which glowed red in the faint light, displaying numbers and tactical information concerning whatever it was aimed at.

Starfire did not know one gun from another. To her, they were all simply weapons, universal of use and intention, their specifics of no particular importance. But yet, this gun was, to her, plainly distinguished from every other that had ever existed. The distinguishing characteristics were partly that it was here, now, in this place, at the end of the world. Partly it was the vague recollections she had of the forensic reports from a month ago when everything had begun to fall apart. But mostly, it was the small symbol etched into the butt of the rifle, the sole blemish on its otherwise immaculate surface. A tiny bird, colored in red, mounted on one side in astonishing detail, such that it took her no time at all to identify just what type it was.

A robin.

And right then, before she could stop herself, Starfire simply exploded.

With a scream of incoherent rage, Starfire drew her head back and threw it forward, releasing a torrent of energy from her eyes into the black altar. Stone and metal melted, canisters and liquids exploding into boiling ruin. No blast did she fire, but a solid state beam of annihilation, rending the altar down to the floor and leaving a burning, smoking crater in its place. Only when all trace of the gun and the black altar that had supported it had been reduced to steam and smoke, did she finally stop.

But as she did, she heard a soft pop from behind her, and realized the mistake she had just made.

She spun around, fist extended, a starbolt primed and ready, and as she expected, she saw Warp behind her, standing erect now, a black shield held before him, the Book of Azar clutched in one hand, his other raised palm-forward in her direction. With a cry, she launched the starbolt, Warp had been given time to re-enforce this shield, and the bolt glanced off uselessly.

An evil sneer crossed Warp's bloody face. "Show me your vengeance now..." he said.

Starfire didn't hesitate. Roaring words of battle and violence in Tamaranean, she leaped from the ground and hurled herself at Warp, her entire form glowing green as energies incalculable coursed through her. Yet even as she threw herself into the air, she knew it was too late, for Warp did not seek to dodge or flee or teleport anew, but spoke words of his own in some arcane language she could not identify, and from his outstretched hand there leaped a ribbon of white light which whip-lashed across the hall before striking her full on in mid-air. She had time only to shout one last cry before the entire world washed out white, and then she saw and felt no more.

O-O-O

About, about, in reel and rout
The death-fires danced at night ;
The water, like a witch's oils,
Burnt green, and blue and white.

O-O-O

The mosaics on the floor were particularly intricate, swirling patterns of Parian, Tennessee, and Sylacoga marble, the work of a famous modern artist hired ten years ago to embellish the mall with something unique. But he saw only calcite mineral inlaid with low quality brass, and walked on. The ceiling was hung with Halloween ornaments, even though the holiday was not for a month and more. Jack-o-lanterns and witches and goblins cavorted up the walls and supporting columns and chased one another along the dome of the mall's rotunda. But he saw only silhouettes of construction paper and cardboard studded with LEDs and polyethylene chads, and walked on.

Statues of civilians, men, women, children, lay scattered about the mall in clumps, huddling together in groups of two and three wherever they had chanced to take shelter when the apocalypse hit. Pain was writ on their faces in the most clinical of detail, every curve of screaming mouth or frightened eye captured perfectly in petrified stasis, forever. Small children clung to their mothers' skirts, husbands and wives clasped one another in their arms, the brave stared forever from windows at the sight of their doom approaching, while the fearful took what shelter they could.

But he saw only basalt stones, piled atop one another and coated in soot and fly ash. And he walked on.

His gait was unhurried, his cane held lightly with three fingers as it tapped a soft meter against the marble floor. Past storefronts and display windows he walked, giving them only the most momentary of glances before walking on anew, no sounds but his own footsteps echoing down halls that were never meant to be silent.

Ahead loomed the central rotunda, three stories tall and capped by an intricate dome of stained glass, ringed by the remnants of food courts and confectionery shops. The glass was gone now, its crushed remains laying underfoot, while the shops and courts were burned out pyres, and he slowed only slightly as he entered the vaulted chamber, giving only the most perfunctory of glances to the left and right.

He reached the center of the rotunda, and stopped.

The ground was covered in crushed glass, dust, and cinders, but studded along the floor were a series of small black patches, smeared on the marbled mosaics as though scraped off the bottom of someone's shoe. Anyone else would have needed to crouch down and examine them in detail to determine what they were, tar perhaps, or bitumen, or simply dog droppings that someone had stepped in. But he was not anyone else, and with only a glance, he recognized pulverized carbon mixed into a slurry with the addition of water.

He sighed.

"David," he said, loud enough for his voice to echo, "this is a waste of time. I know you're in here, and I'm in no mood for hide and seek. Now are you going to come out and finish this with some semblance of dignity, or am I simply going to have to level this entire building?"

There was no immediate response. Just the muted sound of the dying city filtering in through the broken roof dome, and the crackling of glass shards underneath his feet. For ten seconds and more the man waited, alone in the midst of the ruins.

And then there was the sound of a door opening.

On the far side of the rotunda, where it tapered to meet the rest of the shops and arcade, a small utility door slid open with a click, and from it emerged a single figure, small and thin, a teen-aged boy still slathered with streaks of slurry made from coal dust and condensed steam, his skin as grey as the statues around him, and his eyes as red as burning coals. A steel telescoping staff, broken off at one end, was clipped onto his belt, but his hands were empty, and he made no move towards it, nor did the area around him begin to tremble with the frosted preludes to supernatural detonations. The boy advanced some half dozen paces out the door, just enough to take him into the rotunda proper, and stopped.

Devastator smiled.

"You know," he said, "I half-expected you to try and bring the building down first."

"I don't know how," said David.

His smile broadened. "No," said Devastator, "I suppose you wouldn't, now would you?" He looked his younger counterpart over with an appraising eye. "Awful hard to hide though, when you're trailing sludge everywhere."

"I didn't have much choice."

"It was a good trick, with the steam and the coal," said Devastator. "But not good enough."

David seemed to take it with equanimity. "I thought about ambushing you from one of the storefronts," he said. "Hiding behind the glass and... I don't know... blasting something through the window. It's transparent to me, but to you it's just a wall of silicon."

Devastator considered the option for a moment, shrugged and nodded. "It's not the worst idea ever," he said. "But while I'm blind, I'm not stupid. I do remember what it was like to be able to see through glass."

"Yeah," said David. "And I remember what it was like to not."

Neither one said anything for several moments.

At length, Devastator took a deep, almost theatrical breath, sliding his cane up lightly in his hand. "Well," he said. "I suppose we should resolve this little matter, now shouldn't we?"

David did not stir from where he stood, nor reach for the broken staff at his side. Instead he narrowed his gaze somewhat, and calmly spoke, his voice even and calm.

"You mind if I ask you a question?"

Devastator raised an eyebrow either at the unexpected request, or at the manner it was phrased in. "And what's that?" he asked.

David took a deep breath, steadying himself, before replying. "Why am I still alive?"

Devastator's brow furrowed with confusion. "Say that again?" he asked.

"I think you heard me," said David, crossing his arms in front of himself and staring evenly at his counterpart. "Why am I still alive?"

Devastator did not answer immediately, watching his teen-aged counterpart as though looking for a hidden weapon. "I suspect you'd need to ask Terra that, now wouldn't you? I assume she's the one who brought you back."

"She was," said David. "But I don't need to ask her. I need to ask you."

Devastator let the cane slide through his fingers until the tip landed on the ground. "Look, if you're trying to make some kind of obtuse philosophical point, this really isn't the time or place."

"You killed the Titans," said David. "I watched you do it. You killed all four of them together in less than ten minutes. Even Raven, who's fifty times more powerful than I'll ever be."

"To be fair, she had the minor disadvantage of being unable to hurt me," said Devastator.

"The others didn't," said David. "But you wiped them out anyway. You even killed Robin by popping an artery in his brain. I didn't even know Devastator could do that."

"Long practice can accomplish wonders," said Devastator. "What's your point?"

"My point is that you slaughtered them. All of them. And six hundred other people besides. People with guns, and grenades, and armored cars. That was a fortified compound that they were barricaded in and you tore it apart like a cereal box. Slade, Brother Blood, even Trigon, none of them were ever able to do what you did. You're a killing machine. You're the most perfect killing machine I've ever seen."

"I try," said Devastator.

"I know," said David, unfolding his arms and slowly stepping forward, into the rotunda. "Which is why I can't figure out why, when it was time for you to kill me and Terra, you just started throwing cars in the air."

Devastator smirked. "You have something against cars?"

"No," said David. "I've used them too. But I've been doing this for nine months. You've been doing it for thirty years."

Devastator raised his eyebrows, staring at David like he couldn't decide whether or not to laugh. "Are you actually critiquing my combat style?"

David did not seem to perceive the joke. "I'm wondering," he said, "why you starting throwing cars, and trucks, and bits of the street around, and making lots of smoke and noise, instead of just killing us."

"The idea wasto kill you."

"Really?" asked David, and he stopped, staring at Devastator as though trying to peer right through him. What he was looking for, and whether he found it, he gave no sign, but after a few moments, he began to walk towards the older man, his pace slow and careful.

"I had two dozen birdarangs attached to my belt," said David. "You blew every one of them apart individually. But all you needed to do was target the belt itself." He gestured at the belt at his midsection. "It's titanium steel, easy stuff. You could have torn me in half with it, but you didn't."

Devastator let that comment sit, as David carefully closed the distance, giving no sign of what he thought of the question.

"You blew an entire skyscraper apart, just to show me you could," continued David. "But when you lost sight of us in that factory, you just turned and walked away." He spread his arms wide. "You knew we were in there somewhere, why not just vaporize everything within half a mile?"

Devastator stood motionless, watching as David continued to approach, step by step. "You make it sound so easy."

"Please," said David. "I saw you draw enough thermo-kinetic energy out of atmospheric gases to freeze nitrogen. My entire life, I've never been able to do gasses."

"You never wanted it enough," said Devastator.

"You conjured a bomb powerful enough to flatten a city block out of thin air, literally." He stopped again, now less than ten paces away. "But I'm still here," he said. "And I'd like to know why."

"I'm going to guess that you have a theory?" said Devastator.

"Yeah," said David. "And I don't think you're gonna like it."

A smirk crossed Devastator's face. "Well, heaven forbid, David, that we should ever disagree."

David watched him in silence for a few moments.

"What happened to you?"

The smirk disappeared.

"Excuse me?"

"What happened?" repeated David. "What changed your mind. What did... this?" He gestured at Devastator's coat and gun, his hidden sword and the various accouterments concealed within his coat.

"Changed my mind?" asked Devastator, enunciating each word slowly. "What exactly gives you the idea that my mind ever changed?"

"Stop it," said David. "Just stop it. You know what I'm talking about. You and I are the same person. Until nine months ago, we lived the same life. So what the hell happened?"

"The Titans happened."

"Bullshit!" roared David all of a sudden, and his shout was like a banshee's scream in a quiet field, so visceral and angry that even Devastator flinched. "Bullshit!" he repeated, stabbing his finger at Devastator accusingly. "The Titans had nothing to do with it! Nothing at all! And you know it!"

"Is that so?" hissed Devastator.

"It is so!" shouted David. "I never wanted this. Not ever, not even before the Titans. All this... this... death. The swords and guns and ruins everywhere, I never wanted any of it! It's the whole reason I never touched Devastator. Because I knew where it would lead!" He paused for breath, rubbing his eyes and flinging away the moisture, before rounding on his counterpart once more. "And I don't give a damn if you think it's stupid, because you didn't want it either!"

"You're awful certain about what it is that I did or didn't want."

"That's because I still remember it well," said David. "For me it wasn't that long ago, less than a year. For you though... I don't know. Maybe it's been too long, and you can't remember anymore. Or maybe you just convinced yourself that it had never been this way, because when you're running around murdering thousands of people at a time, it's probably pretty inconvenient to be reminded that there was a point when all you wanted was to be left alone."

"Are you done?" asked Devastator acidly.

"No," said David. "And you know it. Because I still don't have an answer to the question you've been waiting for me to ask since I showed up here." He folded his arms once more, staring his counterpart in the eyes like a judge facing down a defendant. "What happened?"

"The question I've been waiting for you to ask?" asked Devastator, peering down at his counterpart like a scientist examining a microbe.

"Ever since you showed up," said David. "Ever since you found out what I've been up to for the last year." He paused, looking Devastator over once more. "And if you ask me, I think that's why I'm still alive."

Devastator's dead eyes went wide, and an instant later, he raised his cane, and there was an explosion.

A small blast, all things considered, concentrated in the marble floor of the rotunda, right beneath David's feet, powerful enough to hurl him back into the wall, where he struck and fell, sliding down it onto the ground in a cloud of marble and coal dust. Devastator advanced towards him, still holding up the suddenly-burning cane, stepping over the pothole he had just blasted in the floor.

"You stupid little shit," said Devastator, and he sounded good and angry now. "Is thatwhat you think this is?" He swept the cane through the air like he was slicing invisible stalks of wheat, marching towards David. "I've seen the same movies you have, remember? You think I'm one of those costumed idiots who monologues about how the world sold him short when he should be finishing the job? The talking killer, I think they call it?"

"I think," said David, wiping his mouth as he pulled himself back to his feet, "that I'm not the only one here that Trigon had a surprise for. I think you've been asking yourself the same question I have since this whole thing started. Because that's what we do. We second-guess, we ask questions. We can't not." He coughed, spitting grey blood mixed with coal dust down onto the mosaic-inlaid ground, as Devastator slowly lowered his cane once more, watching him in silence. "Robin kept telling me that I needed to stop that. That I had to learn to trust my instincts, instead of second guessing everything I did."

"Did he?" asked Devastator, stopping in front of David.

"Yeah," said David. "But I could never figure out how. And you may be... a million times more powerful than I am..." He stood up straight, bracing himself against the wall. "... but if you really areme, then I bet you never figured it out either."

"So now I'm Darth Vader?" asked Devastator

"I don't know what you are," said David. "But I bet you don't know what I am either."

"I know exactlywhat you are," said Devastator with a snarl.

"Do you?" asked David, and he stepped forward, off the wall, his eyes bathing Devastator in red light. "Do you really? It's not churning around in your head, the obvious question?" He opened his hands skyward, as though inviting a reply. "You're a supervillain, a contractor, whatever the hell you call it. You're the most powerful Metahuman I've ever heard of, you've got a body count in the tens of thousands. But you just found out, that with one small change, Warp pushed me into the company of the people you've spent your entire life trying to kill. Your arch-enemies, the people you hate more than anything in the world."

Devastator's hands clenched and unclenched around his cane, as though he were being pulled in multiple directions, but he said nothing, staring only into David's eyes with his own empty orbs.

"And you can lie to me all you want," said David, "tell me I'm stupid or I'm wrong, I don't care. But you and I both know what we were like before any of this happened. You went off, and turned into the exact thing that we were both afraid of becoming. I turned into something else." He took one final step forward, to within sword range of his counterpart, his eyes unblinking. "And I know," he said finally, "as sure as I'm standing here, that you're thinking the same question I am." He folded his arms, planted his feet, and stared directly up at Devastator. "What happened?"

"I know what happened to you," said Devastator in a voice that was a growl.

"No, you don't." said David. "And neither do I."

Devastator said nothing.

"The Talking Killer talks," said David, "because he wants the hero to understand him. You may not be the Talking Killer, but I'm not the hero. I'm something a thousand times worse. I'm proof that you could have been something else. All your lectures, all your bullshit about how you're the smart one, you made the right call, and I'm such an idiot? I don't even think you believe that. You're not gonna tell me what happened because you want someone else to understand you. You're gonna tell me what happened because we're the same person. And if you can't convince me that you were right, then how the hell are you gonna convince yourself, now that you've seen how easy it was to step aside?"

Silence fell over the rotunda, the scarred man and the ashen boy facing one another motionlessly. Devastator's cane still burned in his hand, but he did not raise it, nor conjure more fire, watching instead the child he had once been as he stared him down in the midst of ruin.

"Now I'm gonna ask you one last time," said David, slowly and carefully. "What happened to you? And if you don't answer me, then I'm gonna pull this staff, and I'm gonna make you kill me. Because I can't beat you, and I know that, and so do you." He laid his hand on the broken staff at his side. "But if you kill me without answering my question, then I swear to you, for the rest of your life or whatever the hell you have now, you will never be able to convince yourself that you are anything but a liar, a murderer, and a coward. Because you'll know that I died, thinking exactly that."

Devastator said nothing as David fell silent, did not move, did not even blink. The cane in his hand was as steady as a statue, his frame entirely motionless, he did not even seem to breathe. David for his part remained as still as his counterpart, and they stared at one another as year-long seconds ticked by, one after the next.

And then, all of a sudden, Devastator lunged at him.

It was like a cobra's strike, so fast that David did not even have a chance to shout. The fiery cane burned like a branding iron, but it was Devastator's other, empty hand that he led with. In a single, fluid motion, so fast that there could be no resisting it, Devastator fastened his hand around David's throat, and squeezed.

The grip was like a vice, crushing weight fueled by molten fury and God-knew what else, and David gasped, and choked, and grabbed at the hand that clenched his throat uselessly, even as he felt himself being lifted into the air. Devastator loomed over him, hoisting him up, staring into his eyes with dead orbs and an ice-cold expression that could have quenched all the fires in this burning world. For three, long, horrible seconds, Devastator regarded his younger self in stony silence, as David gurgled and squirmed uselessly. But at length, he slowly lowered his arm once again, and lightened his grip, letting David's feet find the floor and his lungs the air. And as David gasped for breath and coughed uncontrollably, Devastator leaned forward, staring the child he might have been in the eyes.

"Tell me, David," he said, his voice as raspy and as sharp as a diamond-tipped sawblade. "Have you ever heard of a place called Arkham?"

O-O-O

Her lips were red, her looks were free,
Her locks were yellow as gold :
Her skin was as white as leprosy,
The Night-mare LIFE-IN-DEATH was she,
Who thicks man's blood with cold.

O-O-O

"So... Cyborg opens the door, and we're all standing there, and Robin says that since he left the Titans, he has to be initiated all over again. And that's when you showed him the dress."

Frankly, Raven didn't understand what Beast Boy was getting at with this story. It might have been because he seemed to assume that she could remember everything that had happened, and was racing through it without pause or hesitation. It might have been because he wasn't a very good storyteller, too prone to running off on tangents every time something he said reminded him of another "hilarious" moment. But all things being equal, it was probably because she was currently holding onto him for dear life, trying to avoid looking down at the ten thousand foot drop that yawned beneath her.

Beast Boy stopped laughing long enough to realize that Raven wasn't joining him, and shrugged as he reached for another handhold. "I guess you had to be there," he said. "Or... well I mean you were there, but I guess you can't remember yet. It'll be really funny once you remember, I promise."

The wind whistled across the icy wall, as Raven held onto Beast Boy's back as tightly as she could, reciting her mantra to herself in tones so low she wasn't sure if Beast Boy could hear her or not. She remembered that there had been a time when she had not been afraid of heights, but it was an academic knowledge, without context or meaning. The dark, wind-swept abyss beneath her, so vast and profound that she could no longer see the bottom, was far more real than any half-remembered moments of bravery.

Besides, heights weren't anything special. There had been a time when she wasn't afraid of anything at all, or near enough. No longer.

Beast Boy shook violently beneath her, and for the thirtieth time, Raven's breath caught, thinking that he was about to throw her off or that she was slipping. Yet for the thirtieth time, the tremor was merely him shifting into a more commodious form to tackle some particularly difficult section of climb, as mountain goat or snow leopard or giant octopus. Each shift made her feel like she was about to fall, yet with each shift, he caught her again effortlessly, positioning his body in such a way as she would wind up on his back or in his paws or gripped by sucker-laden tentacles. So it proved now.

Beast Boy wasn't afraid, or at least didn't seem to be, either of slipping and falling, or of dropping Raven, an attribute Raven assumed was tied to the fact that he could, at will, turn into an eagle or bat. Yet every time he had done just that, shifted into some gigantic flying bird or reptile and tried to bear Raven up in that manner, the howling winds had instantly gone from gale to tornado, and forced him to abort. As a result, they were forced into this much slower, much more treacherous method of climbing the ice wall, not that Beast Boy seemed to mind.

"Reliance on others is the mark of immaturity. It is a road that leads nowhere."

Raven grimaced silently and knotted her fingers tightly into Beast Boy's fur, and wished, with all her might, that the voice might stop talking. Belatedly, she realized that it might help if she had known where this particular road was leading.

Beast Boy had suggested climbing the ice, and so they had climbed, and climbed, and climbed until the frozen wasteland below was shrouded in darkness, and there was nothing in the world except the wall. Yet why he had chosen to climb was beyond her. To her, it seemed entirely possible, indeed reasonable, that this wall might prove to be infinitely high, an impossible barrier surrounding the inescapable prison to which she had been banished. She had not asked Beast Boy what had caused him to decide that this method was an escape route, precisely because she was afraid of the answer. Right now, she preferred to hold onto the hope that Beast Boy knew what he was doing, rather than risk confirming that he did not.

"So... um... what do you remember?"

It took Raven a few moments to realize that he was asking her a question, and only then did she realize that she hadn't even noticed him shifting back into his human form beneath her. She opened her eyes to find that he had spotted a thin cleft in the ice that could serve, with difficulty, as a walkway, and had clearly judged it easy enough that he could afford to indulge in further conversation.

Of course, it didn't take much for Beast Boy to indulge in that...

"I..." she said nervously, "I don't remember much. Just fire... and... his voice inside me..."

"This secret shall be your burden to bear from this moment until the day you achieve your destiny. There can be no other way. You must guard it as you would your own life, for it is far more dangerous than any enemy could ever be."

"Oh..." said Beast Boy. "I um... I didn't mean from... that. I meant from before. From the Tower?"

"The... Tower?" asked Raven. Towers dominated her fragmented memory, towers of stone and slag, towers of steel and glass, towers that were prisons and havens, and towers that were actually monsters made flesh. Try as she might, she couldn't separate them all in her head.

"Yeah," said Beast Boy. "You remember the Tower, don't you? Home?"

Run her brain though she might, Raven didn't answer. Home was something that happened to other people, an abstract concept of no bearing on her life.

As always, Beast Boy saw a gap in the conversation, and immediately inserted himself into it. "You remember the time that I tried to get Cy with a water-balloon full of motor oil?" he said breathlessly, such that despite not being able to see his face, Raven could practically hear the grin. "I had this whole contraption set up to shoot the balloon into him. You tried to warn me that Starfire was coming, but I didn't listen and it shot her instead." He laughed. "Star wouldn't talk to me for like a week after that, but I still think it woulda worked if I'd planned it better." He paused, seemingly thinking things over. "You know... she never actually told me what a 'wuserloop' was... I'll have to ask her when this is all over." He turned his head half-around to glance at Raven. "Do you think she ever told you?"

Raven didn't even know where to begin with that one.

Beast Boy shrugged. "I still think she makes half of that Tamaranean stuff up, anyway," he said with a grin. "I would."

As before, Raven didn't answer, but Beast Boy did not appear in the slightest put out by that, and simply began relating some new incident that had apparently happened involving Starfire mistaking a tofu sausage for some sort of alien grubworm capable of devouring whole planets. He seemed to be talking to himself as much as her, and the story made little-to-no sense in any event, involving as it did a Tamaranean purification ritual, high explosives, the Jump City fire department, and some kind of larva named Silkie. Yet he continued to relate it in his own inimitable fashion as though it were the most normal thing in the world, which for all Raven knew, it was. Yet it wasn't the content of the story that she was listening to. It was the tone, the easy familiarity of events that were weird and yet harmless, the casual manner in which he spoke of friends, of places, of things ordinary and non-threatening in the present tense, that seemed so totally removed from where they were, and what her world consisted of, now and forever. It was like opening a book in a language she didn't know, and finding pictures inside of normal, happy people doing normal happy things. It was warm, inviting, even comforting.

"Refusal to accept what is, instead of how we wish things were, is inexcusable cowardice."

"Stop it!"

Beast Boy stopped in mid-step as Raven let out a scream that could have woken the dead. Raven didn't even notice that he'd stopped, her eyes clenched shut, fingers tightly clasped around Beast Boy for fear that they might otherwise release him entirely and claw at her own head. By the time Raven even realized that anything had happened, and opened her eyes once again, Beast Boy had slid her off of him and knelt down to her level.

"Raven?" he asked, but she didn't answer him, too occupied in trying to calm her breathing down, trying to remember what the lesson was for that, whether she was supposed to clear her mind or focus it on a telepathic symbol. The monks disliked it when she mixed those two up.

"R... Raven?" asked Beast Boy again, shaking her gently by the shoulder. "I... what'd I do?"

She was still barely able to speak, but she was able to shake her head no. "Not you," she managed to choke out between tense breaths. "Not..." her tongue caught, and she turned away, feeling the first signs of tears beginning to well up in her eyes.

