Pure darkness. A complete lack of light. Her wings beat slowly, keeping her aloft and scattering noise into the nothingness until it was subsumed. She strained her eyes, but their keenness could see nothing save coloured phantasms floating before her. She strained her ears, but their acuity revealed no sounds save the rushing of blood in her head. Her tail registered no vibrations in the air save those she made herself.
She hovered for an indeterminate amount of time until, far in the distance, a faint sound registered. It took a few moments to register as the sound of waves, the sound of wind breaking whitecaps into foam and fury over open waters.
Then the typhoon was upon her, twisting and dancing about her until she knew not up from down nor left from right. Then, a great voice boomed forth over the waters and her soul vibrated in sympathy with it as it stated, "Let there be light!" And there was, a brilliance that scorched her vision and dazed her senses, causing her to fall into the water and float there in that purity until her sight was clear once more.
The scene passed with increasing swiftness as waters were separated from earth, and night from day. The creation of the sun and moon, the sprouting of every growing thing and the beasts that crawled, walked, or flew. Man was created, and Woman from him, and the world exploded in a frenzy of free will, each decision a patterned thread that wove a complex and beautiful tapestry.
"The greatest story never told," Jon's voice came from nowhere in the dervish of activity surrounding Raven. "Made great by the sum of its parts. A story made of stories, all the way down to the very beginning, the smallest and most wondrous story of them all, the story of a person's decision, 'Shall I or shan't I?'"
"Jon?" Raven rasped out, made dizzy by the swirl of activity.
"There is no story without free will," the voice continued, heedless to the newborn Nephilim calling his name. "Without free will there are no decisions, only directives. No drama, only descriptions. A Chronicler learns of, remembers, and tells these stories. A Chronicler's trade is the honouring of humanity's greatest gift."
Cities were being built, small gathering places of mud and straw, being replaced with increasing swiftness by abodes of wood and stone. Cities rose and fell, to disease, famine, fire, invaders... all precipitated by decisions.
"Shampoo not understand," a new, female voice replied. "How is Chronicler story-time different from Loremaster telling tales?"
"I suppose you could say that the Loremaster collects information for the sake of power while the Chronicler collects information simply for the sake of having it," Raven quoted under her breath as she watched a small child play in the dirt at his mother's feet in sudden real-time.
"Loremasters collect information pertaining to the tribe's operations. They remember spells, tactics, diplomatic gifts and the like. Chroniclers collect all information, especially legends and myths, in whose hoary lines hide deep-nestled nuggets of insight, wisdom, and truth. And for enjoyment, of course. A Chronicler is also an entertainer of the tribe, a tribe's soul even. I suppose you could say that the Loremaster collects information for the sake of power while the Chronicler collects information simply for the sake of having it. And then using it for the betterment of the tribe." Jon's voice was thoughtful, apparently thinking his way through the answer as he gave it.
An old man with a tonsure and wearing the habit of a monk approached the playing child, a wooden rosary hanging from his belt. His eyes were blue, the colour of cornflower. His nose was straight, but Raven knew that at some point it would become crooked, as though it had been broken a few times and refused to set properly. He did not smile, but Raven knew that if he had it would be an easy grin that revealed teeth tinged the slightest yellow. His face bore blue-black tattoos that twisted and curved gracefully about his features, something that the archetype wearing his form, strangely, did not possess.
"Shampoo think you very strange man, but maybe make good tribe-friend."
The man spoke to the woman, and she suddenly looked both anguished and unbearably proud. She picked up the little boy, whose brown hair was full of dust and whose vibrant blue eyes met hers unflinchingly, full of laughter and love. Tears ran down her face as she smiled, bent her neck, and kissed his forehead. The man, Claus, put his hand on her shoulder and squeezed it reassuringly. His other hand he placed upon the boy's-
"Jon's," Raven suddenly understood.
