"Death is more universal than life; everyone dies but not everyone lives."

-A. Sachs

"Pazuzu! PAZUUZUUU!"

-Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth (Billy West), Futurama

Or at least what had been Slade. For now, all that sat in the chair was a decimated corpse, bludgeoned and burned. He still wore his armor, but the mask was gone. The cadaver was mockingly propped up in a simple wooden chair by rope. The stench was nearly unbearable to Robin, but not as unbearable as the truth. Richard struggled to grasp just what it meant that Slade was dead, and not even by his own hands. He walked over to the body, Kresk keeping an easy distance lest the foolish mortal tried to strike.

Robin lifted the dead skull of Slade. The face had been crushed, no evidence of a man apparent. In the end, all that was left of the body of Robin's arch-nemesis was everything Richard had seen him as; a monster, plain and simple. And yet, it was unfulfilling. So much had been endured for this moment, so much suffering. Tera, Red X, Trigon: all meaningless. Robin was expecting a god, and now all there was under the mask was a man.

He wheezed out to Kresk "How'd you do it?" The demon chuckled and backed the accusation away with his hands, chortling, "Oh no, my boy! It wasn't me who put an end to old…'Slab' was it?"

"Slade."

"Whatever. No, I did not kill old half-face; it was a team of Inevitable who did it."

"Inevitable? Is that some kind of metaphor?"

"Maybe. It's what they call themselves anyway. The Inevitable are a race of constructs based on the plane of perfect law, the Clockwork Nirvana of Mechanus. Whenever their high council senses a crime that defies the natural order of the multiverse, if it's severe enough, they send out an Inevitable to track down the perpetrator. They are judge, jury, and executioner.

When half-face here made a deal with that Trigon fellow, the deal was bound in blood and witnessed by the high council because of Four Eye's cosmic rank. I am doubtless that this was completely intentional to insure that 'Blade'-"

"Slade."

"-Whatever could not break his deal without dire consequences. Breaking the pact sent the kolyaruts after him. Prolonging his life by releasing other damned souls sent a marut after him. And running forced a zelekhut on his tail. The zelekhut tracked him for a long time, the rest of the team in tow. They finally cornered him. I remember, I was there, hidden. I've done some stuff the Inevitable might not like, of course."

The Fire Demon chuckled as Robin continued to stare into the empty eye-sockets. "Yeah, I'll tell ya', I've never seen a single mortal stand up to four Inevitable at once. He got rid of the zelekhut fast. Of course it was easy, its frame was light and it doesn't have much armor. The kolyaruts were hard. He managed to get the marut to blast one by mistake, but it was tricky. I can't exactly remember how he got the last kolyarut. There was a flash of light, what sounded like a thunderstorm, and then the thing was headless. Oh, but that marut, that marut was a real bitch to kill. Its body was made out of solid marble, it was covered in armor, and it blasted lightning and thunder from its fists. It hit his leg, you can see it on the corpse right there, and the lightning's what caused all those burns, but the marut's not the one that killed him. Somehow, even with a broken leg, he managed to crawl to the top of the statue and put a bomb under its helmet. A few seconds later, there was a boom, a bang, and not an animate Inevitable in sight.

Of course, he should have known that there was a price for so openly defying the natural laws of the multiverse. The punishment for killing an Inevitable is worse than death; the perpetrator must face a recoudut, an Inevitable of Final Resort. Whenever a being kills an Inevitable, much less four, a recoudut is sent to destroy the anarchist performing said crime. Not a moment after the death of the marut, a recoudut appeared. He tried to fight the construct, but to no avail. It was too strong. It finally killed him. His soul is now in Mechanus, laboring for all of eternity. He's gone, for good this time. His fate, as they say, was…inevitable."

There was a moment where Robin absorbed what had just happened. It was hard to accept this, hard to accept that Slade was now and forever gone. What was he supposed to do now? Why should he get up in the morning, Robin wondered. Something inside of him died, a dream died inside Richard. Unseen to anybody, the Daniel the Sandman stood behind the demon and Robin. Daniel was in many ways different from his predecessor Morpheus. That was after all why Daniel was there, because the last Dream did not want to change. The new Sandman was kinder to be sure, but only a little, not enough to change a simple fact of the Endless. That Dream was by far one of the cruelest of the Endless, even more than his sister Death and a little less than his brother/sister Desire. Robin was lucky; his dream of Slade had died quickly, in the instant he saw the corpse sitting in a chair. For others, the passing of a dream is a long and painful experience, taking years as the hope dies and fades into nothing. And all the while, Dream only watches as one of his children dies.