Yet when she tried to turn away, Beast Boy cupped his hand around the back of her head and gently but forcefully turned her back. "What's going on?" he asked, and there was fear in his eyes this time, worry, all the things that sat so poorly with him. "Is it Trigon? Is he trying to... do something?"

The name was enough to conjure an immense mental effort, if only to forestall Beast Boy using that name again. "No," she said, forcefully. "Not him. Not now."

"Then... then who is it?" asked Beast Boy.

"What you undergo here is by necessity unique. Your circumstances being what they are, there is no one else who will ever understand the need for it."

Her voice was a mere whisper by the time she could force the name out.

"Azar."

As with everything down here, saying the name made it all the worse.

"You cannot escape your destiny by wishing it away."

She tore away from him, gripping the sides of her head with a fevered intensity, feeling her fingernails dig into the skin of her temples as she tried to force the voice to stop by main force. But nothing she could do, no gesture, no recitation, nothing could stop the awful monotone, not harsh and violent but reasoned, patient, wise, inexorable. A voice like a judge or prophet, pronouncing wisdom that could not be gainsaid.

"We are not afforded the chance to choose the circumstances of our birth. But we are afforded the chance to choose what we make of them. You have the choice between life and death, Raven. If you choose death, you will never be able to blame another for the consequences."

"Raven!" shouted Beast Boy, and there was nothing gentle or restrained about his voice this time. He grabbed her from behind, ignoring her violent struggles, lifted her off the ground and pinned her against the ice, forced her hands down to her sides once again and held them there as she writhed and squirmed uselessly, for he was not only twice her size, but at will could become fifty times larger, should it serve his purposes. In the event, however, he did not expand and grow, but remained where he was, not even venturing to ask her what was the matter, simply holding her in place until her struggles subsided and she slumped down, exhausted and defeated, tears sliding down her face to boil away in the sub-arctic cold.

"That book of yours," said Beast Boy. "The one that tried to eat me that one time? You called it the Book of Azar. That ring Slade gave to Cyborg was the Ring of Azar. So who's Azar?"

Raven tried, unsuccessfully, to fight back the tears still spilling out of her eyes. "She... taught me," she said, not even sure herself if that was true or not. "She taught me everything."

"But... then is she here or something?" asked Beast Boy, looking puzzled but worried. "Can... you can hear her?"

Raven couldn't bring herself to answer in words, and nodded instead.

Beast Boy blinked, but did not ask any of the questions he no-doubt had, save of course one. "What's she saying?"

"Our destinies are not of our choosing. They are written for us by an uncaring, unfeeling universe. To curse them is pointless, to rail against them, useless. Only in understanding and accepting them is there peace. Look to Oedipus, or Sigfried, or the Aesir and their doomed stand against the darkness. In every case, the lesson is clear enough. Fighting against your destiny is the surest possible way of bringing it about."

Raven shook her head violently, as though to hurl whatever was clamped upon it off into the empty space beyond the ledge. "She's saying it's my fault."

He still didn't understand. "What's your fault?"

"Everything!" she shouted. And with one final supreme effort, she tore her hands free of Beast Boy's grip. But rather than clutch at her head again, she waved them violently about, gesturing at imagined phantoms that danced before her very eyes. "All of this! Everything that happened to you, to Robin, to the others, it's all me!"

"No it's not!" answered Beast Boy, as loudly as she had. "We've all been trying to tell you since this whole thing started, it isn't your fault that Trigon did what he did."

"And you're all wrong!" shot back Raven. "You don't understand!"

Beast Boy held her in place, visibly searching for something to stem the torrent. "Raven, we all saw Trigon come back. We saw what he did to the world, to you. We understand it all now."

It didn't help. "No," hissed Raven through clenched teeth, squeezing her eyes shut to prevent them from leaking. "No, you don't. You can't." She wanted to say more, the words burned in her throat, pounding for release, but she couldn't force them out no matter what she tried.

"The universe has a way of ensuring that we get exactly what we deserve."

"Beast Boy," said Raven, opening her eyes at last, feeling boiling tears roll down her cheeks. "You can't take me out of here."

He did not understand. She could see in his eyes that he did not understand. "Why not?" he asked, only after some hesitation, testament to the conflicting replies he had considered and rejected.

"Because this is where I'm supposed to be," she said. "This is where I belong. It doesn't matter how high you climb, you can't take me out of here."

"That's not true!" roared Beast Boy angrily.

"That's how this place works."

"I don't care how it works, you don't belong here!" shouted Beast Boy, heedless of her remonstrations. "And you're not staying down here even if you did!"

"I brought Trigon onto the Earth! I killed all of - "

"I know!" exclaimed Beast Boy. "We all know, you told us all, remember?" He hesitated, just for a second. "Okay, maybe you don't remember, but I remember. You told us everything. You told us all the stuff you did. None of it matters."

"The human mind has an infinite capacity for rationalization in the pursuit of its goals. That luxury can never be yours."

"No, you don't understand..." she said, not angrily or violently but plaintively, a soft, weary hiss as she slumped forward in his grasp. "I killed everyone."

"Trigon killed - "

"No!" shouted Raven, fire welling up within her anew. "No, no, no, no, no!" She clenched her fists until they turned white, breath hissing in and out from between her teeth. "I knew this was gonna happen. Azar... the monks. They told me that it was gonna happen. And I believed them. And I let it happen anyway."

Beast Boy's expression slowly softened. "Raven..." he said.

"No... you don't..." her throat closed, and she choked on the words that followed, coughing and sputtering. Beast Boy did not seek to rush her, simply holding her in place, as she carefully pieced her equilibrium back together. "I was warned," she finally said.

"So what?" asked Beast Boy. "You did everything you could to stop it once you got the warning. I don't care if you don't remember it, I do."

"But that's not why I got the warning!" insisted Raven. "The warning wasn't so that I could stop it, the warning was so that I could go."

"Go?" asked Beast Boy. "Go where?"

"Anywhere!" cried Raven. "Anywhere but here, where he'd come out and kill all of you! I could've... I could've gone to the other side of the universe! Even Trigon couldn't have gotten back to the Earth for billions of years. None of you would ever have heard from him again! I could have stranded him in the darkest corner of intergalactic space and left him to starve. That's what I was supposed to do!"

The last remark caught in Beast Boy's ears. "Supposed to do?" he asked. "Who said you were supposed to do anything?"

"Azar did," said Raven. "All of them did, all the monks that lived on Azarath. They... taught me everything. How to use my powers, how to watch for the signs that Trigon was coming back. They knew what was going to happen, and they told me what to do when it did. They said that I couldn't stop him from coming back, but I could make sure that he couldn't hurt anyone when he did. That was the whole reason that they took me in. That's why they taught me everything they did. So that I would know what to do when the time came."

Beast Boy said nothing this time, staring at her with his emerald eyes wide and shimmering in the ethereal twilight. His mouth hung open, not from surprise, but simply from default, as though all the things he had intended to say had melted away from him. Looking at him, Raven could practically see the understanding beginning to crystallize inside of Beast Boy, and it stabbed into her like a knife. She closed her eyes, unable to face him any longer, and turned her head aside.

"They sent me to Earth," she said, "because I had some time before it happened, and they... and I wanted to try and live by myself for a while. Because every second I was in Azarath, I was reminded of what was gonna happen, and I just wanted to pretend it wasn't, just for a little while, before... before I died. They didn't want me to go, but I convinced them to let me by promising that I would do what I had to once Trigon came. I looked Azar in the eyes, and I promised her that I would leave Earth, and strand Trigon in the emptiest, blackest part of the universe. But when the time came... I didn't do it. I knew I had to, but I didn't do it. And now everyone's dead! And it's because of me! Not Trigon, not Warp, not Slade, me."

Lapsing into silence once more, Raven waited as long as she could for something to happen, anything at all, for Beast Boy to argue with her some more, or agree with her, or throw her off the cliff, or something. But nothing happened. He neither spoke nor moved nor otherwise made a sound, and when finally she could stand the silence no longer, she opened her eyes once more to see why. He remained where he had been, stock-still, but his expression had softened somewhat. His mouth was closed, his eyes slightly smaller than they had been before, and he appeared less tongue-tied than waiting for something, though what it was, she could not possibly determine.

"That's why you can't take me out of here," she said finally, looking him in the eyes. "That's why I can't leave." The pained, empty expression in Beast Boy's eyes was like acid burning into her soul, and she lowered her head to escape it. "I'm not supposed to be with the rest of you anymore," she said. "I'm right where I belong."

What she expected him to do at this point, she did not know. Leave her behind, perhaps, or take her and drag her further up the endless ice-wall, dismissing everything she had said as always. He had come this far for her, in the face of tremendous peril, and moreover Beast Boy was always the sort who preferred to simply pretend that facts inconvenient to his world-view did not exist. She didn't remember much of what had come before, but she remembered being driven near to madness by his obstinate refusal to take seriously anything she said, even when it was -

"Why didn'tyou leave?"

Jolted out of her recriminating thoughts, Raven blinked as she looked back up at Beast Boy. "What?" she asked.

"Why didn't you leave Earth?" he asked, calmly, as though it were the most normal question in the world. "Why didn't you do what Azar told you to?"

She hung for a moment, tongue-tied by this unexpected question, but there was no place to hide here, not from the truth, unvarnished. And so she answered him.

"I was... afraid."

Of all things, Beast Boy smiled, not his usual ear-to-ear grin, but something more subtle, a warm, inviting smile. "The Raven I knew wasn't afraid of anything," he said.

"That's not true," said Raven.

"Maybe not," said Beast Boy, "but she sure looked like it. And she never, ever did something or didn't do something because she was afraid of doing it. I know that, even if you don't remember. So how come you didn't leave Earth?"

"Because..." she hesitated, still shifting in place as she tried to evade Beast Boy's absurdly calm gaze. "Because I... I was afraid. I was afraid of dying."

Beast Boy blinked, as though puzzled by a strange question. "So... you came all the way to Earth and became a hero, fought villains and monsters, all because you were afraid of dying?"

"That was different."

"Maybe," said Beast Boy, "but you wanna know what I think? I think you didn't leave Earth because you knew that we wouldn't have let you."

Confused now, to the point where it overcame her reluctance to look Beast Boy in the eye, Raven raised her head once more, arcing an eyebrow as she stared at him in puzzlement. "What... what do you mean?"

"Raven," said Beast Boy, in the tone of one stating the obvious, "do you honestly think we'd just let you run off to the end of the universe and die alone somewhere?"

Raven, to be honest, was fairly certain she had never even considered the matter. "You... you couldn't have stopped me," she said, her tone no longer remorseful, just a simple, neutral fact."

Beast Boy's smile broadened. "Oh yeah?" he said. "Just like we couldn't stop Slade or Brother Blood? Just like we couldn't stop Star from getting married to a pile of slime?"

"This is different, and you know it," said Raven. "Any time I wanted, I could have just disappeared."

"Yeah," said Beast Boy, "and we would've found you. I would have found you. No matter where you went, or what hole you hid in. Between the T-ship, and Robin being Mr. Detective, and Starfire knowing half the galaxy already, there's nowhere you could have gone that we wouldn't have found you."

Raven shook her head, half in disbelief and half in simple frustration. "You don't know what you're talking about."

"Yeah I do," he said. "I know that I would have found you anywhere you went. Even if the others couldn't do it, I could. It doesn't matter if you hid in another dimension or a hundred billion light years away from Earth. I'd have found you there, and I'd have brought you home. And there's nothing you or Trigon or anyone else could have done to stop me."

So certain, so flippant was this declaration, that Raven didn't know what to think. "You..." she stammered, "you don't... I could've..."

"Dude, Raven," said Beast Boy, his smile exploding into an ear-to-ear grin that seemed to light up the very air around him. "I just found you in Hell. Were you gonna hide somewhere worse than this?"

Try as she might, Raven had no answer to that.

"It doesn't matter," said Beast Boy. "I'd never let you just disappear off into the middle of nowhere and die alone. Not ever. And if Azar or those monks who raised you had a problem with that, well that's tough."

"But..." stammered Raven, "But Beast Boy... why?"

If the question caught Beast Boy without an answer, it only did so for a few moments. "Because," he said, his tone indicating it was both obvious and all the answer needed. "It's you."

Raven felt something jolt inside her, like an electrical circuit that was suddenly completed.

And then Beast Boy was grinning again. "So, you see, it really wasn't your fault that all this happened, because even if you'd done whatever Azar or the monks wanted, it wouldn't have helped, because I'd have gone out and dragged you back anyway." He smiled, his face exuding confidence, in a way Raven managed to belatedly recognize that she had seen before, somewhere. "So, I guess... really... this is all my fault, not yours," he said. "And if it's my fault, then you can't belong here at all."

Raven might have said anything at that particular juncture, anything at all. But before her tired, wrenched mind could settle on any one thing to say, someone else answered in her stead.

"Well," came a voice, as sharp and hollow as death itself, "if you insist..."

Raven jumped, and Beast Boy jumped right along with her, but the source of the voice did not take long to identify itself. The driving wind, which had been blowing snow and shards of ice at them since they first began to scale this endless wall, parted as they turned, to reveal a massive, looming shadow that quickly resolved itself into an enormous slab of slate-grey stone. The size of a moving van at least, it was topped with a thin figure with grey skin and red eyes, sheathed in gold.

"We made this place for her," said Terra, gesturing at Raven. "But there's plenty of room."

The front half of the rock disintegrated, flying apart like birdshot into blocks the size of mailboxes. Wrapped in a golden halo, they hung in the air, just for a moment, before Terra extended her hand and hurled them at Beast Boy and Raven like a meteor swarm. Raven threw up her hands in a paltry, automatic defense, but before the rocks could impact, there was a guttural roar mixed with the sound of exploding debris, and suddenly a massive, green, leathery tail, swept her off her feet and slammed her back against a cleft in the ice ledge, hard enough to knock the wind from her lungs. Yet in moment, she recovered her equilibrium sufficiently to peer out around the enormous tail, only to see that Beast Boy had become a giant, armored dinosaur, horned and plated with thick ridges of bone, against which the stones were shattering like glass ornaments hurled against a brick wall. And when the stones were spent, the last ones sliding down Beast Boy's face and flanks and tumbling off into nothingness, he remained in place, immovable and implacable, facing down the doppelganger with narrow eyes and a horned beak that was somehow twisted into a scowl.

Still perched atop the other half of her stone slab, Terra simply folded her arms and smirked. "Bad idea, Beast Boy," was all she said, and Raven was still trying to figure out what she meant when the entire ledge that she and Beast Boy were standing upon collapsed.

No sound or sign preceded the collapse. The ledge simply sheered off as though severed by a bolt-cutter, propelled no doubt by the unsupportable weight of a twelve-ton dinosaur. Instantly, Raven found herself tumbling end-over-end in freefall, colliding with chunks of ice as large as refrigerators and scraping against and bouncing off of the wall at her side. So abrupt, so complete was the disorientation of her sudden drop that she could not have reacted to it, not even if she had managed somehow to think of what to do, and all she could do was fall.

"We are all vessels of life, pouring ourselves out over the longer or shorter term. Yet ultimately, we all wind up empty, spent, and finally forgotten."

She landed on something soft.

At full speed, she should have dashed her brains out, no matter what the object she had hit was, but the object was falling right alongside her, and the speed of impact was small enough to be borne. Landing like a beached fish on her stomach, she gasped for the air that had, for the second time in as many moment, been knocked out of her, and it was only a few seconds later that she belatedly realized that the strange objects she could feel rustling between her fingers were feathers.

Raven opened her eyes to find that she was laying atop a giant bird, larger than anything that could have ever conceivably existed on the Earth, a roc or thunderbird, or some other primordial monster derived from nothing more than the nightmares of bards and fantasy authors. Thirty feet in wingspan, the giant bird nonetheless bucked and fought through winds of hurricane force that had materialized from nothing, blowing drifts of snow into her face so fast that she could no longer even see the enormous wall of ice that could not have been more than fifty feet away. Second by second, the wind built, howling and shrieking like a chorus of the damned, gusts slamming her against Beast Boy's feathered back one moment, and threatening to rip her free of him the next. Before long, it was plain that Beast Boy could no longer fight the wind off, and he spun, flailing with his enormous wings, as Raven held on for dear life.

Ahead, the snow parted, and the wall of ice loomed before them, not smooth as it had been, but jagged, encrusted with spires and blades of razor-sharp ice. Inexorably, the wind shoved Beast Boy and Raven towards the wall, despite everything Beast Boy could do to try and force them away from it, as from somewhere upwind, they heard the mocking, uproarious laughter of a voice that sounded like Terra's tinged liberally with monomania and madness.

Collision seemed inevitable, but as the wind swept them towards the wall, Beast Boy suddenly shrank in size. Raven's hands grasped in vain as she slipped off of him, falling and spinning in all three directions, but only for a second. In less time than it took to process, she felt something soft wrapping itself around her wrist, and looked up to see a giant squid, larger than a gasoline tanker, looming above her, the wind puffing it out like a para-sail. A tentacle the size of her entire body was lashed around her arm, and as Raven watched, the dozen or so others that extended from the squid's body lashed out and snatched at the wall that sped past them. There was the sound of flesh tearing, of ice shattering, of a low, awful moan, as the tentacles grasped at the wall, slicing themselves open on blades of ice as sharp as razors, yet the suckers connected, and contrived to hold, if only for a few moments, swinging the squid, and Raven with it, around and towards the wall. Before Raven could even gauge whether she was about to be smashed or sliced to pieces on impact, the tentacle that grasped her twisted, pivoted, and brought her up hard enough to nearly dislocate her arm, seconds before she was bodily shoved into a tiny crevasse in the frozen ice, barely large enough for her to stand.

The impact was hard, but not crippling, and little though she wanted to, Raven forced herself to turn around, to see what had become of Beast Boy and Terra. For a moment, she saw only empty air, and no sign of Beast Boy at all, whether in the form of a giant squid or anything else. Desperately she searched the air, squinting and shielding her eyes from the arctic gale. But then she heard a soft whimper from, of all places, below her, and found him once again.

Beast Boy was hanging from a tiny corner of the ledge by one gloved hand, having resumed his human form somehow in the midst of all the aerobatics and gyrations. His other hand, and for that matter the rest of his body, dangled helplessly from the ledge, there being no room for him to so much as use his other hand to hang on. The wind whipped at him mercilessly, threatening to blow him completely off his tenuous perch, yet he did not change form again, did not turn into a gecko or grasshopper or something else that might have been able to either cling to the wall or fit easily alongside Raven on the tiny ledge, but hung there instead, his eyes closed, face contorted, and moans of pain escaping him loud enough to be heard over the howling wind.

"Beast Boy!" shouted Raven, though her voice was instantly blown away by the storm, and despite the risk of falling, she crouched in place and grabbed his arm with both hands. She could not pull him up, for small as Beast Boy's human form was, he was still too heavy for her nine-year-old body to lift, and there was no room for him anyway. She grabbed him nonetheless, it was all she could think to do, and from where she crouched, she saw that Beast Boy was covered in gashes, some deep and some less so. Across his face, his torso, all four limbs, the slashes seemed almost randomly distributed, despite the fact that moments ago his tentacles had been the recipients of the actual blows. But then, for a shape-shifter, who could tell how a concept like locational injury might translate?

Unable to either succor or lift Beast Boy, Raven could only hold onto him as tightly as she could while she tried to think of something. She had no idea how badly Beast Boy was hurt, if he could still morph at all, or what her plan was to be if either of those questions had bad answers to them. Yet before she could consider these issues in anything but the most cursory sense, she saw a shadow forming up far below Beast Boy, which swelled and deepened until it resolved itself once more into Terra, standing implacably upon her levitated block of stone, the wind that howled around them not sufficing to even disturb her hair.

A louder-than-average groan refocused Raven's attention on Beast Boy, who opened his eyes with apparent difficulty, looking up at Raven, and then fearlessly down at the rising form of Terra. Terra had torn another slew of stones free from her block, this time smaller ones, fist and pineapple-sized chunks of rock that orbited around her extended hands like satellites. Wedged in place as she was, Raven had no defense against such projectiles, whether Terra merely shot them at her, or commanded them to dance over and beat her brains out. Beast Boy, hanging helplessly by one hand, had even less defense. And yet, when Beast Boy, seeing what was coming, turned his head back to look up at Raven, there was, of all things, a smile, nervous and forced perhaps, but a smile nonetheless, plastered onto a face that would have, Raven realized, looked incomplete without it.

"I won't let you disappear," said Beast Boy. "No matter what."

And then he let go of the ledge.

Instantly, Raven's grip on Beast Boy's wrist melted away, and he fell in what seemed to Raven like slow motion. But before he had fallen more than twenty feet, he shimmered, and rippled and suddenly vanished right before her eyes, shrinking down to nothing in the space of a heartbeat. For a second or two, she searched for him with her eyes in vain, certain that he had simply adopted some tiny, half-invisible form for reasons unknown. The wind was still howling at hurricane force, and any creature that small would have mere seconds before being smashed to pulp against the iron-hard wall of remorseless ice.

What followed, Raven had to piece together from inference.

All of a sudden, Beast Boy re-appeared, not as a human but as, of all things, a fish. No mere trout or guppy was this, however, but a twelve-hundred pound swordfish, which materialized from nothingness, flying perpendicularly away from the ice wall towards Terra like a green streak, as fast as a speeding automobile. Only belatedly did Raven realize that he must have taken on the form of a flea, or grasshopper, let the wind blow him against the wall of ice, and sprung off of it towards Terra at hundreds of miles an hour, shortly before increasing his own mass by a factor of seven hundred thousand.

For just a brief instant, Raven saw Terra, who like her, had not been expecting anything like this to transpire, rear back in reflexive shock as a half-ton of angry, sword-wielding broadbill fish shot towards her like a guided missile. The loose stones, still wrapped around her wrists like bracelets, formed up into a shield of rock, which Beast Boy crashed into headfirst, thrashing left and right with his head to scatter the stones, slashing at Terra, who fell back to the edge of her block of stone. And then the curtain of snow and wind slammed closed, and Raven lost sight of them entirely.

But only for a moment.

A great, booming clap of thunder jolted Raven so badly that she nearly slipped from her precarious perch, and a bolt of forked lightning flash-illuminated the area for a billionth of a second. It was just long enough for Raven to catch a glimpse of the stone block in profile, and of writhing forms, human and bestial, lunging and slashing at one another with claws and horns and blades of obsidian glass. And then the darkness closed over them again, leaving only the echoes of the terrible thunder, and the distant sounds, muffled and muted by the howling gale, of screams and cries, trumpets and roars, the clash of solid rock against plates of armored scale and bone.

For what felt like an eternity, Raven simply stood wedged into the crevasse of ice, and peered into the darkness without daring to breathe, as awful, inhuman sounds filtered through the whirling air to her ears. Every so often, lightning would flash across the sky, affording her a frozen snapshot of silhouettes tearing at one another. At times it appeared that a thin, wiry human, festooned with stones and cudgels and blades of volcanic rock, stood against a roaring, leaping dinosaur. At times she ducked the slash of a raptor's claws, or the jaws of a foaming polar bear. At times she brandished her weapons before a looming, flapping beast, fel and reptilian, whose alien cries sent shivers into Raven's very soul. And at times she was frozen mid-spring, lashing forward at some hybrid shadow, a chimera of a dozen different creatures caught in freeze-frame for just an instant.

How long the battle raged, Raven could not discern. But finally, as the light from one lightning strike faded, and she prayed for another to show her what was happening, she heard a loud, brutal "crack", sharp and piercing as a gunshot, and then all the sounds of war and rage ceased abruptly.

For one, agonizing moment, she waited, willing the air to vomit forth more lightning, to confirm or deny her worst fears. But instead the stormy air parted, and the stone block appeared from within it, pitted and chipped and gouged as though by enormous scoops. Terra stood atop it, her grey skin and red eyes boring holes straight through Raven, one hand clutched at her side where a viscous, gray liquid was leeching through her fingers. But beside her, prostrate on the ground, lay Beast Boy, once more in human form, laying on his stomach, eyes closed and motionless, with red blood streaming from a terrible gash in his forehead, staining his green skin and purple and black uniform crimson.

Raven felt her heart stop beating.

Doubled over, her breathing so heavy that it could be heard above the storm, Terra, or the simulacrum of her, managed a feral, predatory grin, as she stared Raven in the eye. In one swift motion, she reached down and took Beast Boy by the collar, hoisting him into the air with one hand and letting him dangle above the stone block like a marionette. Her voice was clipped and brittle, but perfectly clear.

"You didn't seriously think he could save you, did you?"

