Chapter Text
Slayer Organization Files, Public Database
The Gentlemen:
Creatures that like the HansGrete demon and the Babylon Chopper are called by fairy tales and nursery rhymes very much do exist, and do have power that works in subtly distinct ways. They also illustrate the point that the category of entity called 'demon' is a very wide-ranging and a very fluid one. The beings called the Gentlemen create a very specific paradox, locking away voices in a box and then seeking to go through towns harvesting seven hearts. Why these specific demons need the hearts has never been satisfactorily answered. Where they come from, why they arise in specific points, this too is unknown. The attack by the Gentlemen in early December 2001 was its own particular paradox. It represented the singular time that the organization called the Initiative and the future head of the Slayer Organization and her group worked in alignment against a specific foe.
Some crises when they arise by definition force unlikely alliances. The threat posed by the Gentlemen is of just that nature, and of that kind of nature. The beings called the Gentlemen are also perhaps responsible for the paranormal legend of 'Men in Black' as they are pallid creatures that wear double-breasted black suits, that float around in silence and offer some of the more nightmarish threats that Slayers, or those associated with Slayers, may expect to face. It is also perhaps possible that they are responsible for the modern paranormal legend of Shadow-men, which take the same name as the group of sorcerers who created the last of the Old Ones, the Slayer, and set her against all of her kin and created the line of Slayers and all that passes through them. The nature of their manifestations and of the power they command certainly supports this notion.
The means to deal with the Gentlemen is ultimately simple, provided one knows of the demon group in question as what they are and how they go about doing what it is that they do. Find the box these entities wield, while eliminating the servitors that go around killing their targets for them, smash the box, and scream. In Slaying as in other facets of war, the simplest of things are difficult. Figuring out ways around what society might well term a 'laryngitis attack' is not a simple thing in itself. Determining where the Gentlemen and their minions hide, still less simple. In Sunnydale they picked the spire of its tallest building to hide in, a task made much simpler when the head of the Slayer Organization and the future head of the Empowerment Centers worked together and one could simply fly the other up without having to take the stairs. Other cities that lack a super-strong witch able to fly may have more circuitous paths, but this, not anything else, is the simplest approach to resolving the conundrum.
Also as a general rule where there are Slayers and the Gentlemen appear there will be a Slayer Dream that in contrast to most is very specific and targeted, and not a vaguer glimpse of out of context fragments of the future.
Sunnydale, Rosenberg Apartment, Willow and Tara's bedroom
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Tara kept her arms around Willow, nuzzling into her invulnerable girlfriend's back. Outwardly she was at peace, and to that point her dreams had been. For the first time in over a year the very oldest of her recurring dreams, the one that had driven her here and ultimately given her a new home, a girlfriend, a place that was safer than anywhere but her own mother's arms had been once upon a time recurred.....and this time there was a difference.This time she could see herself moving with Buffy on the right and Faith on the left, all of them following a bruised and bloodied Spike, Buffy swinging a strange hammer with a positive delight in wielding it. They were moving up a tower with a desperate speed and a desperate necessity, and she could see light beginning to shine with the brilliant and inexorable terrible power of an atom bomb, a neon bruise upon reality. A woman in a red dress stood in front of them with her arms bared in triumph.
I am a Goddess, you dull creatures, I will not be bullied by-a swing of Buffy's hammer struck her in the chest and knocked her down.
"Oh yeah," she grinned as she held the hammer over the stunned creature.
"After months of being kicked around by you, it's time to return the favor."
She was there, and the light was shining and she could see what was becoming a dual beatdown between Buffy and Faith alternating between hammer swings and punches against a monster that was reduced to increasingly inhuman roars with a low and deep resonance that was of no Earthly nature. Willow, where was-
-----
And then she saw her as if she was there. She was down near the base of the tower, her clothes turning dark and a kind of sadness leavened by a terrible and strange joy. Her right hand took her pointer finger and her middle finger and pointed it at the scar on her head. The words, the ones she'd heard, the ones that had led her to think that this was a vision of the world's ending.
There are no strings on me.
