Chapter 6

Dusk gave way to dawn, which in turn, gave way to dusk again. In her room in Titan's Tower, Raven dreamed.

Dawn broke in a red wash of light across the city. All around her, she could hear the screams and cries of the dying. The city stood – unmoved and unchanged – but it's inhabitants writhed in a sea of panic. As she moved through the streets of Jump City, Raven saw hoards of people lying dead in the streets whilst others trampled them in a desperate attempt to escape.

A solid weight rammed into Raven's knee, causing her to stumble. Looking down, she saw the little girl she'd met only a few days ago, except now, the chocolate curls were matted with blood and her skin was sallow. She clung to Raven, crying, but as the young Titan bent closer she was horrified to see that drops of blood, not tears, oozed from the child's eyes. With a pained shriek, the girl doubled over and vomited onto the street. Raven recognised the mess at once: the putrefied mass of a decaying organ. She caught the child as she fell, only to feel tears on her own cheeks as she realised the girl was dead.

Standing up, still cradling the dead toddler, Raven fervently wished herself out of the dream and far, far away.

"This is no dream, my daughter. This is something that you must remember."

The voice of Ariella wafted towards Raven's ears. Elated and confused, she turned towards the sound. There translucent but still very much discernible stood Raven's mother. Raven's mind battled with what her eyes and ears were telling her. Ariella was dead – destroyed along with Azarath when Trigon returned to Earth.

Ariella frowned slightly at her daughter's narrow-mindedness. "You of all people should know that death is by no means an ending."

Chastised, Raven nodded. So this was a vision? The spirit of her mother nodded and gestured with one, elegant hand. The city around them dissolved away and they were left floating above the surface of the sea. Raven tightened her grip on the child in her arms – not wanting her to fall into the polluted deeps.

Even as she thought it though, she realised something was wrong. It was true that all coastal waters in this day and age carried human contaminant, but this was worse than usual. A sickly yellow thread, wound its way through the waters. Frowning she followed it with her eyes, horror sinking into her heart, as she watched the thread weave it's way into the pipe that carried part of the city's used water supply into the ocean.

Startled, she turned back to the image of her mother. Ariella merely nodded sadly and tenderly reached across to the child in Raven's arms and brushed a lock of hair away from her face.

"The paving stones for this disaster have already been placed. You will need to distinguish enemies from allies in these coming days, and the lines will not always be clear. But hurry, my daughter, the days grow short."

With those final words, the vision faded.

Raven awoke with a start, her sense quickly tuning in to the sounds of the Tower. Hearing nothing in the immediate vicinity, she let her power wash over the place she called home.

Beast Boy lay on his bed in dog-form, paws twitching in the air as he dreamt. Cyborg's machinery whirred quietly as it charged, though the noise was not enough to wake Starfire, who slept next door. In the main room however, Robin was wide-awake.

Curious, Raven pulled on her cloak and sank silently into the floor, materialising behind Robin noiselessly. Thin bars of moonlight illuminated his figure, and though Raven's made barely a sound as she stood there, he was aware of her presence.

"I couldn't sleep." He said, turning slightly to look over his shoulder at his friend. The dark witch nodded and floated silently over to the window where he stood. As with the last time she and Robin has stood gazing out over Jump City, Raven could feel Chaos blooming in her mind. The roil of an insecure future was much nearer than she had last sensed, and Raven cursed herself for allowing her involvement with X to distract her from what she should have sensed. Her mother should not have had to relinquish her eternal peace in order to force Raven to acknowledge what she should have already foreseen.

"Something bad will happen." She said, as they gazed across the water to the lights of the city. "Something that will threaten the people of Jump and throw the city into panic. I saw death and suffering, but no physical destruction."

"A pathogen then."

"Quite possibly."

Robin looked at her. "What else could it be?"

Raven said nothing. It was possible that dark magic had caused what she had seen, but human nature could just as equally be at fault. Besides, Robin would want to know where she had learnt of the spells that could cause such an outcome and she did not wish to share that secret with him.

Suddenly, darkness exploded at the edge of Raven's senses. The girl staggered, caught of guard by the seriousness and brevity of the power flux. Gasping, she clutched at her chest, trying to remember the last time she had felt a power so … wrong. What she had just felt defied all laws of nature – was this the source of the Chaos she had felt growing in the city? Was this what her mother sought to warn her against?

As Robin laid his hand on her shoulder, as his concerned face entered her field of vision, Raven felt another surge of wrongness, and blacked out.

"You would dare to threaten my child." The words were hissed like venom, between clenched teeth, as an elegant, female hand closed around a male throat. With a yell, the man was sent stumbling backward toward his three friends. One, fear permeating the fog of alcohol in his brain tried to run, only to be stopped short as his legs gave way beneath him, the muscles atrophying even as he tried to crawl away. He watched helpless, as with a scream the young woman who had cornered them flung her arm skyward, and at once his friend's bodies spilt apart, blood and entrails littering the ground in a macabre parody of rain.

Whimpering, the remaining man, a drunken john who had made the mistake of taunting a group of passing children, earlier in the day, trembled as he now faced a mother's wrath. Golden eyes blazed like a dying sun, fury and malice warring for dominance in their depths.

Unable as he was to propel himself from the deserted street, he held his breath as the soft clicking of heals against concrete signalled the woman's approach. Slowly she knelt beside him, rolling him onto his back and straddling his waist. Despite the terror of the situation, the man felt his body respond as a creamy expanse of female flesh entered his vision. His eyes widened in disbelief as with a sultry smile, the girl lowered her face towards his, one hand snaking down between their bodies. At his gasp, the smile quickly changed to a sneer and two pale pink lips crashed down to his.