Tears welled up in Raven's eyes, and this time she made no effort to stem them or brush them aside. All fear of slipping and falling deserted her as she drew herself up, her entire body shaking in raw desperation.

"If you insist on dragging others into your destiny, all you will succeed in doing is sharing it with them."

"Let him go!" she shouted into the gathering storm. "Let him go! He doesn't belong here, I do! I'll go back with you, back down below, stay there forever if that's what you want, just don't hurt him!"

Terra's smile only broadened. "You heard him, didn't you? He'll always come after you, no matter what. And I'm afraid that we just can't have that, now can we?" She turned her head slightly, looking over Beast Boy dismissively the way a sport fisherman might examine his catch, as Raven stood uselessly on the cleft in the ice, and watched her with her heart in her throat.

"After all," said Terra as she turned back to Raven, her expression vindictive and cruel. "You don't deserve anything of the sort."

And then, with one halfhearted, almost contemptuous shove, Terra half-threw, half-pushed Beast Boy off the rock, and watched as he fell, limp and helpless, and was swallowed up in a heartbeat by the empty, yawning darkness below.

And right then, at that instant, Raven's mind collapsed.

The wind still howled, the snow still blew in drifts. But to Raven, seeing Beast Boy fall, it was as though those things had stopped by fiat or executive command. The snow ceased to be cold, the wind ceased to be deafening, and instead, a tremendous, burning, acidic sensation impaled her like a spear of incarnated pain. Like her fragmented memories of another time, long ago and yet not long, when she had been disintegrated by the radiance of a cosmic manifestation, so was this sensation, striking dead all of her previous thoughts and fears and worries and replacing them all with the sight of Beast Boy tumbling out of sight into the darkness below. It seared her insides like a raging bonfire, boiling upwards until she could contain it no longer and opened her mouth to emit a formless, wordless scream of incoherent pain, a sound neither human nor demonic, so hideous and deformed that even the evil clone of Terra drew back from it in horror. But Raven saw none of this, blinded by tears and fear and desperation, having forgotten where she was and what she was doing there, all else in the universe cast aside in one moment of supreme, absolute grief and denial, save only for one, unshakable voice, that refused, even now, to leave her be.

"You are death herself, Raven. Death incarnate writ large upon the universe. You play games with a destiny that could consume the very fabric of reality. And everything you touch will die with you."

And so it was, without any conscious thought or act, that in one, unbroken motion, the little girl who was Raven lunged forward and leaped, arms and eyes wide open, into the gaping, yawning void, plunging down into the pit after Beast Boy, leaving only a trail of frozen tears to mark that she had ever tried to climb out of Hell.

O-O-O

Alone, alone, all, all alone,
Alone on a wide wide sea !
And never a saint took pity on
My soul in agony.

O-O-O

"I didn't live in a tower," said Devastator. "I didn't live in a shining palace, with my every need catered to. I lived in Warp's future, a place where the whole world fell off the rails."

The world outside was quiet now, quieter than it had been, perhaps because David was no longer listening to it, trying to make out the sound of his nemesis approaching. His nemesis was already here, standing before him, and there was nothing else to listen for.

"What happened to it?"

Devastator shrugged. "Warp happened to it. I didn't know it at the time of course, but he changed everything through omission. Starfire's omission, to be precise."

"Warp killed her?"

"No," said Devastator. "He removed her from the world, at least for several decades, I'm not entirely sure how. The effect was the same though. Without her, the Titans fell apart. And without the Titans, all the various groups and heroes they would have inspired or helped establish either never came to pass, or gradually dissolved. Without them, there was nobody to replace the older generation of heroes when they retired or finally fell victim to the hazards of their profession. Within ten years... everything was going wrong."

"The bad guys won?" asked David.

"Nothing that drastic," said Devastator. "The world never completely lacks for self-sacrificing lunatics willing to put on a pair of tights. If they'd all disappeared, some bloody-minded psychopath with an orbital death ray would have enslaved the earth. What changed was the density. Instead of teams of heroes policing their respective cities, you had a handful of die-hards raging against the dying of the light. Every so often, someone would cross some sort of line, and one of the old guard would come out of retirement to batter them into fragments. By and large though, things didn't end with a bang, but with a whimper. Petty crime rose, then violent. Governments got more corrupt. Brushfire wars broke out everywhere. Petty dictators seized control of forgotten third-world hellholes and fought one another. Nothing cataclysmic happened, but you could feel it in the air. The world was falling apart because nobody was at the wheel. A handful of the heroes kept going. Nightwing, for instance, even Beast Boy for a while. But they were trying to bail the tide out with buckets."

"So what, you decided the best thing to do was kill the heroes that were left?"

Devastator frowned. "Don't be stupid," he said. "I had nothing to do with any of it."

"So what were you doing?"

Devastator did not answer immediately, turning away and walking several paces back towards the center of the rotunda. He stopped, lifting his head and eyes to the broken skeleton of twisted metal that had once been a stained glass ceiling. And when he spoke, his voice was softer, almost plaintive.

"I was a chemical engineer."

David watched Devastator in silence, waiting for the older man to continue. And after a time, he did.

"When I left the system" he said, turning back around. "I had a GED and no real applied skills, but I did have Devastator. And while I had no conception of how to use Devastator properly, it had a secondary use that I was very well versed in. I could, at a glance, identify the constituent materials in any object, fluid, or gas." Slowly, Devastator walked back over to David, and reaching into his pocket, he drew out a small business card. "You wouldn't think that was terribly useful," he said, extending the card to David, "but, as it turns out, you'd be wrong..."

Hesitating for a moment, David finally took the card, half-expecting it to explode in his hand. But Devastator merely slid his hand back into his pocket and stood back as David read the card.

"David Foster," read David aloud, "Senior Spectroscopic Analyst." He read the card over to himself several more times in silence. "What's... that?" he finally asked.

"Spectroscopy is essentially the study of the interaction between radiated energy and different forms of matter," said Devastator. "Essentially, we determine what things are made of. Spectroscopic analysts use lasers and other types of light emitters to analyse objects and determine what they're composed of. Except, what took them weeks of careful analysis, I could do in seconds with Devastator."

David slowly lowered the card. "And... that's a real job?"

"Oh yes," said Devastator. "I could take a core sample from an exploration dig in some god-forsaken hole in the earth, and tell in ten seconds if there were traces of gold or oil or rare earths, and at exactly what depth. I once had a construction company bring me a sample of the steel their suppliers were giving them, and spotted an impurity in the metal that would have cost them eight hundred million to fix after the fact. It's a job, David. Maybe not as thrilling as running around in a red suit and blowing up purse-snatchers, but then I didn't have a team of heroes to take me in and train me, now did I?"

"So then why did you stop?"

A hesitation, this time more noticeable, as Devastator seemed to to freeze for a few seconds. When he spoke again, his voice was quiet, almost a whisper.

"I worked for a company called Geolex," said Devastator. "A large oil and natural gas firm based in Gotham. A good company, with good people in it. Technically, I didn't have the qualifications for the job, I didn't even have a degree, but I was their best analyst, so what the hell did they care? Within two years, I was the most senior spectroscopic expert they had. After three, I was running the department. I had an apartment, friends, I made embarrassingly good money.

And I met a woman there named Stephanie..." a small tremor, barely noticeable, ran over Devastator as he spoke the name. "She was an exploratory geologist, one of the best. We were... close." He stopped again, taking a deep breath before lifting his head once more to look David in the eye.

"And then one day, I came home from Geolex, and I found the Joker waiting for me."

David froze, froze like one of the statues that surrounded him, staring at his counterpart with wide eyes and parted lips. How long he stood there, he did not know, the single name arresting in its place everything he had been disposed to say. At length, it was Devastator who, viewing David's reaction, smirked, and ventured a comment.

"I trust you've heard of him before?"

The question loosened David's brain enough to restore the connection between his brain and throat. "The... the Joker?" he asked, half-incredulous. "Why?"

"You're not seriously asking me to explain the Joker's motivations, are you?" said Devastator. "I was nobody. Just an analyst. I walked in the door, and there he was, along with a dozen of his goons. Turns out, he'd broken out of Arkham Asylum a few hours before. Maybe he picked my place at random. Maybe he knew about Devastator somehow and wanted to see what made me tick. I have no idea. They chloroformed me before I could even shout. And I woke up inside some demented fun-house, along with Stephanie, a madwoman in a suit of motley, a dozen criminal psychotics with automatic weapons, and the clown prince himself."

Ruined and aged though the figure might have been, to hear his own voice describe such a thing as this sent a chill that nothing else here had quite managed to engender running down David's spine. "What did he do?" he asked, certain even as he asked it that he did not want to know the answer.

"Whatever he wanted," said Devastator. "Which, given the Joker... well... I think you can imagine. And if you can't, then I'll spare you the details. Suffice to say, he was the one who did this."

Slowly, Devastator lifted his hand and pointed to the lifeless blanks that served him as eyes. And following his hand, David beheld for the first time up close the rough scars that radiated from the white orbs across his upper face.

"He used acid," said Devastator evenly, and David could not suppress the shudder that shot through him. "Said it was a kindness. That I wouldn't have to see what he was going to do to Stephanie. But of course, that wasn't true at all. Because I had Devastator, and Devastator let me see without my eyes." Devastator hesitated, but only for an instant. "So I got to watch," he said, "in glorious technicolor, as he beat her to death with a mallet."

David could only stare in horror as Devastator laid out what had happened simply, without hysterics. His mind dulled by everything that had happened and everything he had just been told, he asked the first question that popped into his head.

"Why didn't you stop him?"

Staring vacantly into the space above David's head, Devastator reacted to the question as though someone had just slapped him in the face. Instantly, he rounded on David in outraged anger.

"Stop him?" he asked, incredulously. "With what? Devastator? I had no idea how to use Devastator! I was a civilian, a chemical engineer, not a goddamned vigilante! Could you have stopped something like Joker before you met the Titans?" David recoiled before Devastator's indignation, but could not conjure up any words to meet it, and Devastator simply raged on without him. "I made a terrible mistake, David. I assumed that if I left the rest of the world alone, it would pay me the same complement. I was not prepared to deal with something like the Joker, not on any conceivable level. I could have armed myself with the power of Devastator, but I made a choice not to, the same choice you made, ever since you were old enough to suspect what really happened in that car accident. And for that choice, I was tortured, and Stephanie was killed. Please do not insult me by assuming that you are somehow going to find solutions that I should have thought of. I spent enough time in my own personal hell to listen to second guesses from you."

A thousand possible answers came to mind at once, none of them managing to force their way to the fore, and so David stood dumb in front of Devastator, and said nothing as the fire drained from his lifeless eyes, and he slowly returned to his previous, casual demeanor. Only after the transformation was once more complete did David muster the wherewithal to change the subject.

"How did you survive?"

It was no more pleasant, to judge the reaction, but Devastator did not explode or shout once more. Instead he narrowed his eyes, his hand gripping the head of his cane tightly, and answered in a dead monotone that augured nothing good.

"Six days after I was taken," he said, "Batman found us. Apparently, Stephanie and I weren't the only ones Joker kidnapped. Batman broke in, just as Joker was getting ready to have more 'fun' with me. Joker had goons, weapons, death traps, but none of it mattered. In about five minutes, Batman clobbered all the thugs, beat Joker to a pulp, and... 'rescued' me. I don't remember much of the aftermath, just waking up in a hospital, with some policeman asking me questions, and promising that Joker would go away for good. That... justice would be done." He hesitated a moment. "As though that were even possible."

Slowly, Devastator lowered his head, lifting his cane casually with one hand and turning it with his fingers, looking into the silver handle as though it were a crystal ball that could summon up visions of the past.

"I was in that hospital for three months," said Devastator. "Two months into my stay, Joker broke out of Arkham again. This time he killed thirteen people with a sniper rifle before Batman caught him. Once again, he was beaten to a pulp, arrested, and dragged back to Arkham. Justice, apparently, had been done."

David said nothing, and Devastator simply sighed. "I got out of the hospital eventually, returned home, but I couldn't go back to Geolex and pretend that everything was normal again. It wasn't the scars or the blindness, it was... me. People I knew, friends, colleagues, they kept telling me I had to 'let go' of what had happened. They recommended I talk to people, doctors or head shrinks that would help me 'let it go'." Devastator raised his head sharply, looking back at David with a stare that was piercing despite the lack of eyes. "None of them even considered the possibility that I didn't want to 'let it go'. I didn't know what I wanted, but I wanted something. Closure perhaps, I didn't know how to describe it, but I stayed where I was, trying to find it."

David said nothing, and Devastator's eyes darted back to the cane in his hand once again. "And then, maybe six weeks after I left the hospital, Joker broke out again. Him and several other super-criminals. He didn't kill anyone this time, but he slashed open the faces of a couple of civilians, stitched their grins from ear to ear. A trademark I guess. His rampage only lasted a couple hours, but I listened to the entire thing on the radio, the press conference and the hourly updates, the police bulletins, and the cheers and relief after Batman swooped in to save the day, again. And as Joker was packed back off to Arkham once more, all of a sudden, I realized exactly what it was that I wanted."

"What did you want?" asked David.

Devastator looked up at him, the firelight reflecting off his scarred face and empty eyes. They stared at one another in silence, David apprehensively, Devastator coldly.

"I left Gotham," said Devastator, ignoring the question. "I went up into the mountains, into Appalachia, where nobody would look for me. Where I could prepare without being disturbed. And there, I taught myself how to use Devastator properly."

As he spoke, the cane in his hand burst once more into heatless flames in his hand, and he turned it over, as though admiring his own handiwork. "It was a long, slow process," he said. "I didn't have Robin or Raven or anyone else to teach me how to wield Devastator. I had to figure it all out for myself, practicing on rocks and trees and abandoned coal mines." He considered the matter in silence for a moment, and turned back to David with a smirk. "Then again," he said, "I also wasn't as conflicted as you were about what I was doing. I knew why I was learning to use Devastator, and what I planned to do with it once I was ready. It was an agonizing process, as I'm sure you can relate to. But after a little more than a year, I decided it was time to do what I wanted to do."

Lowering the cane back to the ground, Devastator let it burn as he held it with his fingertips, and he straightened himself up to full height before facing David and answering the question he hadn't asked.

"I returned to Gotham," said Devastator. "I told no one that I was back, I simply rented a hotel room and waited for what I knew would come. And sure enough, about a month later, Joker broke out of Arkham again. This time he tried to nerve gas a kindergarden. Batman managed to stop him before he could go through with it, and he dragged Joker back to Arkham once again. And the night after he returned Joker to the asylum, I left my hotel room, caught a ferry to Arkham Island, and once there..." a hesitation, but only a small one, "... I indulged in a bit of reciprocity."

A cold feeling seeped into David's gut as he finished Devastator's thought for him with what he assumed he was about to hear.

"You killed the Joker," he said, "didn't you?"

Devastator simply smiled.

"No," he said. "I killed everyone."

O-O-O

I closed my lids, and kept them close,
And the balls like pulses beat ;
For the sky and the sea, and the sea and the sky
Lay like a load on my weary eye,
And the dead were at my feet.

O-O-O

"Star?"

Starfire lifted her eyes, lowering the magazine to the counter as she did so. "I am... sorry," she said as she tried to recollect the conversation from a moment ago. "What was the question you wished for me to answer?"

Robin smiled, not that anyone besides those in the room would have described it as such. The mask made it hard for most people to tell if he was happy or preparing to throw explosives at their heads. "Did you want anything besides mustard?"

"Oh! No, thank you," exclaimed Starfire. "Unless... are there any more of those wonderful spices that went so well with Cyborg's chili?"

"Um... you mean the breath mints?" asked Robin.

"Are there any remaining?" she asked.

"I'll er... check," said Robin, stooping and opening the cabinets beneath him.

A fresh chorus of beeps and bangs emerged from the television as Beast Boy's digital avatar defeated another wave of multicolored ninjas. He sat hunched forward on the couch, his tongue sticking out of one side of his mouth, glaring at the screen as he punched a fresh series of commands into the game-station controller.

"You better do better than that if you wanna take down my best time," said Cyborg, sitting next to Beast Boy with his arms crossed. "I'd have been halfway to the boss by now."

"Dude, watch and learn," said Beast Boy without glancing away from the screen for even a second. "I'm just getting warmed up."

"Sure," said Cyborg. "Look, nobody's gonna think any less of you if you just admit that you ain't got a chance of beating the reigning king of - "

There was a loud, swirling explosion of light and sound, as red flames emerged from Beast Boy's digital avatar, and every enemy ninja on screen vanished, replaced a second later by a series of large numbers. Beast Boy laughed as the figure advanced once again, and Cyborg's boast died in his throat. He fell silent, content to watch and see what Beast Boy might be able to do.

"So... how does this thing work again?"

Sitting in one of the chairs along the side of the room, David held an indigo jewel the size of a chicken's egg in one hand, turning it over as though it were some strange machine of unknown function. Across from him, Raven sat cross-legged on another chair, a similar jewel cupped in her hands.

"You're supposed to focus on the soul-stone. It'll change color as you concentrate on it, and the colors represent different states of mind. You can use those to... what?"

David was looking nervously down at the gem in his hand, glancing back up at Raven evasively.

"I er... it's just when I concentrate, I don't really see colors..."

Raven let out a low groan. "You're not supposed to destroy it," she said. "It's a meditation aid. Don't use your powers, just concentrate on it normally."

Judging from David's expression, Raven's instructions were not helping overmuch. "Um... okay..." he said, lowering his eyes to the bauble and staring into it as though expecting a picture to appear within.

"All set," said Robin, and Starfire turned back to see him sliding a plate of the worm-like substance humans called "spaghetti" over to her. She knew of course what most of the others thought of Tamaranean cooking, but the first time she'd seen spaghetti, she had nearly lost the contents of all seven stomachs. Since forcing herself to try some, she had discovered that it didn't taste anything like the Eridanian slime tendrils she had initially assumed it was related to. Nevertheless, the resemblance was so strong that she normally avoided it. This time however, the plate Robin slid across the counter to her was covered liberally with delightful yellow mustard, and sprinkled with the spices she had discovered only recently.

She dug in with gusto, even as Robin prepared a number of other portions, eschewing the mustard and mints. "So, Star... did you still want to do that patrol?"

Hesitating only for a second, Starfire quickly gulped down the mouthful of mustard-slathered spaghetti, and turned back to Robin. "Oh, yes," she said. "I should enjoy that very much."

"Great," said Robin with a smile. "Petty crime's up 20% around the park, and the police are overstretched, so these patrols should really help clean things up."

"Of... course," said Starfire. "When may we begin?"

"Well, I was thinking we'd start tomorrow. Today we'll be doing a double-training session."

A buzzer sounded on Beast Boy's video game system, simultaneous with a loud, muffled thud, as David dropped the crystal he was holding on the carpeted floor. Cyborg turned his head around with an expression of disbelief, and even Raven cracked an eye open at the news.

"Are you serious?" asked Cyborg. "Doubles again?"

"It's a light day," said Robin. "We might not get too many more of those. And there's some new routines I'd like to practice."

"Dude," wailed Beast Boy, "that'll be three double sessions in four days. Are you trying to kill us?"

"A little effort never killed anybody, Beast Boy," said Robin.

"Couldn't we have gotten a little warning?" asked Raven. "I've got some books I wanted to finish this afternoon"

"Criminals don't give warning," said Robin, a small smirk appearing on his face. "Neither do I."

David didn't say anything, but sagged his head and wearily picked the crystal up off the floor, rubbing his eyes with his free hand as he quite obviously tried to figure out how he was going to get through this one. Elsewhere, the grumblings continued, but only briefly, as everyone, even Cyborg and Beast Boy, knew that talking Robin into lightening the training schedule was somewhere between an impossibility and an absurdity.

Starfire remained quiet as well, mechanically eating bites of her food as she thought things over for a little while. It wasn't until Cyborg and Beast Boy had returned their attention to their game, Raven and David to their respective crystals, and Robin to the dishwasher, that she ventured a question.

"Cyborg," she asked casually. "Did you... encounter any difficulties on Tuesday when you and David were on patrol in the park?"

"Huh?" asked Cyborg, still watching the screen. "No, nothin' really. Just a cat up a tree and a couple of lost tourists. Why?"

"Cyborg?" repeated Starfire, adding a little more force to her voice. This time Cyborg turned around, to find Starfire staring intently at him. "Did... perhaps the local law enforcement authorities mention anything happening?"

She saw the understanding crystallize in Cyborg's one human eye. "Oh," he said. "Um... yeah. Yeah one of the park cops said that there's been a bunch of uh... purse-snatchings?" He raised his eyebrow at Starfire, who nodded slightly. "Yeah... yeah it was purse-snatching. Said they didn't know how they were gonna stop it."

Robin turned around, his mask shifted to show that he was raising an eyebrow. "Why didn't you tell me about this?"

"I... uh..." stammered Cyborg. "Well... you see... uh."

"I... forgot to," interrupted David. "I... er... I told Cy that I'd tell you, Robin, but..."

"But," added Starfire, coming to the rescue, "he told me instead, and that is why I wanted to ask Cyborg what he discovered. I only recalled it moments ago."

Robin looked from face to face to face, his mask effectively hiding whatever he might have thought of all this. "Did the police say anything about suspects?" he asked at length, not directing the question towards anyone in particular.

"Uh... no," said Cyborg. "They um... said they didn't know if it was all the same guy or whatever. But they said that if we could step our patrols up around that area a little bit - ."

" - Then perhaps we could defeat or deter the resumption of container-theft perpetrated against the citizens of the city!" exclaimed Starfire. "Perhaps we should commence immediately so as to properly deter these acts of larceny!"

Robin said nothing, looking back and forth from Cyborg to Starfire, his mask hiding all signs of what he might be thinking, as usual. "I'm... not sure that - "

"Robin," said Starfire, straightening up and looking him in the eyes. "Surely we cannot allow such crimes to go unchallenged, can we?"

She knew she had him even before he did.

"I... guess we can start the patrols today," said Robin at last. And it was fortunate that he did so while looking at Starfire, for he could thereby not see David's sigh of relief, Raven's smirk, or Cyborg mouthing the words 'thank you'.

"Excellent!" said Starfire, judging it prudent to ignore all of the above gestures. "I have no doubt we shall extirpate this scourge from the recreational spaces of the city." Robin didn't look terribly convinced in her opinion, but he didn't object or seem inclined to change his mind, and Starfire supposed it didn't really matter why he agreed in the end.

Robin sat back down at the counter, looking rather like he had just had his own handbag stolen and was trying to figure out how it had happened. Starfire suppressed the urge to smile. It would not be the first time or the last that Robin would decide to simply accept that he had agreed to this sort of thing for legitimate reasons. And if the others felt they owed her for getting out of a double training session, so much the better...

A loud burst of static-like noise came from the television, accompanied by a deep rumble that set the windows to rattling. Robin grimaced and turned his head to where Beast Boy was still cutting a swatch through the multicolored ninjas.

"Beast Boy, turn that thing down," said Robin. "You'll short out the electrical - "

There was a thunderous crash, and the entire tower shook as though an earthquake had just jolted the island it sat upon. Both Raven and David dropped their respective crystals, and Beast Boy his controller. The television, shaken from its moorings on the wall, fell silent as the cords connecting it to the speakers came loose, yet the rumble did not cease, growing louder and louder, like an approaching herd of stampeding buffalo.

"Dude!" exclaimed Beast Boy as everyone scrambled to their feet. "What gives?"

"I don't know." said Cyborg, consulting a display built into his arm. "Some kind of weird energy signal coming from outside the tower. I can't tell what it... incoming!"

There was a momentary flash, followed by a deafening explosion, and a shockwave so intense that it threw everyone to the floor. The shriek of rending metal mixed with the clash of shattering glass and ceramic, and the air was suddenly choked with smoke, dust, and fine debris. Starfire landed on her side, the stool she had been sitting on crashing to the ground atop her, and she shoved it off and pushed herself back up, waving the smoke out of her face as she tried to determine what had just -

She froze.

The entire front wall of the common room was gone, as though peeled off by a giant can opener and cast into the sea. And looming in the newly-made entrance were a phalanx of enormous, flying, reptilian beings, green-scaled and red-eyed, bearing polished, golden armor and a slew of various weapons, each one nastier-looking than the next. But Starfire's eyes were locked, not on the front rank of alien warriors, but on the one who loomed behind them. A hulking behemoth fully two feet taller than all of the rest, whose armor bore intricate carvings and symbols to testify to his exalted rank, and whose right eye was narrowed to a squint by an ugly, jagged scar running up the side of his face.

"Princess Koriand'r," said the scarred alien with a raspy hiss. "How I've missed you..."

Whatever words Starfire had intended to speak turned to stone in her throat, and she stumbled backwards without even realizing that she was moving. Desperately, she tried to speak, shout a warning, even just scream, but all she could manage was a feeble cry, formless and lost in the tumult that exploded to life moments later.

