Okay, It's been months since I've posted anything on this site, andIdon't want to bore you with my rambling. Consider this aclosing note to Spellbound as everyone's favorite dragondeals with his pummeling by Raven... Disclaimer: I don't own Teen Titans in any way, shape, or form. That honor belongs to Cartoon Network and I'm not contesting thatprivilage. I seek no profit from this and merely wish to avoid being sued. Hope you enjoy this piece. On with the show.
Justice and Vengeance
By Wordbearer
There was a cave, an endless cavern that twisted and turned forever in Gordian knots that linked back onto themselves. The cave was devoid of the colors of life and change, hope and freedom, as the walls glowed impossibly in defiance of the laws of physics. White stone flowed organically from ceiling to floor, forming pillars of glaring alabaster inscribed with lines of ebony text that shifted and flowed from moment to moment as if no amount of space could contain the vast sea of knowledge embodied by the pulsing script. Apart from the words and their restless writhing, the snaking chambers were empty, but that silent, still expectancy was soon broken as a hoarse roar echoed endlessly in the pale expanse of cavities.
"She defeated me! No one defeats me! Not with the same spell that sniveling little mageling used against me 1,000 years ago!" Again the roar came, the cry of some great beast denying the truth, the truth that meant he was trapped once more in his prison. A dark tail lashed back and forth in fury as vast wings flapped overhead. A great reptilian body perched on its hind legs and a pillar of fire burst against the ceiling of the massive central chamber. The ceiling was unscathed by the display of draconic might, a fact that angered Malicor all the more as he slowly calmed himself.
He whispered with his crimson eyes held tightly shut, "I overlooked the child's potential. I considered her destroyed when she was merely buying time to gather her power. I did not see my foe clearly and that is what defeated me. Had I known her abilities, she would have been destroyed… hrrrrraah…"
Reassured, the great wrym focused a moment and the lines of scrawling text shifted and stabilized into one great text. This realm was responsive to his will and mystically linked to every book, written or unwritten, allowing him to call upon any information he desired. It had kept him sane all these centuries and now that ability would allow him to know his enemy and seek out another to grant him freedom from this place. Pages from the divine Book of Life flashed kaleidoscopically before his gaze until they halted and crystallized into one image, one page of text.
"Raven Roth… Defeater of Malicor, destroyer of the human-forged Abomination Cardiac..," the dragon paused as he calmed himself once more and skimmed past the dark mystic's time with the Titans. He knew the roots of her power lay far deeper than that, but paused, astonished as the text blurred out at Raven's fourteenth year. It was as if she had not existed before then, for no being could avoid having his or her deeds recorded in the Book of Life. His triangular eyes narrowed in bemusement.
"The only way for her to avoid having her deeds recorded in the Book would require that the Almighty himself will it. The only beings granted such rights are daemonic, not human. Raven is no daemon; she is as emotionally soft as the rest of those arrogant cattle. Could she be..? Is that…"
"Possible in this day and age I believe you going to say?" The mild, cultured voice chuckled softly as Malicor spun around with all the grace his saurian form could muster, his tail slapping against the walls. He faced the speaker, the conundrum of the missing text forgotten in the face of the impossibility presenting itself to him. Someone was present in his prison. This had never happened before and his mind reeled at the implications of this outsider's presence. Before he could speak, the black robed figure raised one crimson, skeletal hand palm up. The stranger's black robes hid his face completely and locks of brittle white hair poked from the shadowed confines of his hood. The voice that spoke was that of a man in his prime, booming in a way totally at odds with his frail appearance.
"Don't speak, I would hate for you to spoil the grandeur of your physical manifestation with the banality of your words." Malicor growled inside, but held his fury back out of the sure knowledge that his 'guest' was far more than he seemed.
"I find dragons so intriguing at times. They reflect something primal and chaotic about the universe that so many living things deny. And chaos is the mother of us all."
The stranger snapped his face upwards, revealing a shadowed void in his hood, four yellow glaring eyes visible in the darkness. The eyes held Malicor in their grip, seeming to compare him to some ineffable standard. The way the figure turned away from him screamed disappointment to the bewildered dragon.
