Chapter 0 - Death  and the Raven:

Welcome, little Death, a voice spoke in the darkness which Death of the Endless found herself in. It was a low voice, only partially human, with an infrasound reverberation that made the very air crack with the sound of its passing. These sounds were writ into the syllables of its speech such that even its breathing reflected it. Yet beyond that there was a voice that would have been low even were the speaker a full human. 

Burgess failed to entrap your brother but I have succeeded in capturing you, the voice echoed and then the shadows moved and within them were glowing red eyes and snarls that slithered through the darkness, the sounds of a predator outside a campfire. She could make out a sound of steps, a tread that sounded oddly human for the kind of smothering and all-consuming power that pervaded the room. 

And now here you are, alone, friendless, and no blood kin to be near you any more than they were for Dream himself. 

The shadows pulsed and four red eyes gleamed like pools of blood that literally drank in the darkness, not dispelling it. Lips peeled revealing bright white fangs, the snarls and moans within the room or chamber she was held in shifting timbre slightly, deepening in some aspects and becoming sepulchral within others. Darkness stalked out like a tendril, caressing along her face. Her hair, dark as the room and seemingly merged with it. Along her forehead, her cheeks, her chin, and pressing against lips she tried to keep shut. 

Laughter rippled, the growling and low baying of a thing that hid in the darkness and more than that, it was the daughter of the darkness. 

You cannot resist that power, little Endless. There are greater things than you and your six siblings in the known universe. 

And then her lips opened, though she felt the upper part of her lips quirking slightly and then jerked when the darkness lashed out in triple shapes, three tendrils. Two slashed along her hips, one along the underside of her breasts. The tendril slipping into her mouth felt more than simple darkness, it had an organic feeling to it. As if the darkness were more than simple darkness, just as with the ones that had slashed along her hips and even now were feeling along her striations and slowly and teasingly dipping downward. 

It moved with a welcome strength and speed, exploiting that as an Endless she did not need to breathe, that her body was more suggestion than truth. Even if here, tied to a bed in a chamber with a thing of awe-inspiring strength, it felt like more truth than suggestion. As if that thought had activated something a set of runes blazed into being in a pattern that reflected square walls and yet they were not merely of the angles in the room but within them and through them.

As with the glowing eyes the runes drank in the darkness, and drank it hungrily, and yet the darkness did not dissipate or lessen. It grew the more intense, to a point that what contrast there was came from the bone-hue of Death’s skin, exposed where it was in turn. The shackles that bound her wrists and her ankles tightened, low growling thrumming through the room with a demonic fury that surprised her a bit in that she could feel it. 

So easy it was when only the Presence and his twin eldest sons were more truthfully powerful than she (at present, if the systems of belief changed by majority another would take his place above her but she would remain just beneath whichever it was) to believe herself invincible. She was cocky, she was arrogant, she had gotten herself in more than a share of trouble relative to her siblings and not just on that one day a century. And here in this strange room she was bound and at the mercy, if mercy there was, of a kind of being neither well known for it nor truly disposed to it. 

The wet sounds of the tendril in her mouth and the first probings between her legs, one of the tendrils brushing along her labia and slowly coaxing out her clit, the other jamming inside her with force sufficient that her back arched. Most mortals facing such a thing might have found themselves slain by the shock (or perhaps not, given one of the key traits of the being that held her) but all she did was arch her back, groaning in a sense muffled and echoing in the darkness that whispered and snarled and moaned with eldritch fury. 

The darkness laughed again, cold and echoing with a tectonic power that lanced into the very nature of her being. 

And all this time I had thought it was your younger….sibling….the one they call Desire who was wanton and needy. 

The footsteps were closer now but deliberate, the thing that held her exulting in the power and the way the darkness enfolded around her and all around this scenario
. 
Perhaps you should truly be Desire, for you are the most beautiful of all beings in creation. Hardly a modest self-concept, but then I suppose the embodiment of life and death would not need it. 

