Yeah, I pretty much just just had fun with battle descriptions, and then the rest kind of followed.

It's supposed to be chaotic, it shifts between past and present. Basically, if Terra's there, then it's somewhere in the past. The rest is post-Season 5. Except for the verses, which are all somewhere in timeline limbo.

Oh, and IVIaedhros (thanks goes to that guy, even if he kept me up till six in the morning to discuss the nature of God) has said that the pacing is too fast, and that it felt a little cheap as a result, so if anybody has any input in that regard, do share.

- Deathwork -

-

"In the name of God, impure souls of the living dead shall be banished into eternal damnation. Amen."

- Hellsing

Rest them in all we spilled here

blood and dirty rainbows

ignite the machine fluids

Inside the pyre I hear a voice call

so please burn them, burn it all

We're "cleaning up" after a disaster. It's really hilarious when you look at it. The mess. Our "cleaning up". This is by far the worst spring cleaning we have ever done.

I'm point man, up front and tanking with BB, of course. I'm built like a tank and none of the hazards here can even scratch my paint job, much less the neo-titanium underneath. Tanking means me and B walk through the zombies on the ground, the girls stay safe in the sky and Robin on his rooftops. Me and the elephant are the one's who get dirty. At least I only have to be hosed and BB can clean himself up in a cup of water, but it still stinks in several way.

Between sonic weaponry, incessant explosions, elephant war cries and heavy metal rock from my baby following behind us, we should be making our presence heard across town. That's the master-plan: we paint a big, fat, red crosshair on ourselves and let the zombies come to us, if they aren't all here right now already. Which we have good reason to believe they are, but a few trips around town are still required before the infantry are ready to roll in and comb what's left for stragglers. Nobody is really put in danger that way.

Zombies aren't dangerous when you're the vanguard superheroics. Even if it's a new strain, which is the case here. Not airborne, thank whatever deities that cruise the universe, not yet, but these bodies don't walk like stick-men. Still, they're not dangerous. It's all those freaks you get when...

Well, there's the telepaths. There's one here, apparently. Or was. One in about 72.166,34 humans are some sort of psychic. There happened to be one here, and it got the whole hive mentality up pretty good.

Let me tell you, there's nothing so creepy as going into a town full of dead people that want to eat you, and knowing how ugly it's going to get... it's really, really ugly... and when you get there, there's nobody home...

Long, sloping streets in the middle of suburban nowhere, with abandoned cars all the way. One overturned. There was traces in the grass, red shoeprints along the streets. Beast Boy purposefully stepped around each crimson mark. Smashed windows, sporadic signs of gunfights. No survivors.

No walking dead.

No dead.

No nobody. Just three boys and two girls walking and floating side by side, and an empty car following them like a obedient pet. The sun hangs high above, and it's pleasantly warm on this day, despite the gentle breeze. The only sounds are those of footsteps: Hard, steel-soled steps on stone. Much heavier, metallic steps. And his own rubber soles, producing much less noise. Each of the others' footstep grated the changeling's nerves. He almost wanted to whistle, just to stand in for the birds who so conspicuously stayed silent. "What happened to the undead hordes?" he asked no one.

Even the T-car made no sound. There were only more footsteps.

In my home, I can always hear the surf of waves against the beach. I can hear the low hum of electricity run through the home I built out of an alien troopship, water through the pipes. I can even at all times detect the distinct heartbeat of everyone but myself in the tower. When I drive through Jump City, there's always a thousand sights for those who are looking. I feel a million electromagnetic signals passing through the air, I can link up to the net everywhere I go, I can see a hundred television ´channels, hear a hundred radio stations, cell-phone conversations, map my surroundings from satellite eyes above and see leylines of electric power and information, and I can hear the heartbeat of thousands of humans, keeping them going in their daily lives.

This place is silent. The only hearts that beat here are those inside my three friends.

Rest in eternal nothing

leave life to the living

Leave your hunger, instinct, loathing.