Before Robin could command the Titans to go, before everyone could even stand up, the common room was suddenly filled with aliens, slashing and shooting and roaring as they tore into everything within claw's reach. Starfire could see nothing but a swirling mass of dark green, punctuated by the shrieks of metal and the cold zap of magic, as flashes of color revealed where her friends were being swarmed over.

A green, scaly claw seized her shoulder, closing around it like a vice, and a leering, reptilian face filled her vision, jagged teeth slavering as the other claw reached for her face. She screamed, and felt her eyes burning as she vented her rage and horror through them, and a second later the face was gone, as her optical starbolt smashed the alien into the ceiling and threw him out the window from whence he had come.

More aliens loomed before her, grim-faced and armed with poleaxes and vibro-swords, and she leaped up into the air, trying to find her friends, to see what she could do to help them. It was hopeless. A dozen aliens leaped after her, grabbing her feet and arms, dragging her back to the ground, so many that she could not throw them all off, nor lay them all out with starbolts and eyebeams. She heard gunfire, the impact of waspish projectiles on counter-tops and walls, and even screams, all too human but otherwise unrecognizable, yet none of the aliens employed such weapons on her, no matter how many of them she struck, or threw, or shot.

She was still struggling when a shadow fell over her, so profound that she thought the power had been cut. She looked up to find a dark form looming over her, red eyes like slits their only feature. And then she felt another claw on her shoulder, just as cold and scaly as the last, and yet the tiny details of shape and feel and pressure were such that instantly, she knew who it was, and every muscle in her body locked up at once.

"You didn't seriously think you could escape me forever," came the silken, wraith-like voice, "did you, Koriand'r?"

Blind panic took her, and she screamed and fought, writhing like a live wire, but his time the claw would not release her, no matter how she struggled or where she shot. Her eyebeams and starbolts seemed to melt right into the shadowy figure, displacing it only for moments before it snapped back into being. She felt herself being lifted, felt the other aliens fall away as the large shadow held her pinned, raising her up until she was staring directly into its eyes, one intact, one a twisted ruin, both leering.

"Have you missed me?"

The smell of his breath, the timbre of his voice, the feel of his claws, all came rushing back to her like behaviors long left fallow, and she felt frenzied terror welling up within her like a hot liquid. Unable to turn away, to speak, or even to scream, she marshaled what willpower she had while she still had it, and packing every last ounce of emotion into her clenched fists, she conjured fire and let it loose.

There was a terrible rending sound, the screech of protesting metal, and the crash as its protests were overcome by gravity and heat, and a second later she was in freefall, as the floor beneath her and her captor sublimated to vapor. She heard him snarl, felt his grip falter, saw him fall away as he plunged into the darkness below. An instant later, and she landed in the middle of a corridor on her side, seconds before half a ton of steel, wiring, and burning insulation crashed down atop her, and she lost track of the alien entirely.

Clawing like a frightened animal, Starfire tore through the debris that covered her, pulling herself free, heedless of what she might break in the process. What injury the debris might have inflicted did not even cross her mind, as she turned this way and that, seeking her enemy and not finding him. From the hole overhead, she heard more cries, cries of pain and panic, so many and so muffled by the roars of the other aliens that she could not determine whose they were, and she leaped up to fly back to the common room and help her friends, only to find that she could not fly, her emotions refusing to manifest the boundless joy that customarily accompanied taking to the air. Again and again she jumped, unable to even brush the broken ceiling with her fingertips, and with each jump, and each unanswered scream from above, she felt the joy of flight receding further and further.

And then she saw him.

The corridor was dark, the power was apparently out, but from one side she saw him appear, a vague, formless shape on the edge of her ability to detect, save for the eyes that seemed to grow out of the darkness itself. From where she stood, she could only barely trace the outlines of his body with her eyes, in which conditions he seemed to swell and recede; an amorphous presence carved from her very nightmares. Stepping back, she fired starbolt after starbolt into him, yet he did not recoil or fall, the flashes of bright green serving only to illuminate his terrible form for thousandths of a second before he vanished once more into the gloom.

Suddenly, he lunged forward, and before her mind could process what he was doing, Starfire's body had already leaped backwards and her throat emitted another cry of alarm. The eyes narrowed just enough to show that he was grinning, and then they advanced anew, heedless of what she might throw at him, his whiplike tail snapping divots in the steel walls as he advanced.

Feeble cries, growing steadily feebler, still emerged from the common room above, but Starfire could not tear her eyes away from the alien advancing on her. She fell back, pace for pace, desperately seeking for something else to throw in his path, finding nothing. He quickened his pace, broke into a run, his arms extended forward, claws grasping at the air, and her nerve broke, and she turned, and ran, racing as quickly as she could down the maze-like passages, her thoughts bare save for escape and succor.

Down dark corridors and around blind corners she ran, relying on muscle memory and instinct to avoid dead ends, as the artillery-like footfalls of her pursuer pounded in her ears. Unable to calculate what the nearest room of any use was, all she could do was run, hurling starbolts over her shoulder, and try to come up with a plan that —

A bolt of energy the size of a dinner plate screamed past her head and exploded thirty yards up the hallway, collapsing the ceiling in a hail of debris. With bare inches to spare, Starfire slid to a stop, turning back to see the enormous alien charging towards her at full speed. Another energy bolt was already forming in his hands as Starfire blindly slammed her hand into one of the door control panels beside her, and raced through the sliding door that opened...

… only to stop.

So worked up that she had not been paying attention to where she was running, she now found herself standing inside the cavernous reaches of the tower's training room, a vast, formless expanse, bare of all equipment when not in use. But what came to her mind above all else, was that not only was the training room's walls, ceiling, and floor all armored against the powers the Titans wielded, but it was entirely devoid of exits, save for the one she had just entered by.

She heard the door slide open a second time, followed by the low, staccato chuckle she knew so well.

"All this time, I've looked for you, Princess," came the voice of the alien leader as Starfire turned around slowly, only to find him standing in the doorway, leaning on the frame, his claws drumming against the steel.

"Tell me, what shall we talk about?"

O-O-O

An orphan's curse would drag to hell
A spirit from on high ;
But oh ! more horrible than that
Is the curse in a dead man's eye !
Seven days, seven nights, I saw that curse,
And yet I could not die.

O-O-O

"Arkham Asylum housed the worst criminals in the world. The ones Batman drew to Gotham like a flame drawing moths. Psychopaths, Serial killers, carnivorous metahuman monsters of various types. I'd never paid any of them any attention until the Joker came for me, but after that, I became a regular criminologist. Case file after case file, each one as thick as your arm. Murder, arson, kidnapping, torture, terrorism, cannibalism, the worst perversions that men can inflict on one another. It was all there. And nobody would lift a finger to stop them."

"That's... that's not true!" exclaimed David. "You know that's not true! Batman - "

"Batman," hissed Devastator, "was a placebo. He'd fight them every time they broke out of jail, but only so that he could drag them all back to jail once again, where they would inevitably break out all over again. Joker had been imprisoned so many times, the case files couldn't even keep track. There were two dozen others just as bad. And every time they broke out, more people died. More people were maimed or brutalized or kidnapped. People like Stephanie. People like me. How long was it supposed to go on before someone did something about it? Something real?"

David's head swam. "But... all of them?" he asked. "How did you even do that?"

"The most direct way possible," said Devastator. "I laid waste to the entire asylum. I consumed it in fire like the pest-house it was. Cell by cell, building by building, I gave them no chance to run, take up weapons, or fight back. I hit them while they were locked away, helpless and alone. It was only fitting. In less than an hour, I destroyed dozens of the worst monsters to ever walk the earth. Crane, Dent, Falcone, Zsasz... criminals responsible collectively for over six thousand counts of murder. But the crowning jewel was Joker himself."

Devastator raised his head slightly, staring up sightlessly into the cavernous void above. "I suppose I should have used a mallet," he said. "But I wasn't fool enough to put myself in arm's reach. So instead I let him burn. I watched him burn. And then I crushed his cell like an egg, buried it in twenty thousand tons of debris, and pulverized the entire building into rubble." A bitter smirk crossed his face. "And what do you know?" he said almost whimsically. "He stopped laughing."

"But - " stammered David, trying to keep himself focused, "but what about the guards... the wardens, the doctors? There must have been hundreds of civilians in Arkham"

"I concentrated on the cellblocks," said Devastator. "Most of the civilians just ran away or hid on remote parts of the island. But some of the guards... well... they tried to stop me."

It took David a second to make the obvious leap. "So... you killed them?"

"I had no choice," said the older man. "They were using lethal force, and you may have noticed that Devastator doesn't have a stun setting. It was them or me."

Horrified, David spoke before he could decide if it was a good idea or not. "What gave you the right to kill innocent people?"

It was not a good idea. Devastator's head shot back down, the cane in his hand flaring up like a bonfire. "What gave me the right?" he asked, sounding incredulous. "You want to talk to me about rights?" He strode towards David, even as David fell back towards the wall.

"Let me ask you a different question, David," said Devastator as he advanced. "Where did I get the rest of my rights? Because I had the right to be beaten. I had the right to be maimed. To have acid poured into my eyes. I had the right to be crippled, and broken, and to have things taken from me. Nobody seemed to object to those rights. But when I finally decided to hit back, then suddenly everyone wanted to talk about rights! Well you know what? Maybe I don't give a damn about who had the right to do what to who! I killed the Joker like the dog he was! I don't regret it for an instant! And if people died trying to stop me from ending the Joker, who had shown time and again that he would kill, and kill, and kill, and kill, until someone put him down, then to hell with them!"

David didn't know what to say to any of that, and so said nothing, as Devastator loomed overhead. For a second, David thought that the older man might blow him up, or strike him with his cane, but slowly he seemed to cool down, withdrawing a pace or two as he did so.

"Not everyone's content to be a victim forever just to assuage the conscience of those who have no understanding of what it feels like to be helpless," said Devastator. "I refused to allow myself to be a statistic. If Joker could hurt me, then I could hurt him right back. Him and everyone like him. And a pox on anyone who tried to stop me. You don't place yourself between the devil and the deep blue sea, and then get to act surprised when you wind up in Hell."

For a time, David and Devastator simply watched one another, staring in silence, as though neither one were willing to break it. At length though, Devastator continued.

"Batman found me in the ruins of the asylum," said Devastator, the fire subdued, his voice quiet, "working over the remnants of the Joker's cellblock." A soft smile. "I think he expected me to fight, but I'd already done what I had come to do, and Batman had no part of that. He made his appearance, and I surrendered. Quietly. And I permitted him to take me to jail."

David watched Devastator with an inscrutable expression. "Jail?" he asked.

"Well he couldn't very well take me to Arkham Asylum, now could he?" asked Devastator, the smile broadening. "Besides, I wasn't insane."

David waited just a moment longer than usual before responding. "You obliterated an entire asylum and killed hundreds of people," he said. "All to take revenge against someone who hurt you."

"No, David," said Devastator, leaning in close, his voice calm like the lull before a hurricane. "I obliterated an entire asylum, and killed hundreds of people, because no one else would. If I hadn't killed the Joker, if I hadn't destroyed Arkham, and slaughtered its inmates, then hundreds of other people, maybe thousands, people who had done nothing but live their lives, would have died. Brutally. That day, a week later, a month, a year, at some point those maniacs were all going to escape again. And neither the police, nor Batman, nor anyone else seemed to be capable or willing to ensure that they did not." He stood back up straight, staring down at David like a headmaster. "Every one of them deserved what they got. No thinking being on Earth would have questioned that. And I do not, for an instant, regret giving it to them."

Fighting to keep his voice calm and his nerves under control, David looked up at his scarred counterpart. "Is that what you told the police?"

"More or less," said Devastator. "They made me speak to doctors and psychologists, who concluded that I was suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder." Another smile. "I guess I can't really argue that one. There was, apparently, a great deal of debate as to whether I was fit to stand trial for my actions, something about whether or not I knew what I was doing was wrong." He sighed. "It was all window-dressing, really. I hadn't done all this just to hide behind the same defence my victims had used."

"So what happened?"

"My case was a sensation. Wiping out half of Gotham's endemic maniacs in one swoop generated attention. Dozens of lawyers lined up to defend me at no charge, just to make their reputations. I got death threats, marriage proposals, requests for interviews from every media personality I'd ever heard of. My case was debated on television and the internet in every permutation." A pause. "To be honest, I was fairly indifferent to it all. Nobody in jail bothered me, they knew what I could do, and I was left alone to think things over. I'd never really planned ahead beyond killing the Joker. I didn't know what I wanted to do." He stopped, this time for longer, but David waited in silence for him to resume.

"Then one day," said Devastator, averting his gaze. "I received a message from someone I'd never heard of. His name was something Arabic-sounding... 'Ras Al Ghul' I think it was, and he claimed to speak for some group called the 'League of Shadows'. He said that he admired my... 'fortitude' he called it. And that he wanted to know if I was willing to assist him. There were, he claimed, a great many people who just as deserving of death as the Joker. People who were in the process of ruining everything they touched. Politicians, industrialists, metahumans, all sorts. His organization was apparently dedicated to the elimination of these individuals, and he was therefore inquiring if I would participate. He claimed that if I agreed, I could look forward to rewards beyond my wildest imaginings."

"And did you?"

Devastator raised his eyes back to meet David's. "No," he said. "Ras Al Ghul was a lunatic. An eco-terrorist who thought mass genocide was the solution to global warming. But his message did make me start to think, because he wasn't entirely wrong. The Joker had hurt me. Two-face, Scarecrow, and the rest of Arkham's inmates had not, at least not directly, and yet I'd killed them, and found after the fact that I felt better having done so. And the reason I felt better, ultimately, was because they were scum. Brutal, thuggish, violent scum, whose very existence upon the Earth brought nothing but misery and death to those unfortunate enough to cross their paths. And while this League of Shadows may have thought everyone was just as awful, there were others who did meet those criteria. I had always known on some level that, even if I managed to evade the charges against me, I was never going to be able to go back to Geolex and stare at soil samples again. I had... declared myself. Crossed the line. I was committed, for better or worse. So one night, thinking these things over, I simply decided to leave."

David blinked. "Leave?" he asked. "What do you mean leave?"

Devastator smiled. "Come, David, you must know that there's no prison in existence that could hold us. Bars and walls and security fences? Even you could punch through any of those without breaking a sweat. My biggest challenge was not accidentally destroying any load-bearing walls. The guards who tried to stop me found that their tasers and guns all mysteriously broke, and anyone brave enough to accost me physically had their truncheons transformed into rocket engines and were pitched through the nearest window. By the time Batman or anyone else could arrive to stop me, I was long gone. They hunted for a while of course, but I hadn't escaped for the purpose of going on a crime spree. I kept my head down, disappeared into the crowd, and they never found a trace."

Devastator stepped back again, this time drawing the packet of cigarettes from his pocket, drawing one out and placing it in his mouth. He produced neither lighter nor matches, yet a second later the tip of the cigarette flared orange of its own accord. As he replaced the pack in his pocket, Devastator drew a deep breath and the burning ember changing to a deep red, before he removed the cigarette from his teeth and blew a stream of smoke into the still air.

"Nine months after Arkham," he said, the burning cigarette tracing a red slash through the air as he gestured with his hand, "a man by the name of Felix Faust surfaced in central Africa. Faust was a sorcerer of some sort, wanted by every national and international police force on the planet, mundane or meta-human. He was in Africa in search of some sort of mystical artifacts he needed to perform a ritual that would, of course, have granted him omnipotent power." He smiled, as though remembering something amusing. "They're always after omnipotent power."

David said nothing, and Devastator continued. "Faust fueled his magical talents by, I'm not making this up, sacrificing the souls of children to dark gods." Devastator's face twisted into a sneer as he spoke on, using the cigarette like a laser pointer as he gestured around him. "The area he appeared in was remote and lawless and filled with people too poor and too unimportant for the world at large to care about. The heroes, or what was left of them, didn't find out about his plan until it was nearly too late, as usual." The sneer became a cruel smile. "But I'd been watching Faust for some time. Following in his footsteps, locating his allies and suppliers. When he finally turned up, the heroes went after him. They claimed they wanted to capture him, put him on trial, imprison him in some kind of corrective facility, because that had worked so well the previous eight times. Unfortunately for them, I got there first."

"What did you do?" asked David, in the voice of one who wasn't certain they wanted the answer.

Devastator's eyes narrowed and his smile vanished. "I did what any reasonable person would," he said. "I slaughtered his minions. I shattered his magical implements. I brought his improvised fortress crashing down around him. And then I dragged him into the center of the nearest town of note and spent the better part of a day running a tractor over his head."

David tried, and failed, to suppress the shudder that ran through him at that clinical description. Devastator merely shook his head.

"If you think that's excessive, David, please bear in mind that you didn't see what I found in that fortress of his."

There was nothing in the world right now that David wanted to know less, than what Devastator had found in the fortress of Felix Faust.

"What does any of this have to do with the Titans?" asked David.

At the question, Devastator did not answer immediately, but smiled and took a half-step back, letting the smoke from his cigarette curl up towards the open ceiling.

"The world of Metahumans is incredibly incestuous," said Devastator. "Everyone is related to everyone else, by blood, by adoption, by kinship, by long association. People change sides, they change affiliations, they connect, they fall apart. Everyone has a connection to everyone else. And not infrequently, the tightest, closest connection is between enemies. The Joker and Batman, Luthor and Superman. Faust was only the beginning. I went after others, hardened murderers, predators, warlords, human smugglers, serial killers, anyone who thought that the rest of the world existed to feed their depraved fantasies. I took down generals and presidents and board chairmen, but my specialty was always Metahumans, and if I made a mistake, it was in underestimating the interconnectivity of their world. Every one of them I killed, every monster I destroyed, every demon I exorcised from the Earth, every one knew someone. They were tied to someone. They had connections with someone, no matter how depraved. And that someone tended to take what I did poorly."

"So who did you kill?" asked David. "Who did you kill that crossed the line? Who brought the Titans down on you?"

Devastator didn't answer, concentrating instead on his cigarette. Slowly, David stood up from the wall, and began to approach him.

"I know the Titans came back," said David, his movements careful but precise. "I watched you fighting them. They got back together and started working as a team again. By then, you were already... what did you call it? A contractor? A killer? But something happened to drive you into the Titans. Something specific. Something that made you hate them. What was it?"

Devastator fell back, slowly, watching the teenager like he was trying to decide between slicing his head off and retreating entirely. David did not let himself think beyond pressing the point.

"Who was it?" he asked. And when he got no response, he repeated the question, loud and commanding.

"Who was it?"

"Who the hell do you think it was?" snapped Devastator at last. "You were a Titan. You know who it was, the only one it could have been! Who was the cancer that ate away at the city that the Titans claimed to protect? The one they refused to dispense with, even when they finally had the opportunity to do so? Who else, David, could it possibly have been?"

David hesitated before the barrage of questions, a thousand names flickering through his head like a rolodex. But one name, one name in particular flared up in his consciousness, one name that seemed always to be at the center of anything debased and diseased. And as David were considering whether or not that were even possible, Devastator answered his own question and removed all doubt.

"It was Slade," said Devastator, staring into David's eyes with the intensity of the mad. "Jump City's prince of darkness. I went after Slade, and for that presumption, everyone died."

O-O-O

Her beams bemocked the sultry main,
Like April hoar-frost spread ;
But where the ship's huge shadow lay,
The charméd water burnt alway
A still and awful red.

O-O-O

Wind tore through Raven's hair and cloak, so much wind that it forced her eyes to slits, blinding her with driven snow and her own freezing tears. It roared in her ears like a savage beast, a steady, unending howl, rising and falling in pitch as she was buffeted and spun by the mad gusts. It drowned out everything, buried it in a mountain of indiscriminate noise, such that she could hear nothing, not even her own voice.

"There is no void deep enough for you to hide from what you have done."

Nothing, save of course for the one thing she would have given everything to drown out.

Free falling, spinning in three dimensions like a leaf in a hurricane, Raven struggled to even find some way of determining what direction was what. Beast Boy, Terra, even the infinite wall of ice that she had leaped from, all had been instantly swallowed up by the storm, leaving her to fall alone in a world comprised entirely of wind and snow. She could not even tell which way was down, so violent were the winds that hurled her this way and that. She could not tell if she was falling or being blown in some other direction.

Which left her alone with her own thoughts, to await whatever might be coming.

"Do you imagine yourself noble?"

Raven closed her eyes. They weren't doing her any good now anyway, and held her hands over her ears. It cut the roar of the wind, albeit only partly, but it did nothing to cut Azar's voice, still as clear as though they were sitting together in a still room.

"Is that what this was? Nobility? Expiation? Did you do it out of pique? To spite me? Poor little girl, beset by unfeeling taskmasters, who had the temerity to demand of her the same things they demanded of everyone else?"

"Stop it," moaned Raven, so soft that she couldn't barely hear herself.

"You were always so eager to have things stop. Didn't I teach you what time really was? Or did you forget that part too?"

"I didn't... forget," said Raven, curling herself into a ball as best she could as the wind carried her about.

"Of course not. You were always too smart for that. So there's another excuse denied you."

"Stop!" shouted Raven. "Just... Stop it, please! I know what I did!"

"Do you? Because you still haven't accepted it. And I wonder if you ever will."

She forced her eyes open, if only to have something to look at, something to experience that wasn't the incessant droning in her head. She was plunging... down? Up? Plunging somewhere with hail driving into her face from every direction like bullets. There was no sense of distance or depth, no timing to it. She did not know if she was going to smash into the ground in ten seconds or two or an hour or fall forever into a bottomless void. And no matter where she turned or spun or looked, she couldn't see anything else.

"Why are you persisting with this infantile tantrum? What, exactly are you looking for at this late hour?"

"Where did you hide him?" she demanded aloud, of the wind perhaps, or the phantasms that haunted her mind.

"Nobody could ever hide anything from you, Raven. You were far too smart for that. Even as a little girl, the only way to deceive you was to convince you to deceive yourself."

"I didn't!"

"Yes, you did. You deceived yourself in the most masterful way possible. And you used your friends to do it."

The winds died all of a sudden, draining away like a tide, and Raven was left to fall, spinning lazily in three dimensions as she grasped with her fingertips for the solid objects she imagined lay just out of reach.

"I told you that Trigon would return. I told you what needed to be done to prevent his ascendancy. You swore to my face that you would do what was necessary when the time came. But when it did come, instead of fulfilling your promise to me, and to the universe at large, you destroyed everything. And you won't even admit to yourself why."

Through the snow-flecked darkness, a soft, blue glow slowly began to build at the dimmest reaches of Raven's vision, like an apparition fading into view, though what it portended, she could not know for certain.

"I know why I did it," she whispered.

"Do you?"

The glow slowly began to brighten, like a fluorescent bulb gradually approaching full power. It might have been some fresh monster, conjured up by Trigon to torture her further, or perhaps the first signs of the infinite field of ice towards which she was supposedly plunging. At this point, she wasn't certain that it mattered any more.

"You were afraid. You were afraid of death. Afraid of pain. Afraid of what might befall you. But instead of facing down your fear as you were taught, you permitted it to consume you, and to deflect you from the task you were given from birth. And for that presumption, all life in the universe will shortly - "

"That's not why!"

The wind picked up again, gusting out of some ill-defined place below and before her, spinning her like a gyroscope over and about.

"That is why. You were a coward, Raven, and that is why you are here."

Squeezing her eyes shut, as tears leaked from their corners, Raven felt the wind buffeting her this way and that. She pulled her arms in, curling up into a ball, barely daring to whisper further.

"I couldn't leave them," she said. "I couldn't..."

"Did you even try?"

"Yes!" she shouted in anguish, her eyes flying open once again, as though she expected some stern accuser to be present before her.

"You don't even believe that. You used their optimism as an excuse, absolving yourself of the need to make hard decisions by fobbing the responsibility for stopping Trigon the Terrible onto a handful of unprepared teenagers. You knew, in your heart of hearts, that they had no prayer of stopping your father. But you acted as though they could do it, because it let you make easy choices."

The bluish glow below her continued to gain in strength, but suddenly the snow stopped entirely, vanishing back into the gloom from whence it had come. And far below her, off to one side, Raven saw a distant object, plummeting down as she was with all the grace of a collapsing lawn chair. Yet as far away as it was, Raven could still make out the colors that cloaked it: purple, and black, and a fine, emerald green.

"And now look what you have wrought upon them."

For the first time tonight, Raven didn't hear what was said, for as soon as her eyes caught a glimpse of green, she turned and dove.

