I was five and a half years old when I told my mother that I no longer wanted to live. It was on one dark day of many dark days over the Granite Fields of Azar, training to meditate. She swiftly interrupted the session, knelt down, and caressed me with a concerned inquiry. I told her that as long as I live, I would be a gateway for Trigon to come into this world and nothing else. Keeping me alive would only be delaying the inevitable doom of Azarath and dimensions beyond it. Someday I would be forced to kill the ones I loved.

My mother told me that all life was precious, and mine most of all. And she told me that even the most somber soul in Azarath knew where death had a beginning and an end far from the gentle warmth of breath. As she taught me, I saw in her eyes the glinting shine of someone who had been carved out of a weeping shell and somehow sewn back together like rough patches of skin in an inverse puzzle. And at the center of the labyrinth was her gentle hug and inside the crook of her arms I felt that warmth more than I could ever believe it and for once my young troubled mind finally learned to meditate.

And when the years drew by and I grew up into an adept of the Book of Azar, my mother grew distant from me but I felt her warmth in all eyes and arms surrounding. Life was hidden between the gentle swish of robes and cloaks and blue, blue, blue, blue history melting into the air all around me with the flicker of candlelight as joints and the chants of elders as glue and all things fossilized into a living chain of history of souls and graves stacked up on top of each other to form the most beautiful library all Existence has ever seen.

And when Trigon broke into Azar and slew every pupil I ever worked with and every teacher that ever embraced me and every courtyard I ever meditated in, the fires burned bright into the air and I saw the very moment I emerged from my hiding place the smoldering bodies and burnt-black flesh of all that was moving and breathing. The gnarled flesh was warm, and the heat spoke to me my mother's words in the disguise of crackling embers off of bone and the gentle moaning of fading corpses two heaps away in the charred shadows of the place. And I felt myself and I felt my beating heart and the gateway throbbing within; challenged but not attained. And I knew that this one drop of blood in all Azar was precious beyond measurement and I fought to preserve it and my mother and my teachers through the very pulsing of my limbs.

And when I came to this world and I saw the horror that Slade was spreading and the terrorism of bank robbers and murderers and mad bombers threatening women, children, and schools, and all walks of life, I swore to protect the very blood that felt like lava to the touch of my cold, Azarathian skin regardless of the darkness inside of me and the tragic land that I came from. I gave up my life, my sanity, my safety, and my identity to chase down the malevolent fiends of the world in a hope that I'd never have to again see so many helpless bodies—their eyes decayed gray—lying on the endless pavement with that smell that wrought out the bile in me and made me realize that the last thing I would ever do or ever want to do is commit suicide and join the stench in a manner that would undermine my mother, hurt my friends, and cancel whatever joy I have left to indulge in this world.

And that is why now that I'm standing here on the street corner with the fires of Slade's latest bomb still flickering in the shell of a broken building and with the paramedics walking over to the red-drained body of a fourteen-year-old girl dumped across the street from the explosion,lying battered on a sidewalk to be draped over with a plastic, black sheathe with Beast Boy in the distance whispering to Cyborg:

"Man…gotta suck to die when you're tits are still that small."

"Snnkkkt….oh gawds. Ha ha ha ha!"

….I want to kill them.

I want to kill them….and it doesn't frighten me.

It doesn't frighten me one bit.