-head, upon the moist skin where the mother's lips had just rest. A spoken word, and the lines of ink seemed to flow off of the old man's body, down his arm, and across the hand bridging the gap between man and boy. The lines rearranged themselves upon the boy, all sharp crescents and bold intersections. Finally the process was over. The child now bore the mark of the office he would one day fulfill. The old man retained only a single line of ebony, curling from ear to eye to mouth, the mark of a Chronicler's teacher. The old man took the child from the woman and walked away.
Jon never cried or looked back. Such is the bond of a Chronicler and his Mentor, forged in ritual and tempered by experience.
A swirl of colour as time again accelerated past her. A new voice, again female, spoke from the aether.
"Hey Ranchan, what are you doing out in this weather? And who's your friend? Let me get the kettle."
Jon, now about ten years old, sat at a tiny desk. He read by the sputtering light of a single candle, and as Raven watched he finished the book and added it to a pile on the right. He took another off of a pile on his left and began to read.
"Thanks, Ucchan," another, higher-pitched female voice replied. "This is Jon. He's a friend of-" and here the voice changed midstream into a male voice, accompanied by a sound of splashing water, "-the old ghoul."
Claus entered the tiny room from a door that led to the outside. Raven deduced that the tiny room was in fact a trailer, as evidenced by the circled RVs and trucks. The old man gestured to the child and then to the sunny exterior of the trailer, his meaning obvious. The child shook his head and lifted the book in his hands slightly, his meaning equally obvious.
"Great, just what I need, more Amazons running around and-" started the girl addressed as Ucchan before Jon's familiar voice interjected.
"Friend is going a bit far. Diplomatic envoy is more accurate. I am also going to be your's and Ranma's new English instructor, Ms. Kuonji, so I suggest you choose your words carefully."
Raven, familiar with Jon and his sense of humour, could easily tell that the gravitas with which these words were delivered was done in jest. The Kuonji girl, however, did not, and she was set to stuttering.
The child Jon left the protective confines of the trailer and slowly approached a group of children playing a game with a ball. He tried to talk to them, but if the expressions on their faces were any indication, they were not interested in either conversation or cooperation. Eventually the group of children began a new game, one that involved hurling sticks and stones, and a running, crying tattooed boy. Claus looked on with a sad mien, and Raven understood that he was seeing his own past and the past of many a Chronicler play out before him.
"I don't get it," the sometimes male, sometimes female, and presumably Ranma's voice said next. "How is it that you, Cologne, and Mousse can all speak perfect Japanese but Shampoo still sounds like she just got off the boat yesterday? She's been here almost two years now!"
A swift montage of people and places. Everywhere, Jon was talking. At eleven, he was asking for directions in the Black Forest. At thirteen, he was reading an essay aloud to a class in France. Fourteen saw him talking a Korean man from a building ledge. Sixteen, and he was wandering around a convention center, dressed like an alien and speaking with others costumed similarly.
"Well, I have something of a flair for languages. It's a talent of mine. Cologne has been alive for hundreds of years, and has collected a fair number of languages in that amount of time. Mousse's father was Japanese, and that's where he knows the language from. Really, though, you shouldn't be too hard on Shampoo. Japanese is something like her fifth or sixth language, and one that she didn't really think she'd ever have to know."
Palm trees and a sky scorched blue-white by a brilliant sun. Jon, now about twenty, walked calmly across the busy college campus in his suit and tie. His head was now smooth and hairless, the style in which he would wear it for the rest of his life. Around him, his peers dashed and swarmed, yet he was separate from their hurry. He was at peace with the distance between them. He entered a lecture hall, approached the podium at the focus of the half-bowl of seating and began to teach.
"Chronicler, as Matriarch of the Far Eastern Tribes of the Amazon Nation, it is my duty and honour to inform you that the Council of the Joketsuzoku has decided to reestablish contact and trade agreements with the Far Western Tribes of the Amazon Nation." The withered, raspy, yet still strong voice lowered to a more informal tone as she added, "You've done well by your people, Jon."