"You have such potential, yet you squander it. Blessed with materiality and the power to shape it to fit your needs you play mental games. That sickens us as we watch you. We, the first born of creation, are trapped in the Abyss beyond the veil of time and we pay tremendous costs to gain for a few seconds what you enjoy so ignorantly, so wantonly. Humans we can forgive, for they provide us with so much pleasure when we break through. But your kind is a waste…" The stranger's eyes flared with hatred, and something wilted inside Maliocr's chest as he began to realize what he was dealing with.
In a voice that was bolder than he felt, the wrym asked, "Are you a daemon? One of the Cursed Children of the Darkness?"
The stranger stopped pacing and snickered harshly before continuing to speak, "You are so ignorant, yet so correct. I am a daemon, one of the Three First Scions of Chaos and a force to reckon with on either side of the Abyss. How do you find this prison? It must be most maddening…"
Malicor blinked, struggling to come up with an answer to this seemingly frail wraith and his nonsequitur. Anger began to glow beneath his fear, pride rebelling against common sense, "What right do you have to talk to me like this? You are a pitiful wisp of hate and I shall be free to claim what I will someday."
A small nagging voice insistently screamed for his attention, yet he ignored it as the stranger gazed passively at him. Malicor continued despite himself, "You and your kind will never be free and your kind of cleverness can be learned by anyone. Were we on the material plane, I could destroy you in a heartbeat."
Waiting until Malicor finished his tirade, the stranger pulled back his ebony hood. The face beneath was thin and ravaged, the quartet of eyes containing millennia of hatred and madness, an unkempt mass of white hair spilling halfway down his back. A dark shadow flooded out from his form and the white walls turned gray. The sound of wings echoed through the cavern, a dark flock coming at their master's call. The great dragon stepped back and lowered its head, flames licking from its mouth in fearful anticipation.
His form aglow with black light, the stranger spoke, gazing at Malicor with more contempt than any being should be able to transmit to another, "You are clever, and you are mighty for one of your kind. Keep in mind that I am one of the Three, the One who consumed his siblings in my rise to power. We both seek freedom from our bonds, and we both seek to use the same person to get it. Raven. There you err. There you make your mistake. She is mine. She has always been mine, for I helped create her." Malicor turned cold with fear as he began to suspect who this being was and who Raven was. A black bird swept past his gaze, the lithe avian glaring at him with four red eyes as more of its kin began to orbit the great wrym's form.
"I see understanding in your eyes, beast. I see fear. I see awe. But I see it too late; the damage has been done. No one slights Raven without my consent. She is my scion, the portal, and Trigon the Terrible does not tolerate trespasses."
Terror pumped through Malicor's veins, chilling him to his core. Trigon was a byword for destruction, a symbol of genocidal change that he and his nestmates had been warned against. Trigon was a destroyer of worlds. Trigon was to be feared more than Michael, Champion of the Heavenly Hosts, and the imprisoned Lucifer the Morningstar. The dragon was paralyzed, too bound by fear to even think of fighting back. Inside his head, pleas screamed through his head, yet none touched his lips. Dragons did not beg; they triumphed or were destroyed. Trigon walked forward slowly, a sickly grin playing across his tortured features.
"You fear me and that is good. I think that it is time for you to fear my scion and realize what she could do if she were to let herself go. Dream of what might have been and know how close you were to annihilation." A spark leapt from Trigon's palm and struck Malicor squarely in the forehead. Darkness drowned his vision.
Malicor's vision cleared and nausea swept through his thoughts. He was hovering over a rocky island dominated by a glass and steel structure shaped like the human letter 'T'. His wings beat involuntarily as he gazed at the frail prize clenched in his claw. Shrouded in a white cloak, Raven struggled for freedom, her eyes blazing white light. A surreal sense of unreality washed through Malicor's thoughts as his lips moved against his will.
His low mocking voice rumbled through the night air, "You're not going to cry are you? I won. I got what I want and there is nothing you can do to stop me. It's over and I don't need you anymore." Raven looked up at him, despair etched on her face, a sadness not engendered by his power, but by some internal defeat.
Raven whispered as her shoulders slumped and her hood hid her features from his gaze, "You're right. It is over. I'm sorry." Malicor was puzzled by this statement, deciding to crush this dust mote when he had the chance.
