Voila. Sans introduction.
Overlord
The Grandmaster had received the pleas of his once favoured Emissary with inexorable scorn.
Failure was a crime. It was that simple. In the end, what was failure but an expression of ignorance? There was always a way. If you do not know it, you fail. If you fail, then you do not know it. Needles to say, it disgusted him.
He had made up his mind quickly as was his fashion. He ignored the desperate cries for reinforcements, the begging for relief from a task that was simplicity in its very essence.
He had immediately set Acolytes to move the new acquisition into position, the fluctuations in time caused by the concentration of potent sorcerous energy allowing this task to be completed before the Emissary opened her portal.
The Grandmaster almost smiled as the construction began its slow descent into the Emissary's metaphorical grave. However, the mortification layering his mind prevented that. He felt cruelly betrayed, his valuable trust had been placed in the servant he was now condemning. The mistake was unforgivable. The phrase was, he believed, "If you want something to be done right you have to do it yourself." He completed in that moment the total embrace of the maxim.
He wrenched his mind back to the matter in hand; eight slaves were arrayed before him, each one held on a chain by a High Priest.
The sixteen men hovered down to the ground of the strange city. Their Grandmaster followed them on a floating pulpit of grotesquely carved stone. He was followed by another, an Acolyte, his face covered be a sacrificial mask.
The buildings seemed to be formed of small rectangular blocks of stone, sometimes faced with something, sometimes left bare. They each bore a thin covering of dirt, and there was no architecture to speak of. The buildings were functional boxes. The hyaline overhead was filled with the glory of noon, clouds were high and few. The air was cold enough to bite.
He quickly deduced that the area he was standing in was sunk in poverty, or bordering on it.
But now the High Priests were coming forwards, forming in circular formation around the Acolyte.
Each drew an obsidian dagger inlaid with the cipher of the Temple and the Lord Trigon. The Grandmaster watched in fascination as the blades raised, the barbs on their lengths catching light and sending it shining to and fro. His tongue flickered over his lips as the blades ceased their rise and the High Priests drew the heads of their prisoners level with their own.
The prisoners were terrified, but not in some animal way. They knew what was happening, they had witnessed it before. They knew the entity that headed the Temple. Indeed the Grandmaster believed that they had formed the centre of the society that the lord had destroyed not long prior to the discovery of the daughter here.
But that was of no matter, all importance here was attached to the ritual. The ritual must succeed; nothing could be allowed to prevent it. Not that there was the slightest possibility of prevention occurring.
The Masterful Plan was complete, today was the day, as the red sun would fall, and the demon stars would rise, Temple would reign supreme, and then, then… perfection.
He snapped his fingers.
Eight sacrificial daggers plunged down. Time gathered itself around to watch the blades falling in suspended animation. The tips pierced skin simultaneously, none of the victims convulsed in the slightest, putting their energy into fighting the magic potential rising in the moment. But still it was not done. The barbed black blades sunk further as blood began to well up in the wounds then rush out in swelling streams as the eight knives sunk towards eight beating hearts.
The metal of the knives met the soft flesh of the living hearts.
And eight corpses exploded with magic energy, their forms filled with a new, different and unholy brand of life. Bands of power exploded forth, setting the air alight. The noise was thunderous, as if the foundations of existence were trembling. The light shone high into the air, a nexus of brilliance that spoke of the majesty of the doom being unfurled, the greatness of the rite being performed.
The sacrificial Acolyte stood at the centre of the maelstrom as the High Priests chanted sonorous, sending their incantations to bind the primal force into usable form. The intonations rose, striving against the power of the force the chanting devotees were attempting to master. The Grandmaster felt the semi sentience that was the sorcery lapsing into indecision. Then he felt its native half intelligence being destroyed and replaced with the will of the High Priests.
The Acolyte raised his arms, the inferno curling to writhe around him, no longer half wild. The robed priests around shifted to a new chant, their voice raising and falling in an unearthly rhythm to which the Acolyte writhed, strands of the mighty sorcery dissolving into his form.
The man's stature swelled improbably as more magic was absorbed, his skin stretching as the mass within him grew.
The blasphemous intonation ended abruptly.
The Acolyte exploded.
His skin burst open, golden light shining as to blind from within. In the light a figure was growing. The body that had once been a Temple Acolyte expanded impossibly into something towering and lumbering.