"Our people, Khu Lon. Our people," Jon responded with pride.
Jon sat lotus style, locked in a dark room in the center of a dizzyingly complex casting circle brushed into a bed of powdered salt and silver shavings. Moonlight filtered in through a hole in the curtains, caught and scattered precisely by a crystal to the four cardinal points. His mouth began to move, and salt and silver alike began to shine with an inner luminescence.
"Claus?" Jon's surprised voice said, "What are you doing here?"
"Matriarch Khu Lon told me you were getting yourself into something you might not be able to get out of, Jon," responded the gentle voice of Jon's mentor. "What have you been working on that keeps you from clan-kin and friend? What rituals have you been performing that require the dark hours and such total solitude?"
"I can handle it, Mentor," Jon replied, not unkindly, and somewhat eagerly. "I've just... I think our magic might be... potentially limitless."
A short pause before Claus snapped, "This is dangerous talk, and blasphemous as well, child! You know well the penalties for hubris. Do you not carry the marks set to remind all Chroniclers of the folly of pride? Have you learned nothing from your readings? Are you so blinded by temporal power that you cease to remember that they are a gift from the Almighty, to be used humbly and in service?"
"You don't understand!" Jon yelled in a sudden fit of passion, odd to ears that had only ever heard him serene and composed. "Doesn't more power mean more good? Can I not be of greater service with greater power?"
A whip-crack of flesh hitting flesh, and a long pause. "That," Claus said in a voice trembling with suppressed emotion, "was for blasphemy. I taught you better than this, foolish child. Away from me until you've thought on this course with your whole self."
Footsteps fading away. Jon's voice, muttering, "Stupid old man..."
A beast of hate and shadow; his sheer malignity leeched the light from the day... a pigtailed boy in a red shirt... a rough teenager wearing a bandanna... a beauty wearing a cheongsam and wielding two large maces... and another determined female with a bandoleer of spatulas draped across her form...
Jon and the beast met in the center of the circle formed by the others. On the ground before them, Claus lay in a pool of sticky crimson. Jon knelt, brushing his hand across his mentor's face, closing eyes that would never see again. At some unseen signal, a grand melee broke out, Mortal versus The Other.
The Chronicler called down the stars and drew fire from the very earth. The cheongsam-wearing girl danced in a spiral and summoned a tornado. The two boys flung orbs of light. The spatula-wielding girl peppered the beast with explosives, hobbled it with sticky rope, and confounded its senses with packets of dust and thunder.
Suddenly, time froze, save for a single, weeping man in a rumpled, white linen suit who entered the scene from behind a tree. "Jon, I'm sorry," he said, "but you've done this to yourself." With an almost careless gesture, reality was torn asunder. Sickly green light seeped from the rip in the air, and everything around became subject to a violent suction as it attempted to devour the world whole. By some stroke of chance, one of the ropes used to hobble the beast whipped from the ground and entwined itself about Jon, so that as he was dragged, silently screaming, into the green abyss, the shadow-monster was drawn to his supposed doom as well.
"Lightbringer! What have you done to me?!" Zarach's familiar voice, followed by those that register on the very edge of acquaintance.
"A demon! Belldandy, you've brought a demon into the temple!"
"But, his soul is human! I know it is!" And then the voice that spoke to Raven mere minutes ago...
"Banpei-kun hasn't targeted him either, Urd! It must be a hum- ack! Let me go!"
"Undo this curse! Else- urgh!"
"I said let go!"
"Now, Urd!"
"I shall return, godling, and you will be mine! Payment for your crimes against me! You shall be MINE!"
A dark nightclub, strobing illumination. Lasers painted sweat-slicked flesh green and red and blue. Oddly silent in this remembrance, the dancers twisted and gyrated to music Raven cannot hear. Jon appeared in the shadows, but from his stalking gait and hard-cast eyes it's obvious that Zarach is in control. A slight touch, merely brushed against the nape of a girl sporting pink hair with brown roots. The spark of greasy yellow light lost in the chaotic illumination. Zarach behind her now, moving in sync with her hips, crotch to crack, predator and prey, a dance of deadly portent.