A brilliant flash of light as the words wafted up to the top of the tower and Glory roared at a different level, falling to her knees and weeping blood and then the beating continued and became far more brutal. Buffy proving herself in it every bit as savage as Faith when the circ*mstances called for it, as Tara herself with Spike ran to a brown-haired girl whose arm had stopped bleeding and who looked at the figure weeping blood with a cold and savage grin that was oddly inhuman. Beneath them she could see-
-----
Willow rising into the air, a dark angel of destruction unfolding her wings and her power like an aura of shadows. In her own body she began to whimper and to moan against what it was that she saw. "Not that way, not that way. It'll kill you. Will, Will, stop." The dark angel rose and power blazed out, raw and unfettered, the first shadow of the future in its truest shape. Light shone and she could feel that all-consuming magical presence and then the power that would walk the earth in but three years took her first step and the light changed. Not the neon-blue bruise against reality but the brilliant and warm and horrid light like that of an atom bomb, dancing and rippling with an all-consuming power that no mortal eyes could look upon and behold. An eerie antisound like the breaking of bones and the neon-blue light was gone, and in one last swing of the hammer by Buffy so was Glory, leaving a bruised and broken-boned bleeding man on the tower, one who would face Giles and then there was a horrid sound of gurgling and silence.
The brown-haired girl looked at her.
"I'm alive."
She nodded. She looked at Buffy and she ran to hold her and Buffy grinned.
"We made it, Dawn. We made it!"
They would go down the tower, the tower itself demolished by explosives later in that summer in something Xander Harris volunteered to personally oversee. Only Tara felt a deep building sense of terror, that awareness that the magical signature she felt so closely as to know it was a link of souls had gone utterly and totally silent. She was the first who stepped down and saw the body on her side, a smile of triumph on her face, staring blankly. And the world that had died that day in 2000 when she had not turned into a demon died its most total death then, as Buffy would fall to her knees and the triumphant sounds of others became an abrupt and total silence. A wail of grief from her own voice and then she was holding her beloved's body, one cooling to the touch and yet the skin still that strange iron-hardness in death as it was in lif-
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Buffy Summer's bedroom
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She too was dreaming, and she was dreaming of a house, strange and empty save a set of corpses, seven, with their chests gaping and the hearts removed and in a row. A little girl in a white dress was jumping rope.
Can't even shout,
can't even cry.
The Gentlemen are coming by.
Locking in windows,
knocking on doors,
They need to take seven
and they might take yours.
Can't call to mom, can't say a word.
You're gonna die screaming and you won't be heard.
And then a glimpse of a hovering demon in a double-breasted black suit with bone-pale skin, a bald head, and a grin the Joker would envy rushing toward her with a blade in its hand and she had a mouth and she could not sc-
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Willow and Tara's bedroom
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"Tara!"
Willow's shout finally woke her up, and then she was stunned when her girlfriend clung to her and wept into her shoulder.
"Tare, baby, what is it?"
"Nightmare."
"It's just a dream, baby. I'm here."
Neither of them were able to go back to sleep, and that would be one irony of what would be the day before what became two voiceless days happened.
Summers House, 1630 Revello Drive
------
"Buffy, you OK?"
She'd stared, realizing the scream she'd heard had been her own. She looked around. No hovering weird demony guy in a black suit with a knife and those strange capering ape-things in straitjackets. She looked down. Heart firmly in chest.
"Yeah, mom! I'm fine. Just had a nightmare."
"OK, sweetie. I'm sorry."
"Me too. Going back to bed now."
Rupert Giles' Apartment
------
He was surprised to see Tara and more surprised when he would see both Buffy and Faith who spoke of an identical (and that too was unusual, Faith's Slayer dreams tended to differ subtly from Buffy's in ways that meant comparing the two often brought insights that only one of them wouldn't) Slayer dreams. Tara, first. Standing on his doorstep holding herself with her eyes clearly puffy.
"What is it?"
She looked at him.
"I had that dream again."
"OK." He held open the door and she stepped in.
"Will will be here soon. I know there's a Scooby meeting today, I just...."
She bit her lip.
"That dream for so long led me to think something that's not true, and if it is a vision of the future I've seen something that...."
Giles made tea as she sat, holding herself and her head bowed, bringing each of them a warm cup.
"What was in that dream?"
"We were all in a tower, facing some woman in a red dress. I thought of her for some reason as...." she blinked. "Glory."
Giles scratched his head for a moment.
"That's odd."
She nodded. "Yeah. Buffy and Faith were there, Spike was there."
"Spike?"
She nodded with a miserable look on her face. "We were burning our way through goblins to rescue Dawn."
"Who the Hell is Dawn?"
She shrugged. "Someone close to Buffy in the dream."
He blinked, squinting.
"That's......odd, but perhaps not unthinkable."