Don't worry, no trying, no curtain call.

I'll do it, I'll end you all.

They had walked for half an hour with no zombie sightings when Robin decided the atmosphere was too oppressive even for him.

"What do you guys want to listen to?"

Normally, it was a short argument of whose turn it was to decide what music was to be put on, but nobody really felt like listening to their favorite tracks right now. Most of Raven's personal track lists fit the mood to a tee, but nobody wanted to feel worse than absolutely necessary. They agreed on something none of them really listened to much in their spare time, a mix of semi-noise, semi-metal instrumental rock. The kind that could even put out the super-villains that weren't used to such psychological warfare, and really sounded right with explosions and things being smashed, and screams.

According to theory and our own experience, this would draw zombies like flies to zombies. But we ended up walking around for another half hour with noise rock screaming into the back of our heads without seeing even one cadaver. I turned it off again when Raven's headache leveled an apartment building. She was naturally less concerned with public damages than normally, but still...

There was supposed to have been a zombie apocalypse here. It should be swarming with brain-eaters all over the place. But there wasn't even still corpses, even though there should have been plenty of headshots with the federal weapons legislation. The legislation that was supposed to put the normal Joe on eye-level with zombies, and all those other freaks.

Like us. As if.

"If you can't do it, don't try to force yourself, okay?"

"I can do it." It was an automatic response. He didn't doubt that the newest Titan could do what was necessary, but this was not just friendly concern for her feelings.

Keep the voice neutral and the face friendly. "That was an order." She looks surprised. "If you get scared, float to somewhere safe."

"I can control my powers now, you know." Which means a lot to her, understandably.

"I do know, but you can't afford to loose your edge on the job, ever. We trust you as much as any of the rest of us, and anyone who gets scared are supposed to get themselves to safety. Otherwise you're a liability. It goes for all of us. Safety is the highest priority in purge-missions, and, no offence, but we have more experience and can take better care of ourselves than you can. So..."

Cyborg ends his aborted sentence: "Concentrate on watching your own butt."

"Guy's, I'm a superhero too. I've seen dead people before. I'm not going to break down or anything, okay? I know they're already dead." Her hair fell over her eyes like it tended to did. Could be a problem in a tight place.

Robin wouldn't ever forget the first time he broke down. Or rather, he panicked, and the training had taken over from there. He'd blacked out, and he hadn't dared to find out if any of the bodies were virus-negative afterwards. "Okay. But stay out of range. You don't have our defensive capability. And Starfire, braid her hair."'

"What?"

"Wonderful idea! Please, sit down Terra and we shall commence the braiding maneuvers."

We have to purge this city.

Stain your hands, blades and souls,

slay the sinless without pity,

forgive them, sisters, brothers, and purge them

rest them, purge them and save them

In her first fight against zombies, Terra tipped a bunch of buildings over the largest masses. Pretty much leveled what little skyline that place had. Awe inspiring power, absolutely, yet Robin was more concerned with the way she had crushed whole families right in front of her without a single moment of hesitance. He could tell she wasn't entirely untouched, or had rationalized their death perfectly already the first time she did it.

The first times were always the hardest, Robin knew that. But this didn't look hard to Terra, only unpleasant.

He didn't like to think about what it meant, and he wasn't Batman, so he had let it stay at concern. She had a right for privacy, to keep her history her own, like they all had. Especially himself.

"Guys, let's get something to eat. If the zombies aren't coming around anyway, there's no reason to starve, right?" The changeling was looking towards a mart. There was the smashed remains of an interim barricade behind the smashed glass doorway. Stacks of shopping carts.

Robin shrugged. "Okay, no point in fighting starved."

The inside of the place was pools of soda, beer and oil on the floor. Rotting tomatoes, apples, and assorted groceries. It could only stink worse if the meat wasn't cealed in plastic. Bagged and canned foodstuff. Lots of empty shotgun shells. A single smear of somebody's cranial fluids over the dairy-section. Fifty different flavors of potato chips.