The young voice of Skuld, hitching with sobs, "Please... let me go..."
"I can't," whispered forth Jon, dead words tumbling from a lifeless soul. "He has us both ensnared, you in your cage and I in my body. It's all I can do to prevent his... darker... urges."
A pause pregnant with terror before the inevitable question, "What darker urges?"
"These ones, my pet. Relax, and you may even enjoy it..."
A long silence, broken only by ruffling of clothes and the gasping half-breaths accompanying shuffling hands and feet. Finally, "Curse you Jon! You cannot hold me forever! See what your actions have wrought upon this innocent?" and the heavy thud of fists hitting flesh, punctuated with sharp, animal cries of pain and the silent tears of a soul subsumed.
A tall woman with platinum hair and artfully revealing clothing flew through the air on wings of ebon and ivory, dropping lightning to the earth below. On the ground, another woman with honey-blond locks sent cutting winds and purifying light at the figure standing atop a glowing cage that housed a huddled girl. The man atop the cage responded with fierce fire and choking smoke, his chest heaving with silent laughter. Suddenly, eyes comically wide, Zarach stopped and fell to his knees. His posture drained of arrogance and pride, he knelt and placed his hands behind his neck.
"Quickly, now before I lose control!"
"No," Skuld whispered before shouting, "NO URD! STOP!"
At the threshold of hearing, Jon's voice whispered, "Hail Mary, full of Grace..."
A great clap of thunder, fading into the rumbling distance, replaced with the heaving sobs of the broken hearted.
The three sisters stood before a kneeling Jon, each with a hand upon his brow. Twisted lines of ebony added to the marks already there, flowing forth from Skuld's hand. These lines became imbued with a pale blue light from Belldandy, and sealed upon his flesh with a small lick of flame from Urd. Standing and bowing deeply to the three, Jon turned and waited a moment as a gently spinning portal appeared, shedding green light. He then stepped through and into the unknown.
"May I sit here?" Jon's voice asked politely.
A long pause, giving time for a dawning recognition in Raven's mind.
"Very well, then. Silence gives consent." A quiet scrape of wood upon wood, a soft rustle of cloth, and then near-perfect silence.
After several minutes Raven's voice broke the silence with a question."Why are you here?"
Jon's voice was smooth and unaffected, though she remembered sensing a brief flicker of surprise cross his aura. "Since I assume you're not opening a conversation with philosophy, the simple answer is that I'm here for the reading."
"More specifically I meant, 'why are you here at my table?'" came the slightly annoyed response.
Unruffled, "Ah, yes. My apologies. There are no other seats."
Jon walked down the dark street with a fountain drink dwarfing his right hand. Every now and again, his lips would purse about the straw and draw forth carbonated sweetness. Pausing in the shadows of a broken streetlight, Jon looked up and seemed surprised to see Raven standing alone in the center of the street. Scarlet and azure strobes bounced about the crumbling brick, hinting at a police presence just out of sight. It was in the temperamental glare of these lights that Jon spied, across the street and down an alley darker than the one he himself traversed, a small group of men hiding behind a dumpster. Presumably curious, Jon moved a bit closer, the new angle and chaotic light revealing a glint of gunmetal.
Without pause, his right hand had released the cup and his feet pounded against the cracked asphalt. His mouth opened in a silent shout, but Raven could hear well in her own memory the name, "Rachel!" as she saw the much larger man tackle her to the ground, brilliant roses blooming across his body.
"What is it that you do for a living?" Jon asked.
"I suppose you could say," Raven began delicately, "that I work in a form of specialized law-enforcement."
"Aren't you a bit young? I mean, isn't that dangerous? You can't be older than eighteen or nineteen..." Raven smirked as she recalled this line. She wasn't even seventeen yet... although depending on how strongly Jon's mindscape had telescoped her perception of time, she could be much older than that by now...
