Author's Note: My apologies for taking a while to update. Obviously this chapter (and indeed the rest of the story) is dedicated to Lennox RH and evilsangle, the two people who havve managed to review. I'm finished, read on.

RegisSantia

Templar Night

The Grandmaster bestrode the floor of one of the larger halls of the Temple; apart from a few of the higher-ranking technomancers clustered around a table at the other end of the vast chamber the hall was empty of life.

Communication with his emissary had been suspended while slaves were being gathered into the vast Sacrificial Camps. It seemed that the Temple had no minions to spare, that was infuriating, the Temple should have a surplus of slaves, the Temple should have a surplus of everything.

He moved over to the table spread with maps and charts being pored over by head technomancers.

The commanding technomancers were all straight-faced, calculating, and ruthless individuals. They had to be, the upper echelons of technomancy in the Temple had a separate and incomprehensible political system, it put the most toughened by life as part of a culture where mass human sacrifice was commonplace in power, and destroyed any still sensible to the suffering of others. The four overall heads of technomancy that came out on top were always practiced in practical technomancy, and it was impossible to find anyone better versed in the theory of the practice that was part art, part science, and part religion.

The Grandmaster knew all of this, not knowing it would have been unbearable for him, but despite the obvious ability and intelligence of the men he was dealing with he still regarded them as inferior. He had nothing in his mind but contempt for all except the Templars. A serious flaw, which he was dangerously unable to recognise.

He halted standing opposite the most senior of the technomancers.

"Slaves are being gathered into the camps," it was a statement.

"Yes lord, some are being incensed before time just to speed up the process," replied the Master of Mechanics, the title the technomancers afforded their overall commander, on the opposite side of the table.

The Grandmaster snarled within his cowl, "When I make a statement I do not require conformation inferior."

"My humble apologies lordship," replied the Master of Mechanics with a bow that might not have been so servile and low if it had not been needed to hide the expression on his face.

The Grandmaster sneered at the kowtowing minion, then returned his attention to the desk in front of him.

"How soon can the plan be implemented?" he barked at the second highest ranked technomancer.

"When every slave has been herded into a camp the procedure may begin," said the woman to whom the question had been addressed with a dull lifeless face.

While the Master of Mechanics had reacted to being a man whose orders caused the deaths of thousands by becoming cruel and bitter this one obviously took the route of feeling nothing at all. Most of the senior technomancers took this approach to easing their tortured souls. Some, who ruled purely because of their overriding competence, there had been a few in the Grandmaster's time, tried to make the Temple a "better place" through their influence. The thought was laughable, what could be better than the Temple where the correct order of things, inferior races ruled by superior Templars, was enforced strictly.

An Acolyte who wore dignity like a cloak approached the Grandmaster and spoke, "The Templars are rallied and awaiting your address."

"Very good," replied the Grandmaster striding after the man with long paces.

After several turns through winding tunnels and spacious halls the Grandmaster walked through a heavy wooden door onto a large balcony.

Before him the entirety of the Order Templar stood in a carefully arranged pattern. The rows of bodies were arrayed so well that they appeared to be radiating outwards from the balcony and the single stories worth of dark Temple wall beneath it.

The Grandmaster saluted, raising his hand in the ancient gesture that had been a secret method of identification before the Temple came to power.

The crowd saluted back en masse as their leader began to speak.

His words inspired raw emotion. Every figure in the crowd below saw their ultimate destiny as the rulers of all life, the Master People, the lords of an empire that would last a thousand times a thousand years.

He spoke on, stirring the crowd up into a teeming mass of raw emotion and passion. Time seemed to stop as his speech worked surely on the minds of the listeners, strong well used words enforced subconsciously by the calculated gestures of his arms and the tones of his voice. The Grandmaster addressed the crowd until it was impossible to go on. And the crowd listened until they were swept away in the wave of pure feeling created by his words.

He ended his speech with one final salute which was returned by the thronging, cheering, screaming mass on people below him with vigour.

Any normal crowd would have been brainwashed to the point of ritual suicide by the Grandmaster's speech. But the crowd was not normal. The people were Templars, trained from birth to accept the hideously twisted propaganda of their regime and revel in it.

The Grand master was pleased with himself as he swept away to witness the incensing of the first camp of slaves.

Victor Townsend, accomplished thief and man of many unsavoury talents was congratulating himself on a good night's work. Too many criminals were soft these days, there was no competition. He followed a strict rule: no witnesses, no bodies.

