Author's Note: Two reviews, in such little time, how flattering. To evilsangle I say, firstly, my thanks for your review. Secondly that the only pairings I will put in the story are suggested, I am sure that I am unable to write romance

To Lennox RH: from time to time OC's will walk on and off just to give the story a bit of colour, the Commisioner is (at least so far) one of them, I'm afraid their appearence is largely up to you to create. In ths chapter you get to know a bit more about the Grandmaster (you lucky person!) and see a bit more of the workings of the Temple. The plot proper takes a little longer to begin.

Circles and Fire

The Grandmaster grew frustrated, he couldn't stand ignorance. Ignorance in others was bad; it interrupted the flow of information, and prevented the growth of understanding. Ignorance in others was contagious, if one was convinced his knowledge was false, others were sure to follow, like idiotic sheep. It disgusted him. Those around him being ignorant was bad enough, but to be ignorant himself was unbearable, it could cause him to come to a disadvantageous decision, come to an incorrect conclusion or do the one thing he held to be hateful above all else, make a mistake.

That was why he had joined the Temple, to enhance his knowledge, to become better, greater, to strive boldly on the long road to perfection. Perfection, the ultimate state which he craved at all times. Perfection, that he would achieve, no matter what it took, he would become perfect. At long last he would no longer have to deal with the idiocy and incompetence of others. At last he would be free from dependence on anything. No other would ever match him; he would be forever greater, forever incomparable, once he was perfect. He would be perfect, but now he was ignorant. He could not communicate with the Emissary, and so he was ignorant of the situation on, Earth. Earth, or so he had been informed, was but one mass in a realm of unimaginable amounts of masses, it irked him that the number of masses was to great to contemplate, he should be able to contemplate anything and everything.

Fortunately the technomancers had discovered a method of communication, it used up disproportionate amounts of slaves, but here were plenty of the inferiors around to be used.

He stared into the mirror that the technomancers had mounted on his wall 1 hour 23 minutes ago. It ceased to reflect after a few minutes and he saw a Technomancer standing "inside" it.

"Grandmaster, the rite we are about to perform is-"

"Am I aware of the functions of the ceremony, it was quite fully explained to me," snapped the Grandmaster. "Just get on."

The Technomancer bowed his acknowledgement. He signalled to his subordinates to begin. The subaltern began to walk slowly in front of the arrayed slaves swinging a brazier filled with deadly incense. Else where in the lines of condemned three other technomancers were doing the same. They paced solemnly across the room and back leaving clouds of incense in their wake.

The Technomancer Overseer was in agonies of guilt; the majority of slaves came from the culture he had been raised by, a culture which the Temple had destroyed, along with countless others. Those with training in technomancy were spared while the others were put to work as Temple slaves, and usually slaughtered to power the devices created by technomancers like him. A tear crept from his eye; life in the Temple hardened you against anything that didn't safeguard your own life, guilt, or any other feeling save cruelty, counted among these.

He would have time to hate himself later, right now he needed to get out of the room, before the incense killed him as well as his former countrymen.

The Grandmaster looked into his mirror, or screen as it had become, at the slaves, some of whom were beginning to writhe in the agony which the poisoned incense inflicted upon their insides. Soon many of them were keeling over and lying dead on the floor. He had been informed that the spell required to transport the Temple into the same world as this Earth, known as The Ultimate Solution, would require the incensing of every slave on Temple land. To someone not so fully indoctrinated as the Grandmaster the spell would have been unthinkable, but to him it was merely unusual in the amounts of energy required, and nothing more.

As the life of the last slave left its body the scene in the mirror changed. The Grandmaster was no longer looking into a chamber filled with the bodies of slaves, but out of the eyes of the Emissary. She appeared to be inside a dingy run down room, he took in its contents with distaste.

He spoke into the mirror, into the Emissary's mind, "Report."

She spoke tentatively, "Would you enlighten me as to how exactly I am to report lord."

He did so swiftly.

"So as I ordered, report," he finished.

"As you command," she began.

The Emissary spoke swiftly, she described to the Grandmaster her landing and her acquisition of lodgings, ("Lord the impudence of the populous is amazing, they don't seem to realise that they are inferiors. I taught respect to those who refused me accommodation,") then went on to inform him of her plans regarding the daughter of His Lordship. The Grandmaster heard it and approved. Then the link between them was broken.

Her plan was by no means perfect, information on the daughter of His Lordship had been sparse at the Temple, almost all save her age, gender, and most obvious abilities was hidden, curse Azar and the pacifist scum!

The solution to the problem of being unaware of the name or description of her quarry could be solved in one way, there was a chance that her soul would be devoured, but that possibility was present in almost any ritual.

She selected a large stick of charcoal from a pouch somewhere in the folds of her robe and began purposefully marking the floor with it. She drew the summoning circle familiar to all those with any experience of such of things, moving the charcoal across the floor with smooth expert motions, summoning was the first thing a Temple Acolyte learnt, and was universally mastered.

She completed the circle and stepped back, admiring her handiwork, until she snapped out of it and got on with the task in hand.

She chanted quietly, her voice blank. The rhythm and the pitch of the ancient chant gradually grew greater and greater.