"Let's just say that there are... special circumstances."
The White Monster, now revealed as a being that called itself 'Arform', bounded over tables and chairs in a mad dash towards Raven. From this angle, Raven could see herself go aloft and begin to do battle with him as Jon attempted to force what seemed to be a healing spell into his leg. When that failed, Jon stood and began to draw raw magic forth from the earth and sky, releasing it as a bolt of pure mana once Raven had been knocked clear of the confrontation. Arform had, however, taken on the form of this new threat, and glowed with the same bruise-like combination of colours that had meant to strike him down. Suddenly the atmosphere became dreamlike, and the fighting ceased. Jon and Arform stood across from one another, apparently holding counsel.
"What do you remember about the fight with Arform?"
"Arform?"
"About this tall-" pause, "-this wide and seemed to be gunning for you."
She spoke in dead tones. "We fought. He punched me. It hurt."
"Succinct. Accurate. I rather like your way of summing up a situation, Ms. Roth."
"Call me Raven."
"If you insist. Anyway, the most important part of the fight is how it ended. He hit you hard enough to break a corner off of a stainless steel, industrial strength kitchen appliance. By the time I got to you the blood puddle was about a foot in radius. I didn't see any gray matter, but it's entirely possible that it was under your skull rather than inside of it, if you catch my meaning."
A long pause as the meaning sunk in. "It was a miracle that you were alive as long as you were. To not put too fine a point on it, you were already dead but just hadn't realized it yet. Your body was giving out on you, and your magic was trying desperately to keep you going. Unfortunately, it was interfering with my own healing spell and I couldn't do anything in that regard. Instead, I tethered your life force to me. Had to force it, too. I don't know where you learned to sling spells but you have one hell of a lot of mojo."
A pause before the response, delivered with a hint of cold malevolence."You could say that it's hereditary."
Briefly, a montage of their time together in the shared mindscape. Mock battles, discussions, and portraitures. Raven, slowly easing into his company... Jon, slowly losing the shadows no-one had ever noticed behind his eyes...
You could hear the sneer in Robin's voice as he said, "Raven is probably the least trusting of all the Titans, and you have her eating out of your hand in no time? You admit to having mental abilities and command of magical forces. What's your game?"
"This is ridiculous," Jon's voice, full of honest disbelief. "I demand counsel."
Robin, taken aback. "What?"
"You're not getting anything out of me except for my name, rank and serial number until I have a lawyer or a representative of my nation in the room with me."
"Are you serious?" Raven found it amusing to hear her leader taken so far off his stride with so few words.
"Jon Doe, Citizen,United States of America, Chronicler, Amazon Nation, 741-70-2186. I demand legal counsel and contact with a representative of the Amazon Embassy."
"I don't know what kind of game you're playing-"
"Jon Doe, Citizen,United States of America, Chronicler, Amazon Nation, 741-70-2186. I demand legal counsel and contact with a representative of the Amazon Embassy..."
Raven and Jon, together in that room that, for so brief a time, had been his at the Tower. The blue glow of her healing magic as it sluggishly went about stitching the myriad glass-pricks that painted his person. Him stopping her and offering his blood, a gesture of trust and affection that he must have learned from his time as a prisoner in his own body. Raven squirmed as she watched herself, an echo of the feelings she had felt then causing her to feel a tightness in her chest and a moistening at her womanhood.
"Harry, it's a pleasure to meet you again," Jon's slightly amused voice said.
"Jon, was it? Good to meet you, but what's all this about 'again'?"
"We knew one another in a place far from here. Or, rather, I knew another you in a place like this but not this."
"You're talking about alternate dimensions? They don't exist, at least not on this side of the Outer Gates," Harry replied with clear skepticism.
"You've obviously never read your own books," Jon stated dryly before muttering to himself under his breath, "or seen the TV series. Regardless," he said, returning to a normal tone, "I have need of your services. I know you have the ability, and I have the coin to convince you to exercise this ability."