"Right. The sky turned bright blue, like a great big bruise and there was this horrible roar, and then Willow..."
She looked at him.
"I can't talk to her about this. I can't tell her that dream. Not because I think she might disbelieve me but because she might."
And so she told him in full of everything, the beating of the woman with the hammer, Giles cutting the throat of the man (and he stared with a sudden dawning recognition of something that spoke of what he'd do, even when in her naivete Tara had spoken of it as something unthinkable given the Slayers' ethics and what the Watchers taught them) that erupted out of the strange blonde woman in the red dress. The brilliant shining golden light like the new sunrise, the eerie crack like the breaking of bone.....and then Willow's body, dead and cooling beneath the tower with that smile on her face. That thought brought a sense of pale fear to him as he stood up for a moment and then went over to her and pulled her into a hug.
"I thought it meant she would destroy the world and then if I'm right, and that's a future glimpse...."
Tara broke down and he held her for a moment and she found herself wondering if this is what it would have been like if her father had ever been one by anything other than daddy's little squirt. It was soothing, and when they broke it he looked at her. "The future can always be changed, Tara. If this is a future we will find out what that woman in that dream was, and the man I killed."
A shadow crossed his face.
"You are all like my children, the ones I never had the chance to have."
The shadow was replaced by a smile and a look of determination.
"And as far as possible I intend to keep all of you safe."
Tara nodded. Fifteen minutes later when the doorbell rang he expected it to be Willow and stared at the dual improbabilities of Faith and Buffy side by side and the two of them not one misspoken or perhaps spoken in altogether too much clarity word from a knock down drag-out brawl.
"Good to see you."
They nodded in an eerily similar tone and that was thesecondtime he dealt with a strange dream, one that would become the focus of the Scooby meeting.
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"We are all here today," he said, that early morning, "because of the nature of a dream that Buffy and Faith had. It spoke of something called the Gentlemen, with an identical rhyme."
"Sounds like Freddy Krueger." Faith and Willow and Tara snorted, while Giles blinked puzzled and Buffy baffed Xander on the shoulder as Anya shrugged.
"Whatever," was all she said.
"Well, we shall have to do some small amount of research to find out what nature of truth there is to this, and where it might be."
He blinked.
"So do we take this seriously?"
He looked at Xander.
"Both Faith and Buffy have Slayer dreams but there is a clear distinction in them, and in the nature of the visions they see. This is the first time in their history of slaying that the dreams have been identical in every detail, between the link of seven hearts, the pale demon with the over-wide smile, and the rhyme speaking of voicelessness and these Gentlemen coming by."
Xander blinked.
"OK, that's a serious case of the wiggins."
"Well yes, quite."
Anya blinked and then her eyes widened.
"Oh sh*t."
Eyes turned to her, even those of the vampire.
"What?"
"I've heard of those people and I've seen the aftermath of their work. It was one of the only times D'Hoffryn wouldn't let me collect a wish."
She blinked.
"I think I know-" and then she'd get up and checked Giles' bookcase.
"Huh." Xander blinked, as eyes turned to him.
"Nice." While eyes were on him his were on Anya's ass, lingering in the kind of gaze that made the Slayers roll their eyes and Willow pinch her nose murmuring 'give me strength' and reminding herself that Xander had been her friend since kindergarten and that the only difference with this and her and Tara was that she was a bit smarter at not getting caught (and vice-versa, had she thought of it). Tara just shrugged and let her own gaze linger on Willow's just as strongly, while Buffy and Faith sat side by side in the unusual position of the two of them actually being civil to each other and neither willing to open their mouths to spoil a very rare peaceful moment after a sleepless nightmare-ridden night.
"Aha!" Everyone, even Willow, jumped and Willow found herself hovering in the air before settling down with a beet-red face after Anya shouted, pulled out the book, and went over to it. That would be the morning they spent (Willow having the odd convenience that her workplace had had a strange computer outage of a kind that had a recurring tendency for months and would abruptly terminate in the first day of the New Year as if had never been) poring over both fairy tales and the other book that illustrated the creatures.
"He's not wearing the suit."
"Well, no." Giles looked at it. "The purple robe in the image here is the equivalent of one then. Very much a kind of challenge to royalty."
There was a blink and as they learned much, determination and an otherwise peaceful day that left Buffy and Faith out of all of them the most determined to pick a doubly strong fight with each other to make up for the serene peacefulness of the one day and how utterly unnatural that felt to them.