A sudden chill flooded his flesh as Raven was engulfed by black fire, his claw numbed by the otherworldly energy. Raven looked up as he flapped spasmodically with the pain, red light staining her face scarlet as it flared from her eyes. The gaze hypnotized the great wrym, the eyes infinite voids that would consume the planet in a futile quest to fill their hunger. Raven's cloak stretched fluidly and engulfed his arm and chest in folds of white fabric as tendrils of absolute darkness erupted from the black flame surrounding the half-daemon's body. The lashing tendrils burned with cold as they embraced his form, leaving white trails of frost all over his hide. His shrouded arm and chest burned with acidic pain as a thousand and one blades hacked at his flesh beneath the living fabric carving away layers of scale, bone, and muscle. Malicor tried to crush the girl clenched in his grip, but the fabric held against his strength. Raven smiled coldly at her attacker. Malicor began to drop when his wings cramped, wrapped in black tendrils that stripped the leathery skin as if it were tissue paper. He tore his head away from Raven and saw the ground rising to meet him. The cold was spreading, his upper body seeming numb and dead. The dragon's great bulk hit the rocky ground hard and he could see crimson blood splatter all over the rocks like a profane offering to a pagan god. Malicor twitched in agony as Raven continued to feed, his flesh mummifying as the petite horror drained the life force from his body.
His vision dimmed to grey. The last sight that met his gaze the slight girl he had sought to manipulate rising into air amid a storm of black flame. Something ineffable gently gripped his soul and pulled it free of his ruined flesh into realms beyond mortal experience. He was surrounded by a sorrowful presence, one that felt pity for his limitations and the horror he had unwittingly unleashed…
Malicor shook as the vision finished, breath booming from his lungs and tremors pulsing through his limbs. He venomously whispered to the still figure of Trigon, "An illusion. You seek to scare me with illusions. Kill me and be done with it, daemon."
Trigon smiled, "We are masters of fate, and all possible futures are open beneath our gaze. What I showed you could have been, had my daughter been less self aware and more willing to embrace her heritage… A pity. It would have been glorious to see what she could do, glutted on a dragons lifeforce!" Excitement bloomed on the daemon's face for the first time, and he closed his eyes to calm himself as his black feathered heralds cawed frenziedly.
He continued more calmly, "There is still the matter of your punishment. I am within my rights to take your soul back with me into the Abyss where you would experience a million and one tortures each day, every one worst then the last until the end of time." Malicor would have sweated if he could at the thought that there were some fates worse then his current imprisonment.
Bravado demanded he respond, "What are you going to do, Trigon the Terrible, Third Born of the Darkness? Is the great destroyer unable to make a choice?"
"Not quite, I have a better plan to deal with you. Let the punishment fit the offense."
Trigon reached out and touched one of the walls and the words fled from the spot in seeming terror.
Reflectively Trigon murmured, "These words have kept you sane, have they not? Dragons are terrible at introspection; they have no patience for the solitude of their own minds. Let's see how you endure isolation…" Trigon knealt on the cavern floor and held his palms a foot apart. A chill wind burst from his slight form and the world changed. Malicor felt a whispering cry caress his soul as the pulsing lines of text that adorned the walls of his prison exploded into the air, homing in on the space between the daemonlord's palms, forming a sphere of inky darkness. The dark birds descended on the dragon pecking and slashing at his eyes.
Malicor raised his arm to protect his face and shouted, "What are you doing?!?"
The influx of words only increased when Trigon answered, "Severing your connection with the outside world. You will never speak to another being again, never read another line of text for so long as your spirit endures. I'm setting your prison adrift in the Void, a bubble to contain you in isolation for all eternity." The words streamed past Malicor, a terrible reminder of the validity of Trigon's statement.