"What to do want me to do?" Harry questioned, wary of this seemingly crazy and possibly dangerous individual.
"I need you to help me, thaumaturgically, send a message to myself," Jon replied.
Jon stood alone in the middle of an abandoned construction site. He looked about, and proceeded to a half-finished brick wall. Stopping before it, he spoke a few words and waited as the face mask and outline of Arform appeared. After conversing for several minutes, Arform raised his hands and tilted back his head, sending a near-invisible distortion through the air. Immediately, more face masks and outlines appeared. Two... five... a dozen... three dozen... a small army of white figures that rose, ghostlike, into the shadows and waited. When some sixty figures were present and it seemed that more would not be arriving, Jon began to speak. At the end of his discourse, they spread out into the city and disappeared.
"Diana, my final preparations are complete. Be prepared for a call to the Tower in the days ahead."
"Jon, you don't have to do this. Let the League help you and the Titans!"
"I tried asking for your help before, Diana, as my Princess and a fellow Amazon. Instead, you denied me the chance of helping them prepare. Only now, when your own mystics finally note the danger of the precipice we balance upon do you offer assistance? It is too late, Princess. If this threat is anything close to what I think it is... you should get your own final affairs in order as well."
"The Justice League could-"
"They are not interested, Highness!" Jon's voice uncoiled and whipped forth, striking Wonder Woman dumb. "I already warned them of the danger, and do you know what they did? Turned me away as they turned Rachel away, the both of us spurned for the darkness we cannot help but harbour within. With her they had years to forget and be surprised by their narrowly averted doom. Now? They're lucky to have weeks."
"Chronicler, let me explain to them-"
"Good day, Your Highness. If my plan and the Titans' come to fruition, I may come before you again to beg pardon for this breach in decorum. Otherwise, look for my Messenger."
Jon sat in seiza within a circle scribed in chalk. The early afternoon sunlight filtered to a dirty yellow through dusty windows situated high on corrugated steel walls. Diffuse shafts of light illuminated wheeling motes of dust as they fell and rose, a microcosm of life and death. The chalk outline sublimated, rising in gaseous elegance to swirl about the mage within. His eyes were closed, but a blue light seeped from beneath the lowered lashes. The vapours ceased swirling, stopping unnaturally, and then dove towards the man. They entered his ears, eyes, and mouth, a final wisp disappearing into his nose as he inhaled deeply. His eyes opened, a horrific negative; corneas dark as sack-cloth, irises an unnatural orange, and pupils a bright, penetrating white. His lips writhed into a position that was more sneer than smile, right corner twisted far above the left, black teeth gleaming with oily iridescence.
"Yes Jon! Flee! You cannot hope to fight me like this, weakened and pathetic!"
"Leave me be, Zarach! Back in your cage, vile Sin-Spawn!"
"Never again, fool! I shall live through you forever! No confluence of Fates here, you poor devil!" A resounding, mocking laugh. "I shall begin by availing myself to the flesh of your consort. What was it, Jon? The evil in her called too strongly to the evil in you? Drew me forth from my prison to take what you were too small of a man to ask for?"
"You leave her alone!" Jon's voice, desperate, weak.
"Never! If only because it causes you anguish, if only because it fills you with hopelessness, I shall pursue her."
"Then please, I offer a deal!"
"Intriguing... what do you offer?"
"Give her a chance. Allow her to fight you to the best of her abilities, allow her to try all she can, and only when her defeat comes from a lack of ability to defeat you, true lack of ability, do you take her. Otherwise, kill her cleanly first."
"And what do you offer in return for this boon?"
"My passivity. I will not fight you. I'll retreat, so deep within myself you'll never see nor hear me again."
"Agreed."
A whirling, spinning, nauseating recap of Raven's desperate flight from Zarach, and then the centuries spent in Jon's mindscape floated by until...
...a small voice, trembling, asking, "Who are you?"