Like the rest of them, Starfire hadn't made outward signs of discomfort, but still quickly found the mustard and started binging one bottle after another in a steady tempo. Beast Boy put crackers, juice and chocolate in a plastic bag, Robin downed some of his pills with lukewarm ice-tea, and Cyborg gorged himself on tortilla chips, which was a pretty ugly affair when his fingers couldn't handle the thin, crispy treats. Raven just floated there.

"Yes, we've still made no contact... none at all?... They don't usually hide... We'll keep going." Robin flipped his communicator shut. "Patton out there says that the barricade hasn't seen any zombies either. Not a single one while we've been down here, and none for the last twenty four hours."

"This is the behavior of a sentient enemy, not mindless cadavers." Starfire.

"Someone is controlling them." Cyborg.

"Yes." Raven. "I've felt something off about this place since we got here."

"Broadcasted mind control?" Robin.

She nodded. "Spread out, unfocused and not powerful enough to affect us, but zombies only need a little push."

They may share a thousand brains through the psychic, but it's still just a bunch of rotten brains. The best strategy they came up with was massing in one place and hit us with everything they had at once. Essentially a small upgrade from what the same thing they always do. I remember that's what I thought. Now I think someone would really liked to have a look at the brain in that telepath, but that's not really an option.

They still didn't have a chance, of course. We've gone through the end of the world. Zombies are so infinitely weaker than firedemons that we almost considered telling the bigwigs to have somebody else do this.

The reason we didn't is that there's always that element of chance. The chance you might get hurt or worse is always there on missions, and it is a particularly influential factor when you deal with the sort of quantities that zombies represent. And when you go into this dark, underground parking lot because something definitely is down there, judging from the smell... and when you find this stinking, disgusting mountain of bodies, literally a rotting meat-wall across the place – and when they suddenly come flooding through your only exit, you can't help wishing you had stayed home.

Well, you found them now, so you turn your back to the wall and your power-weaponry to the undead, hold 'em at gun-range, let loose -

... like a disco mortuary, with throngs of people jumping and screaming and colorful lights dancing over them. The defensive fire and Cyborg's ghostly flashlight illuminated glimpses of torn clothes, empty eyed stares and open ribcages.

They were running, by god! Running and gunned down one after another, groups at a time, more and more, soon getting close enough that Beast Boy and Robin had to cover for the girls firing over they shoulders, but rapidly forced to back up to the meat-wall. Cyborg was left at the fore, arms blazing and face concealed in a plasma-proof mask, like a lone rock jutting up from the human waves crashing against him. He only shrugged them off, changed his sonic cannons for chainsaws and, stomping zombies with each step, plowed and hacked his way through the rain...

- until the damn mountain starts moving behind your back! And I trip and fall and crawl my way back, but it's like I'm just pushing dead zombies back with my feet instead of getting anywhere before I can warn them.

I've killed people before. The Titans don't know, and I don't think anyone of them have killed. They've never had the same problems like me with their powers. Raven had those priests who helped her... or maybe not so much helped her, if I have to judge from what I know about her, but at least she never killed anybody because she couldn't control her powers.

Okay, I'm not sure at all. If anyone of them is ever going to commit murder, I see Raven doing it.

Terra looks back at those thoughts now while she looks at Starfire point a flat hand at the officer's face and shoot a starbolt through it. The chewed-at face implodes into itself and out through the crater at the back of his skull.

When Terra had opened the earth and let the undead fall down to crush them when she closed to ravine again, the geokinetic saw those she had killed before: The zombies were already dead, and so were those she had killed before, and he had helped her to accept that guilt. Accept it and get over it, and that was something she didn't think she could ever thank him enough for. It didn't kill her inside to do this, not the way she could see Robin struggle to finish them off. Not like Cyborg retreated into his cyberbrain and macho facade, or the way it visibly sickened Beast Boy. She was sure even stoic, emotionless Raven had a problem with what they had been ordered to do.