"I'll sell you the remains for fifty bucks." Kresk said. Robin dreamily lazed out, "No. Do whatever." Robin left the room in a trance-like state, Kresk close behind. Daniel walked in and untied the rope holding the body. It fell on the floor and shattered into pieces, staining Dream's white boots. The Sandman walked away. He knew Robin would recover. And even if he didn't, it wasn't Daniel's problem. For after all, a Dream is too big to surrender that quickly…

It was movie night in Titan's Tower. Almost every night was movie night, but regardless. Due to the infernal plot nature of several horror classic and Kresk's recent (public) arrival. The first vote was for 'The Exorcist', but at the mere suggestion, Kresk started running around and flailing his arms, screaming "Not Pazuzu! Pazuzu! PAAZUUZUUUU!" Obviously he wasn't serious as Raven knew, but it still disqualified the movie. Starfire forwarded 'Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dream Coat', preaching on the virtues of song, dance, bright colors, joy, etc. At the very name 'Andrew Lloyd Webber', Kresk pulled a sawed-off double-barrel shotgun, loaded it, and with one trembling hand placed it at the right side of his head, looking like he was having a seizure.

Thankfully, the boys (save Robin, who was still in some kind of existential stupor) said they weren't in the mood for a musical tonight, or ever.

"So I guess 'The Producers' is a no then?"

"They re-made it?" Kresk asked. Cyborg disgustedly said, "Yeah, but as a musical." Kresk dropped his head and mourned, "Oh, Mel Brooks. What has the world done to you?"

"How 'bout 'Village of the Damned'? You don't have a problem with creepy little British kids with glowing eyes and monotone voices, do you?" Beast Boy sneered.

"Are they demonic?"

"No. It's hard to explain."

"All right, I'm open to new things every now and then."

And so the terrible re-make was selected, viewed, and mocked promptly at the end by Kresk he laughed hardily. Beast Boy asked, "Oh, what? Let me guess? This really happened where you came from didn't it?" Kresk snorted, "No, never. It's just the irony! They work so hard to keep things like this quiet, and then some stupid mortal blows it through the roof!"

"Who is 'they'?"

Kresk leered, "Why the illithid, the Mind Flayers of course. Yes, horrible aberrations that live deep below the earth in the caverns of worlds. Cold and alien, they have no wish but to blot out the suns and take the darkened multiverse as their own. Master psions, they have four tentacles around their mouths. When they catch you, they wrap those tentacles around your head and crack your skull open like a walnut. Than, they feast on your brains and psychic energy until your noggin is as empty as a coconut."

"So, what has that got to do with anything?"

"Well, you see, the Mind Flayers are incapable of basic reproduction, so they have several ways of populating their race. Among them is to impregnate human women, sometimes by shape shifting, other times by magic, such as here. The woman unwittingly gives birth to a Mind Flayer in human form. The child is pale and has white hair, but most importantly, they have magnificent psychic powers. They remain in their sheep's skin until puberty, at which point they mutate and transform into their true shapes, into Mind Flayers. I suspect that something very like this may have happened once. And if that is so, it means the illith are still alive on this world. Just waiting in the shadows, hungry, until they can spread their darkness across the globe." Kresk ended this with an ominous note. He had been staring out at the window, into the night itself during his monologue. When he turned around, four mauve tentacles surrounded his mouth and he asked, "Now who wants a snack?" The Titans shook their heads unnervingly. "No? Alright then." The tentacles dropped from Kresk's mouth and disintegrated on the floor.

"Well, I'm hittin' the sack. You'd be wise to do the same kiddo. We have to get up early tomorrow, if I know Bert. You got everything packed?"

"Yeah."

"Alright then. I have preparations to make. With any luck we'll leave this dimension before nine..-ish."

"Where's our first stop?"

"Technically we don't stop until we reach Sigil, 'journey is the destination' and all that crap, but I suppose our first plane will be the Ethereal Plane."

"The Border or the Deep?"

Raven and Kresk continued this little conversation in planar geography for a bit before the Shadow Mage and the Fire Demon parted. And for a moment, Beast Boy was scared. Raven was leaving, but who was coming back?