Now she was beside her and from the darkness moved a hand grey in contrast to her bone-hue. Her ash-hued skin was one that seemed unnaturally pale in itself against the contrast of mortals. Next to an Endless of bone-white in an eldritch darkness filled with light that drank it and yet did not change, it seemed a contrast of much more profound nature. The hand brushed along her left cheek, the knuckles pressing against her skin, a caress of mocking gentleness. 

It moved and then those fingers were against the edge of lips that were still being claimed by tendrils of darkness like the ones that were pistoning in and out of her spread legs, like the one brushing and circling around her anus, as she tensed slightly. The tendril in her mouth trembled then with a force that vibrated through her and her jaw ached with the power on display, the light shining and thrumming with a pulse not unlike that of the film the Titans had watched the other day, a low droning sound that ended in a sudden flood of liquid that was boiling hot and then soothingly cool and flowed deep down her gullet, as she sighed with satisfaction as the tendril withdrew and then began to caress her lower, each and every inch of her breasts given careful attention that matched that given along her stomach and her earlobes. 

The hand that was there was now brushing along her lips. 

Life, after all, sustains itself by the raw presence of sexuality, and so naturally that which personifies it would call to herself that truth. 

The demonic cum that had poured inside her was pooling in her belly now, oscillating between warm and cold and she felt contented and full on the one hand and achingly needy at another, her lips kissing along the ashen-hued fingers. Her conqueror’s hands were always strange to the touch, at the one level one might have expected cold but not a truly hellish warmth and a latent strength hidden from her chosen family but never from her. 

After all, where she was with them if she was at all she was at her very gentlest. With her, she could take anything given to her and so there were no reasons for restraint. 

Her kisses continued, a feeling soft and welcome to the thing that stalked the darkness, before she moved her hand away as Death couldn’t resist a light keen of disappointment. A tendril whiplashed out and slapped her along the cheek and she understood the signal, remaining silent as a voice whispered in her mind, and she nodded eagerly, her teeth shining amidst black lips. 

The laughter rippled, then, a volcano that burned with the same heat as those hands, and the tendril around her asshole suddenly and without warning slammed its way in as she arched herself, letting out what would have become a yelping scream were it not for an ash-hued face that loomed out of the darkness, hair of deep violet and four red eyes shining, and locked lips with her. 

If the skin was warm the lips were warmer, and in the feeling of that kiss there was the coldness and gloom of the Sunless Lands against a light-within-darkness that was in the darkness and was the darkness, for not in the will of these entities were they separated. There were lips together and a long forked tongue that slid out and caressed her own, mastering her and her being, doing so with an effortless demonstration of strength. 

Hips were moving, three tendrils working in unity, the one in her ass bigger than the two between her legs, and their motions in a perfect harmony and amplified by the surreal feeling of feeling the tendrils brushing against each other. 

These were details she could only partially absorb in a room lit by hell-runes, where the darkness rippled and snarled and echoed with sepulchral sounds, where her lips met those of her conqueror and yielded to a kiss as they had to a tendril’s warm pleasures. Eventually the kiss parted, a single strand of saliva connecting them before breaking and splattering along her chin. 

M-More, she groaned, as the thing that looked at her in the darkness looked with an eerie eldritch grin. 

Your wish is my command, little Endless. 

The tendrils within her escalated their pace and their ferocity and she wailed, she couldn’t not wail. Her body was not hers, not now. Herr very concept was not hers either, it was the plaything of the Daughter of Darkness, who crossed bare arms across equally bare breasts hidden within the shadows. Yet Death could see them as she could see through that darkness if she wished, and she drank in the sight. 

Now a woman of twenty-three, Raven had become from a pretty girl a stunning woman, long purple hair draped past her shoulders. Her ashen skin merged with the darkness where hers never did, her pussy marked with a very light strip of hair of lighter purple than the hair on her head but otherwise clean-shaven. Her bare feet were against the smooth bare-wood floor of the room, a more than slightly smug smile on her face. Yet in truth, to have the very incarnation and governing will behind life and death tied to a bed, begging for more, writhing in such an incantation was a good reason for smugness. 

