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Even Death May Die

Summary:

"You aren't afraid of me," Goliath said.

The fishwife kept her eyes on her boiling pot. "Should I be?" she asked, voice tight.

"You said you've heard of me. From the other villagers."

"I've heard of strangers in town," the woman acknowledged. "And I was there when they discovered that old fisherman's body. I know most of the neighborhood blames you."

But the woman’s expression was neutral, not accusatory. Goliath raised an eyebrow. "But...?" he prompted.

"But this village has always been strange," the woman said.

Chapter Text

"I'm not sure I like the looks of this inscription," David said. 

He ran his thumb over the gilded edges of the mirror, trying to rub off some of the corrosion on the lettering, but before he could, Demona snatched the mirror away. 

"That this portal has survived these thousands of years buried among humans is a miracle," she said with a sneer. "If you sully it with your oily human hands—"

"Fine. No sullying." David went carefully blank-faced and shoved his hands in his pockets. "What's it say?"

Demona studied the inscription herself, one clawed finger tracing the near-illegible words on the mirror's frame. Her face softened — in the dark light of the tower, she looked almost reverent. But she didn't answer.

"What, you don't speak Welsh?" David asked. 

"It isn't Welsh," said Demona, her voice dark. 

"Could've fooled me." David sidled closer. He scanned the lettering one more time: lots of consonants, very few vowels. Unless time had chipped them all away. "Translate for me," he said.

"Do not give me orders, human," said Demona.

David gave her a flat-eyed stare. "You want my help or not?"

"Your help?" Demona repeated.

She was easily his least-favorite gargoyle. "My cooperation," said David patiently, "if that's more palatable to you."

Mollified, Demona side-stepped across the room with animal grace — quick and silent. She held the mirror before David, its silver surface gleaming in the soft light. His reflection stared back at him, so washed-out that he looked like his dad, and he turned his face away with a quiet, "Ugh."

"One of Air and One of Sea," Demona read, tracing the unfamiliar letters with her claw. "Travel through the skin of time to birth the end of death."

David wrinkled his nose. He repeated the words once in his mind to cement them there. "Awfully flowery," he said. "Might be a bit more cinematic if it rhymed."

The look she gave him seemed to say he'd be better off not joking around tonight. David suppressed the urge to roll his eyes and took the mirror from her — careful not to touch the lettering with his oily human hands. He tried to guess which words separated into English, but linguistics had never really been of great interest to him. After gazing at it for a moment, he could only shrug, studying Demona with narrow eyes.

"What language is this?" he asked.

Demona's expression could be cut from stone. "An ancient one," she said evenly. "Far more ancient than I."

A thousand years wasn't really all that ancient, but David would let her tally that as a win. 

"One of Air and One of Sea," he repeated. "Well, I can hazard a guess that you're of the air, yes?" He nodded at Demona's wings. "Who's the One of the Sea?"

She stared at him like it was obvious. 

"You are, son of the fisherman," she said. 

David stared back at his reflection — the planes of Petros' face beneath his mother's skin — and gave himself a humorless smile. "Always wanted that to be my claim to fame," he said. "So, how exactly does one 'travel through the skin of time?'"

"Easy," Demona said. "One simply recites the incantation."

Not in Latin, David assumed. "What is the incantation?" he asked, studying the engraved letters on the mirror's frame. 

"Sorry," said Demona blithely. She didn't sound very sorry. "Not telling."

That was fair — he couldn't blame her for wanting a little insurance. He ticked over the terms in his head. Eternal life, if Demona was to be believed — and she wasn't, but who would David be if he wasn't willing to find out? Adventure, at the very least, and he'd been getting bored lately with the day-to-day running of Xanatos Corp. and Gen-U-Tech. Plus, he didn't have anything pressing on his schedule until next month's Tech For Tots gala. But as for Demona…

"Okay, what's in it for you?" David asked.

Demona took the mirror from him and gazed into the silver. Her lips curled around her fangs in a smile. 

"Let's just say this mirror will allow both of us to achieve our goals," she said. 

Oh, yes, that definitely sounded like a good deal considering she turned the entire city to stone the last time they worked together. David folded his hands behind his back, subtly activating a beacon in his watch band as he leaned closer to the mirror. His face — and Demona's — swam in the silver, peering back at him. 

"Incant away," he said graciously.

Outside, unseen and unheard, the Steel Clan drew closer to the windows. He'd had them outfitted for anything that might come through this mirror once Demona started her spell — Children of Oberon, tentacle monsters, bigger, badder gargoyles — or God forbid, more Demonas. With his clan just outside, David could rest easy, his shoulders relaxed and his lips slightly curved, as Demona began her spell in a vowel-less growling language he'd never heard before. 

The mirror glowed. The silver deepened. Their reflections flattened, warped by ripples in the looking glass. And then, where once there had been silver, there was only darkness — darkness and the faint, eerie melody of a piano. 

"Now," Demona said, her eyes flashing red. 

"As you wish," David said. But he didn't take a step forward. He pressed the button on his watch again, this time ordering the Steel Clan to enter.

Someone entered, all right. But it wasn't the Steel Clan. 

In a crash of glass and broken metal, the window to David's left shattered, showering him in razor-sharp shards. He ducked by instinct, his head covered — so at first he didn't see the intruder, only heard the flap of leathery wings, the medieval growl, the thud of muscle on flesh.

Goliath. Of course. David lowered his forearm from over his eyes and watched as Goliath and Demona tumbled on the tower floor. Tables rattled; wooden legs broke on impact; vials of glass rolled to the stone floor and spilled their contents in vaguely-magical puddles. At a leisurely pace, David studied the flexing pool of shadows in the mirror's frame and gathered some necessities — his exo-frame soared from a hidden alcove on the other side of the room, called to him at the touch of the button, and he stood still as the pieces fitted themselves automatically to his frame. When his chest plate was in place, he sealed his helmet — just in case the air quality was bad on the other side of this mirror — and glanced back at Demona and Goliath with a jaunty wave.

"See you on the other side," he said. "If you make it."

…and he had one foot in the ice-cold, blood-thick substance of the mirror when with a mighty growl, Demona kicked Goliath off of her — and right on top of David.

And the coldness swallowed him — swallowed both of them — whole.