Author's Note: An apology is defintiely in order for taking so long to update the story. iIwill not insult anyone who has note long since grown bored and left with excuses. I hope that this chapter and the next can make up for my failures.

Re-entry

Raven subjected the figure on the opposing side of the table to a gaze that cut through flesh and struck straight to the core. Her eyes narrowed slightly and her head tilted back as her shoulders widened to allow her to lean back slightly in her chair.

"The thing is Raven, you are the only interesting thing in this city, apart from the cathedral, and I believe I have some connection with your past," said the man opposite, a calculating expression on his face.

"That is highly unlikely."

The man smiled, relishing the shock of his next words, "Do not be so sure, Raven. Not everyone who knew Azar went to Azarath." He delivered the comment in a casual manner, but it sliced down to the centre of Ravens mind with an icy blade.

She was shocked that the thought had never occurred to her, that she had never thought that Azar, whom she knew had come from earth, could have left any acquaintances behind.

Scott smirked slightly, then drove on with what he had to say, "I never believed that I would ever see anyone else who knew her again, but now I have."

"How did you find out?" choked Raven through the numbing shock.

"The wonders of the internet Raven, the wonders of the internet. You wouldn't believe what it can tell you." Raven was beginning to be annoyed be the slightly superior style in which he spoke, like a lecturer gradually and measuredly disembowelling the delusions of his students. "Strangely there was also," he paused, "never mind." Raven decided that she didn't want to know, or more precisely that if she did find then she would regret it. "So Raven, I must ask you, how is Azar?"

It was his turn to receive a shock; Raven saw no point in prevaricating, "Dead." Emotion fought to wash into the words, to push its way out of its confinement through her face or her voice. But she said the words blankly, the constriction of her chest the only sign of feeling.

Scott visibly reeled, his brow creasing as if trying to comprehend the meaning of the word. He half muttered unintelligible words, moving and wringing his hands in a physical expression of disbelieving agitation.

The spectacle of the total and instant destruction of a delusion that has served to bring comfort for the best part of a lifetime was painful to watch. Eventually Scott summoned up enough courage to ask the strangled question, "How long?"

"Years now," replied Raven, sorrow and pity mixing in her deep eyes, "I'm sorry." She was.

The man across the table in the room that had suddenly become cold managed to break the flow of sorrow within him to request, "Tell me, how?"

Raven told him, from the story of Azarath to her own birth to the coming of Trigon to the very moment of Azar's death itself.

By the end of the story Scott had succeeded in calming himself down. When Raven related the circumstances of her mentor's death he muttered to pronounced to the world at large, "I should have been there, I should have died at her side." At that moment compassion, one of the emotions whirling chaotically at the apex of her Raven's mind came to the fore and she reached out an arm and patted him on his shoulder.

He lifted his head from his hand, "You were the last person she saw. I hope you realise how much of a blessing that is."

Raven nodded solemnly, oh yes, she knew. She knew better than anyone just how much of a blessing that was.

Scott lifted himself from his chair, his breathing deep but largely controlled. "Please, come with me, I have something that you must see."

Raven raised an eyebrow in her customary fashion and followed his footfalls through the halls of his manor house. The long chambers ran from north to south and their massive French windows faced out to the east, giving a spectacular view of the mountain around which the city was built. You could look across the wide pedestrian clogged road that ran from the summit of the mount down to the waterfront to see the gothic towers of the early colonial cathedral and the gilt frontage of the court building, which had been removed from the estate of the mayor when it was decided that democratically elected rulers should not live in buildings composed mainly of marble and gold leaf.

Her guide turned through one of the doors that emerged from the mahogany panelling of the hall and she followed him into a large room generously furnished and decorated in a regal and old-fashioned manner. Windows on her right looking over a courtyard allowed the pale light of morning that had been so golden but a door away filter into the chamber. There was a real fireplace, like the warm and homely log burning pieces that she had loved in Azarath, built into the wall in front of her.

Scott walked over to it and leant against it with his hand on the mantelpiece. "In that chest there," he said, motioning to a case below the windows, obviously meaning that Raven should open it.

She knelt beside it and lifted the lid open.

Lying inside it on a purple cushion was a book. No, more precisely, a tome.

It was bound in leather, inlaid with tiny amounts of golden wire that formed Azar's symbol when the light caught it in the right way. It was roughly half the size of a dictionary; the sheaves of paper that made up its pages were bound together with black cord.

"What is it?" Raven asked, lifting it reverentially from its bed. Something about the way it exuded knowledge and wisdom.

"Azar's First Treatise on Pacifism and Psychic Ability," stated Scott, "rather a long title, but I am sure that the content is infinitely more interesting."

Raven caught the hint in the wording of the sentence, "You don't actually know?"

"I've read the section regarding pacifism, but Azar forbade me to read the chapters on psychic abilities unless someone from Azarath had read it first."

And to think, thought Raven, that all this knowledge might have been lost if I had not been brought here.