Death would have tried, perhaps, to defang it a bit as she would have with other mortals but there was no dignity in this place, as she was now. There was only pleasure, a pleasure that rippled outward and burned with a wondrous heat, there was the feeling of her body against silken sheets. The knowledge that everything of hers was on full display to a being who in their previous encounter had shaven her hair in the shape of the bird-like sigil she wore when she wore her current costume. 
A suit of what was both armor and leather enchanted with works of old Azarath, with a Raven with upturned wings in the chest area. An outfit one might have expected more of the Bat-family, and yet it, with its deep darkness, suited her. She did not wear it now, for here she needed no mystic enhancements to complement the darkness produced by physics and the Olber paradox, for this darkness was hers and it was her very nature uncaged. 

And it was a mirror of that between her legs, a crude and yet effective means of marking her as her woman, insofar as she was a woman at all. Those bare feet strode forward again, steps that were slow and confidence, the steps of the woman who quite literally held the whip hand. 

I love seeing you like this, Didi. You writhing and groaning and reduced from the sweet and lovely being you are into a wanton harlot on my bed. It takes so very little. 

A hand extended from the darkness and brushed along that carefully patterned hair as Death keened, moving in unity with the tendrils inside her. 

Tempt little Death with pleasure and watch her fall, and fall, and fall. 

The hand that brushed along her moved up, along her right striation and Death felt the tendrils beginning to pulse, hips moving as her eyes, dark as the room and her hair, met the red eyes. 

So very simple a thing. 

Then warmth surged into her, between her legs, in her ass, and she groaned with a low sound that rumbled outward, captured by the darkness and its millions of eyes and its echoing low voices, which mirrored her sound back to her in a chorus. 

It’s a good thing your brother never considered offering you the key to Hell. If he had you’d probably end up shared by all the lords of all the planes and Hell would have become even more disorganized than it is. 

Death shuddered for a moment imagining the vision, the powerful demon-lords like Choronzon and Necron and Afomorgon having their way with her, and then it vanished with that ash-hued hand that burned like the fires whose after-leavings it matched the hue thereof, one that slipped to her chin and pulled her vision still more firmly into four eyes that drank in darkness and gleamed with a bloody light. 

But they are not here. They might fancy you, for most of the Great Ones do. They might desire you, for anything that lives and sees you and still lives would forever be spoiled for another. 

The darkness parted now to let her curvy body with its long violet tresses stride outward, the being that stood next to her moving her hand back to caress along the outer edges of her labia, bringing a hand soaked in demonic cum to her lips as Death lapped at it eagerly, willing her lover to see her for what she was. 

Oh I do see you for what you are. A little lost child and yet ancient and more ancient than anything that lives. Hiding so many secrets behind a smile, and how familiar that is to me in turn. 

Her palm was clean of it and she sucked off each of the fingers with an enthusiasm that she would never show for a cock, nor would she have reason to ever show it for one, either. Her preference was other women, and it would always be. Yet if her mistress, her conqueror, demanded it so would she do. 
She was left with the middle finger to fellate and so she did, humming contentedly around it. 

Laughter, laughter caught in the darkness as a wind and echoing as if there were an audience that looked upon her and beheld her as this, caught in a trap made by the skillful hands and conjurations of another. 

The finger slipped away and then a being of ashen hue floated up, hovering over her, as the tendrils slipped out of her and seemed to fade back in the darkness and she made a low and pleasant moan, as if the darkness were her (and so it was) and as if it had been her inside of her and treating her with that delicious mixture of pleasure-pain (for it had been her, too). 

The entity moved and lowered herself, her cunt engulfing Death’s field of vision where her ass did not and like she enjoyed letting herself do with the beings whom it was not quite her writ to claim, she let herself start to kiss along her labia, first, enjoying re-memorizing the shapes of Raven’s folds, the demoness lounging forward, her hands moving along the rest of her body. 

Death’s body was neither warm nor cold (though her smile could light up any darkness or bring soothing night to one who could not endure the light of day). The ash-hands that moved along her burned with the fires of the Hell from whence her father had risen to sire her, along her shoulders, again paying attention to her breasts, along her stomach where her flesh rippled, the entity’s moving her hips as she continued to carefully and lovingly lick. 