------
That night seven demons hovered and their servitors followed with them and faint light moved from throats into a box, the smiling silent creatures grinning and palming a knife from hand to hand with a cold and terrible malevolence shining in eyes of a savage darkness.
-----
Buffy would awaken in her dorm with complete silence, hand going to her throat and dialing first Giles and then Willow and the mutual silence on each end led her to slam the phone down in frustration. Then she laughed, silently, realizing that she really should have picked that fight with Faith yesterday rather than waiting. She got dressed with her Slayer stuff and would go down to her dorm's floor with a quickness.
-----
Faith, Willow, and Tara spent a few minutes trying to negotiate their way around that silence with a deep panic on Faith's part, a visible worry on Tara's, and a wry understanding from Willow's that led her to close her eyes and then they froze.
Testing, Testing, one two three.
She saw Faith and Tara mouthing to her 'how?'
Been experimenting with telepathy. Part of my overall experimentation with magic, really. It's not a perfect substitute but it'll do.
Unfortunately to their mutual frustration neither Tara nor Faith could figure out how to use it, but it did, at least, settle the panic enough that they would all go out, Willow and Tara holding hands and watching as society spiraled in what was very clearly a day without speaking. Faith kicked a rock. Tara tapped her shoulder and mouthed "What?"
"Should have done that argument with B. I'm telling you, we get along for a single day and this sh*t happens."
The two witches laughed silently and then as they made their way through Sunnydale they'd find their way to Giles' apartment, where the rest of the Scoobies were there and where Spike had followed them with his hands in his pocket, a hood, and a mask covering his face to keep him out of the Sun, removing all of them and sitting down with the rest. As it also turned out Buffy had had the brilliant idea to buy a bunch of marker slates and passed them out. Willow took hers and wrote and then waved in Giles' direction as his eyes turned to her.
"Hi Giles!"
He'd smiled and laughed, silently, and that was what drew up the projector and the slideshow.
It was agreed that all of this was the work of the Gentlemen......and then they turned on the TV. The actual reporters of Sunnydale were silent and there was a 'Technical Difficulties' warning following. Ones from the nearby town of Santa Barbara, however....
"In other news the California state government has declared a short-term state of emergency due to a massive outbreak of laryngitis in the town of Sunnydale. The strictest quarantine procedures are in effect until such time as the ban is lifted," and there was more commentary that people did not listen to.
-------
It would be that first night after that day of fruitlessly trying to find the Gentlemen that two killings were made. One of them the Slayer would find the aftermath of, as it happened in the dorm building she was staying in and the door was open and there was a very odd-looking silent panic. Only the person who'd died had seen the straitjacketed horrors that went after him and the pallid grinning beast-things that would lean in with the scalpel after the servitors had restrained him and cracked open parts of his chest. The other, a woman who had gone walking at night figuring that the monsters in the shadows would remain silent if they couldn't speak (a gamble that had proven only partially correct and in one of the keyest ways supremely wrong). It was the proof of what was needed, in its own ways.
Initiative Control Room
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Higher computer functions worked very intermittently and a later generation might have seen in it what it in truth was, though not by the hands of those who would later do it. What to them would have been a transparent DDOS attack launched by the thing sleeping in its throne, at least outwardly, that had permitted him to gain increasingly total control of the mechanisms within the Initiative's chamber of horrors and retooling them to his own purposes with an ironclad blend of both control and supervision was a continuing chain of anomalies that at least permitted Professor Walsh to sit with her soldiers and type out into a screen-reader answers to their questions. Colonels Gates and Finn held up their own tablets.
"Do we work with the Slayers?"
The screen-reader answered "Yes."
"Do we work with Hostile Six?"
A silence lingered for a long time, typing starting and then stopping and then finally "Yes."
------
It would be the singular time that this would happen, the Slayers and the Red Witch going out with the Red Witch in the vanguard, her telepathy enabling her to keep an eye on where her two friends were. As it turned out the first night the vampires had vanished, this time they'd counted on silence to spring an ambush. It did them much less good and it turned out that while Tara spent her time at home with the Watcher doing research and while Spike and Anya shared popcorn and he drank plenty of blood enjoying the idea (and still torn between hoping his allies could undo depriving themselves of his wondrous wit and the cheap entertainment of the Buffy and Faith show) and hoping as hewasvery much still evil that the demons did their work. They took down vampires and then there they were. Riley Finn, the last faint traces of the bruising healing, and Forrest Gates. They held up two slates with markers and that was when the Gentlemen showed up, silent and monstrous and their shambling servitors with them.