The moment they touched, the drunken man could feel a change in his body. He felt weak, and old. He could feel his skin beginning to whither and dry. Then just as suddenly as it began, it ended and he opened his just in time to see a pearly white mist trickle from between her lips and into his.

The young woman seem to regard him thoughtfully for a moment before a malicious smile carved her lips. Sobbing, the man clawed feebly at the hand that wrapped around his throat.

The girl's hair floated in an unfelt breeze, surrounded in a soft gold light than turned hard and crisp as it mirrored her anger. From the corners of his vision he could see the littered bodies of his friends, their lives ripped from then one by one in the initial surge of this woman's wrath. Now, with a malevolent smirk, the golden-eye one switched her hold and made him watch as his limbs began to whither and die before his very eyes. Searing, white-hot pain scorched through him as his blood began to boil, bursting from his lips in a steaming wave. His wretched and watched horrified as a part of a putrefied lung slithered betwixt his lips and fell with a soft plop to the concrete below.

He howled again in agony, only to be cut off as a hand crushed his windpipe. The pain continued on and on. Never weakening, never stopping. Until his mind began to lose all sense of anything else. As his vision began to waver and grey, the last thing he saw, before the darkness of death claimed him, was two merciless golden eyes, staring into his own.

Raven opened her eyes to thin, morning light and the concerned face of Beast Boy peering down at her. With a stifled groan she levered herself upright, only to be carefully laid back again by Beast Boy.

"Don't get up just yet," the changeling instructed. "You've been out for a while." Beast Boy's normal, joking manner was entirely absent and deep worry lines were carved around his mouth and between his eyes. She opened her mouth to question him as to the source of his worry when he grabbed her hand and held it to him.

"You stopped breathing Rae."

Raven was touched to see tears in her team-mate's eyes. She didn't need to be an empath to discern the distress BB was trying to hide. She offered her friend a rare, comforting smile. "I'm fine Beast Boy."

The boy nodded and collapsed down next to her, falling onto a stool positioned by her bedside. Now free to look around, Raven saw she was in the infirmary, its stark white walls made ever plainer in the cold light of dawn.

"Where are the others?" she asked eventually, when it became obvious that BB was too relieved to be very forthcoming with information.

"Oh? Right," the green skinned youth chuckled. "They're out scouring the city. Cyborg's bio sensors have noted an increase in the ecological fluctuations that have been occurring lately and Robin thought it might be linked to your collapse."

Raven stared, wide-eyed at her companion. She had harboured the suspicion that Beast Boy was nowhere near as foolish as he pretended to be and she knew that much of his silliness came from the fact that he was in fact much younger than the other Titans. His ability to recite the necessary information that accurately, simply confirmed her suspicions.

Correctly interpreting her stare, Beast Boy ran a hand through his hair sheepishly. "Don't tell Robin." He begged. "He'll have me doing hours of paperwork if he thinks I'm smart enough not to screw it up."

Raven's eyes crinkled in a small smile and Beast Boy glowed with the knowledge that he'd been the one to elicit such a response. With instructions to rest and to call for him if she needed anything, the changeling left to inform Robin of Raven's revival.

Closing her eyes, Raven sank deep into her meditation. She could still feel the pulse of the City, could hear it the minor faltering which signaled Chaos was growing. Ignoring it all, she scoured the metaphysical darkness for the pin-prick of light she had sensed initially. If it was lost, than it was possible Ariella had come to her too late. If not, there was still hope. Frantically she searched for the elusive light, almost giving up, when a tiny gleam – smaller than it had been caught her eye. The light grew and shrank, a clear sign that in the coming days, its ability to withstand the darkness would be decided by what surrounded it. Raven knew she must find the source of the light and ensure its safety before all else.

With that settled, the sorceress turned to attention to Nevermore. Before she had passed out, her mind had tasted a familiarity in the power surge. Somehow, she had encountered something or someone that remaindered her of that power. She hoped that Knowledge would have the answer. Letting her mind wander she rolled the taste of the power across her tongue, savouring it like a fine wine, trying to tempt the recollection from the depths of her memory.

In the deeper realms of Nevermore, Rage purred in contentment, the demon in her, basking in the rays of such power. She batted at the memory of the power like a kitten with a ball of string, pawing at it, playing with it, wrapping herself in its depths.

Frowning, Raven made to leave Nevermore, disgusted at her demonic heritage's lust for power, when Timid cautiously crept towards the bars of Rage's cage. The memory of the power had personified in Nevermore, blanketing Rage in a soft grey mist. Raven watched, bewildered as Timid reached a hand between the bars and gathered the power towards her, the worry lines that permanently marred her face, easing as she did so.

The other emotions stopped what they were doing and turned stare. Even lazy, blinked herself awake and stared in sleepy bemusement at the scene before. Rage rolled, languidly towards the edge of the cage, one arm snaking out to ensnare Timid. Yet, even as Raven and Courage leapt forward to defend the gentle emotion, Timid herself reached out and entwined her fingers with Rage's.

The pair looked at each other for a heartbeat before turning to the others. Six pairs of eyes, four vermilion, two amethyst, regarded Raven and her emotions calmly. In unison, they spoke.

"Not all violence is born from violent hearts." Raven had only a moment to blink before Rage extended her free hand, and in an act of will, expelled her Mistress from Nevermore.

A/N: I'm worried that this story is losing pace slightly and that I'm dragging it out too long. Please review and let me know what you think. Thank you for reading.