The mass grave the city has become, the extreme lethality of the bio-weapon that has been proclaimed the most potent WMD in history, the scores of superhumans that travel through the metropolis on a cleansing genocide like a vision of the end of days... none of that unnerves Terra as much as the genuine, cheery beam of a smile on her friend's beautiful lips. Beautiful like everything else about her, graceful in her freedom of gravity and monstrous power. Even the way she gives death to the undead is beautiful: the gleam of scorching fire in the alien alloys on her arms and neck, the ease and confidence exuding from her body, even the single trail of someone's blood across her nose and around her smiling lips is beautiful.

After a day of feeling protected by her precious friends she's decieving, of almost pitying the unthinking zombies' inability to properly defend themselves from the metahuman march, suddenly Terra's breast constricts and her blood runs cold.

"They're in the pile! It's only fatal damages on top! They're insi-!"

Bright and dark blasts went off into the clawing and squirming wall behind their defensive ring, setting meat aflame and throwing body parts over the boy's head.

"Give us an exit, now!"

Blue twin beams lit up the underground death-trap and blasted through the ceiling into the street above, which only came crashing down with rot from the horde that had gathered over them. Cyborg was buried in seconds, but Robin flipped between the undead with inhuman agility, dodging falling bodies and pressing his legs to send him rocketing through the hole, hauled himself through the waterfall of undeath raining down.

Starfire had lit the place up like a firestorm before he was halfway out. The heat scorched him, hands clawed for him and gravity pulled him towards death... Robin tore through melting flesh like a spear, and then he was up and flying alongside the half-demon. Beneath them, a sea of gaping, moaning mouths and a hole in the ground: a melting pot of flesh and green fire, growing exponentially hotter and more intense

and it'll take me a week to get the zombie-crusts out of my-

obsidian flashes through the mob, and the things start falling into pieces. Arms and torsos and legs and heads. And the whole thing still moves. "Leave it to the fire-squads" And then green lances streaks across and along the streets, in level with the targets, cutting and burning and making a smell that she really shouldn't enjoy.

Cyborg's two cannons are, if anything, even messier. Sonic vibrations essentially disintegrates the target, and as he plows through the masses, a fine, crimson mist is left in the wake, like a burial shroud. He is dripping, and Beast Boy has become an unclean brown monster from eras past.

"Cooool."

I rarely use that word, but now I hear myself drone it in appreciation of the spectacle, like it was all just a big show. Part of me would feel guilty about that, but then, I don't do feelings. What feelings there are, I've sorted out already. For the moment, I rest suspended several meters over the churning slaughter-field and allow myself a little macabre fascination.

The only thing abnormal about me is that I'm used to seeing a splatter film this close. Fascination with death is hardly exclusive to the infernal, whatever else the priests were trying to make me believe. I could videotape those two monsters down there - that's what they look like, as they wade through the animated remains of humans - and sell them in another dimension, tell the locals it's a mockumentary splatter film, rate it M for blood and gore. It could conceivably become a blockbuster simply from the 'advanced special effects'. Put the same thing I see behind a screen, and suddenly it's okay to drink in all the details, to even laugh at the mindless violence.

So a whisper of fascination is allowed past my mental roadblocks while I admire the two down there: Animal and machine, with bits of their 'enemies' decorating their frames, walking and crushing forward, unstoppable.

They look cool.

I'm just watching. As long as no one is hurt, there's essentially no difference between splatter and snuff. There's no such thing as thought crimes. I'm just doing my job, and I'm doing it well. I'm not even feeling anything any more. Nothing that's going to impair my focus, anyway.

Something whispers behind my eyes that I should be meditating more...

seven little zombies.

Six little zombies

births eight little zombies kills

ten zombies tasting biting eating

seven little zombies.