Fear and anger pushed the dragon to act. "No!" He lowered his head and directed a stream of fire at the kneeling figure. In his desperate fear, he ignored the birds that cut at his flesh like razors. He kept up the stream of heat for as long as he could and was gasping in exhaustion as he stared fixedly at the cloud of steam that boiled around his target. To his horrified amazement, the words continued to flow into the cloud unhindered and when the cloud cleared, Trigon was unharmed. His pose was unchanged. His hair and robe were unscathed. His palms spit black lightning as they contained the sphere of pulsing darkness between them. The words came slower now as the last of them were absorbed. A sense of familiarity brushed Malicor's senses as a final cluster of words hurled out of the twisting caverns. His book was in those words. His prison was keyed to these unique words, his portal bound to them. To lose these would doom him to the eternity of isolation promised him by the daemonlord. Malicor reached out with his talons, determined to grasp these last precious pieces of knowledge. A pair of birds struck and tore out his eyes as he heedlessly sought his prize. He felt the words pass through his claws like a summer breeze and vanish into the sphere clutched between his tormentor's hands. He hit the ground hard, the knowledge of his failure far worse than the agony of his destroyed eyes.
The dragon roared in what he hoped was Trigon's direction, "Give those back! I must have at least those back!"
"No."
"Then destroy me! I beg you!"
Trigon was amused, "A dragon begging? A first in my experience, but no."
Malicor slumped in despair and murmured, "Why do you care? Daemons care only for themselves. She isn't even fully daemon, only a crossbreed."
Trigon's response was glacially cold, "You have no understanding of us. You should know that kinship is the only universal bond and Raven is my scion. No one will harm her and remain unscathed. Take your punishment, beast. See if you can live with yourself. Take my justice, my vengeance. If you remain sane, my daughter may be inclined to keep you as a pet when she embraces her destiny and leads my Hosts in battle. Farewell, Malicor." The voice stopped and the flutter of wings faded away, telling the dragon he was alone. Blindly, he rose and focused on the Words. Nothing responded. The cavern was dead forever. He was alone, blind, and robbed of contact with the outside world. Malicor roared and the sound was redolent with despair, the cry echoing through the infinite caverns. Only he would ever hear it. Only him. Forever.
Raven woke up with a start, her hair plastered to her skull with sweat. The dark mystic's sleep had been tainted by dreams of Malicor and her father, of an endless series of caverns shaped from glowing white stone. Images of crippling eternal punishment still flickered in her head as she calmed herself, the morbid familiarity of her room reassuring her. Raven took in a deep breath and her calm facade took its normal place of supremacy on her face. She kept glancing at the chest where she had hidden the book, certain that the dream she had experienced was more then it seemed. Rising slowly, Raven undid the wards sealing the chest and lifted up the incense scented cover that lay over the few items she kept within. When she saw the book, her eyes widened minutely, the only sign of her surprise. With steady hands she picked up the tome and carried it over to her bed.
The recently gleaming cover was rotted and flaking, leaving pieces of browned leather all over her legs. The book was utterly transformed, leaving her feeling numb with shock. She may have intended to hide the book for all time, but she wouldn't have destroyed it without reason. Malicor had used the book to mislead her, play her emotions like an accordion in the selfish desire to gain his own freedom. She opened the cover and it snapped off with a brittle crack. Raven put the cover aside. The pages within were riddled with decay and crumpling at the edges. Her eyebrows rose when she realized that the pages were blank, not even a trace of ink remaining on them. As she carefully flipped through the book, she noticed one page in the back that looked as new as the morning dew. The rest of the book seemed to have aged a thousand years in a night, but that one page stuck out of the decayed mass of its fellows, a gleaming blade amid a scrap heap redolent with rot. Raven impulsively turned to it, ignoring the spray of splintering paper dust that flew into the air as the pages shredded.
This page was not blank. It contained a single line of text and a signature, the words written in red ink in a delicate script. The dark mystic trembled slightly as she traced the words with a finger. She put the ravaged tome aside and rose to get dressed for her morning meditation, determined to erase the dire message from her mind. The depths of her eyes gleamed with grim disbelief at implications of the omen. Frustrated anger came over her at the familiar resignation that she could never escape her tainted birthright. Raven exited the room a few minutes later, leaving the book open on her bed. The single white page amid the pile of ruined leather and paper framed a simple message, "Consider this a late birthday present, daughter He will never hurt you again. Trigon." The words seemed to burn in the darkness of the empty chamber.
Okay, now that you made it down here. what do you think? Good? Bad? Clear as mud? Leave a review if you you see fit and tell me what you think. Thank you very much for your time...