The Angel of Death

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Okay so there's been some confusion lately about the prophecy. When it refers to the 'son of death', that is meant in a very broad term, encompassing the whole concept of death, the underworld, and everything related. Since Hades is the king of the underworld, and thus the king of the Gods like Thanatos, the 'son of death' is an all-encompassing term for any child of the underworld. It also rhymed better. 

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Instead of finding myself in the weird empty void that my last dream had been, this time I was standing back on the desert road, with the dead tree creaking in a slow breeze. It was quiet for a minute, and I had the feeling that the scene was holding its breath, waiting for something. The silence was broken by the sharp 'caw' of a crow, and when I turned to face the animal, and was startled to find dozens of them, covering the ground behind me, all silent as the dead and watching as if waiting for something too. "A murder of crows," I murmured, and something ticked in my memory. Something about a murder? Or crows?

Three of the birds stood out to me in particular. They were white, and sat in the middle of the murder, eerily still compared to the ruffling of feathers and shifting of feet from the rest. "Three crows..." I whispered. Something about this was tugging incessantly in my mind, but before I could figure out why the crows held such significance, the ground cracked open and I fell into the chasm.

I landed in the middle of a battlefield. It was dawn, the sun barely rising over the horizon. The field was filled with clashing demigods and monsters. The air was crowded with fog so thick I couldn't tell friend from foe, could hardly make out blurry shapes. But I could tell that these monsters seemed different. They were darker somehow, slightly misshapen as if they weren't real monsters at all but look-alikes made by someone who only had a rough description of what they looked like, and had tried to mould them out of black clay. And not all of them were monsters- I could hear Nyx's horses in the distance, a sound I wasn't likely to ever forget.

A caw sounded, and I looked down to see the white crows at my feet, looking up at me as the hue of their feathers darkened, draining to a midnight black, and one by one they dropped dead at my feet. When I looked back up, all the figures were gone. The previously raucous fighting had become a frighteningly still quiet. The fog was still thick, but it was quickly dissipating. I took a step forward and felt something hard under my shoe. I lifted my foot, squatting down to examine the ring that was sitting in the trampled grass.

It was mine. The Stygian iron ring, forged in the shape of a skull. I shifted my eyes, and a few feet away lay an outstretched hand, the fingers limp as if they'd been reaching out to grab something. Like the ring. The fog slunk back, giving me a perfect view of the body that lay out on the ground, face turned towards me, and unseeing eyes open.

It was me.

I woke up on the verge of screaming. Someone's hands were on my shoulders, and I panicked, lashing out and swinging, aiming my fist for their eyes. I connected, and the pressure disappeared, leaving me to fall back onto–

A bed?

I blinked and everything became suddenly clear. I was in my bed, at the mansion. And Dick was sitting on the floor, nursing a budding black eye. "Holy hell," he said, awed. "You're a lot stronger than you look!" He pushed himself up as I tossed the covers away from myself, scrambling to get out of bed. "Hey, woah woah woah!" He pushed me back into the mattress. "You lost a lot of blood, kid. And you were thrashing around like you were on fire when I came in here, you probably pulled your stitches. Just let me check, and then we can get you up, yeah?"

Stitches? The ambrosia should have worked by now. If I let him check my shoulder, he would want an explanation. Bruce certainly already wanted one. What regular teenager gets attacked by a pack of giant wolves in the middle of a city, and sprouts wings to defend himself? I couldn't come back from this slip-up. I had done what I had to do to protect myself and Bruce, and I wouldn't apologise for that, not if Zues himself threatened me. But if the Waynes knew what I was, that death literally followed me, I didn't know how they would take it. Jason was unique, he knew what it was like to be a child of death. The others didn't. I was a living, walking disregard for Bruce's no-killing rule. He wouldn't let that go, no matter how nice he'd been to me. But Dick seemed understanding. Maybe he wouldn't care who I was.