She felt the addictive feeling of power that had attracted many new Acolytes over the millennia. It has destroyed more than its fair share of Acolytes to. They felt it once or twice then went mad, or craved it above anything else, starving themselves of food and water, taking in nothing but exhilarating magical power, which gradually became less exhilarating once you grew used to it, that was when the addicted ones finally cracked. The strength and the will to use it flowed through her body. She jerked as it ran down her arms and legs and she laughed manically, needing to release the energy inside her.

Then it was gone, and she returned slowly to her levelheaded normal state of existence.

The air in the centre of the summoning circle was swirling and howling, light blazed out from the core of the power, forcing the Emissary to avert her eyes. She saw shadows playing on the wall she was staring at, keeping her eyes away from the maelstrom of blinding light in the circle. The light took longer to die away than the power surge, but it did eventually, and it left something far more important than the power surge had behind it.

She turned her eyes firmly shut and prostrated herself before the ting in the centre of the circle.

She began to speak in a clear ringing voice,

"Lord thy greater purpose,

Is upheld in I,

I shall never cross thee,

'Till the day I die.

I beg thy assistance,

Show me now the way,

And I shall follow thee,

'Till my dying day.

Victory uphold thee,

Never to look back,

Glory shall enfold thee,

Nothing thou shall lack.

I am here to serve thy,

Wishes and thy call,

Show the road before me,

Enemies shall fall.

Lordship victory nears,

On the battle plain,

All our foes shall fall there,

And feel the endless pain."

A voice filled with millennia of hunger malice and hatred spoke, or roared, "Arise servant, and speak quickly for I am not best pleased to listen."

The sound of the voice sent shudders running through the Emissary's body, and awoke doubt in her, it was the first time she had ever not been fully confident, and it was frightening beyond even the bestial presence in the centre of the chamber.

Raven sat bolt upright in bed. She felt pain unlike anything before it, a heaving, wrenching, tearing. It filled her mind until she could contemplate nothing else, it seemed that it had always been this way, and that it always would be this way, life was not worth living, it was filled only with searing agony.

She writhed in her mind, her body a useless appendage; muscles twitched sporadically, their purpose forgotten. Her body was abandoned by the mind that controlled it, as it became totally immersed in the torture streaming through it.

Raven keeled over onto the floor, her body thrashing in imitation of her psyche. She spasmed and twisted uncontrollably, filled with fire that nothing could remove.

She screamed against the throbbing, her voice gradually rising out of the audible spectrum.

Her friends with Cyborg at their head burst through her door. Beast Boy ran to her, and her hands grasped at him, jerking him off his feet, he fell over her and skidded to a halt on the other side of the room. He crawled back and looked into her unrecognisable face.

Her mouth was open in an above audible shriek, tears were streaming down her cheeks unchecked, her eyes were staring straight ahead, and every muscles was pulled taut, screwing up her face into a contorted snarl. Hair was plastered to her head by the sweat rolling freely from every pore.

Cyborg was crouching beside her now and shouting frantically at Robin, and Starfire was standing back in shock, not sure how to think or act.

Raven suffered for a seemingly endless time then she felt the fire fade, slowly, gradually. After more agony filled minutes her screaming dropped back into the audible range and soon stopped altogether, the deathly pain was gone.

Robin ran to the couch as he heard the scream, and stared down at Raven, willing her to be all right as the heart-rending sound of mental torture ceased. He watched as her face lost the tension in it, as the stream of tears from her eyes was stemmed, as the sweat stopped flowing. He waited silently as her violet eyes unfocused.

Raven's eyes unfocused and her mind attempted to recover. It was strange, she thought, that such agony could leave behind such freedom. She felt loved. She felt wanted. She felt friendship.

Raven's self control stepped in, and stopped the train of thought; she would look at where it led later. It was obvious that something out of the ordinary was happening; an empath trained in control of emotion and mind does not fall unconscious in shock then turn into a screaming wreck if events are merely routine. Had anything out of the ordinary happened to her? No, she didn't think so. Had she acted in this way before? Not that she could remember. So it was all a puzzle, perhaps she should enter into her Mindscape, perhaps there it would become clear.

The thought sparked another thought, the dream, what was its connection with the affair?

She turned her mind to the prescient vision; she had met Hatred, which usually coincided with her feeling hatred in real life, and she had not felt it yet, therefore the events of the vision would not begin yet.

So when would they begin?

Questions gnawed at Raven's brain, her mind was fluctuating, and she had had a prescient dream, something important to her was happening, and she had no idea what it was.

Apart from the "symptoms" nothing out of the ordinary had happened, so what could the cause be?

Pondering was pointless; it would all become clear in time.

She walked quietly out of her corner of the Common Room and retrieved a book from a shelf in her room. Instead of settling down on her bed as she would normally returned to the Common Room and sat on the sofa beside Cyborg who was gaming energetically. She curled her legs up feline under her body and immersed herself in the chapters of her tome, she didn't complain when either Beast Boy or Cyborg jumped with cries of victory.

No one noticed her, being wrapped in his or her own separate worlds. Cyborg and Beast Boy locked in furious competition, Robin and Starfire in earnest conversion on the side of the large central room of Titan's Tower.

Soon she had quite forgotten the past twenty-four hours, which went to show just how much she was acting strangely.