Mid-air gymnastics were not now, nor had they ever been her specialty, but the object was falling uncontrolled, and she had at least rudimentary ability to control her own motion. Gluing her arms to her sides and pointing her head down, she dove into the shimmering gloom, her cloak streaming out behind her as she plunged towards the glimpse of green she had seen. Again and again it vanished, as the fickle light that governed this place played tricks on her. Yet each time it re-appeared again, a little bit closer, a little bit bigger, a little bit removed from where it had been.

"You can never atone for what you have done."

Closer and closer she drew, gaining on the tumbling figure at a maddeningly slow pace. Bursts of wind, conjured up from nowhere, knocked her about over and over, sending her spinning like a top and pushing her away, but every time she righted herself, using her target as a landmark to sight herself in. Her progress was so slight that she felt she might never arrive, yet at the last, another burst of wind flipped them both, sending him spinning towards her. Barely, she managed to presence of mind to stretch out her hands, and grab his arm, before they were both blown away.

Weightless and motionless, Beast Boy lay insensate, spinning and twisting like a rag doll with every puff of wind. Streams of red blood droplets marked his progress down, leaking from dozens of abrasions, cuts and scrapes, some minor, some not. His eyes were closed, and he did not react when Raven grabbed his arm, nor when she pulled herself in to take hold of his belt and shirt. Clinging on for dear life, she shut her eyes against the suddenly angry wind as it threw them about, trying to rip her away from Beast Boy moments before slamming her into him again with tremendous force.

"Stop it!" she shouted, the wind so loud that she couldn't hear her own voice, even at a scream. Yet the person she was talking to heard her just fine.

"Stop it yourself. This is your doing, no one else's."

"I never wanted to hurt him!" she yelled back at the empty wind. "I never wanted any of this!"

"Whatever you wanted, you hurt him worse than you ever could know. To the point where, to retrieve you, he willingly plunged into Hell itself. That too, was your doing."

"No!" she shouted. "I told him there was nothing he could do! I warned them all!"

"And you expected that they would believe you? That he would? How is it possible, Raven, for you to have lived among them for so long and not known what he would do?"

"Yes, I knew! But I tried to - "

"Your disingenuous tries are not in question. You did not do the thing you knew would be effective. You did not leave."

Clinging tightly to Beast Boy's waist, lest the howling gale tear them apart, she could feel, hear, Beast Boy's heart, beating erratically within him, as it pumped more blood out of the thousand tiny breaches in his emerald skin. She could see his eyes moving under his eyelids, feel his muscles twitching uncontrollably, hear his breath, labored and congested, as his lungs fought to keep pumping. All of these things she could feel, see, hear, touch, and yet worse than all of them was the certain knowledge that there had once been a time when she could have fixed everything here with a wave of her hand.

"No," she said, her voice hollow even to her own ears. "I didn't leave."

"And in failing to do so, rendered all of your other excuses null and void. You had the opportunity to save him from this, and you chose not to act. That is why you are here, Raven. That is why you will always be here."

She felt a stinging sensation in her eyes, squeeze them shut though she might, and knotted her fingers into Beast Boy's shirt, holding onto him with the desperation of the damned.

"Then let him go," she said.

"I'm not keeping him here. You are."

Her head shot up, her eyes opening wide. "What?" she shouted into the storm.

"You heard him yourself. He came because of you. He refused his chance to leave because of you. He chose willingly to share your fate. There is nothing more that can be done for him."

"No!"

The last word was not a shout, but a scream, loud enough that she could hear it. Loud enough to echo, despite there being nothing physical to reflect the sound from. Loud enough that the wind died before it, and the snow ceased to blow. Loud enough that, for the first time tonight, she heard no reply at all.

"He came here to save me!" she shouted at nothing. "You don't get to keep him!"

"This is not a slave market. He is here because he chose to be."

"He chose to come after me! Even after all this!"

"He chose to attempt the impossible. He chose to attempt to absolve you."

Still falling freely, her arms locked around Beast Boy's waist, Raven stared off into the abyss as though something there could stare back at her. "Why is that impossible?" she demanded.

"Because the victory you gave to Trigon was decisive and complete. Because there is no hope of redressing the balance."

"No hope," said Raven, still staring emptily into the darkness. The rush of air past her face was quieter than it had been, enabling her to hear Beast Boy's labored breathing much clearer.

"None. The promise of your birth was absolute. It has been achieved. There is no hope."

Slowly, Raven turned her head back to Beast Boy, still twitching as though in the throes of a nightmare. Disjointed thoughts ran through her mind, swirling about her like satellites.

"Then why did he come here?"

"He told you that. He came here because you made him."

"I never made him do anything."

"You bound yourself into his life. Into all their lives. Instead of driving him away, as you were supposed to, you instead allowed him to affix himself to you. You did so with callous disregard for the consequences he would suffer. Is it any surprise that he would chase you into Hell?"

"Maybe not," said Raven, still looking down into Beast Boy's blood-spattered face and shivering features. "But nobody ever made Beast Boy do anything."

"You forged bonds of attachment with him, in full knowledge of what would transpire. The result was easily predictable. Don't pretend otherwise."

"He's not an animal!" she shouted all at once, another roar of defiance echoing off the walls of wind that enclosed her. "He's not some machine who does what he's told! He doesn't just do things because I make him!"

"No, he's not an animal. He's an addict."

"An... addict? Addicted to what?"

"To you. To what little validation you gave him. To the moments of empathy you afforded him. Their rarity only served to make them more precious in his eyes. His addiction, his dependency is what led him here, an addiction you fed, enabled, and shared in. Stop trying to shift the responsibility onto him. You're the only reason any of this happened."

Beast Boy's hands were balled into fists, tight enough to strain the seams of his gloves. His face twitched back and forth, as though he were jerking to escape some terrible pain, which for all Raven knew, was exactly what was happening. A mass of contradictory impulses flooded through her as she watched him, none of which she acted upon. None of which she knew how to act upon.

"If it's all my fault," she said. "If I addicted him to me, and all he's doing is what I made him do, then how come he's here? If I'm responsible, then he didn't do anything wrong. It can't be his fault if it's all mine. He shouldn't be here!"

"And what made you think the universe had to be fair? Surely you know better by now."

The words were contemptuous, mocking, an adult amused by the pretenses of a little child. Yet Raven did not scream or curse or try and command everything to stop. Instead she paused, as something, deep inside the recesses of what had once been her mind, cast a weak, flickering light that she tried, as best she could, to grasp.

"It isn't fair," she said, not a complaint but a statement. "But... you taught me something. Something about this."

"It doesn't matter what I or anyone else said. Nothing matters now except your own culpability."

It was on the tip of her brain, she could feel it trying to burst out. Without thinking, she removed one hand from Beast Boy's shirt and held it to her head, clutching it, trying to force herself to remember the things she wasn't supposed to remember.

"You said..." she stammered, ignoring the winds that suddenly picked back up, roaring in her ears like an engine. "You said that... 'the universe is rarely fair... but always consistent.'"

"And what if I did?"

"It's... it's not..." Her brain was lathered in molasses, requiring herculean efforts just to get from moment to moment, yet she soldiered on regardless. "It's not... consistent, for him to be down here with me. He shouldn't be here. He didn't earn a ticket to Hell. He never did anything to deserve it."

"This is your hell, Raven. Has it occurred to you that he might just be here to torture you further?"

The thought floated around in her mind, and the images that came with it. Nightmares conjured up from her past of Beast Boy roasted alive, mutilated, tortured as an object lesson for her. Images so strong that they seemed to twist into her stomach like live vipers, threatening to drown everything out in a flood of pain and anguish. Yet the flickering light refused to be dowsed, shone on as the tides of fear washed around it, even managing to brighten.

"No," she said. "No... that... that can't be right."

"And why is that?"

"Because... he's here. With me. Before he came here, before he found me, when I was alone and nobody was ever going to come for me, that was Hell. But this... this is something else."

The light inside her grew, in perfect unison with the blue glow still looming up from somewhere far beneath them. Radiating outwards like a crystal in a solution of sugars, it seemed to be enveloping the entire world, faint tendrils spiraling off in random directions. She could not tell if it was growing, or if they were getting closer to smashing into it, but stared down into it as she addressed the phantoms that encircled her.

"He can't just be here to torture me," she said as she shifted around Beast Boy, no longer clinging to him in desperation, but holding onto him securely as though to protect him from something in the darkness that might snatch him away at any moment. "Having him here isn't torture."

"Then he must have earned his way in honestly."

"No!" she shouted, no scream of terror and impotence, but a barked shout, full of anger and refusal. "He couldn't have!"

"How would you know? You can barely remember who you are"

"It doesn't matter who I am! He came here to get me out! He said so."

"And what does that have to do with anything? Perverting the course of justice is a sin in and of itself."

"But only if he knew he was doing it! Only if it was his idea! And you said that he's only down here because I addicted him, and made him come down! It wasn't his fault!"

"Then no doubt he did something else to merit his inclusion. It could be anything at all."

"No it can't!" she shouted again. "He's not like me. He didn't deserve to - "

"You have no idea what he did and didn't deserve! It is not physically possible for you to know. Half-remembered synopses of the brief time you knew him do not suffice to pass judgment! This is Hell. Beast Boy is present. Ergo - "

"Someone made a mistake."

"Only a child as willfully obtuse as you, Raven, could possibly conclude that."

"And only someone as arrogant as you could conclude anything else."

"Arrogance? You would speak of arrogance? You, who conclude that the entire workings of the universe are out of order, because they do not conform to the impressions you half-remember from another life concerning the moral integrity of someone you despised?"

The bluish light from below was enormous now, gnawing at the very fabric of reality, a glow so intense it hurt to look into, yet one that illuminated nothing at all, as though they were plunging towards the heart of some mystic vortex, there to be disintegrated, annihilated, or cast into the endless void of outer space. Raven regarded the notion with equanimity, her thoughts far from this frozen, dessicated place.

"I never despised him," she said.

"But you did not know him. Not well enough to be certain that he didn't belong here."

"I didn't have to."

"How convenient that you alone in the universe are absolved of the need for facts. When did you become God?"

"I'm not God," said Raven, turning back to face Beast Boy's unconscious form. "And maybe I didn't know him as well as I could have. But I know he didn't belong here. Everyone knew that."

"I taught you better than that. Appeal to the Majority? You cannot speak for everyone who ever knew Beast Boy, nor would it matter if you could. He does not become less deserving just because lots of people say he is."

It sounded so final. So clean and logical and tidy, and yet she could feel the brittleness in the voice, the quiver in the logic that governed this pronouncement from on high. And once more she came back to another light, the one inside her, the one that refused to flicker. The one that refused to die.

"Is he?"

"He sits before you, does he not?"

"But what if he's not in Hell at all?"

"Have you lost your sense of sight? Is he or is he not in front of - "

"What if I'm not in Hell?"

For a second, though she might have been imagining things, Raven thought she heard the wind itself hesitate.

"Maybe I did deserve to be punished," she said, feeling something inside her starting to roll, like stones on a mountain slope. "Maybe I deserved to be stranded in Hell. And maybe even he did too." She looked around, at the bright blue glow that now encircled them, growing more and more intense by the second. "But who says that's where we are?"

"Where else could you possibly be?"

"I don't know," she said. "But if this was Hell, how could he have gotten into it? Even if I addicted him? Even if he wanted to? You said it was created to punish me. Since he got here, it hasn't been punishment. Hell wouldn't have even let him in!"

"You're awfully certain of the rules of Hell."

She ignored the remark. "Who could have put him in Hell?" she asked. "Who could have put either of us in Hell?"

"Did you forget that your father is the Devil?"

"And what if he is? He can't judge who deserves to be in Hell, he's evil incarnate! He doesn't understand anything else. He can't judge us."

"Says who?"

"Says you! You said we deserve to be down here. You said I'm here because I deserve to be. How could Trigon ever tell that? He doesn't understand guilt or innocence or justice or punishment! He doesn't care about those things, all he understands is pain and evil!"

"Didn't I teach you not to make assumptions? If Trigon could not put you here, then perhaps it was someone else."

"You taught me more than that," said Raven, feeling the strength of the gathering avalanche within her. "You taught me Occam's Razor."

This time the hesitation was obvious and prolonged, as though the wind had been stunned to silence, and needed time to recover.

"You are clutching at straws, trying to convince yourself that - "

"The simplest explanation is usually right!" shouted Raven, drowning out the voice. "You taught me that! What's simpler? That Trigon put me here to suffer just because he's Trigon, or that someone else decided I deserved to go to Hell, created one just for me, and then for some reason let Beast Boy into it?"

"Why do you care? You are in this place. Does it matter what the reasons are?"

"It matters," she said. "It matters to me. It matters because if I'm not here for what I did, then this isn't Hell."

"This is Hell. And you are both where you belong."

It was like the pronouncement of a judge or an angelic arbiter, thunderous and bombastic, a pronouncement riven with authority and malice that could damn entire nations to the flames. Yet as the glow around her reached a blinding intensity, and the avalanche within raged out of all control, she felt a blissful certainty passing over her, and held to Beast Boy as tightly as she could as she spoke words she knew to be anathema.

"He doesn't belong here," she said.

"You cannot know that! It is not your place to - "

"We don't belong here."

"IT IS NOT YOURS TO DECIDE WHO BELONGS WHERE!"

Unable to keep her eyes open any longer, Raven slid them shut, holding Beast Boy around his waist and laying her head against him as she whispered, at last, the words she had not even dared before to think.

"I don't belong here."

And then there was silence.

The silence was almost deafening, nerve-draining. As though nothing in the world existed any longer, save for the feel of Beast Boy on her arms and cheek. She could not hear the wind, nor her own breathing, nor Beast Boy's, nor feel any sensation of movement any longer. Yet she did not open her eyes, and did not release her hold on Beast Boy, until at length, bit by bit, she began to become aware of a new sensation, worming its way in from the very edge of her consciousness.

Heat.

Nervously, reluctantly, Raven opened her eyes, and saw red.

The entire world was red. Red and grey and black where the fires had scorched something to cinder. Red glows filled the sky from horizon to horizon. Red flames licked at ruins and burnt-out cars. Red seas of bubbling magma loomed large in the distance, lapping hungrily at the shore and radiating the tremendous heat that now swirled around her.

Beast Boy lay on his back, motionless save for his breathing, slow and quiet. He showed no signs of waking. Raven was kneeling on the bare ground beside him, rough asphalt under her knees, with no wind but a soft, leaden breeze that barely sufficed to shift her cloak. All about lay the incinerated remnants of cars, houses, streetlights and telephone poles, silent and unjudging. And aside from a low, ambient roar from fires burning in some distant place, she could, at least briefly, hear neither wind nor voices.

"You know, you're absolutely right."

A shadow fell over the immediate area, the ambient red light snatched away almost as soon as it had arrived. Raven turned her head in time to see an enormous block of cracked stone descending from the scorched skies like a chariot of the gods. Wrapped in a field of golden light, the stone held perfectly level, and the thin girl standing upon it, gray of skin and red of eye, grinned as she stared down at Raven and Beast Boy, one hand lifted and closed as though grasping invisible reins.

"You didn't belong there," said Terra. "You belong here. In the middle of the city you destroyed, along with all the people you killed."

Terra swept her arm broadly across the area, and moments later, an entire army of statues, men, women, children, all carved from the same black volcanic rock, emerged from the ruins of buildings and cars, each one cloaked in golden light and dragged towards Raven and Beast Boy as though by magnetism. The statues advanced to within thirty feet and there they stopped, rank upon rank of figures so lifelike as to defy the art of sculpture, each one's face contorted in expressions of terror, pain, and panic. Terra waited patiently until the last row was in place, before turning back once more to the unconscious shape-shifter and the little girl crouched beside him.

"I think it's only fitting that they should get to watch, don't you?"

O-O-O

Beyond the shadow of the ship,
I watched the water-snakes :
They moved in tracks of shining white,
And when they reared, the elfish light
Fell off in hoary flakes.

O-O-O

"Slade was a monster. Even death didn't stop him the first time. If anything, it made him worse. He was so evil that Hell wouldn't keep him. You are one of the few in a position to know that I'm telling the truth."

"I never knew Slade," said David. "Not before all this."

"But your friends did. You trust them, right? What did they have to say about him? What did you see him do with your own two eyes? Under Trigon's orders or not, you looked him in the eye and saw him enjoying it. Cities laid waste, civilians burned to death, you know what Slade was. And the Titans wouldn't stop him."

"Bullshit," said David. "The Titans never stopped trying to stop him!"

"Oh they'd fight him, sure!" snapped Devastator dismissively. "Every time he showed his head, they'd run out and raise seventeen kinds of hell trying to push him back down into the hole he'd crawled from. But he'd always come out to play again. No matter what they locked him inside, no matter how badly they dismantled his robot army or undid his so-called brilliant plan, he always came back. And every time he did, more people died."

"So you decided to kill him?"

"Of course I did. When the Titans first returned, I was glad to see them. I thought, whatever their opinions on me and my business, they might help suppress some of the lower level criminal activity that was infesting most of the world. Lord knew that Jump City needed help, and I couldn't be everywhere. But they always refused to put Slade down for good, and finally I couldn't ignore him anymore. I tracked him for months, followed every lead, investigated every sighting. I dealt with half a dozen traps and ambushes that he laid for me, from Greenland to the Atacama Desert, and finally, finally, I managed to corner him inside a secret base he had built in a remote part of India." Devastator stopped, clenching his hand around his cane's handle, squeezing his eyes shut as he fought to keep his temper in check from whatever his memory was dredging up. "And it would have gone perfectly well," he said at last, "if I had been the only one tracking him."

David said nothing.

"I..." said Devastator, no longer confident, no longer cold, his voice coming in fits and starts through his teeth. "I'd had very little interaction with any heroes before that. Once in a while some third-tier costume-wearer would decide to make his reputation by bringing down the 'Devastator', and I'd just leave him stew under a pile of rubble or some such. I knew who the Titans were, of course, but I hadn't ever even considered I might encounter them like this. They arrived just as I was finishing my work. Slade was beaten, his fortress was in ruins, and I was preparing to administer the coup-de-grace."

"What happened?"

Devastator's head slumped forward, as his knuckles went white around the handle of his cane. "I'd never met them before," he said, "but they knew me, by reputation if nothing else. And they knew what I was here to do. Nightwing told me in no uncertain terms that I was not going to be allowed to kill Slade." Devastator lifted his head again, and this time, violent anger was written all over his maimed features. "I tried to talk sense into them. Slade had attacked a cruise liner with his robots, killed seventy people and kidnapped half a dozen others. But age only made Nightwing more stubborn. Not only was I to be denied my just reward for having broken Slade, but he brought up the international warrants I had on me for the murder of various murderers. Nothing I said made a dent on any of them. They insisted that Slade be allowed to live. I insisted that he not. So we fought." The blank eyes seemed to darken. "And I lost."

David rasied an eyebrow. "I thought you never lost."

The sarcasm took effect instantly, as Devastator turned his glowering face on David. "Does this look like the face of someone who never lost a battle?" he asked, gesturing to his scarred visage. "Is your victory percentage something to brag about? You, who lost to Cinderblock, lost to Terra, lost to Slade, and lost to Trigon?"

"But you said - "

"There were four of them!" shouted Devastator angrily, drowning out David's question. "Four trained, expert heroes, four people I had never in my life expected to encounter at blade's end! How do you think I beat Faust, or Slade, or all the others I killed? I did my goddamn homework. I knew exactly what I was getting into in every instance, powers, vulnerabilities, angles of potential attack. But then the Titans blindsided me. I had no idea what they were capable of, let alone how to fight them off. All I had was blind, blunt force trauma, against an entire team of A-listers who specialized in bringing down metahumans." He shivered, as though the world around had just turned cold. "And I was no metahuman."

"Yes you are," said David

"No I am not," snapped Devastator back, "and neither are you! I was a normal person with a powerful weapon, not some damned juggernaut made of steel! They came at me like they were trying to tear down a skyscraper. Magic, claws, missiles, they hit me with everything. Reduced me to ruins. It didn't take them thirty seconds."

David let Devastator wait for a moment before commenting. "But they didn't kill you," he said.

"No," said Devastator with a cold glare. "Of course not. They were bette rthan me, weren't they? They didn't kill me, just mashed me into a pulp. Broke my arms, shattered my ribs, fractured my skull, pulverized me with soundwaves and rocket-bombs and every other thing until I was a mangled, broken wreck, then scraped me off the ground and dragged me back to the Hague to stand trial for a hundred and eight counts of premeditated murder. And while they slapped me into a hospital so that I could be patched back together enough to face the court, they locked Slade away in some specialty prison for metahumans. The same one I was destined for once they got the formality of my trial out of the way. For the crime of having stopped Slade's master plan and destroyed his army, my reward was to be treated exactly as he was, worse even. Slade didn't need six months before he could walk again."

"That's crap," said David. "You said they charged you with murder, not assault. It wasn't about Slade. It was for Joker, wasn't it? And Faust and Two-Face and everyone else you killed."

"Yes," said Devastator. "That was nominally the charge. But the real crime was showing them up. What were they? Vigilantes all, no backing in law, no official position, just meta-humans who chose to act. And they somehow thought that they had the right to condemn me because I had done the exact same thing, but hadn't conformed to their rules? Because I wasn't sanctioned by the Justice League or Batman or whoever had declared themselves the ultimate arbiters of our world?"

"That's not why they came down on you," said David. "And you know it! They charged you because you were killing people. And not just murderers and killers. You admitted that you killed the guards who tried to stop you at Arkham. How many others were there that didn't do anything?"

"Dozens," thundered Devastator, "but how did that make me different than the rest of the heroes? How many people did they kill by omission? Every recidivist psychopath they permitted to walk on among the rest of us, every murderer they slapped on the wrist and tossed into a holding cell for a few days, every massacre they allowed to occur because some thrill-killer claimed that he'd reformed, whose fault were those? Three months after India, Slade broke loose from that prison of theirs, and killed fifty-seven people before he was stopped, every one of whom would have been alive if I'd been permitted to finish Slade off! Who stood up and took responsibility for that? Who was dragged before the docket and made to answer in a court of law to the deaths of fifty-seven civilians? Nobody! Because nobody, least of all the Titans, gave a damn about the law when it came time to answer for their own actions! When they confronted me in that base in India, did they try and argue the matter? Did they sit down and try to convince me they were right? Of course not. They used powers and weapons and raw strength to force me to comply with them. Because brute force was the only mandate they ever had."

"Really?" asked David. "And what mandate did you have?"

"None at all," said Devastator. "Save the mandate of self-defence."

"You hunted people down and assassinated them in self-defence?" demanded David, his voice making it clear what he thought of the notion.

"A man's home is his castle," said Devastator. "And he has the right to defend it. The whole world was my castle. I had as much right as the Titans to fight in its defence, as I saw fit. The heroes hadn't stopped me from being victimized. They hadn't stopped thousands of others. Whether they couldn't do it or wouldn't do it was irrelevant. Unlike the other victims, I had the means to step up and hit back, and I did so. And for having dared as much, they beat me within an inch of my life, and let my intended target walk free to commit more evil. You can dress that up in any rhetoric you like, David, lecture me about rights and rehabilitation and collateral damage until you're blue in the face. Those fifty-seven people still died. And they died because I wasn't allowed to prevent it."

David said nothing, and after a moment's pause, Devastator offered one more statement.

"And in case you're wondering, that was when I decided to kill the Titans."

A soft wind, colder than the surrounding air, whistled through the ruined shopping mall as Devastator and David faced one another. Devastator seemed to be waiting for David to offer a comment, but David did not do so until some time had passed.

"You're full of crap," said David.

Devastator didn't even blink. "Really?" he asked.

"Completely," said David. "And you know it, too. This isn't about death by omission or the ethics of murder. That's all a bunch of justifications you came up with after the fact. This is about you and the Titans. They hurt you, and you wanted to hurt them back. That's all it ever was. All this... this bullshit about necessary measures and hypocrisy, that's just you and your head inventing ways for everything to not be your fault."

David rather expected another angry tirade, but what he got instead was nothing at all, no reaction, not a twitch of an eye, Devastator seemed to hang in place. And then slowly, he lowered his hands to his sides, letting the cane tap down on the ground softly.

"Is that so?" asked Devastator.

David paused in turn, but only for an instant. "Yeah," he said.

Devastator took a slow breath, holding it in for several moments, the cigarette forgotten in his hand. "Well then," he said, "let me demonstrate something."

The words were ominous enough, but rather than unleash mass destruction, Devastator turned away from David and began to walk towards the edge of the rotunda.

"Did you know that these people are all still alive?" asked Devastator.

The question was so incongruous that David didn't immediately understand what Devastator was saying. "What?" he asked.

"These people," said Devastator, and he gestured with the end of his cane towards the silent statues that ringed the rotunda, men and women and children clutching one another in the last throes of abject terror. "These statues. They're not dead."

