"Lord Slath, may the fire of your life warm our blood and sustain is in the cold, uncaring universe. Lord Slath, may your supple darkness conceal us from the judgmental gaze of other gods. Lord Slath, may your secret power bind the faithful closer than any mitochondrial DNA."

Starfire breathed in deep, smelling the Sulphur and tannis root incense, the spoiled oil anointing her brow, and the oh-so-subtle whiff of old, dry bones. This wonderous planet had no horned carnivores, but she'd been able to lash-up a basic altar with a coyote skull and small deer antler.

Starfire massaged her chitin joints nervously. The ways of this planet were strange to her, but it seemed like more and more, things were just...dying. Flowers wilted, leaves fell leaving trees bare, even the grass around the tower was twisted and dead. Her friends didn't seem alarmed by it, but maybe they didn't notice. Everything mortal died, sure, but there was usually new life to replace it.

For the first time since she crash-landed in the harbor, she wondered if this blue mudball was one of the worlds slated for destruction by her Lord. She'd heard rumors that a Progeny of Slath lived somewhere in this solar system, but it couldn't be in a place like this, could it? Maybe the venerable-if-decadent civilization of Mars had produced the Progeny.

Her morning prayer finished, Starfire closed and locked the doors of the stone cabinet. She drew shut the very noisy bead curtain, stepped out, and closed the closet door, sealing it with a thin, barely-visible thread so she would know if anyone tampered with it. Starfire didn't really need these precautions, of course. Cyborg's security measures could deal with most villains that would break into the tower. Her habit of eating earth insects in her room and hallways ensured that Beast Boy did not listen in as a "fly on the wall". She kept Cyborg and Robin from ever opening it by telling them that it contained tampons. She kept Raven out by extracting a promise from her and trusting that a friend so careful about guarding her own secrets would respect the privacy of others.

Turning around, she pulled open the curtains to welcome another glorious day in jump city. When she saw outside the window, she screamed.

The nimble feet of Robin were the first to approach her door. Raven must be either in her sensory deprivation tank or deep in a meditative trance.

"Starfire? Starfire, what's wrong? Are you safe?" Robin shouted, barely audible above his hammering on her door. Cyborg came pounding up the hallway after him. It was still before 10AM, so Beast Boy would be deep in a death-like slumber.

Starfire fumbled with the door panel. The deathly cold had reached her fingers even through the window. Earthlings thought that space was cold, but they were wrong. There was no matter to conduct the heat energy in the vacuum. Starfire had known cold when she toured the Research and Defense Outposts of Tamaran's poles, but this cold...this was different. It smelled like the taste of tin. It felt like entropy.

"Starfire!"

She slammed the panel with trembling fingers, accidentally digging a furrow into the steal wall. Robin lunged past her, scanning the room for threats. Cyborg put a hand on her shoulder.

"Star, what on earth is wrong?"

"Earth is wrong!" Starfire squealed. "I do not know if it is a solar occlusion or a comet strike or terraforming invaders, or...or something more powerful than all of those, but this planet is dying!" She hovered around Cyborg and Robin like a "moth" circling a light bulb. "We must gather the canned goods, set up some kind of passive solar-heating glass-walled garden, and delve tunnels deep into the soil!" On the ship, there had been victims from dead worlds, like Daxom, Aristar, moon 327-77 of planet 771-72 orbiting binary star system 3323-23 by 32334-57. Gamma storms, killer meteorites, necromantic cascades, planets were a dangerous place to live. The uncaring universe was full of things that could wipe them clean, like a tongue lashing across a gnat-infested armpit.

"What do you mean?" He took her hand in his, endothermic mammal heat pulsing into her and a bit of sweat rubbing on her dry skin. "What did you see? What's happened?"

Starfire stared, reeling at the implications. She pointed at the window. "That! The planet is covered in icy death!"

Robin looked out the window. "It's...snowing."

Cyborg shaded his eyes. "Looks pretty mild compared to a New York Winter. Star, it's just snow."

Starfire looked at the dead world outside, the sky endoskeleton-white, the island and city coated with ice, only the artificial lights of soon-to-fail human habitations warming up the frigid world.

Cyborg squinted. Robin stepped up to the window and peered out through the webs of frost.

"What's wrong? What are you looking at?" Robin asked.

Cyborg scratched his head.