One-two-three-four-five. One-two-three-four. Robin strikes one-two-three-four-five-six-seven-eight zombies down at a time, rapid pin-point jabs through eyes with. He's through the next one before the five last one's have even hit the ground. The end of his weapons enters the skull of the woman, the lid bursting with milky fluid and pulpy matter. -Swish-smash-skid.

The last natural tooth in Robin jaw splits as Robin's cheek grinds over the asphalt, launched like an arrow by his own death-grip on his weapon when the woman jerked her head around. He twists in his awkward fall, lifts himself and with the tips of his fingers and rights himself to his feet in a half-second. Chews the chards in his mouth, spit them out.

Uh... yeah, it hurts. Like someone stabbed you. In the mouth.

It's high time to take a break from the combat, because if I have to wear this uniform for another minute I'm going to be sick. Acceptance and whatnot, brain matter is still the grossest thing I have ever...

Y'know what: Screw it. I take the small knife in my sleeve that Robin suggested I start carry ("you never know when...") and cut my shirt open in the front so I wont have to pull it over my head. No way am I putting that stuff closer to my head and my hear. It's already icking me out so much that I can feel my stomach roll – don't do this to me now, stomach, please don't- please-

The long sleeves have to be cut too, and I cross my arms over my bra while I float my platform-rock to a district I know have already been cleaned out, as much for warmth as for modesty. Now if only I had something to be modest about...

While I look around, another explosion behind me goes off. It's a constant thunder, like an artillery bombardment. With this many teams going around, you have to make sure that you don't blow each other up, so I have to stay inside the zone assigned to the Titans. All of the other superpowered freaks out here doesn't need to know where I'm going to take a bath.

Finding the biggest, most expensive looking house I can before my teeth start to chatter, I land my rock through the roof and into the middle of the living room.

Nice place. Big paintings on the walls and fine china. The furniture that looks like it's made of expensive tree, there's a rug that I feel guilty of stepping on in my shoes, and even a fireplace. Doesn't seem to be anybody home. Thank god.

Power has been down in this city for days and the shower is icy. I plan to make it short, and then I'm going to see if there isn't something in here that I can fit. If I'm lucky, maybe a girl my age used to live here. Maybe she liked the same clothes as me. Maybe it was her shampoo I'm washing my hair with.

Bump! I scream. I jump and slip on the slick floor, before I tear the wall out and into the room beside the bath. There's moans coming from somewhere. The water is still cascading down, obscuring my vision along with my unmade hair. Debris float in the air, ready to smash. But the other room I just made a sizeable hole into is empty, and so is the bathroom.

It hammers on the bathroom door from the other side. The door shakes but holds. There is no way to describe how glad I am to have locked the door. The thing doesn't even try to turn the doorknob.

With the sounds of someone knocking their head uncontrollably at the wooden frame that separates us and moaning for my brain, I hastily dry myself and levitate five tiles from the floor. I position myself at the far end of the bathroom and unlock the door with the ends of two of the tiles. For the first time today, I look away from I crush the woman's face and break her neck.

It's not the army of zombies that's dangerous. Not to me, anyway. But take it from a veteran: Zombies are like a box of chocolates: You never know when one of them jumps up and transforms into flesh-eating mist or some other stupid. The zombie metahumans are dangerous. And god forbid the virus mutates the superpowers too.

I don't know if the latter's the case here, but the brunette in her forties have just thrown me fifty meters into the air and through a roof. Through the windows in a dead stranger's kitchen I can see her grow some tentacles and start spewing something that looks vile. Robin blows her up with a couple of bird-discs. Now if she could please just not regenerate...

Of course she's still moving because Robin didn't blow her in enough pieces.

'Tell you what: the day we see a zombie reality-mancer, I'm just going to hijack some cluster bombs and napalm and make it all burn. There's never any survivors anyway.