"What are you talking about?" asked David, chancing a step forward, as a chill ran down his spine, cause indeterminate.

"Trigon's the physical embodiment of evil," said Devastator. "Evil. Not death. Death is no picnic, don't get me wrong, but there are far worse things in the universe. An eternity of torment and pain, for instance. Trigon could break this planet in half if he wanted to, but that would leave him with nobody to torture except for a handful of bull-headed teenagers. So instead, he decided to lock every living soul on the planet up in a prison of stone, where they could be tortured for all time."

His fear temporarily forgotten, David stepped forward, his head beginning to spin. "They're... they're still alive?" he asked.

"They're watching us right now," said Devastator, as he approached a small clump of the statues. A woman stood huddled against the wall, holding a little girl protectively in her arms, shielding her as best she could against some unfathomable horror lurking just behind. Both figures' faces were contorted in terror, unblinking and frozen for all time. "They can hear us, see us, everything we do or say. They've been watching this whole escapade."

David's eyes were drawn inexorably to the perfectly preserved faces of the statues before Devastator, to their expressions of terror and pain, their mouths open to scream inaudible cries. "Why are you telling me this?" he asked.

"So that you understand my full meaning," said Devastator. And then he raised his cane.

A thunderous, terrible explosion tore through the empty shopping mall, as loud and as unexpected as a bolt of lightning on a cloudless day. There had been louder blasts today, fuel tankers raining from the sky and frozen gasses transformed into sub-nuclear detonations, but this one was all the louder for its sheer unexpectedness. And in the split second it took David's nerves to transmit the signal to flinch at the sound of the blast, he saw the stone statue of the little girl in the woman's arms fly to pieces in a flash of fire and smoke.

He lurched forward, unconsciously, his body having realized what had just happened before his brain did, his eyes wide, his hand fumbling for the broken staff at his side. Yet before he could so much as conjure a noisemaker, Devastator pivoted back and threw out his open hand towards him, fingers splayed like an archwizard's. The ground burst at David's feet like an overripe fruit, hurling him back into the wall and down onto the broken floor beneath it. His head spinning, David tried to scramble back to his feet, but he had managed to rise only to his hands and knees before Devastator's voice arrested him.

"Stop right there," bellowed Devastator, not a request but a command, and David raised his head to see Devastator's burning cane pointed at him like a rifle. "Stop," repeated Devastator, "and think a moment. Think about what just happened."

It was impossible not to, and despite the injunction, David clambered back to his feet. The silent stone fragments of the little girl lay scattered all over the floor of the rotunda. Just looking at them brought bile to David's throat.

"I'm gonna kill you," he said, largely before he could even think about it.

"No, you're not," said Devastator in a voice of absolute certainty. "You can't kill me, and that's the entire reason we're standing here." He swung his cane back towards the smashed statue. "How did that come about?"

David blinked at Devastator like he was watching the ravings of a madman. "What the hell is wrong with you?" he shouted.

"How did that happen?" demanded Devastator, the cane's flames flaring up between his fingers.

"How did - " stammered David, "you killed her!"

"Yes!" shouted Devastator. "And how is it that I was able to do that?"

Whatever lingering sense David had of what was going on here deserted him. He stood with his mouth half-open, unable to conjure up the necessary words. Devastator did not wait for them to appear.

"A six year old girl," thundered Devastator. "Innocent of any wrongdoing. Petrified and tortured and then murdered in cold blood. How the hell did that happen? Six thousand years of civilization, all of it built specifically to ensure that something like that could not possibly happen, ever. And yet here we stand!" He drove the cane down back into the ground like a railroad spike. "Where was everyone? Where were her protectors? The ones we painstakingly created and appointed to watch over her? Where were the police? Where was the army? Where were the heroes? Where was God? Every defence created by generations of men, and all I had to do was walk over here and blast her to ribbons!"

David didn't answer vocally. In a single, swift move, he tore the staff fragment from his side and blasted a section of the wall free with it, hurling it at Devastator like a cannonball. But Devastator thrust out his cane like a crucifix before a vampire, and the masonry fragment exploded into a thousand pieces, the blast channeled back towards David, knocking him against the wall once more, this time hard enough to empty his lungs and send him crashing to the ground, doubled over and struggling to breathe.

"Awful, isn't it?" said Devastator, approaching slowly with the cane aimed directly at David's head. "That terrible chill that settles into your stomach and won't go away no matter what you do? All you can see when you close your eyes is the sight of the atrocity right in front of you, and not even Devastator can blast it out of your head."

His throat and chest still burning, David swung his staff fragment upwards, tossing fist-sized pieces of rubble at Devastator like cannonballs. But Devastator batted them aside almost contemptuously, and then flicked the tip of his cane down. An instant later, the floor bucked like a living thing, bouncing David three feet into the air and dropping him flat on his face and stomach like a boned fish.

"What's the matter?" asked Devastator, letting just a hint of mockery into his voice. "Are you upset? Did I just offend you?"

"You sick, twisted- "

"I've got twists to me you can't even fathom," said Devastator. He crouched down, leaning on his cane for support, staring David in the face as the younger teen managed to push himself to his hands and knees. "Consider what's running through you right now," he said. "The rage, the injustice, the frustration at having borne witness to something that shouldn't by rights have been possible in the first place. Dwell on that, and then multiply it by thousands and tens of thousands. Do all that, and maybe, maybe, you'll start to understand."

"Understand what?"

"Piles of bodies" spat Devastator. "Literal piles. The lucky ones with their throats slashed, the unlucky ones burnt, or mutilated, or subjected to a quaint custom called 'necklacing'. All kinds of course, but the children were the hardest to live with. Eight-year-olds with their skulls split open, whipped to death with barbed wire, starved intentionally, hacked to pieces on a black altar." He gestured back towards the shattered statue with his free hand. "I spent the better part of a decade seeing children like that. Children nobody gave a damn about. Because they were poor. Or brown. Or had been taught to worship the wrong god."

"That's not true," insisted David, as he got back to his feet. "I know the Titans, they wouldn't ever just let people die like that, whoever they were. They killthemselves just to keep kids safe."

"Then why were those kids dead?" asked Devastator, standing up and spreading his arms wide. "And the Titans still alive?" He stood before David like a prosecuting attorney, his blank eyes wide and fierce, as though expecting an answer. "Why is this one dead, when heroes like yourself still draw breath to defend her? Explain it to me, David, and I'll run this sword through my own chest, right here in front of you."

David stared back up at his counterpart, not daring even to blink.

"I can't," he choked.

"No," said Devastator, "you can't. Nobody could." He stepped forward, looming over David like an animate shadow, his voice shaking with emotion. "So don't tell me about what it was I really wanted from the Titans, or who I was trying to fool. You think I just wanted to get back at the people who hurt me? What they did to me was a traffic violation compared to what else I was getting back at them for. I killed the Titans for the thousands, and the tens of thousands of kids they let die because they were too busy punishing me for trying to stop their murderers the only way I knew how. I killed them for their hypocrisy. I killed them for all the sins of omission they committed in a career supposedly dedicated to protecting the innocent. For all those reasons, I slaughtered them all."

He stood directly before David now, close enough to see the scars on his face, illuminated in great detail by the ambient light of David's blood-red eyes. "And if you still think I'm overstating the matter," he said, "or trying to cover my own selfishness, then, I've only got one question for you."

Carefully, almost regally, he bent down towards David, a tower of unassailable power and anger, his white formless eyes glowing like diamonds in the preternatural twilight.

"I held the Titans responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of children," he said. "What were your first words to me, when I killed one?"

For a heartbeat, for an endless heartbeat, David remained where he was, his head bowed, unwilling or unable to meet the gaze or the question of his towering alter ego. But when he finally did raise his head, his expression was empty and dark, his eyes dead as they poured a cold light onto the scarred man who loomed above him.

"You tell me," he said. And then he raised his hand.

Devastator was plainly expecting an attack, or its facsimile, some last-ditch gesture of defiance from a child finally pushed to his breaking point. It was what he had seen from David all night long. It was what he was no doubt anticipating once again, a rock thrown, a bomb hurled his way, some flash of Devastator's handiwork projected at him in a burst of anger.

What he received was nothing of the sort.

Behind Devastator, there came the sound of explosives, but not the titanic, weapons-grade blasts that he and David had been conjuring against one another. These were mere firecrackers, loud pops like the sound of a car backfiring heard at some distance remove, several dozen of them in quick succession, like kernels of popcorn all bursting at once.

Devastator seemed to pause, waiting for the punch line as it were, but the sounds were followed by nothing but the soft scurry of pebbles skittering over the broken floor. Slowly, his expression turned to puzzlement, he raised himself back up, and turned his head to see what childish foolery David could possibly have gotten to this time. But one look, one momentary glance was all it took to freeze him in place like a sculpture writ of ice.

The statues behind Devastator were gone. Every one of them. And in their place, there was nothing left but crushed, pulverized rubble.

Devastator did not move. He did not even seem to breathe. He stood, motionless, as though David's very existence had just been blotted from his memory, staring like the living dead at an empty rotunda where moments before there had stood the inanimate shapes of over fifty men, women, and children. The flames that danced about his cane withered and died, as he stared uncomprehendingly, his only motion a slow pan as he swept his crippled vision across the broken scene. Only at length did he finally remember that David was there, and slowly turn his head back towards him, his expression one of bewilderment, shock, and something that might even have been horror.

Standing now against the wall, David's voice was cold and clinical as he locked his blood-red eyes on Devastator's blind ones.

"Your move."

O-O-O

And the coming wind did roar more loud,
And the sails did sigh like sedge ;
And the rain poured down from one black cloud ;
The Moon was at its edge.

O-O-O

"I told you that I would find you."

There was nowhere to go. The walls were armored with two and a half feet of solid steel, designed to take as much abuse as all six of the Titans were capable of dishing out collectively. And the only way out was blocked by —

"Trogarr..." she said, the name falling off her tongue like a fifty-pound barbell. "You... cannot be here."

"I can be anywhere, Princess," said the alien in the doorway. "Anywhere in all the universe. Including this place."

"But you... you died," said Starfire. "You... I watched you die."

"Be fair, Princess," said the alien, with a reserved smile. "I did not die. I was murdered."

He stepped into the room, the door sliding shut behind him with barely a whisper, yet it sounded like the slamming of prison bars.

"I didn't expect to find you here," he said. "I thought you'd have run for somewhere less obvious."

"This is my home," said Starfire. "I would not leave it."

"Your home is the Citadel. I have a treaty signed in royal ink to prove it."

"You have a bill of sale!" she shouted, "signed in desperation under threat of genocide! You have —"

"I have the signed word of the King and Queen of Tamaran," he said. "Your opinions on the politics that led to it do not interest me. It says you belong with us. With me."

"I will not go with you!"

"You are already with me," he said, stepping towards her with a leering grin. "Or did you think your coterie of playmates would keep you safe from my reach?"

He advanced towards her, step by easy step, and slowly she backed away from him, drawing them both towards the center of the enormous room.

"Do you remember the fun times we used to have?" asked Trogarr, and when she could not answer him, he continued alone. "I remember them well. You were the reason I enjoyed my work so much. I can't possibly tell you how dreary the Citadel is without you there."

Something cold and slimy knotted itself around her insides, and she shot him almost without thinking, her starbolt burning three times brighter than any she had contrived to launch before. Yet it melted into him like rain being absorbed by a sponge, and he did not even slow his pace.

"Those won't be of much help, Princess," he said. "Remember, I know all your little tricks. I taught you most of them."

"Leave me be!" she yelled as he closed in, scrambling to her feet and withdrawing before him. "I will not be your... subject again!"

He smiled. "Oh yes you will," he said. "That's all you'll ever be, Koriand'r." He reached behind himself, and drew forth a thin, steel wand, covered in a dense network of circuitry and topped by a pair of glowing electrodes. And Starfire had only enough time to take in those elemental facts about the object before she realized what it was she was looking at, and then her conscious mind imploded.

Trogarr grinned, reading the recognition in her eyes. "And I have such marvelous things to show you," he said. And then he thumbed a switch.

And Starfire screamed.

She screamed like she had not screamed in years. Screamed so loudly that the walls shook from the force of it, and staggered back into the wall, clutching her hands to the sides of her head with the intensity of a madman. The sheer noise reflecting off the walls was deafening, but the alien did not relent, extending the wand with his arm and slowly sliding the switch up with one finger.

"We shared so much, Princess," said Trogarr as Starfire fell screaming to her knees, pitching forward onto the ground and ripping furrows in it with her fingertips. "So much pain, disappointment, frustration, and yet it made our triumphs all the sweeter, didn't it?" He stood over her, sliding the switch up, up, up, even as Starfire writhed on the ground like a serpent, beams of coherent light emitting from her eyes and burning random patterns in the ceiling and walls. "We cast aside the boundaries of the universe and produced something unique. I could never have accomplished all that I did without you, and you..." a cruel smile crossed his face, "... you would not even exist without me."

The switch reached its zenith, the electrodes on the tip of the wand sparking with lightning, and Starfire's screams graduated from abject to incoherent. She arched her back, her body twisting into impossible contortions as she beat her hands against the ground so hard that one of her bracers shattered. Trogarr stood and watched, lowering the wand to one side, closing his eyes and drinking up the sound of Starfire screaming in agony, before at long last, his finger slid the switch back down to the base, and the screaming stopped.

As the echoes died out, Starfire lay prostrate on her side, half-curled about herself, her body trembling like a leaf on the wind. Tears ran down her face and pooled beneath her head as her breath came in choked sobs. She made no effort to rise, escape, or even to acknowledge the enormous alien that stood over her, not even when Trogarr crouched down over her and lightly laid his clawed hand on her shoulder.

"My little Koriand'r," said Trogarr, running his claws up and down her arm. "My fountain of miracles. This little rebellion of yours was never going to last forever. You knew that."

"No..." she sobbed.

"Hush," whispered Trogarr, his voice almost soothing. "You knew. Deep inside, you knew these humans could never shelter you. This... adolescent fantasy of yours was nothing more than a season's intoxication. I don't even blame you for it. But it's time to return to where you belong."

"N... no..." repeated Starfire, her voice barely loud enough to hear. "I w... I will not..."

"Oh... you will," said Trogarr. "Not because of this device. Not even because of the politics. Ultimately, you're going to come back with me because the Citadel is everything you know. You see, you can tell people that Tamaran was your home. You can recite the language, play-act at the customs, it doesn't matter. When you first came to me, you were nothing but a little girl, and the only Tamaran you know is the one you cobbled together from imagination and a few dim memories. The one you used to tell me about because you thought it would delay our sessions. The one that you know never even existed."

Curled tightly into a ball on the floor, Starfire clenched her teeth and fists and tried, weakly, to throw off the Trogarr's hand, to no avail. She was beyond words, beyond denials, beyond anything but memory and pain, the two blending to form a barrier that nothing but Trogarr's voice could penetrate.

"The Citadel is your home, Koriand'r," said Trogarr. "And I am your only family. Not these pathetic humans, not the royals who gave you away to suit themselves. I am the only one who cares at all about you, who wants you to become everything you could be, the only one who can make you into everything you could be."

His touch was like acid on her skin, making her flesh crawl with the very sensation, but she could not throw him off, could not fight back, and no matter how much she gritted her teeth and tried to will her away, his touch remained very real, and his scent, and his quiet, horrible voice.

"Now," he said. "You will come with me. Or I will make up for three years of lost time right here, and then reduce this planet to ash. You may have chosen to pretend that I would never come back, but I know you remember the consequences of — "

She did not sense the door to the training room opening. She did not see Trogarr turning to see who it was. She did not even feel him withdrawing his claw to reach for some new tool of devilry. But she did hear a single word, in a voice she would have known from the other side of death itself, and hearing it told her everything she needed to know about what was going to happen in the next five seconds.

"Starfire!" came the voice of Robin. And no sooner had Starfire heard it than she became someone else altogether.

She opened her mouth, but what emerged from it was neither scream nor shout nor war cry nor any other thing for which there existed discrete words. What emerged from Starfire's mouth and lungs was a guttural, loathsome howl of pain and fear and formless, pitiless rage that tore through her like electricity. She could not see, for the tears blinded her, and could not hear, for her own roar deafened her. Yet she knew where Trogarr was, and where Robin had to be, and what he would to do to him and to her, and knowing these things broke open a dam of memory so painful that it could not be contained, but exploded from her like a volcano. And without discrete intent or calculation, she sprang up from the floor at Trogarr, who turned back to her just in time to see her leap, and struck him full in the face with such force that they were both hurled through the air a dozen yards.

Trogarr landed on his back, Starfire crouched atop him, and he snarled, his teeth bared, and reached up to seize Starfire by the throat. But before he could do anything of the sort, utter a threat or strike a blow, Starfire grabbed at his other hand, the one that had fallen within reach, and snatched from it the ultrasonic pain inducer, the one she remembered from so many years' worth of punishment and that he had painstakingly calibrated on her for months. His favorite toy. Lifting it high into the air with one hand, she reversed her grip, and before Trogarr could so much as cry out, Starfire plunged all eighteen inches of the slender metal wand straight into the alien's throat.

There was a squishing noise, and then a hollow thunk as the electrodes struck the ground beneath them, and Starfire saw Trogarr's eyes shoot open wide. He opened his mouth, but no sound emerged, as he pawed helplessly at his throat with both hands. Starfire however, did not stop to relish these things, ripping the inducer free before driving it into him again and again and again, screaming as she did so loud enough to shake the room, even as starbolts poured from her other hand and beams of coherent energy from her eyes. Ten, twenty, fifty times she drove the makeshift dagger down, until it was nothing but a sparking, twisted piece of metal, and Trogarr's body a lifeless mass of sizzling pulp, yet still she could not stop, pounding the wet floorplates with her fists until they buckled, beating her own hands bloody as her cries progressively melted into sobs. Only when she could no longer lift her arms did she finally stop, falling to her hands and knees and shaking, weeping, barely able to prevent her seven stomachs from voiding their contents all over the floor.

It was a long, long time before Starfire realized that someone was shouting her name.

She lifted her head, sat up, turned, and saw Robin. He was standing at the doorway, his uniform singed and torn, his skin bruised and cut, but intact, and alive, and utterly, utterly dumbstruck. A birdarang was in his hand, wings extended and primed for throwing, but he seemed to have forgotten it. He seemed to have forgotten everything, his eyes, wide even behind his mask, fixed like nails on the sight of Starfire sitting amidst the gore of the alien she had just brutally murdered.

"... Starfire?" he managed to say.

Tears still fogging her eyes, her hands shaking like the rest of her body, Starfire could not think of what to say or do. Sobs still sought to claw their way out of her throat, leaking past her broken defenses every so often as she sat in the midst of her own handiwork. At length, all she could say was the only thing she could think of.

"R... Robin..."

Saying his name seemed to break some kind of spell, and Robin carefully entered the room, keeping his distance as he plainly tried to process what he was seeing, and failed to. "Star... are... what did you — "

"I... I did not..." What could she say? What could anyone say? She looked down and saw her clothes and skin covered in blood, her own mixed with her victim's. Back to Robin she turned, her mouth working silently as she tried to find something, anything she could use to explain away what had just happened. "I..."

"Oh my god..." Now Robin sounded afraid. He'd had enough time to process what he was seeing, and was beginning to consider what it meant. What was running through his head right now, she could not guess but did not have to. Never before, not even in the depths of the worst crises to haunt the Titans, had any of them ever taken the life of another being. It was a rule so pervasive as to go unwritten and unspoken, so obviously beyond the pale of everything the Titans stood for. And now here she was, and there Robin was, and what they were to do now she did not know, and plainly neither did he.

"He was my jailer," she said, still shaking so badly that her voice quivered too, coughing the words out between sobs. "He was the one the Gordanians set to experiment upon me. He... tortured me... for years... and told me that he... he was the only one who... would ever... would ever... love — "

"Star," said Robin, and he stepped closer to her, his surprise slowly fading. "Star... please..."

Her coherence deserted her. "I did... I did not mean to... I did not... I... he was going to... to..."

"Star!" said Robin, kneeling down in front of her, heedless of the blood that soaked his pants. He reached out gently with his free hand and took her by the shoulder, standing up and pulling her with him to her feet. Blood dripped from her hair and ran down her neck as she stood, looking into Robin's half-obscured face, trying to read anything from it, and trying even harder not to collapse entirely.

"It's..." said Robin, "it's... all right Star. It's all right. I..." a hesitant look at the mutilated body behind them, "I... it's all right."

"Robin..." she said, and she half-stepped, half-fell forward, wrapping one arm around him and holding onto him like a life preserver, the other dangling at her side, still clutching the broken inducer, the murder weapon from a moment ago.

She felt the hesitation in Robin, felt his fear, his reservation, his doubt. Yet he held her too, wrapping both arms around her and simply holding her as she cried into his shoulder. "It'll be all right, Starfire," he said. "I... I understand. And I won't... I won't tell the others. I won't tell anyone. It'll all be all right."

The sobs melted away, and with them the shivering and the fog that clouded her senses. She stood where she was, holding onto Robin and staring emptily into the blank space beyond, for what seemed like an eternity. But when finally she did respond to him, her voice was quiet, subdued, and contained only a hint of the terrible, fathomless sorrow that was soaked into every corner of her being.

"No," said Starfire. "It will not."

There was a soft, almost inaudible, tearing sound, muffled and over in less than a second. And then Starfire released Robin and took a step back.

Robin's eyes were wide once more, but they were no longer focused on her. Instead, Robin was looking down at his own uniform, and at the eighteen-inch piece of jagged, sparking metal that protruded from his shirt, in the center of a slowly expanding circle of red. His mouth open in shock he touched the edge of the broken inducer gingerly, as though he could not believe that it was real. And then, as the reality of what had just happened struck him like a physical blow, Robin lifted his frightened masked eyes to Starfire, who was standing motionless, her expression hollow, mournful, and empty.

"It will never be all right again."

O-O-O

Like one, that on a lonesome road
Doth walk in fear and dread,
And having once turned round walks on,
And turns no more his head ;
Because he knows, a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread.

O-O-O

Devastator said nothing, his empty eyes running over the empty mall. He seemed, temporarily, to have forgotten that anyone else was in the area. His cane was held limply at one side, the tip trailing on the ground, forgotten along with his counterpart. A carpet of broken igneous rock stretched before him, uniformly grey, distributed across the marble floors as though at random. He lowered his gaze to one such piece the size of a hen's egg, which lay beside his foot, so badly scored by fire and worn by abrasion that there was no longer any discernible sign of what it had once been.

"What have you done?" he asked at length, his voice hoarse. He did not turn around.

Standing behind Devastator, up against the wall, David did not vary his position by an inch, nor allow his voice to stray from a cold, steel monotone. "What I was meant to do."

"Meant by who?" asked Devastator, still frozen like a statue himself.

David let the echo of Devastator's voice fade before responding, each word slow and precise, like a machine's words. "By Devastator," he said. "By you. By nature."

"Nature?" There was a slight warble to this one, like a violin string not properly tightened.

"Of course," said David, and now, at last, he stepped off the wall. "What, exactly, did you think I was?"

With infinite care, Devastator drew himself up, turning around to face David. The twilight outside cast him deeply into shadow, a black form in the shape of a man who pivoted with care as David slowly circled him. He did not speak.

"You see, here's what doesn't make sense," said David. "You're willing to kill anyone who gets in your way. Cops, soldiers, heroes, civilians, it just doesn't seem to matter to you."

"You think it doesn't matter?" asked Devastator, breath short and words clipped.

"No, that's just it, I think it does. I think it matters enormously. Because you didn't kill those people because you wanted their money or because they hurt you, you killed them because they got in the way of you killing someone else. Someone you thought needed to die. And why did they need to die? Because they killed people." He stalked around Devastator, like a wolf circling a wounded elk. "Are you seeing the problem here?"

"So I'm a hypocrite?" asked Devastator, his words deathly cold, his hands beginning to shake with anger.

David smiled. "You can't hide from me like that," he said. "We're the same person, underneath the scars and the costumes. You're not a hypocrite. You're not that shallow." He slid inwards, still out of range, his eyes glistening in the darkness like those of some lower demon. "You're damned," he said, "and you know it."

Warily, Devastator followed David with his own eyes. "I work for the Devil," he said.

"That has nothing to do with it," said David. He continued to circle, slowly, gently kicking the rocks out of his path as he went. "Why the double standard? Why it is all right for you to murder, but not for others? Pure hypocrisy?" He shook his head. "No. You're not stupid enough for that. It's too obvious to ignore. You know you're doing exactly what you condemned Slade and Faust and Joker and everyone else for, but you found a way to square that with yourself, and there's no way that I'm the first person to try and explain it to you."

He continued to circle, slowly, a planet of red and grey orbiting a dark shadow of a central star.

