The first thing he noticed was the change—not in the lab, but in the pressure in the air, like the universe had exhaled wrong.
Paradox froze mid-sentence, stylus hovering above the glowing blueprint he was redrafting for the fifth time. He had been optimizing a neural pattern for his pseudo-organic drone prototypes—what he called "emotionally unstable Roombas"—when a ripple passed through the vault.
He felt it in the walls. Heard it in the pitch of the lights. Reality blinked. Just once.
And then the portal opened.
It wasn't like his portals—clean, sharp, coded to exact spatial coordinates. This one tore space like it was cheap fabric, opening in a violent twist of violet fire and smoke that reeked of brimstone and regret.
She dropped through it like a stone wrapped in silence.
Long black cloak. Pale skin. Hair like midnight with hints of indigo. Boots scuffed and robe torn at the sleeve, like she had been running from something older than time itself. She landed hard on the metallic floor, barely catching herself with a burst of magic.
Paradox didn't speak. His hand hovered above the panic trigger, but something in him hesitated. Not fear. Recognition.
The girl raised her head, eyes glowing faintly. He knew who she was the moment they locked eyes.
Raven.
Of course it would be her.
She stood slowly, the portal sputtering out behind her with a final gasp of dimensional noise. For a moment, the room held its breath. Even the drones didn't dare chirp.
"You're not supposed to be here," he said, voice low.
She took a step forward. "Neither are you."
That was enough for him to deactivate the containment field. Not fully. Just a sliver.
"I didn't summon you."
"No," she said, scanning the lab with unnerving precision. "But something inside this place did."
He turned to glance at the vault—the shard inside it was pulsing again, casting pale blue light across the floor like moonlight on a frozen lake.
"Great," he muttered. "First it whispers, now it kidnaps guests."
"I'm not a guest," Raven said. "I'm a warning."
He raised an eyebrow. "To who?"
"To both of us."
They stood there for a moment, neither breaking eye contact. Two beings forged by things far beyond their years—one from the hells of magic, the other from the chaos of intellect.
Eventually, he led her to the observation deck.
It had no real purpose. Just a view. Earth rotated below like a dream, storms curling over continents. Stars above blinked in careful patterns, interrupted only by the occasional Watchtower drone patrol.
They sat in silence. He liked it. Not the awkward kind—this was the rare kind, the kind that sat between two people who didn't need to fill the void with noise.
She didn't ask about the lab. Or the shard. Or the half-rebuilt AI mumbling in the corner. She just watched the Earth turn, the blue glow reflecting in her eyes.
"You're afraid of yourself," he said after a long while.
Her head turned slightly, but her expression didn't change. "And you're not?"
"I didn't say that."
"You built a lab inside a weapon," she said quietly. "You've surrounded yourself with tech so advanced it bends reality. I can feel it—your machines, your constructs, even the AI. They're stitched together with logic, magic, and desperation."
He didn't deny it. He couldn't.
"I'm not trying to become a god," he said. "I'm trying to make sure I'm not left behind when the gods start rewriting the rules."
She didn't speak for a moment. Then she surprised him.
"I get it," she said.
He turned to her, genuinely caught off-guard.
"You do?"
"I'm the daughter of a demon who wants to rewrite creation," she said, voice hushed but steady. "I spend every day trying to stay one step ahead of the thing inside me. You build. I suppress. We're just two people who are terrified of what happens when we lose control."
He exhaled softly. "You're more honest than I expected."
"I'm tired of pretending."
He liked her more in that moment than he wanted to admit. She wasn't dramatic. She didn't posture like Zatanna or banter like Peter. She just was—quiet, sharp, and strong in a way most people missed because she didn't raise her voice.
When the alarms triggered, they both moved at once.
Magic flared in Raven's palm. Paradox snapped his fingers and summoned a magnetic null-field. The AI screamed something about dimensional bleed and localized psychic surges.
He didn't need to check the monitors. He already knew.
The shard had attracted something again.
This time, it wasn't a whisper.
The breach tore open in midair, right in the center of the lab. Flames spiraled out. A talon burst through first, red and scaled, fingers tipped in obsidian claws. And then the eye—massive, burning with hunger, peering in from somewhere not here.
Trigon.
Paradox cursed under his breath. "Your dad has the worst timing."
Raven's voice dropped into something low and dangerous. "He's trying to find cracks. This lab isn't built to hold him back."
"No," Paradox agreed. "But we are."
He activated the counter-leyline generators while Raven began to chant. Their auras collided—science and magic, numbers and shadow. He threw up a gravity well to force the rift closed while she summoned her soul-self, a giant spectral raven that slammed into the breach with a shriek that rattled the glass.
The demon resisted.
Claws curled through space. Raven's body trembled under the effort. Paradox linked his systems to her spell, filtering raw energy through his field network, burning through half the lab's power grid in the process.
They were outmatched. Not because they weren't strong—but because Trigon was endless. They could only delay him.
So they bought time. One second. Two.
Paradox did something reckless. He tore off his protective suit, fed raw cognition into the leyline modulator, and overloaded the spatial array with chaotic data—his own mind as the key.
Reality buckled.
The breach screamed.
And then, it snapped shut like a slamming door.
Everything went dark.
He woke up with a cold cloth on his forehead and a dull throb behind his eyes.
Raven was sitting in the corner of the room, her legs folded beneath her, a book hovering in front of her, the pages turning slowly with a flick of her finger. She didn't look up.
"You're awake," she said.
"Barely," he croaked. "Did we win?"
"We didn't lose."
He laughed weakly. "That's my favorite kind of victory."
She closed the book and stood, walking over to him. She didn't touch him, but her presence was steady, grounding. His mind, still buzzing from the overload, began to calm.
"You risked your mind," she said. "That's not something you can regrow."
"I don't know how to stop," he admitted. "When something threatens what I built… who I protect… I stop being a scientist. I start acting like someone I'm afraid of becoming."
She looked down at him, expression unreadable.
"You remind me of me," she said finally.
He blinked. "That's… good?"
"I haven't decided."
She stayed in the lab that night. Slept on the cot he'd built the week before as an afterthought. He worked in silence, checking systems, patching holes in reality.
She said nothing.
But when he looked up and found her watching him from across the lab, her chin resting on her knees, he felt something shift.
Maybe trust. Maybe understanding. Maybe… just the comfort of not being alone in the storm.