"It seems obvious that you should read it, as it relates to you so deeply."

"Thank you," said Raven in a detached manner, flipping through the first pages, seeing neat ink written text and diagrams.

"May I ask a question," she said, twisting to face her host.

"But of course."

"How did you bring me here? The last thing I remember was being knocked out by Slade," as she said the word her ghost's eyes darkened and his face hardened, "before waking up here."

"Very well Raven," Scott began, "I have lived in this city for around two years. In that time I have witnessed first hand the cruel nature of both the police and the criminals of this city. For the sake of my conscience I had to take justice into my own hands." Raven was about to protest but he raised a hand and continued, "Pray before you call me a hypocrite allow me to explain myself. I am an unknown force, a foreigner who came here and bought a big house, hardly a threat to a well-entrenched crime lord, but I am not harmless, far from it. Seeing as neither yourself and your little group of altruists nor the police forces were making any progress I decided to find a group more likely to have connections with and knowledge of Slade. The "guild" of assassins that I encountered proved to be just what I was looking for. Oh don't worry Raven," he said in response to the horrified look creeping onto her face, "I gave no orders to kill him. However, when the assassin sent to neutralise Slade failed I had to fork out massive sums to hire what could be called a private army of robots to finish the task." He paused for a moment. "Slade has, I understand, been neutralised, seconds after you were stunned apparently. The robots dispatched to perform that task then brought you here."

Raven took a moment to digest the information, and then said, "So you sent the assassin, and the robots?"

"Yes."

"Should I forgive you?" she asked, looking at him earnestly.

"That is your choice."

At last the time had come. The Emissary didn't know how long she had spent mouldering in the psychic cell of one of the numerous prisons in the city. But at last tonight she would be held no longer in this hateful concrete cube.

It had taken far too long for the inspiration to come to her, but now that it had she was ready to overload the wards that prevented the rituals she had prepared form smashing through the dank walls and forming a rubble strewn pathway to freedom.

In execution her plan was simple. She still had her Temple Blade, an ethereal weapon that no amount of psychic warding could remove. With a single word she could summon it to her hand. The blade could not cut through solid substances, but sever the strands that attached souls to their bodies.

Previously it had seemed useless to her. What good could killing the guard who routinely gave her the barest minimum of acceptable nourishment do?

Then it had hit her.

The cell had been built to hold the psychic potential of a single individual, if she could overpower this by simultaneously releasing the power of two people then she could break herself free.

She sat patiently by the door, her legs crossed and her hands on her knees. The Temple had taught her how to wait.

She supposed that it was midday when the guard came in and brought her lunch. She stood as she heard the key clacking in the mechanical lock and the card swiping in the computerised one.

She summoned her Temple Blade and drew back her hand, the incantation that would send power blasting through the symbols she had sketched on the wall in preparation ready on her lips.

The guard stepped through the doorway, not looking towards the prisoner but down at his watch.

The Emissary struck, the ghostly substance of her Temple Blade swiping the life from her quarry's head. The man fell, still fully armoured, as The Emissary shrieked out her spell.

The symbols on the wall burned with more power than the wards built into the cell could handle and blasted the concrete away. The Emissary smirked.

She muttered another incantation and her feet lifted from the ground.

There was no question as to the next course of action, "While she had failed in her duties, a crime punishable by death in the Temple, there could be no disobedience.

Now that she could be assured that the Temple was in fact occupying the same universe as her it could be contacted directly with a minimal number of sacrifices. She would open a portal to the Temple and call through reinforcements to capture the accursed daughter of the Lord Trigon.

She chose a dirty district that obviously had a tiny or defective police complement.

She landed in a deserted side street, fragments of litter and general grime crowding the area between two blocks of flats.

She lay in wait by the entrance for the rest of the day, ensnaring anyone who walked by until by nightfall she had an eight strong crowd of people lying stunned in the alleyway.

She withdrew the chalk that she always carried, etching lines in the murky darkness, chanting as she did so.

The area was prepared, her incantations had been voiced, all that was needed now was power and the trigger.

Having no other weapon she summoned her Temple Blade up again, raising it to bring it swinging in a whirl that would pluck the lives and souls from each of her captives.

She whirled the weapon, its blade flowing in a swooping arc as the trigger incantation burst from her lips.

She felt the power rising, expanding to fill her form and grow on. She tore the fabric of fragile reality with ease delivered her message directly to the mind of the Grandmaster, opening a small, but physical, unlike the mental fracture before it, hole to mark her position. Soon the power faded and she was forced to conquer the hunger to slay more, more to rebuild the ecstasy of nigh omnipotence.

Her training saved her there and the rift into the space of the Temple blossomed suddenly open.

The Emissary cackled to see the foreboding buttresses and towers, but the laugh warped quickly into a strangled screaming shriek.

It was not column of grey robed Temple warriors that was moving out of the tear.

The Emissary raised her voice in prayer to her blasphemous deity, but for please went unanswered. She glanced up again and screamed her final scream.