"Maybe you thought you were a superman?" he asked bitingly. "Maybe you thought you were better than other people, and had the right to decide who lived and died because of it?" He let the question sit for just a moment, before shooting it down again. "No. You know you're not that. Because Superman doesn't have scars. He doesn't hide like a normal person with a coat and a gun. He doesn't disappear into the shadows and materialize to kill someone before sliding back again. Because he's Superman, and everyone knows it." David ran his eyes over Devastator, the red beams of light narrowing as he grimaced dismissively. "You didn't do anything like that, did you? Even when you had the chance."

Step by step, David continued to circle his alter ego, as the cane in Devastator's hand began to smolder once more, soft, barely visible flames of red licking up its length from steel tip to silver handle.

"You were an assassin," said David. "A 'contractor', you called it. One that could bring down Metahumans. I can't even imagine what that would be worth. You had to be swimming in money." He paused, just for a second, a knowing smile slowly spreading across his face. "So what did you do with it all?" He gestured towards Devastator with his hand, palm open and upward, as though inviting a comment he knew would not be coming. "What did you buy?" he asked. "Private islands? Castles? Fancy cars? Women?" His arm returned to his side, his smile faded, and he regarded Devastator once, who stood in silence before him like a statue carved from obsidian glass.

"Did you..." ventured David, "... did you get anything?"

Fitfully, carefully, as though he had to force his own muscles into behaving themselves, Devastator opened his mouth and choked out an answer.

"That wasn't the point," he said.

"I know," said David. "You didn't do it for money. You didn't do it for fun. You didn't do it for revenge, and you didn't do it from some sense of higher justice. You didn't even do it because you felt that you had to." He stopped walking, holding his hands behind his back. "You did it because you were already damned. Not because of Joker. Not even because of Devastator. Because of who you are. Because of who we are."

"Don't speak of things you don't understand."

"You think I don't understand?" asked David. "You think I don't know what it's like?" His eyes narrowed, and his grin widened, the shadows of his brow darkening his entire face save for the red orbs that now served as eyes. "Look around you, Devastator. What do you think this is?"

"Have you lost your mind?" snarled Devastator, his hands tightening around his cane as the flames cloaking it surged around his fingers.

"Why?" asked David. "Because I killed somebody?" He laughed, spreading his arms wide. "Because I killed those people? Look at me, Devastator. What do you see?"

"I told you they were alive!"

"So?" David shrugged. "You killed one yourself. You killed thousands yourself. Bystanders and cops, people who didn't do anything. That was all right?"

"What I did has nothing to do with - "

"Of course it doesn't," interrupted David. "That's how you justify it. That one thing has nothing to do with the other. Nobody but you gets to slaughter indiscriminately. Because you're already damned. So it doesn't matter what you do anymore, and that makes you free to do anything you want."

Slowly, Devastator began to advance, face stony, cane burning like a branding iron in his hands. He said nothing at all, staring like a zombie at David, who withdrew before him, but not with any sign of either fear or apprehension.

"That's what it was, isn't it?" he asked. "That's why you were able to stomach it. Because after Arkham, you knew you'd crossed the line. You'd burned the line behind you, and it no longer mattered what you did, because you were damned anyway. So you went after monsters. Because you could do whatever you wanted to them, and it couldn't be worse than what you'd already done. You weren't some exalted superman who got to do whatever he wanted. You were going after people just like you. Because you could. Because nobody else could. Because the strongest heroes in the world were still heroes, and couldn't let themselves do what you could let yourself do. They couldn't end things once and for all the way a monster like you could."

The cracked ground beneath Devastator's feet began to emit soft creaking noises, as rivulets of frost started to wind their way over the broken marble, like the webs of a spider. "Be quiet," said Devastator, his voice as dark as a thundercloud.

David laughed, raising his hands to the heavens as though to ask them to bear witness to the absurdity of it all. "Why?" he asked. "What are you gonna do? Kill me? Take revenge? Punish me? Go right ahead!" He reached to his side and drew the broken staff that rested there, but rather than ignite it, he aimed it at Devastator like a sword. "It doesn't change anything. All this time, you've been on me because of the wrong reasons. You thought I was a hero. Everyone keeps saying that I'm a hero. But for some reason, when I tell people that I'm not one, nobody believes me. Everyone else, I can understand. But you," he smiled, "you really should know better."

"That's enough." Devastator raised his cane, and the flames sheathing it exploded into incandescent firelight. Moments later a rock the size of a refrigerator burst from the ground behind him and arced overhead before descending upon David like a meteor. But David raised his own broken staff, which caught the same fire as Devastator's, and the rock exploded into a trillion pieces before it could strike home.

"You know what changed, between the two of us?" asked David, still matching Devastator's pace "What actually changed? I fell in with the Titans. I didn't mean to, Cinderblock and Trigon made it happen. But it doesn't matter why it happened, it matters that it happened. I fell in with them, and they were heroes, and I did what they wanted. Because I would have done anything they wanted. If they had been the HIVE, I'd have committed crimes, if they had been Slade, I'd have killed people, but they weren't. They were heroes. And so I got a costume and a codename and my picture in the newspaper. That's what the change was. That's all that it was."

Stepping forward and pivoting in a semicircle, Devastator swept the base of his cane around, propelling a stream of stones and chunks of debris with it towards David. But David was ready for such things, and swinging his broken staff down like a club, he detonated the first rock like a bomb, the explosion big enough to scatter the rest of the incoming projectiles.

"You see, I know what I am," said David, not bothering to counterattack. "It took a long time for me to come to terms with it, but I did. Thing is, I don't think you ever did. Because you didn't have to. You had someone to blame. Joker, Robin, the Titans, whoever crossed you most recently. You never had to stop and look at yourself in the mirror. Whatever you did was their fault, because they pushed you across the line, and that made everything that followed their responsibility, didn't it?"

No further assault was produced, but neither did Devastator say a word. His pace began to accelerate, footsteps like hollow impacts on the broken marble. The cane in his hand burned ever brighter, as delicate patterns of frozen condensation spiderwebbed across the floor. Yet far from shrinking back in fear, David's grin seemed to deepen with each step, as he paced Devastator's advance with his own retreat, slinging no weapons in reply but his own stinging words.

"I don't think you're angry with me because I fell in with the Titans. You might be angry at them, because of what they turned me into, but that's just because you don't know what that is. You think they turned me into a hero, took a blank slate and painted their own picture on it. But you only think that because you can't see that the only thing I ever was, was you."

The floor began to fly apart.

Raising his hands like a high priest trying to conjure forth the spirits of the dead, Devastator called for destruction and received it, as entire sections of the broken ground burst into the air at his command. Dozens of blocks, each the size of a wall safe, leaped up, only to hurl themselves at David. David stepped backwards, swinging his broken staff back and forth as fast as he could, and the most threatening blocks exploded into steam before they could strike, the rest sailing around him in every direction and smashing great holes through the wall behind. Yet Devastator did not stop, ripping stones from the ground with burst of flame, his empty eyes wide with incandescent rage, until a broad chasm loomed between them.

"I'm you," shouted David as soon as he had a chance, loud enough to be heard over the exploding boulders. "I'm everything you were when you were my age. I was never mutilated by the Joker, I was never beaten into a pulp by the Titans and left to rot in some hospital. Nothing ever happened to me that made me do these sorts of things. No abuse, no torture, no madness." The echoes of the clashing stones died away as David stopped retreating, bracing himself with both hands on his truncated staff. "I just killed sixty-seven people I've never met in cold blood. I have absolutely no excuse for doing it. And we're the same person." His smile became a leer, the sneering jagged stare of a jack-o-lantern dancing in his preternaturally bloodshot eyes.

"So what does that say about you, and your grand crusade?"

Devastator didn't respond in words.

In a single, swift move, Devastator drove the end of his cane into the broken floor. The instant he did so, fire blossomed around it, hurling him into the air, not the violent uncoordinated shove of your average explosion, but a perfectly modulated rocket-propelled leap that launched Devastator in a parabolic arc up through the air and down again on wings of living flame. He landed with scarcely a tremor bare inches from David, looming over him with an expression of pure, savage indignation.

"This," he said, as he raised his hand.

Before David could react, before he could even blink, Devastator conjured an explosive fireball out of what appeared to be thin air, so quick and seamless that his eyes did not have time to take in what was happening. In a heartbeat, David felt a blow like a wrecking ball, and he was thrown back twenty, fifty, a hundred feet to crash headlong into the far wall.

Six months ago, such a blow would have knocked him unconscious. Three months ago he would have needed five minutes on his hands and knees to recover. Two days ago he would have taken a moment or two to catch his breath. Tonight he bounced off the wall, spun back around, and slashed at the air with his broken staff, tearing a piece of marble siding the size of a tow truck out of the very wall he had just collided with, and shooting it at Devastator like a cannon.

It blew up like a firework twenty feet away, and before the smoke could clear, Devastator threw a wall of fire at him.

It wasn't actually made of fire, but it might as well have been. It was a series of cataclysmic, shaped blasts that filled the entire mall from broken floor to shattered ceiling, so many and in such rapid succession that they appeared to be a continuous stream. What Devastator was actually using as ammunition, David could not tell. All he could do was quite literally fight fire with fire. Sweeping his staff back, he tossed pieces of debris into the air with one hand and flung them like artillery shells in the general direction of Devastator with the other. He did not bother to aim, for his goal was not attack but defense, to simply throw enough high explosive out in front of him to frustrate the barrage of frenetic death that Devastator was hurling his way. Backed against the wall, he did not dare try and consider how long he might be able to hold off such an assault.

For no more than five seconds, David threw literally everything he had to try and hold Devastator back, yet it was all in vain. All of a sudden, the curtain of fire and smoke was violently torn aside by a thunderclap so potent that David felt it as a punch to the chest. In its place stood Devastator, and it was impossible to determine where the cold flames of his cane ended and the hot ones he was conjuring forth began. Fire danced from his hands and feet and reflected in his eyes and ran over the intricate patterns of frost on the floor, and as he stared at David, the very air about him seemed to warp. He drew his hand back, twisting it into a grotesque claw, as the wall behind David began to crack and lean inwards. And then, brandishing his cane like the flaming sword of an avenging angel, Devastator lunged forward with murder in his eyes and destruction at his fingertips, his free hand splayed forward, as though conjuring all the fires of hell for one, cataclysmic blow.

But it never landed.

Mid-lunge, Devastator gave a rending cry, pitched forward and collapsed to the ground with all the grace of a puppet whose strings had just been cut. As he fell, the flames around him vanished or receded, and the frost that traced patterns in the floor evaporated like so much morning mist. His cane clattered to the ground at his side, quenched and dead, nothing more than a useless prop. David did not venture to move, not one muscle, staring emptily down as Devastator landed on his hands and knees, face contorted in pain, one hand gripping his temple as though trying to dig his fingers through his own skull. His other hand balled into a fist, and he clawed at the broken ground with it, as groans of pain tore themselves from between his clenched teeth.

Yet as Devastator fell, David did not lunge forward to capitalize on whatever had happened. He did not brandish his own staff and call for more destruction, nor hurl debris and fire, nor spring forward to strike Devastator physically. He did not counterattack in any way, letting Devastator writhe, letting him clench his teeth and force back the pain and stabilize himself. David did nothing except step back, tensing himself like a spring, and when Devastator finally lifted his head to see what he was doing, he saw David standing back, his eyes and arm raised to the heavens, one finger extended skywards. His expression puzzled, Devastator lifted his own gaze up towards the smoke-shrouded ceiling, and froze like a deer in headlights.

Floating near where the ceiling of the enormous mall had been was the equivalent mass of an entire mountain. And it was sheathed in gold.

The arched roof, whatever it had been, was invisible now, blocked by a layer of boulders and stones and loose clods of earth, so many and so densely packed that they formed a vaulted ceiling of their own, stitched together from wall to wall like a flowing tapestry. And in the center of it all, floated Terra, supported by a handful of stones, crouched as though in a loft, staring down at the wielders of Devastator who had spoken and shouted and fought with one another to the utmost extent, so consumed in their reciprocal fight that they had not bothered to look up.

Or at least one of them hadn't. The other had contrived not to.

And then the whole world collapsed.

Terra did not merely release her collection of stone and dirt, she threw it down at Devastator like a meteor the size of an apartment building, and instantly the world vanished behind a pall of dust and smoke thick enough to be physical. Coughing and staggering backwards, David waved his hand in front of his face, trying to clear the air, only to be greeted by the sight of an immense mountain of stone and dirt, heaped fifty feet tall, that now sat where Devastator had been crouching a moment before.

He didn't even hesitate.

In a heartbeat, his staff was in his hand and burning like a torch, and he swung it down as though he were trying to hammer a railroad tie into the ground. Deep inside the mound of loose earth, a gigantic rock froze momentarily before detonating at his command with the power of a mortar shell, sending shockwaves coursing through the interior of the caern and causing its surface to rumble and shake. Again he raised his staff, and again he brought it down, detonating another stone, and another, and another, until he could find no more rocks of sufficient size, and began detonating clumps of earth, bits of debris, everything and anything he could wrap his mind around. Still he continued, working the mountain over and over, until an entire facing of it came shaken loose and avalanched down upon him. Clawing his way free, he refused to stop even then, climbing part-way up the loose heap on his hands and knees and beating it with his staff, like a destroyer raining depth charges down on an invisible submarine.

He carried on like this for an indeterminate amount of time, until his arm would no longer lift the titanium staff, nor his pounding head countenance another stroke, and then he collapsed, spent, slowly sliding down the side of the ruined heap of dirt and stone chips to the ground. A moment later, and there was a soft thump from somewhere nearby, and he opened his eyes to see Terra kneeling before him, looking as exhausted as he was, staring at him without a word, her expression a mixture of shock and knife-edged fear.

For a few seconds, David didn't say a word, his attention occupied with trying to force air into and out of his lungs. But when Terra's expression didn't change, he ventured a question, lifting himself up on one arm as he did so.

"Are you okay?" he asked.

"How did you know what I would do with the statues?" she asked right back.

Something caught in his throat. "Did you... did you get them out?"

"They're fine," said Terra. "There's a garage underneath the mall. I moved them all down there and replaced them with pieces of shale. But how did you know that I was going to do that?"

"I didn't," said David. "But I knew you were watching us."

"So?" she asked. "You told me not to interfere until you signalled. You said you had some kind of plan."

"I did," said David. "I just... hadn't figured it all out yet."

Terra's shell-shocked look didn't change. "But what if I hadn't moved them?"

David thought about it for a moment, his exhausted brain running only on the most basic levels. At length he managed a half-smile and looked back up at Terra with a shrug.

"I guess I just sort of assumed you would."

He didn't really mean anything special by it. He was far too far gone for any sort of double or hidden meaning now. But Terra visibly stopped short when he said it, blinking in silence at him as though she couldn't think of what to say. He waited in turn for her to recover her voice, but she finally just reached a hand out to him, her expression shaken. "Come on," she said. "We should go."

He took her hand, and she helped him up, but as she turned to go, he held on gently and stopped her.

"Terra, wait a minute."

She stopped, turning back, obviously expecting him to do something else, or pick something up. But instead he took a few seconds to catch his breath, and collect his scattered wits.

"I just... before anything else happens, I wanted to say - "

She shook her head. "Don't worry," she said. "I won't tell anyone what you two were talking about." Once more she turned away, but once more he did not release her, and she turned back.

"No," he said. "It's not that. I wanted..." words deserted him, thought deserted him, and he shook his head to brush the cobwebs clear and just said it outright.

"Thank you."

She seemed to hesitate again. "What?" she asked.

"Thank you," he repeated. "For..." he looked around at the ruined mall and the scene of destruction that surrounded them. "For everything," he finally said. "For... I can't even start to..."

He was, as usual, making hash of this, but as he looked back up at Terra, she did something he had not seen her do since when he had known her as 'Carrie'. She smiled. And seeing her smile brought one to his own face, and he laughed, at the absurdity of it all as much as anything else. And then a moment later, Terra stepped towards him and put her arms around his shoulders. Another moment, and he did the same.

They stood there for a little while, leaning against one another, for it was all that kept either of them standing, and David closed his eyes and bit-by-bit, forced his taut nerves to slowly relax. His head swam, his feet shifting unsteadily beneath him, but Terra held him up regardless, and he her. Every breath he took and released seemed to empty the fire from his lungs, and a calming, almost apathetic numbness spread over him. "Thank you," he repeated at length, and she did not answer him, but stood there, motionless but for the occasional shudder that seemed to well up from somewhere deep within. Her head rested on his shoulder, and he felt something wet on the back of his neck, but did not reach back to feel what it might be, sure that he already knew.

"I'm sorry," she whispered, though what she meant she did not say, and he did not ask. The only reply he could muster was to simply stand in the midst of ruin and death, holding the girl who twice before had sought, with all her considerable might, to be the instrument of his own death.

It was no longer even remarkable.

At long, endless length, Terra gently pulled away, and he released her as she did so. Her face was streaked red beneath the mud and grime that they were both coated with, and her eyes glistened in the firelight with tears, but she brushed them away with the back of her hand, and smiled. "Come on," she said, patting him on the shoulder again. "Let's go find the - "

A crackling, rustling sound at their feet distracted both Terra and David at the same time, and they both lowered their heads to see what might be causing it. When they saw what it was, Terra paused, blinking, not understanding what it was that she saw, but David did not. Below them, the broken rocks and loose debris that covered the floor of the ruined mall were being covered in frost, rivulets of ice materializing over them and running in intricate patterns about their feet. And as he beheld this happening, in that precise instant, David felt his heart stop.

And then fire.

There had been louder blasts today, and larger ones, but none so cutting, none so depraved as this one, this explosion of fire that ripped the mountain of stone and earth apart and blasted it into the air. Standing as they were on the edge of the mountain, David and Terra were cast aside like toy soldiers, hurled bodily into and through the weakened wall of the shopping mall. They fell, bounced once, and crashed headlong into a parked car in the ruined parking lot outside, fetching up against it like rag dolls thrown to the side by the mad rage of a whirlwind, broken, sundered figures of no further consequence to anyone.

David wound up on his side, the smoking ruin of the car looming over him, and beside him lay Terra. She gave a lurch, and wheezed horribly, reaching blindly up with one trembling hand to try and pull herself upright. Seeing her move served to remind him that movement was possible at all, and he rolled over onto his stomach and with an effort undreamed of, pushed himself up to his hands and knees. His lungs on fire and his head spinning, he contrived to lift his head, and look back at the broken wall he had just traversed.

The wall was gone, already damaged by previous explosions and now simply obliterated by this last one. And beyond it, the mound of dirt and stone that had been Devastator's resting place was gone as well, atomized by the blast that had just evicted them both from the building. The crater that now stood in its place vented smoke too thick to see through, but as David watched, he saw a bloodied, clawlike hand emerge from its depths, and clutch the lip of the crater with an iron grasp, moments before its owner heaved itself into view.

"No," whispered Terra beside him. David did not retain enough capacity to echo her.

Slowly, like a primordial beast, Devastator crawled his way out of the smoldering crater. His face was horribly gashed, one eye enucleated, blood streaming from a hideous slash across his forehead and running down his arm. One hand was clutched tightly over his abdomen, where his coat and shirt was stained black. The other held his battered cane, which he planted in the broken ground like an ice axe and used to leverage himself to his feet. Blood ran from the corners of his mouth, and he spat on the ground to empty it, his remaining eye staring daggers at the two teenagers who lay broken before him.

"Clever boy," he snarled horribly. And then he raised his hand.

"NO!"

It was no shout that emerged Terra's mouth but a roar, some kind of deep, primal refusal, and though David could not possibly see how she mustered the wherewithal to, Terra reached up and grabbed the empty window of the car, using it to pull herself up to a seated position before slashing her other hand through the air. Instantly, a dozen football-sized stones raised from the ground at her command, and threw themselves at Devastator, but Terra's kinetic commands no longer had the force they once had, and the stones merely rolled to a stop at Devastator's feet. He kicked them aside contemptuously as he stepped forward, hobbling on his cane, leaving behind a trail of blood, yet obstinately refusing to die.

Somewhere deep inside David, the near-extinct flames of self-preservation gasped to life once more, and with an effort of will he did not think he had left within him, he managed to rise up onto his knees and extend forward the broken, battered staff he still clutched in one hand. From near to Devastator, a piece of metal junk, a carburetor perhaps or some other loose thing, was lofted into the air on a pulse of fire, flying in Devastator's general direction before exploding near him like an air-bursting shell. But the explosion's teeth were drawn, and the blast barely buffeted Devastator, who retaliated by shooting a bicycle-sized piece of masonry from the shattered wall at David and Terra, missing them both by inches.

On came Devastator, launching shots at them with each step. Neither Terra nor David tried to evade them, every ounce of concentration maintained on returning Devastator's fire, on bringing him down before he could advance further. Yet neither accuracy nor power was left to them, despite all their efforts, and while Devastator was in scarcely better shape, what force remained to him was sufficient, ultimately, for one last strike.

Now emerged fully into the parking lot, Devastator stopped in place, knocking one of Terra's rocks aside with his staff, and pivoted back towards the ruined mall. He reached his hand back, palm up, as though grasping some unholy idol. All of a sudden he clenched his fist, and from deep within the ruined building, there came fresh bursts of fire. An instant later, a barrage of steel rebars, sheered to points by the violence inflicted on the shopping mall, flew out of the ruined building like javelins, hurtling past Devastator and straight towards David and Terra. At his peak, David might have tried to blast them from the air, but he was so far from his peak as to be unable to even remember what it felt like, and he had only enough time to duck his head and turn away before he heard the rending crash of steel on steel as the rebars drove into the car behind him like a quiverful of arrows. For an endless instant, horrid screeching sounds buffeted his ears, as he felt the wind and the grazes of half-a-dozen near misses. But then the sounds died, and he opened his eyes once more, his staff still clutched like a religious icon, and turned to deliver what return fire he could.

But as he did, he heard Terra gasp. And when he turned to see why, he froze.

Terra sat against the ruined car, her eyes wide and blinking in surprise, as she stared down at a grotesque shard of jagged metal three quarters of an inch in diameter that emerged from her stomach as though conjured there by magic.

For several seconds, David forgot how to move. Terra, it appeared, had done the same. She neither screamed nor writhed but only stared down at the metal bar driven through her as though she could not comprehend its existence, and the existence of such a thing were an unfathomable absurdity, one expected to disappear presently when the world chose to right itself. Gingerly, she touched the rebar with trembling fingers, as though she could somehow command it to vanish, or her stomach to repair itself, but it remained, cold and unfeeling, and only then did she raise her frightened, desperate eyes to meet David's, her expression asking a question that her mouth could not form.

But David could only crouch there helplessly, unable to push his mind past the fact before him, that Devastator had, with a wave of his hand, stapled Terra to the ruined car,and the abstract theory of his and Terra's impending deaths became, all at once, cold reality.

From his side, he heard Devastator cough, and turned.

Devastator stood unmoving now, swaying gently and leaning upon his cane, now finally reduced to the purpose it had been originally intended for. His face a mass of hideous tissue damage, his clothes soaked through with dark blood and stained by dirt and ash, he stood nonetheless alive, watching his victims with a cold gaze. And as both Terra, pinned to the car behind her by a rod of solid steel, and David, ambulatory but devoid of further resources, turned to watch him, Devastator spat the blood from his mouth, and spoke in a voice that might have been summoned from a tomb.

"Tell me, David," he said. "Do you know why it came to this?"

O-O-O

Robin staggered back, his hands clutching uselessly at the spar of metal embedded within his chest. His mouth worked open and shut, but he could not speak. But as he turned back towards the perpetrator of all this, Starfire stepped forward, and spoke in his stead.

"Did you think I would not know?"

He slipped, and fell backwards, collapsing in a heap, crawling backwards away from her, getting tangled in his cape as he went. "S... Star..." he coughed out. "Star! Ple - "

"No!" she roared, and the walls shook from the force of her command. "You cannot lie to me any longer! Did you think you could deceive me here? In this way? You, who would not understand this if I granted you a thousand lifetimes to reflect upon it? You?" She stepped forward, her eyes full of tears, her fists balled at her sides, and spat her words at Robin like poison.

"You understand nothing. And you no longer have the power to deceive."

The walls began to shimmer, receding back into darkness, the metal lining of the training room vanishing, only to be replaced by volcanic stone or open air. Down the walls and across the floor, the transformation swept, until Robin was left alone on the parapets of a vast, black fortress. And then he too shimmered, his appearance receding before her eyes. And moments later, in Robin's place there lay a man, armored with gold, covered in blood, who grasped uselessly at a shorn-off staff that was jammed like a harpoon straight into his chest.