She wished her hands were free but it was not the will of the Daughter of Darkness that they would be, or could be. No, it was not her will and as a grateful guest of the demoness she did not dare tempt her brother’s sphere She licked and kissed and then sought to spell out her conqueror’s name, her tongue slithering into her lover’s cunt, hearing the demoness moaning as she relished the sensation. 

Soon the demoness was on top of her, their bodies intertwined, the ash-hued heat against the bone-hued concept that wriggled with the almost tickling sensations of breath that hissed with a slow but continual heat like a sleeping dragon or an awakening volcanic fury that had been buried in deep slumbers beneath the Earth. 

Her own moans were low and echoing with that infrasound aspect, not at all like Death’s higher and swifter sounds that once made would end and then go forth and echo again. The darkness mirrored them, too, and it was as if it was a rain made only of thunderclaps, a sound that thrummed in the darkness, before those hellfire-heated lips closed in on her thigh and started to kiss and nibble. 

Raven’s hips were moving, mirroring the pleasures that Death gave her and there was a warmth in her at the thought that such a being who had so effortlessly mastered her lusts could react to her in turn. She was more than a moment of ending doomed to outlive entire universes and go on and on and on and on, she was a woman, here. A woman whose lips and tongue were reaping their first rewards as Raven’s pussy dripped into her mouth and she drank it as if it were Ambrosia, on Olympus of old where both Cronus and Zeus had invited her (and Zeus, true to himself, had tried to claim her and found it not going quite as he had imagined). 

It had a spicy edge to it, a heat that drew her onward and drew her with more eagerness to coax out more of it, her mistress’s hips rocking along her face as she gasped in delight, the sound muffled between those thighs. 

She knew, as she knew all things if so she wished, that people thought of Raven as physically weak, and if the barometers were the Amazonian monster slayers or the children of Krypton lost in her sister’s old gamble, perhaps. Yet those thighs displayed muscles that were immensely strong in themselves and she knew that Raven concealed a great deal more strength than she wished to let on, for in her view what reminded her of her father was worth the forgetting. 

Yet on her outer thighs her grip was powerful, one that held her in an iron grasp, ashen heat leaving her wondering if Raven would leave burns on her again that would fade, in time, but leave such delicious streaks of darkness to match her preferred clothing and her preferred hue. That did not matter, the feeling of that forked tongue moving along her did, the feeling of Raven’s hips moving did. 

The tendrils that reached out of that darkness to caress along her and seemed to be both within her and extending around and from Raven did. 

Raven’s desire was not for parts of her, nor for the imagery that they must have presented, tendrils that were at one remove smoke lit with hell-eyes and snarling rasping demonic voice and tendrils with a thousand mouths and a murmuring chorus mirroring their mistress’s emotions, a low and purring thrumming drone. 

It made the air feel thicker at points but she welcomed that thickness as a mirror of her successes. 

The warmth of Raven’s cum dripped along her cheeks and her chin, blazing trickles of liquid and the hellfire-heat of Raven’s body that felt like a marking, like a brand. It was not in truth one, for hers was not a flesh that even her true name would allow a brand to stick. But it felt like it and Death had wanted more symbols and sigils of their relationship as time and its space and its welcoming nature permitted. Her siblings were not altogether fond of the relationship nor of Raven, and that in itself was a reason to welcome it. 

Hips moving, thighs taught with jiggles in a couple of places. Body moving against hers as a continual heat and that blaze now ignited between her legs where lips opened and moved and tendrils extended and amplified things. She had to get her mistress off first, it was only fair. Her mistress had brought her to the brink but it would never do to have the conquest cum before the conqueror. 

Her lips and tongue continued to move and her shoulders flexed a little, and she moaned with a disappointed sound when the heat moved from her lips only to hear a billion voices pealing in the darkness with the echoing of Raven’s own moaning sound as the liquids flowed from her body, drinking of it as deeply as Zeus had wanted her to drink of the ambrosia, or Odin of the mead of poetry in the ancient times when he had come to her to ask her for relief for his son Baldr, a relief she had offered a prospect that it would be so and yet so it was not and would not be. 