"The ambient temperature has fallen below freezing! The sky is darkened! Your planet has clearly reached an apocalyptic ecological disaster!"

Robin frowned and tilted his head. Cyborg broke into laughter. Was this the "gallows humor" she had heard so much about?

"It's just winter, Star. This thing happens every year," Cyborg said. "Sorry for laughing, but it's no big deal."

"Every year?" Starfire asked. She wasn't ready to let go of the fear and shock just yet, but she felt a little less cold.

"Winter," Robin said. "Children make snow-men and snow-angels. Christmas and hot chocolate." He stammered. "This part of the world gets colder for a little while, and the plants die off, and the animals store up fat and go to sleep, and then later the ice thaws and the animals wake up and the birds lay eggs and the plants come alive again."

"Come alive again?" Starfire asked. Surely only the power of Slath could raise the dead!

"Well, it looks like they're coming back to life," Cyborg explained. "Really, the trees shed their leaves before winter so they can save on energy, and some plants shrivel up above the surface but their bulbs and roots are still alive, and then when it's warmer and there's liquid water to feed them they kinda 'wake up' again. Meanwhile, just as it's getting cold in here, on the other side of the planet things are heating up and it's summer."

Starfire opened her mouth. Starfire closed her mouth. Starfire popped her joints while she scraped detritus from the inside of her mouth.

"This is normal?" She paused and thought. "The planet has a tilted axis?"

"Yes, exactly!" Cyborg said, while Robin said "Your planet doesn't?"

Starfire let out a long breath and cleared her spiracles while the flood of relief washed over her. "Oh thank-thank goodness," she said. "You are sure this is nothing to worry about?"

Cyborg and Robin nodded. Starfire hugged them both, and she could smell oxygen-rich blood rising to Robin's cheeks.

Her main arteries pumped smoothly again. She enjoyed nine seconds of peace before their communicators buzzed.

Starfire swept through the sky, ignoring the tiny ice crystals that pelted against her, while her friends followed behind her, to do battle against another villain who threatened the safety of her adopted city.

Friends. There was her Gnorfka, of course, but she suspected that some of her cell-mates on the prison ship had been friends. Not Varblok, obviously, or all the people who had complained about being locked up in the same wing as a vacuum-spewing Troq, but the funny White Martian and Azree'el the Daxomite definitely qualified.

"Converge on my location," Robin's voice crackled over the speaker. "Reports suggest an advanced crypto-meteorologist or dangerous elemental magic user, so approach with caution." "Roger," Starfire spoke back. Robin was sweet, but full of feminine aggression and hard reason. She hoped he wasn't one of the humans that would perish in Lord Slath's rise. Even if he did, maybe she could pray to Slath for his reanimation. She smiled. The coded text said that the worthy would be resurrected to serve Slath's hidden name in eternal glory. Surely her close friend Robin qualified for that. Cyborg and Raven did, and probably Beast Boy did too. He wasn't the strongest amongst them, but there was an...unspoiled energy to his being, like the almost-ripe glorka-berries on the edge of a branch.

When she arrived, nothing looked particularly disharmonious. True, snow blew and the pond had frozen over, but the children looked joyous and untroubled despite the cold. They were sensibly insulated against the cold by fuzzy, layered clothing. Some of them were building strange idols from the latticed ice crystals, with stick arms and carrot noses. Some sipped a chocolate-smelling liquid that steamed with heat and floated with white puffs of rendered ungulate bone. Others were sliding across the ice on bladed footwear in a manner that would have alarmed any parents present.

"I don't see the problem," Beast Boy said, echoing her thoughts. "Everyone looks happy."

"What did the report say?" Cyborg asked Robin.

"Just an emergency signal. It ended before there was any voice," Robin said, uneasily. "Maybe they were cut off before they could say anything." His tone suggested that this being an accident or a mistake was more than a remote possibility.

"I sense something unnatural," Raven whispered. Her voice carried on the howling wind.

Children continued, laughing and playing, maybe with a manic edge, but still, just children being children, unrestrained and un-supervised. Some could not be more than four OSASR old.

"They're children," Starfire said, almost to herself. Something tingled along her decentralized nervous system, clenching the nodes in her knees, shoulders, and third stomach. "Very small children."

"Yeah?" Beast Boy asked, as if ready to start a fight. "So?"

"So where are all the adults?" Starfire said.