His strict adherence to this rule had seen him through the bad times as well as the good, and now he was undisputed ruler of the minor scale criminal underworld that gnawed continuously at the roots of Jump City society.

The burly man turned a corner and walked down a lamp lit street. The streetlights towered above him, like hunched spirits bearing devilish orange lanterns. He moved with confidence through the pools if light thrown on the ground by the lamps overhead and turned off to the left.

Now he was walking down a dark alleyway, one of the myriads of dark and unwelcoming side streets that crisscrossed the city. His feet fell silently, that came with experience.

The street was blissfully quiet. No, wait it wasn't. He flicked around drawing a small but unmistakable knife. There was nothing, nothing to have caused the rustling. The passage behind him was quite literally empty. There was no cat skulking in the shadows, no leaves, it was nearing the end of autumn, nothing at all, not even a carelessly discarded crisp packet.

He turned slowly and began to walk again, but his gait had lost a part of its confidence, and gained in wariness.

After a few minutes his assurance returned, along with his ability to convince himself he must have imagined the noise, but then he heard it again.

He whirled on his feet, nerves in shreds. Had he been in a normal state of mind he would have been wondering, how could such a small and unimportant sound cause him to lose all of his self-confidence, his self-control?

One person could quite easily have answered these questions, and she dropped from the sky to stand behind his back.

Townsend span to face the young woman behind him, his last mistake.

All he saw was the glint of moonlight off a silver blade as it plunged into his throat.

The Emissary watched dispassionately as her prey fell clutching at its neck. It was really to easy to hunt them, all it required was a gradual siphoning off of self confidence and an unexplainable distraction, simple.

She crouched down removing a ring that seemed to be all jewel from her left hand and placing it on the recently deceased thief's chest. She muttered unintelligibly for several second before replacing the ring on her hand next to three identical rings and swooping off, leaving the corpse to rot.

She landed again in one of the many abandoned warehouses supported by Jump City Docks since it had ceased to be an important port.

Eight rings were placed on the ground, there was little ritual. The sorcery was designed to be brutal. She flew out of the building to perch on one nearby.

With trembling fingers she took a matching broach from the seemingly infinite folds of her clothing. She suppressed the nervousness in her body and snatched at a heavily ornamented mallet that hung from the side of her belt. Her hands shook as she ripped the mallet off the belt along with the hook it hung on.

She placed the broach on the dusty flat roof and raised the mallet above her head, a head which suddenly found itself flooded with second thoughts.

The sensation of insecurity and indecision was new to her. She found it uncomfortable and no matter how hard she tried there was no getting rid of the voice in her head.

When she had seen Trigon she had felt awed terror, if this was the father, how could she hope to better the daughter who had been able to hold him at bay? She had completed the ceremonies described by Trigon, the weakenings, the tortures, but it didn't seem at all important, she would face the daughter of Trigon, and she must win. Regardless of unfaithful voices in her head. She screwed her eyes shut, sucked in a deep breath, and brought her mallet hard down in the broach.

The mallet flashed and smashed the broach to powder instantly.

The Emissary smirked in victory and looked over to the warehouse with the rings in it. She recoiled pulling her cloak up in front of her eyes as the building and much of the ground around it erupted in a glorious fireball.

The great tower of flame rushed upwards and billowed out engulfing walls, ceilings, and unfortunate stray animals.

Soon the pillar of orange and red had risen high above the small rings which gave it birth.

Minutes passed as the blaze settled over the great coastline and fizzled out leaving great plumes of smoke rising up. An obvious marker of destruction and carnage.

Crouched on the roof opposite the dying flames the Emissary watched. Destruction would bring her the daughter of Trigon, and then the daughter of Trigon would bring the Temple the one thing it had been created to find.

The Emissary smiled her snarling smile, and settled down to wait.

It wouldn't be long.

Raven sat in her room, eyes closed hands laid on her knees. She didn't feel like meditating. Well, you'll just have to meditate anyway, she thought, addressing herself in the second person.

She cleared her mind of distraction, withdrawing into herself, accompanied by the soft repetition of her timeless mantra, "Azarath, Mentrion, Zinthos." The chant worked like the charm it was, lulling her into meditative concentration.

She sat motionless, until she was interrupted by a knock on her door.

"Yes," she barked, annoyed.

She reached out psychically to it and it swung open.

Beast Boy stood outside. "Dinner is served," he said, and walked away.