She drank and more liquid flowed into her stomach, content at the feeling of warmth that remained warm, the heat snaking through her and then she made a yelping low moan m the midst of Raven’s cunt that combined with the reasons for it and the ways that her own body flooded Raven’s mouth gave her mistress a second orgasm that she drank as thoroughly as she did the first. 

Coolness warred with warmth beneath her and the demoness slid off, on her knees beside her as the darkness around them went from mirroring Raven’s sounds to the usual low tectonic voices that whispered sounds just beneath the edge of hearing and eyes upon eyes upon eyes and mouths that snarled and moved out to caress and lick and bite. 

The demoness sat on her haunches, her red eyes gleaming along Death’s body. She moved her right hand, now, the ashen heat over Death’s belly and purred with a sound mirrored by the shadows around her. 

I feel that warmth and that coolness, both. Her grin was overly wide, stretching from ear to ear for a moment and the teeth in her mouth were too sharp and too long.

To think that I can do this to you. 

Death grinned, then, an eager grin and purred in turn. 

I…..I need you, she spoke with a low whispering sound that rasped slightly with the roughness of her desires and the ways they were mirrored in other aspects of her body. In the trembles of her wrists and her ankles and the ways her arms vibrated with the buried and contained strength. 

I want this, she hissed, her own smile as wide as Raven’s, their eyes continuing to meet, as the demoness’s hand on her belly slipped up to her bound wrist, looping around the enchanted shackles that held Death in a grip more powerful than any she had let herself feel. 

I know, mused the demoness. And I can’t not feel giddy at such a thing. I literally have you, here, like this. Willing to trust that a figure of a kind that is no friend to your family would remain what we are. I am not used to trust, few people trust the daughter of Trigon to be anything but the world-destroying inferno my father desired. 

The hand slipped and then her mouth dipped in turn, sharp teeth biting along first Death’s shoulder and then around her nipple as Death jerked in a pleasurable sensation. 

And yet you do. 

Her hand was now sliding down along Death’s stomach, pausing for a moment again at the warmth and coolness mirrored within her belly, and then sliding down further to cup her right cheek, as Death hissed again in pleasure. Then again when two swift slaps left scorching heat moving at a blistering speed along her body. 
The shackles opened then and Death slumped on the bed, a pool of contentedness surging in her and around her, staring at the dark ceiling and the eyes that were the fell mirrors of those on her own wings. Eyes that were the last sights many a person saw, weeping a single golden tear in their memory, for it was Despair’s task to remember and to mourn in one way and it was hers to see the course of lives and to understand them and to take them all in turn. 

Her eyes were warmth and love and lack of judgment. 

The eyes in this room glowed crimson and drank in darkness, the smoke-like tendrils that snaked around her and were soon slipping around to form a kind of strap-on that was longer and thicker, a thing that could only work as magic. It tapped against her cunt as Death groaned eagerly and then reached out with a whiplash of speed and strength of her own to pull Raven down and within her, flipping them around so she was on top. 

She remained then, biting her lip, as her hands caressed Raven as she had been caressed, along her cheeks and her neck and her breasts that were much larger than her own and that due to her demonic heritage remained perky and beyond the effects of gravity. Raven was not so quietly grateful for this as otherwise they were of a size she would have considered reduction for the sake of her poor spine. As it was, they were soft and warm and welcome in the hands of Death, who was admittedly a bit biased but considered them the finest pair of any in the superhero community. 

Those of Kara Zor-L were larger, as were those of Dinah Lance and Pamela Isley and a few others besides. It wasn’t the size. It was that here was someone who could see her and be felt by her and let her be who she was and as she was and in that embrace there was so much else to offer. It was that she trusted her to let herself be felt, for of those who knew her and knew how she felt and what surged through her, very few even among the more mystically inclined could or would let themselves trust Death’s touch and her embrace. 

She remained for a moment like this, her body feeling the fullness of Raven within her, the way the strapon parted her and made her feel contented, its thickness something beyond that of a being of true flesh but for her just right. Her thighs were on Raven’s own and a position that would have been steeply uncomfortable otherwise tingled with feelings that each of the two beauties that felt them relished. 