The princess' burgundy tresses wave in the shimmering air. There is pulse in her arms that almost feels like a cramp, her hearts beats out of sync and her skin has become brilliant emerald. The others can feel her body heat from the radiation, and her body paints hues of emerald over everything. Steam rises from the bodies that approach her, skin withers and blackens and curls into itself, but still they crawl while their brittle limbs crumbles under their weight.

For a moment, Starfire sees herself in another place, in another time. Somewhere her parents hadn't had to sell her like a commodity, and their race had done as a warrior-race was supposed to do.

The sky was the same color as that of Raven's eyes, and the ground a softer material than stone. She rejoiced in the sound of her family and a million of their subjects ravaging this last fortress of on the continent. The moment of victory was again in the fist of the royal Fire.

To her left, standing a little ahead of her: her sister in blood and war, Blackfire. Empress, loved, strong and revered by all of Tamaran.

To her right, standing abreast with her as an equal, the beautiful fiancée that made her heart soar with his unparalleled skill and unfaltering loyalty, and made her tremble with his kisses.

Behind her, like the protector he had always been and always would be: Galfore. Massive and great and wise, and unstoppable in his ground shaking rage against those that would oppose the royal house.

And under her heavy, thunder-steel boots: the kneeling defeated and splayed bodies of the enemy. She picked one up and held it in front of her so she could see it and it could see her and understand who was superior. She incinerated the head, and then she saw again the rotting meat burn away and leave the grinning skull of a human wreathed in green flames, held in front of her like she vaguely remembered a man hold another skull and say something that sounded profound, but that she hadn't understood. She threw it away and went on to combat these hungry dead at Robin's side. Could anything be more glorious than that?

Robin... said he was one of these humans, even if it stood clear to her and should be obvious to all others that he was far from these peons. Like the best of this race, he was ingenious, but he was also so much stronger than any of them. Which other human could stand up to one of the Royal house of Tamaran in battle? Which other human could weave so easily through the tight-packed ranks of the enemy like fish swam through water, and what human could dart from the ground to the highest reaches of city-spires?

Strength and Honor were the two greatest virtues Starfire had grown up to be molded in, and none would have found a place in her heart without them.

"Bomber!" cries Beast Boy in warning, twenty meters above. He falls, and the earth trembles when he hits the pavement, crushing human bodies between it and his humongous, maritime corpus. The great, green mammal disappears, and moments later the boy again appears over another group of flesh-eater.

"Bomber!"

The impact thunders, and everything shakes. Crumbled and mangled remains are all that remains. Transform, fly, transform, fall, repeat.

Robin breathes, sighs exasperatedly, scowls, and says: "Me too." Then, with a twirl of his bo-staff, takes of the head of the teenager that has shambled to him. The body stands for another five seconds, displaying the plain T-shirt the girl was wearing in her last moments, emblazoned with letters on the front spelling "I 3 SF" over a stylized drawing of his girlfriend.

The boy's aren't that afraid. They might not even realize it. I probably should at least feel some revulsion with this nightmarish scene. Starfire has an excuse in not even being part human. Terra...

Sometimes I wonder if there's a reason the core-titan girls seem to be the worst ones. But that's now fair to Starfire, because to us she is still the most gentle and affectionate being you can imagine, and like so much else, I envy the perfection with which evolution has adapted her race's psyche to carnage. Look at her. She can prod her bare fingers through skulls and still retain her innocence. If there exists anything more paradoxical than an innocent princess of a warrior-race, I would like it to be an innocent demon.

But as with the time all of Jump City had been reduced to slags and unreal grotesques by one disgruntled, criminal youth who jumped into the vortex of power and risked death and existence, again the only word I can seem to think of is 'cool'. It hadn't been so different from my father's apocalypse, and if the End hadn't turned for the best, I wonder if I wouldn't again have found the same fascination for that world and all that Trigon was.

I'm used to nightmares. What the others dream when they sweat and roll in their beds at night, that's my dreams. My nightmares would drive a mortal insane. And I'm half-mortal. That's why I let myself indulge in them just enough, seek refuge in the part of me that isn't human when I think I'll scream if I wake up now.