"We Tamaraneans may sometimes resemble you, Warp," said Starfire as she advanced slowly towards the fallen man, "but we are not you. We do not think as you do, we do not perceiveas you do, and we do not lie to ourselves as you would have us do. You witnessed me murdering someone in hot rage."

She took a long, slow breath, and when she breathed it out, her voice was as even as a pane of glass.

"Robin would never have accepted that."

O-O-O

"It wasn't about power,"

At David's side, Terra still did not emit a sound. Likely she could not. No longer able to move, stapled as she was to the car behind, she could only sit where she was and watch, her eyes oscillating between David and his counterpart. Devastator, having finally beaten Terra into irrelevance, now ignored her, his one remaining eye focused on David alone. And try as he might, David could not tear his eyes away.

"Your problem wasn't stupidity," said Devastator. "It wasn't some moral failing, and it wasn't even cowardice. It wasn't your association with the Titans." Devastator raised his free hand slowly, looking down at it, turning it over as the smoke from the ambient fires flowed through his fingers like a living thing. "Whatever anyone may say, we're not standing here because you were a fool. Your problem, David, was far more fundamental."

Slowly, Devastator drew a deep breath, holding it for some time as the air danced about his hands. At length though, he raised his remaining eye to meet David.

"Your problem," he said, "was will."

And then the wind began.

O-O-O

"It was all because of you."

There was nowhere to run. Beast Boy and Raven were hemmed in on all sides by an army of statues a hundred ranks thick, thousands and tens of thousands of frozen witnesses to the endgame.

"Can you even imagine seven billion people? I can't. So many people that they just merge into one faceless crowd... maybe that's how you lived with the decision. I helped a super-villain take over a city, and tried to wipe you and your friends out. But I have to admit, Raven, I never even considered something like this."

Beast Boy lay unconscious on the ground, dead to the world, unable to save himself, let alone anyone else. Raven could not even back away from Terra without leaving his side, abandoning him to whatever tender mercies Terra had in store for them both.

"You can't hide from something like what you did," said Terra as her stone block lowered to the ground. "You can't cloak yourself in innocence and pretend it's all right. You willfully annihilated the entire planet you swore to protect. Killed literally everyone you ever knew. Did you really think that you would get away with it? That anyone could absolve you? Are you actually that naive?"

The block touched down, so softly as to be almost silent, and Terra stepped off it onto the burnt earth. Her hands glowed gold as she stepped forward towards Raven, shaking her head as though from deep, bitter disappointment.

"You don't get away that easily, I'm afraid."

O-O-O

"Will is everything," said Devastator. "Will is life itself. Will is the fundamental force of the universe. Greater than gravity, greater than magnetism, greater than any nuclear absurdity dreamed up by physics. Will alone commands the cosmos at large."

Wind swirled around the car, smoke and dust and ash blowing in eddies like living things. David staggered, searched for purchase with his hand, and found it in the form of Terra's, grasping at the empty air against the pain and the fear that visibly welled up in her like a fountain. Steadying himself, David saw the currents of air twisting inwards to a fixed point of whiteness that gradually took form in Devastator's outstretched hand. A speck of ice the size of a paint chip, then a ball bearing, then a marble...

The sudden tightening of Terra's grip told David that she had realized what was going to happen, roughly at the same moment that he had.

"Will, is all that matters," said Devastator. "And will, David, is what you've never had."

O-O-O

"Robin was an absolute," said Starfire. "His convictions were impenetrable, his commitment total. He would never, ever have condoned what I did. He would not have understood it. He would not have told me that it was all right. I know this, because I knew Robin. It is why I never told him. It is why I never told anyone what I did to Trogarr back before I came to Earth."

His breath coming in a ghastly wheeze, Warp crawled back, away from Starfire, who followed at a slow, relentless pace, even as Warp reached the edge of the parapet, and found himself forced to stop.

"I knew this," she said, her voice holding steady, albeit with a tremble of suppressed emotion. "I have always known this. Just as I knew that Robin would not lie to me. Not about this. Had he entered a room to see me murdering another person, he would have obeyed his convictions. He would have fought me. He could not do otherwise. It was not in his nature to do otherwise." She paused, standing now directly above Warp, looking down at him like a statue. "Did you imagine that I could have felt as I did for Robin without knowing this? Did you think I was so broken that I would fail to recognize Robin when I saw him? Or were you so debased that you actually believed I would prefer Robin as I would have made him be over the Robin he actually was?"

Laying prostrate on the ground, his eyes wide with fear as he stared up at Starfire, Warp did not answer.

"Such was my belief," she said.

O-O-O

"You can fight it all you like," said Terra. "Pretend it isn't true, or that it's not fair, or that you never meant for anything to happen. But you'll never convince anyone, not even yourself."

She was less than ten feet away now, stones the size of mailboxes floating casually around her, and her red eyes bathed Raven and Beast Boy in their crimson glow. Terra's gait was unhurried and her manner calm, and from the corners of her eyes, Raven could see openings in the wall of statues that surrounded them, crevasses and corridors she might run and hide in afresh. But Beast Boy lay behind her, and so she could not run. Not now. Not here, at the ending of all things.

"The truth is, Raven, you are the end of the world. You've always known that, even before anyone else here had heard of Trigon. It's why you left the monastery, why you tried so hard to avoid making friends. It's why you've always heard that little voice inside reminding you of what you are. And no matter how many times you deny it, no matter how many people you tried to help, ultimately, you were born to consume everything in fire. And that is exactly what you did."

Terra was right in front of her now, and Raven felt the urge to cower. To cry. To scream and hide and wrap herself in her cloak. But she looked up at the the ghastly simulacrum of Terra, and steeled herself to stand where she was, at least for the few seconds that remained.

And perhaps Terra saw that small resolution in her eyes, for she smiled, and raised her hand slowly, as the enormous stones carefully positioned themselves above Raven and Beast Boy.

"We all get exactly what we deserve, Raven," said Terra. "Even you."

O-O-O

The wind was a howl now, a violent shriek of distorted air, and the swelling, crystalline jewel in Devastator's hand grew ever larger, until it was the size of a softball, the sparkling center of a swirling vortex. Yet somehow, despite the wind, Devastator's voice was as clear as a bell.

"You had Devastator," he said. "But Devastator is commanded by will, and you never had the will to make use of it. Not in the centers, not with the Titans, not ever. You sat back, and let the world do what it wanted to you, because it was easier than thinking for yourself. You're a bystander, David, an intruder who let himself get dragged into events that by rights should not ever have concerned you. When the DCS told you to move, you moved. When Robin told you to fight, you fought. When I told you to run, you ran. And now we're all here, in the middle of this burning hell, because fundamentally, you couldn't answer the most simple question that all of us are ever asked."

The wind cut all at once, leaving behind a deafening silence, as David stood beside Terra, watching his counterpart with unblinking eyes.

"On a basic level, David, you have simply never known what it is you want."

And with that, Devastator lightly tossed the ball of nuclear ice into the air, and struck it with his silver-handled cane, sending it rocketing towards David like a shooting star.

O-O-O

But soon there breathed a wind on me,
Nor sound nor motion made :
Its path was not upon the sea,
In ripple or in shade.

It raised my hair, it fanned my cheek
Like a meadow-gale of spring-
It mingled strangely with my fears,
Yet it felt like a welcoming.

Swiftly, swiftly flew the ship,
Yet she sailed softly too :
Sweetly, sweetly blew the breeze-
On me alone it blew.

O-O-O

There was a wet slap. And then absolute silence.

It was as though the fires themselves had stopped their ambient roar. David did not move, did not even breathe, standing as still as the statue he had been before Terra awoke him into the world of flames and damnation. If anything else transpired, he did not know it, his universe reduced to nothing but immediate reality. For an indeterminate time, he stood there. And then he opened his eyes, and looked down on the object he had just caught with both hands.

It was beautiful.

Cupped in David's hands sat a perfect sphere of white crystal, so cold that the air around it seemed to shimmer, and yet his bare fingers felt nothing but a faint electrical sensation. Deep within it, he could discern a tremble, soft but forceful, the slightest hint of what awesome forces lurked within. Yet he felt no fear as he stared into the sphere of frozen nitrogen, his eyes bathing it in red light which blended with the soft glow emanating from its churning core. For an eternity, he watched the ball of crystalline ice, until at length he drew in a long, slow breath.

And then he lifted his head.

The man still stood before him, his cane still held in one hand, dripping with the red flames of wrath. But he was no longer Devastator, Lord of Destruction, slayer of multitudes and servant of Trigon. Instead, David saw a twisted and broken man standing dumbstruck in the street as he beheld that which should not, per his thinking, have been possible. His one remaining eye flickered between David's eyes and the crystal, as though expecting at any particular moment for the world to return to the way he was accustomed to it behaving, and finding at each consecutive moment, that it did not.

As his counterpart slowly settled his gaze back on his face, David tightened his fingers around the crystal sphere, and said the only thing that he could.

"I want my family back, you sonofabitch."

And then, with one, fluid motion, David Foster lifted the ball of shining ice into the air, and willed, with every fiber of his being, for light.

And there was light.

O-O-O

The flash was like nothing she had ever seen.

It came from somewhere far away and off to her right, oblique to her and Terra, but even if it had happened behind her, she still would have seen it, for its intensity was dazzling beyond all imagination. The sky, the fires of Hell, the ruins that stretched on into eternity, it obliterated them all in a heartbeat, subsuming them in soundless, formless light, as though a star had sprung into life before her very eyes. It cast no shadows, illuminated nothing, drowning all other objects in its infinite luminescence, and though it lasted only an instant, it seemed to penetrate straight through to Raven's soul, searing her heart with a brand of light, even as she felt its heat waft against her skin.

And then the flash abated, and in its place she saw a mountain of fire.

No ambient hellfire was this, no twisted manifestation of Trigon's volcanic hate. This was living fire. A towering inferno of unfathomable proportions, looming upwards from a distant spot like some vengeful demon arising from Hell. It boiled upwards, yellow and orange and red by turns, parting the clouds of ash before it as it drew itself up to stratospheric heights. Its crown swelled as it rose, expanding in every direction, taking on the shape of an enormous mushroom. And as Raven watched this transpire, she heard a low rumble, like an endless landslide heard from a great distance, which shook the very ground she stood upon.

"What in the Hell...?"

Raven did not turn her head at Terra's question, her eyes riveted on the pillar of flame looming before her, her hands frozen at her side. What this new development was, where it had come from and who had caused it to be, she could not even begin to determine. But none of those questions were important now, for all of them were sidelined by one, singular fact.

Someone else was alive.

Not since laying eyes upon the charred wasteland that had once been her home, not since waking up in a frozen Hell, not once had Raven even considered that someone besides her, Trigon, and Beast Boy might still exist upon the Earth. Not once had she given thought to that possibility, for it was a plain, obvious absurdity. Her torment, her guilt, the very reason she was in Hell in the first place, all of it was predicated on the assumption that she had, by her own failure to act, exterminated the entire human race. She had fought with herself for hours, days, maybe decades, over the question of whether or not she was truly culpable in this enormous, unfathomable crime.

She had never once imagined that the crime itself might not yet be fully comitted.

She did not know if the fireball was the doing of one of her friends, or a complete stranger, or even Trigon himself. It did not occur to her to ask. The recognition that not everyone had perished, that somewhere out in the wider world, there remained someone other than Trigon and his tools, was like a magic wand passing over her head. Even if the fireball was Trigon's doing, and its target now dead, the mere fact that he was still resorting to such crude tactics meant that his victory was not yet complete, for he was still, visibly, in the process of trying to win it.

And if it wasn't Trigon's doing...

Dimly, she heard the sound of Terra's footsteps as the simulacrum turned back to her to finish what she had started. From the corner of her eye, she saw the geokinetic raising her hands to the rocks that still floated overhead, saw her bring her hands down, commanding the stones to fall upon Raven like meteors, and yet she could not bring herself to turn, or scream, or cower. All she could do was stare wide-eyed at the fireball, her mind spinning like a top, until at last, the great stones came crashing down upon her head.

But she did not fall.

There was a great crack of splintering stone overhead, and the hollow rattle of pebbles being scattered across an even surface, loud enough to shake Raven from her trance. And when she lifted her head to see what had produced such a noise, she saw a great barrier of white light shimmering directly above, enclosing her and Beast Boy together in a hollow shell. Above the barrier lay the smashed remnants of Terra's rocks, dashed to pieces against it like crockery thrown into a brick wall. And as she turned in shock and wonder, to locate the source of this unexplained miracle, she caught a glimpse of her own hand, and saw that it was glowing white.

"No..."

She lifted her head once more and saw the Anti-Terra standing in undisguised shock before her, mouth agape and arms limp at her sides. Blinking in astonishment, Terra's eyes traced the edges of Raven's shield as though expecting it to vanish, and finding with horror that it did not.

"I won't... let you hurt him," said Raven.

"NO!" Bellowed Terra, and she threw her hands out, uprooting stones the size of cars and busses and hurling them at Raven like cannonballs. Yet Raven did not flinch, or cry, or feel the touch of fear, for somehow she knew that she did not need to. The stones struck the shield with the power of cannonballs, yet each one shattered in turn like glass thrown against concrete. And with each successive stone that failed to breach the shield, Raven felt something alien and yet familiar stirring within her, the first flickering of a sensation she had not felt in so long that she had begun to regard it as fable.

Hope.

"I won't let you hurt anyone," she said, and opening her arms wide, Raven felt a warm embrace, alien and yet familiar, as light stretched forth from within her to swallow everything nearby. And the last thing she saw was Terra's expression of surprise and fear, as the light reached forth towards her in the shape of a raven's claw.

And then she saw no more. Nor did she need to.

O-O-O

"So has it come to this then?" coughed Warp, spitting blood over his golden armor. "I thought you came here to rescue Robin."

"Robin is not here," said Starfire. "He is beyond my capacity to rescue now. You saw to that. He was but an excuse to bring this about."

Despite the pain, Warp managed a hollow laugh. "I offered you no excuses," he managed to say. "You came of your own free will."

"No," said Starfire. "Not yours. He was an excuse Iused, to bring myself here without complication from anyone other."

The laugh faded as quickly as it had arisen, and Warp's face froze back into a spiteful sneer. "In life as in death," he said. "All he was to you was - "

"Stop it," she said, her voice still even. "You cannot hurt me any longer. Do not even pretend to try."

"I have no need to try any longer," he said. "I havehurt you."

"Yes you have," she said, stooping down and lifting Warp up by his collar. "And now you shall receive your wages."

Despite the blood still choking him, Warp laughed at this, long and hard. "I have already received my wages," he said. "You need only look around you to see them. I exterminated your friends, annihilated your charges, and Trigon will see to Tamaran in due course, make no mistake of that. So run, if you want, or stay here with the cinders of your loved ones. It doesn't matter. I've done what I came here to do, Princess. I've given you the gift you gave to me. However long you manage to evade Trigon for, you'll always be nothing more than a scavenger and a fugitive. You'll be just as I was: broken, helpless, and all alone."

Starfire opened her mouth to answer Warp, but something else answered first.

There was a flash, impossibly distant, yet distinct despite it, bright enough to penetrate the ash clouds that surrounded the fortress. She lifted her head as her eyes caught the light, in time to see the flash fade from white to orange, the livid orange of fire. Yet even as the fireball attained full height, as if in response, a second flash of light appeared to challenge it. White as the first one had been, this one did not fade to another color, but exploded outward like a living thing, and though it took less than a second to resolve to its mature shape, Starfire needed several more seconds before she realized that it had taken on the form of an enormous bird. Backlit by the distant fireball, it rose into the sky like a phoenix, spreading its wings as it ascended, head held high. And then, just at the edge of her perception, Starfire heard a low, soft rumble, muted by extreme distance, mixed with a sound she might well have imagined, but that she thought resembled a bird's call

Neither Starfire nor Warp said a word, both watching the searing fireball and the brilliant white bird as they soared towards the heavens, only gradually fading from sight. Neither one said a word, until, at length, Warp rounded back on Starfire with a flash of anger.

"You think it matters?" he spat at her. "Let them shuffle the deck chairs if they want. Trigon's only playing with them. If there's any justice in the world, he's just saving them so that he can kill them all in front of you. Just like Robin."

Starfire's eyes narrowed, her grip on Warp's collar tightening as they did so, as the churning energies that boiled inside her began to shine through them. Warp recognized the sign for what it was. He could hardly fail to.

"That's how it is then?" asked Warp. "Fine then. Go ahead and kill me. It won't bring Robin back. And you'll always know that your last act in Robin's name was to destroy every principle he ever lived by. However long Trigon lets you live, you'll spend every second of it remembering how you betrayed him."

He might well have said more, but at that moment, Starfire pulled Warp in until his face was inches away from hers, his eyes floating right in front of her own, as hers filled once more with fire.

"Then that, Warp" she said, "is how it shall be."

And then, as she released the pent-up energies that boiled within, the last thing Starfire saw before the fluorescent glow of her own incarnated rage blinded her, was the sight of Warp as he opened his mouth to scream.

O-O-O

Stunned by that loud and dreadful sound,
Which sky and ocean smote,
Like one that hath been seven days drowned
My body lay afloat ;
But swift as dreams, myself I found
Within the Pilot's boat.

O-O-O

The echoes of the thunder died in the far distance before David opened his eyes once more.

The air was still now, and clean, the smoke and ash that had choked it gone, swept away as though by a broom. In its wake, the sky was stained only by thin wisps of fresh smoke that marked fires, small and few in number, wherever some tiny bit of flammable matter still remained amidst the general emptiness. Save for the patch he stood upon, the street itself was gone as well, the asphalt boiled away to nothingness, leaving only scorched bedrock behind. Here and there, pieces of irregular black glass lay scattered about, from where sand or some other silicate had been subjected to unfathomable heat and pressure, the only objects dotting the sterile landscape that had once been choked with debris and materials.

And of Devastator himself, there was no sign at all.

He felt a wetness on his cheek, and reached up to touch it, his fingers coming back stained with a dark grey fluid he realized only belatedly was his own discolored blood, seeping from the corners of his eyes like tears. More blood ran from his nose and ears, and he could taste the salt of it in his mouth, yet he felt no pain. Indeed he felt a strange numbness that seemed to spread from his extremities in towards his core, pins and needles gently pricking him all over his body until he could no longer feel the ground beneath his feet nor the wind gently wafting across his bloody fingertips.

He wondered, almost casually, if he was dying, and could not for the life of him discern what, if anything, he thought of that possibility.

At his side, a ragged gasp, finally taken by unwilling lungs which could hold their breath no longer, woke him back up, and he turned and crouched down unsteadily. Terra remained as she had been, pinned to the door of a burnt-out car by a three-quarter-inch steel rebar which protruded jaggedly from her stomach, ringed by a small trickle of blood, red, unlike his own. Unable to think of what else to do, he reached out and touched her shoulder, and in response, she opened her eyes, taking in at last the scene before her, the pain, along with everything else, draining from her face as she replaced it all with sheer, undisguised shock.

And more than shock. Awe.

David didn't know what to do. He couldn't even begin to catalogue the possibilities. And so he stayed where he was, crouched in the dirt, his face and hands smeared with greyish blood which mixed with the coal and dirt and ash and everything else that he and Terra were covered with, and simply waited. Terra's eyes grew wider and wider as she swept them across the scene of annihilation that lay before her, the glass-strewn rock and fire-scorched ruins that had not been present when moments ago, David had tossed a snowball into the air.

At length, Terra finally pulled herself away from the empty scene before her, and back to David, who remained crouched beside her. For a few moments, she seemed as lost for reply as David himself, her mouth opening and closing without forming any sounds. Yet before David could ask her what they ought to do now, or even if she was all right, relatively speaking, her eyes darted past him to where Devastator had been standing, held there a moment, and then returned to him, her eyes narrowing as she clenched her teeth, either against the pain of having been impaled, or as a symbol of what needed to happen.

The message was obvious enough.

Still unsure how to speak, David settled for squeezing Terra's shoulder for a second, before slowly hauling himself to his feet. The mangled, broken staff that had stood with him through this entire endless night still hung at his side, and he drew it once more, turning back towards the ruins of the shopping mall, and slowly walking towards it, his steps tentative and uneven as he descended onto the broken, sterilized ground, obsidian glass crunching under his shoes as he closed in.

The shopping mall was gone, crushed into a formless heap of rubble and then violently blasted across half the city. All that remained was a shapeless pile of indiscriminate debris, too heavy or too well-anchored to be lofted away, dotted periodically with gouting flames burning from some underground source. David approached it slowly, his weapon held outstretched like a wizard's wand, the numbness that had pervaded him before giving way to a tense fear that somehow his counterpart would leap forth once more at any given moment to wreak further ruin and death. He reached the base of the eclectic ruins, began to climb up onto them, traversing the uneven surface of mangled concrete and twisted metal on his hands and knees looking for any signs of life. He was halfway up when he found them.

A long, loud wheeze, like air being siphoned through a broken steam whistle, spun him halfway round and sent him scrambling over the pile of debris, stumbling and falling and righting himself all in one motion, rubbing the blood from his eyes and spitting it from his mouth as he made his way towards where he thought the sound had emerged from. His exhausted mind, like an automaton's, was already calculating the distances and angles of nearby stones and pipes and bits of debris, a reaction by now nearly automatic.

He crested a small ridge of the ruin, and stopped, straddling the mound of debris as he stared down into the crevasse before him. For several seconds he stood there, motionless. And then slowly, the fire around his broken staff dwindled to nothing, and he lowered it to his side.

It was plain, even to him, that there was no more purpose to it.

Devastator lay at the base of a small crevasse gouged into the piled ruin by some gyration of force. Crumpled and motionless, half buried beneath heaps of rubble and destruction, his good eye shut, he lay surrounded by the shattered fragments of his cane and sword, red blood slowly pooling beneath him. More blood trickled from the corners of his mouth, from his nose and ears and ruined eye. One arm lay buried beneath the rubble, the other lay palm-up and empty, the broken, silver handle of his once vibrant cane laying uselessly some inches away.

A hideous, slow, wheezing sound, coupled with the slow trickle of blood, was all that indicated that the body was alive at all. Yet armed with this knowledge, David could only stand where he was, watching his own broken body as the life slowly leached out of it. The wheezing continued, gurgling sounds from within Devastator's shattered body speaking to the blood filling his lungs. Yet slowly, the battered head began to twitch, and the one remaining eye slid half-open, to see David, standing framed against the eternal twilight.

Carefully, slowly, a thin, feeble smile turned the corners of Devastator's mouth. He opened his mouth, the words seeming to catch in his throat, requiring extra efforts just to push them over the threshold. When finally he spoke, it was in a harsh, almost ghoulish whisper.

"David..." said Devastator, his words slurred and trailing off like a man in the last stages of sleep deprivation. "My my... what have you done... ?"

Any lingering sense David had of what he ought to say or do deserted him, and so he stood there, balanced uneasily on the edge of the shallow crevasse, looking down at his own broken body. "It's over," he finally said. "This is the end."

Devastator chuckled weakly, pink froth coming to his lips as he did so. "Nothing ever ends," he whispered back. He might have added more, but the froth overcame his capacity to clear it, and his words of wisdom dissolved into a weak cough, and then nothing at all.

Carefully, David slid down into the crevasse, coming to a stop next to Devastator, yet when he arrived at the bottom, he had no better idea of what he should do, or even could do. "Can... can you hear me?" he ventured, not even certain what he wanted the answer to be, and knowing it was useless in any case.

Yet though his eye slid shut once more, the smile on Devastator's face broadened. "I'm not sure... I ever could..." he whispered. "You... learn to turn deaf ears... to that part of yourself..." Devastator's body slowly became limp, sliding from David's grasp back down onto his pillow of rubble, leaving David to crouch helplessly in the ruins. He didn't know what to say. He didn't know if he should speak, but Devastator waited for no reply, his eye sliding open again as he beheld his younger self.

"David... " he said, his voice beginning to weaken. "You must... you must... forgive me." The voice seemed poised on the edge of consciousness, yet Devastator continued, as though what he had to say were the most important thing in the world. "I... I had no idea... all this time..."

His own mind a whirlwind of contradictory impulses, David could only ask the obvious question.

"About what?"

The smile spread wide, even as Devastator's head slid slowly down to his chest, his voice trailing off into nothingness.

"That maybe... there was hope for you... after... all..."

O-O-O

'O shrieve me, shrieve me, holy man !'
The Hermit crossed his brow.
'Say quick,' quoth he, 'I bid thee say-
What manner of man art thou ?'

Forthwith this frame of mine was wrenched
With a woful agony,
Which forced me to begin my tale ;
And then it left me free...

- Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"

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Author's Note: I do not know what the future will bring. I do not know what further disruptions lay in store. But rest assured, dearest readers. I will never abandon this story. Never.

May you all find success in every endeavor. And I hope to see you all for Chapter 38.