Death’s hips were soon moving as her hands feathered through her hair, extending across from her head. She had her mouth open in silent and audible moans, tendrils moving around her at points or whipping outward to crack along her body or nibbling at parts of her and kissing her, each alike welcomed and welcoming. 

The wetness of that sound excited her and Raven both, as she let herself go and thoroughly enjoyed doing the work to get herself off, knowing that the lips and kisses and little nibbles inside of her were helping there. This was no strap on of leather and thus a pseudo-dick meant for a very specific kind of thing, this was Raven, physically inside her and content to be, knowing that her pleasures were real and so would be the reward she reaped. 

Death did not pay attention to the passage of time, only to the ways Raven’s four eyes met her two flowing pools of utter darkness, to the trembles of Raven’s jaw and the ways her fists clenched as she enjoyed herself in that fashion restrained, as it always was, in a more human shape but almost never in the truly demonic one. Restraint that broke further as the tendrils around her slashed at her and she groaned with loud sounds that were echoed by the darkness as if an audience of herself was watching, restrained and enjoying themselves as much as she was here. 

Her eyes continued to meet Raven’s, whose lips were parted in that over-wide demonic smile, the tendrils that slashed at her slashing hard as Death let herself yield further, her hands moving from the side of her head to the side of Raven’s. 

I bet you’re like this with all the girls, Death teased, as their lips were close, her mouth that did not breathe feeling the fire of Raven’s breath against her lips, a continual sighing pleasure that whisped outward like a caress upon her body. That tongue slipped out and brushed against her lips, spelling a word as answer that made her giggle as her hips continued to move, and Raven’s hands slid to her ass and along her back. 

There are no girls like you, Death expanded on that answer, as her hips were content to feel the light feather-weight of Death whose boy was one taught and firm as could be and yet moving with a lightness that made it seem like she was a being of her brother’s realm and not the absolute mistress of her own. 

Lips met then as Death fucked herself harder on the strap-on, feeling the way that darkness inside of her pulsed and moved and her first orgasm was muffled in that kiss, echoing as a sound that Raven felt in the very marrow of her being, her second after the kiss was broken and echoing like a whalesong-drone that pulsed as much as the one that echoed through Raven’s mouth and throat had. 

Death came seven more times, and on the ninth, as her hair was slick against her and her eyes clouded with pleasure, her dignity lost (and in truth with her own hair as slick and her nails become claws that scraped along Death’s body like trailing magma-streams, so was Raven’s). The strap on within pulsed and throbbed and then Death’s hands were on the bedposts in grips of iron as she wailed in absolute delight, the energy that flooded her feeling just like the other tendrils, but more intimate. Part of her ached to do more than breathe life into other things, to do more than reward her siblings’ own conquests with this. It was not a very large part but a tempting image, of her with a belly curved and Raven doing on her and coming to her apartment until the child was born was there. It was there, and yet…..

Death slid off of Raven, content to clean herself with her hands and to swallow more of the same cum that felt like the heat of Raven’s body and cooled down her gullet until it pooled with more coolness in her belly, a symbol and a sigil of that claim upon her. 

The strap on vanished and with it the darkness, and Death clung to Raven, then, letting the shorter demoness be the big spoon as she always wished to be, knowing that she would kiss her in the morning and would encounter her again soon enough. For now there was night and there was her eyes closed, for though she did not truly sleep nor need to sleep, it felt good to feel good, and to feel loved, and to feel desired. 
-----------

Two months later, she appeared to Raven to tell her something quietly that meant an old dream of hers would indeed be fulfilled, and she wondered idly to herself if it was the tendrils as a part of Raven or the strap on that had done it. 

Seven months later their daughter Mors would be born, a girl with violet eyes and hair dark as night, a figure of comfort and empathic connection to death and to the dead, and surging with a roiling maelstrom that was carefully calmed, the hurricane of fire that was the bloodline of the Lord of the Eighth Circle. For the first time in her long life and set of lives, Death had let herself bring forth Life.