Raven followed him. She took a seat in the large common room and took the plate of food offered her.

The team ate in silence, and when they finished Raven stood abruptly and left.

"Is she more grumpy than usual?" asked Cyborg watching her walk out of the door, cloak swirling behind her.

Raven returned to her room, and paced along its deep carpets, up and down… up and down… up and down.

She sat down, restless, and pulled a book towards her. She looked vaguely at the page wondering, not wondering about anything, just wondering.

She read the same line four times, then gave the book up as a lost cause. She returned to her pacing, her expression vacant.

Focus, she told herself, focus on why you're unfocused. But she would not focus, some part of her refused to allow it, and so she moved around for a good ten minutes, doing useless things for about ten seconds apiece.

She sat at the small piano in the corner of her room, and played something that came to her mind.

"Is this the real life?

Is this just fantasy?

Caught in a landslide

No escape from reality."

She sang with a clear ringing voice that bounced and reverberated of her walls, filling her room with sound. Beast Boy appeared in her doorway.

"I didn't know you could play the piano Rae," he said.

Instead of shouting for calling her Rae Raven said, "I learnt in Azarath."

Azarath, thought Beast Boy, where have I heard the word before? Then it struck him. "Azarath, that's the first word in your chant thingy, it's a place?"

"It was a place," corrected Raven, "a beautiful place, I grew up there, until my father destroyed it." Anger flared behind her eyes as she battered the keys of her piano.

"So if Azarath is a place, what do the other words mean?" inquired Beast Boy.

"Other words?" said Raven, the touch of her fingers on the keyboard returning to a gentle caress.

"You know, in your chant, Azarath, Metrion, Zinthos."

"Ah."

She turned on her piano stool to face him, "The language is Azarathi, and the chant has been used in Azarath for centuries."

She cleared her throat quietly and began, "Azarath was where I was born and brought up, a community set up for the peace and plenty of its members, I was taught by the ruler, Azar," her eyes had taken on a far away look at odds with her usual sharp focus, "that is, until my dear father Trigon destroyed the place." She spat the words dear father with ultimate venom. "In Azarath there was a building called the Metrionomicon, the sorcerous hub of the nation the meeting place of a collection of mages of great power. Metrion is the Azarathi word for magic or sorcery. And finally Zinthos means come to me. Azarath Metrion Zinthos. Sorcery of Azarath come to me."

"I never knew that," said Beast Boy quietly.

"I never told you," Raven replied. She looked at him, "Beast Boy?"

The green changeling was pointing out of her window, seemingly frozen in horror.

Raven turned to see a great cloud of smoke forming itself into the symbol of Trigon, a vast daemonic visage, over the dark waters of the harbour. The sound of the explosion rippled over them, forcing Raven to cover her ears.

The two of them sprinted into the Main Room and took off, Raven levitating psychically, Beast Boy becoming a majestic eagle. Raven waved a hand at Cyborg encasing him in Darkfire and they flew out of the rapidly opening window, followed by Beast Boy and Starfire carrying Robin.

Raven stared into the cloud of smoke formed into a massive horned head with a fanged snarl and burning eyes.

Hatred flared within her, hatred for the daemon father who had forced her into a life of isolation and withdrawal.

Raven hovered before the cloud, surveying the devastation below her with a wary eye.

Starfire and the rest of her team came to a halt beside her. Robin looked at her questioningly, "What does the symbol mean?"

"Its Trigon," said Raven bluntly.

"Will there be anything down there to attack?"

"I don't know," replied Raven, "the last time I saw it it was floating above the ruins of Azarath." As she said this her face became immobile and she closed her eyes, breathing deeply.

"OK" said Robin, "Titans g-"

He was cut off in mid line by a bolt of energy streaming up from the ground. Starfire swerved away from the pulsing beam of purple light as the Titans dived to Earth.

They landed in battle stances on the smoke choked floor of the destroyed warehouse.

Raven looked around; there was something here, something beyond the ordinary levels of evil.

She peered into the smoke and barely heard Robin shout, "Stick together!" She fell back towards his voice, hands raised for a fight. Her empath sense was dulled, she couldn't feel any of the people around her, panic flooded into her mind. She staggered, hand outstretched to find a wall to support her. She fell slowly but was caught by a pair of strong arms.

She was about to turn to see who had caught her when a knife, cold, hard and, to her horror, psychically unmovable, pressed against her throat, "One move and you die daughter of Trigon."