The form was bestial, akin to a Minotaur. Shags of fur hung form it, matted with blood and vile fluids of unexplored origin. The hands were powerful and mighty, fingers that could enfold a tree with ease. Upon the wild head were four eyes glowing with the obscene malice fuelling the hideous creature. The monster's skin was brazen, pockmarked and gnarled, and around its head was a crown of horns that grew clustered and twisted together.
The thing rose from its crouch, lifting itself from its knuckles with a flexing of massive muscles, spreading wide its arms and unleashing its barbarous claw to test its bestial strength against the objects around it. Without deigning to shift its gaze the creature lifted a fist, then brought it crashing heavily down upon a house that collapsed into a prodigious amount of wreckage and dust. Smoke rose in great clouds as individual objects caught fire, the flames quickly coming together into a great inferno.
The Grandmaster stood in involuntary awe at the presence of the thing he had made his deity. The Lord Trigon.
Raven saw Scott consider the question she had posed to him, watching his discomfort with a practiced eye. Azar had taught her most of the signs, indeed to an eye with and empath behind it they were fairly obvious, and years tracking down criminals without the dim wits that told them that wreckage and mayhem were not, in fact, easy clues for police or other justice preserving forces to follow had refined her skill.
Yet before the man could answer something caught her eye in the glass of the elegant windows.
Her mind scrabbled for words to shape the horrifying thought forming in her mind. After a stunned minute the coarse thought, "Great Azar, there's a hole in the sky!" was fully formed in English.
Scott saw it two, staring out of the window in morbid fascination as a massive object descended from the rift with deceptive lethargy. Raven recognised the smooth fluid shapes of the construction, the concealed arcane machineries that were the Cannon Batteries, the exposed armouries.
The Tamaranian fortress crashed to the ground and a haze of destruction was thrown up. A wall of sound followed the sight, a dull roaring, melodies of devastation interlaced within the screaming whole, combining into a wave that swept out in all directions from its origin.
Raven watched in morbid fascination as robed figures began to descend from the widening slit in the heavens, but not for long.
After a second Raven reigning in her dangerously wondering mind, forcing it to accept and act upon the situation.
Stating, "We are not finished, come with me," she grasped Scott with psychic energies, and opening the windows with the same ethereal force.
Riding a wave of energy of her own creating she swept forth from the window, soaring out over the City, with infinite grace.
She hovered aquiline over the wreckage seeing robed figures similar to those that she had fought in the airless space above Tamaran.
There were eighteen, eight of which, she realised with a horrible jolt of emotion that fried a passing crow, she recognised.
The Eight Mages that had formed the Centre of the Council of the Metrionomicon, she saw them now, nigh unrecognisable in the tattered rags that clung to their equally tattered bodies. Raven put their names to their worn and hollowed faces, the Lord Commodus, the Lord Pertinax, the Lord Didius, the Lord Caracalla, the Lord Elagabalus, the Lord Severus, the Lord Septimius, the Lord Diocletian.
Raven watched with a sickening, but necessary, dispassionate air as the sacrificial daggers did their work, but when the body of the sacrificial Acolyte exploded out wards she fell from the air, stunned.
Mechanical arms stretched out to pluck her limp form from the air just prior to it being dashed into oblivion on the concrete. The body of Scott, for whom the experience of suddenly falling out of a sky which according to reason you should not have been inhabiting anyway was too much, was caught in the great apelike arms of a green gorilla.
Cyborg laid Raven's body on a tiny patch of grass at the edge of the pavement running along the side of the roads on which he stood. "Beast Boy!" shouted Cyborg through the smoke, the huge body of the gorilla clarified and then came fully into view, placing Scott a distance away from Raven and morphing into human form.
Cyborg indicated Scott with his finger, "Who's that dude?"
"No idea, but he was with her in the sky." Cyborg and Beast Boy shrugged in unrehearsed unison.
Starfire landed gracefully, her knees bending ever so slightly as her superhuman Tamaranian physique absorbed the jolting of the impact of her massive purple boots.
"Friend Raven!" she exclaimed, seeing the girl lying, her head lolling slightly, in Cyborg's arms, It's How is she done? isn't it?"
"How's she doing actually, and the answer ain't great," said Cyborg in reply.
"What are we going to do?" requested Starfire, looking at the man-machine with worry widening her massive green eyes.
As if waiting for that line to cue his entry Robin swept into the scene on a length of metal cord.
"Raven OK?" he asked briskly.
"She'll be fine, hopefully. What're we up against?"
"I couldn't see, but whatever it is we'll beat it."