AAAIIIRRRGHGHG! (cutting into the stomach, voice breaks)

And I try so hard to be human. Who is a little inhumanity once in a while going to hurt? Not this one, because he feels nothing anymore, so it's okay to be a little creative. His spine feels slippery to my darkness, and the spray of stale and coagulated blood is... disappointing, somehow.

Something inside me feels like I did it right, but the result is not the way it should be. Too silent and too dead. I feel unfulfilled. And I should feel at all.

I should stop now. Feeling. I should really, really stop... Now.

His hands shake when the boy looks at them. Looks down at the Doom Patrol uniform, so much pride invested in. So many people on it.

The gloves are wrenched off, and Beast Boy is happy that he bound them extra tight around his wrists when the first running footsteps sounded in the dark of the parking lot: the hands are green, scarred, and altogether ugly, but they are clean.

The gloves are thrown away without a second thought, and he digs into the flesh with one hand as he walks to a soda vending machine, the clean finger swallowed by the skin like it was slime. In the same place his uniform and communicator go when he morphs, he feels the metallic surface and extracts the necessary coin to get a sticky, warm substance in a bottle.

It's silly, he knows, but nonetheless pours it over the black and purple fabric. It's waterproof, and it get a little cleaner. But there's not enough soda in that bottle, and he can't use the water until Cyborg can tell if that where the virus is or not.

Father, is the the real End?

Is this truly my life?

"Give your fire to deathwork, friend."

"Sorry, but I have to splatter you, miss."

Fuck it, I hate to love this

He punches through the machine like no normal gorilla could do, morphs back as fast he can and pours one bottle over himself, another, two at a time and is through the stack in minutes. If he can avoid it, he doesn't want to morph his uniform into himself. There's still too much filth on it.

Invisible tendrils reach out and touch the boy's psyche, spreads through his nerves and stops the shaking, replacing it with a duller, healthier weariness. Uncertainties and disgust begins to lift from his spirit like noxious fumes in the wind. Beast Boy suddenly notices that he is famished. He sends a grateful smile to the dark shadow floating over the dead chaos. Hides it before anyone else sees.

Just their little secret. And Beast Boy leans against the wall, close his eyes and floats away in the small, empathic high. She even takes away the guilt.

The street rolls like an giant beast before me, a landslide that doesn't care about which way is up and which is down. I slap my hand into the ground, and the ground slaps right back into a group of five. The earth rises around me in massive slabs of rock that eclipses my thin, bony frame, like I was the sun to their planets. And I crush them!

I knew already that I could kill, even if I didn't try. But this is so much different. I have orders to do this, and I can finally let loose! Really let loose.

I can collapse all but the steel-and-glass sky-scrapers, knock the little critters off their feet with a tug in the earth like it was carpet to be pulled away from under their feet. Wrecking balls of gravel and dirt streak over the people, crushing and absorbing them into a dripping, macabre mass of earth and death.

(Terra Mortis)

It is exhilarating to feel so powerful. If power corrupts, then I can now understand why he chose to be a villain, because playing a vengeful God of Earth like this, untouchable and above right and wrong makes me feel more alive than I ever have before: Every mangled body that I know I don't have to take responsibility for makes a heartbeat inside me all the more precious, every destroyed home makes me feel so much more valuable and worthy, and I feel like more than a human.

I have transcended humanity. I'm too powerful for them to hunt anymore, too powerful to be prosecuted or persecuted. Now all they can do is fear me. That fear gives him power, and I wonder if he feels the same way with that. Do I make him feel powerful when I kill and shake the earth at his command, when I expose myself and lie in his arms that could so easily crack this little goddess like a twig?

I guess it's too late to start worrying about falling into the 'dark side'.

Right now, it feels like it's enough. It was worth all that I sacrificed and betrayed.