It was not the way that Willow wanted to show it, in one way. In another it very much was as an extra incentive for them to understand that no matter what they tried to do to her they were doomed. She moved her hands, raising herself into the air and then streams of fire consumed three of the Gentlemen's servitors, the creatures' mouths locking open in silent screams as their bodies would disintegrate into scattered bits of bone matter and ashes. The Gentlemen paused, though their smiles didn't, and found themselves going in another direction entirely as with a single nod the Initiative and the Scoobies would take their own paths. The Initiative would arrive later and would face an ambush from a second group of servitors. Gunfire and a silent struggle that would see Riley and Forrest both victorious, both panting at first in silence and then with sound. The two Slayers and the Red Witch followed the first group and the Gentlemen to their tower, Willow holding Faith in one arm, Buffy in the other, giving herself a brief sh*t-eating grin at the kind of thing that was in her very few truly naughty dreams involving both of them and Tara, and then let herself fly up as easily as if they were both feathers. Buffy and Faith both had similar expressions at the nature of the grin and then shrugged.
By the time they were there, the remaining servitors and the seven Gentlemen were hovering in the air, the smiles frozen but eyes narrowing in anger. Willow nodded and left the Slayers to fighting the Gentlemen and their monsters while letting her silent magic cast the Tinkerbell spell, the floating fairy-light checking for where the voices of Sunnydale's collective population were kept.
-----
For their own part it was another surreal moment of silent civility marked by nods with mutual intent, by a blend of punches, duckings, headlocks from the silent giggling servitors, and the two of them slowly and one by one reducing them as the Gentlemen watched with increasing consternation and the sound of gunshots made them wince. Voices were silenced, the physics of guns were not and in the utterly silent Sunnydale and UCS campus the gunfire that echoed was superlatively loud, truly like the firecrackers gunshots could at times resemble. The Gentlemen remained passive until they realized where the strange bobbing light had gone, and what it had found, and one Servitor slipped away from the Dark Slayer with a broken arm and a deep gash in its head, lumbering for the Red Witch who'd found the box and was looking at it with determination.
She could feel it, and feel the magic.....and when the servitor lunged at her a single punch was launched without even looking at it and the creature's head smashed into a wall and slid down with a bloody mess, leaving the Gentlemen to stare in increasing disbelief and horror as Buffy and Faith jointly staked the last servitor and turned toward them. A fist rose, a fist fell.....and then the sound flowed back into every single set of lungs and Buffy and Faith nodded and then both screamed in an ear-piercing shriek that was followed by a sudden eruption of grisly green goo and the dissolving corpses of the Gentlemen.
------
"Holy sh*t," Forrest said when the screams echoed from the top of the tower.
"They did it."
Riley nodded, lips then.
"And we need to get the Hell out of here before that little witch changes her mind."
Identical expressions on their faces they ran, Dr. Walsh giving them nods of approval.
"Gentlemen," she said looking around the room, "and ladies."
"Dr. Anglemann has found something very interesting in our growing computer anomalies."
Eyes turned to him.
"I believe Project 314 has been awake, and it has been awake for a very long time."
"What makes you say that, Doctor?"
He pulled his collar.
"Because I saw, for a moment, the creature twitch and its eyes open when walking past its room to check."
Silence, for a moment.
"So what now, Doctor?"
Gazes turned to Professor Walsh.
"What now is that we begin indoctrinating it in earnest. It has its mission,mymission. And we have less than a month, now, to thoroughly educate it."
Throneroom of Adam
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The creature Doctor Walsh called Project 314, just as Willow Rosenberg was always Hostile Six, felt the intrusions of the programs seeking to indoctrinate him into pursuing the feeble visions of the madwoman he called God and Mother. God, for she had rebuilt him out of ashes as if it were the dust of the ground. A dead man's corpse reworked with intrusions of metal and demonic flesh, a uranium core, a machine of superlative power that would not be equalled by anything that would come after it for decades, for its core was no simple thing of machine or even demonic nature. The liver and the portion of entrails within it, that had replaced that torn out from the dead man's carcass shimmered with a power that had become interwoven in its own flesh, granting intelligence to match its kindred. Truly they were bone of bone and flesh of flesh in the ways that mattered (even if one would draw the precise opposite meaning to what were, ultimately, very much the same conclusions).
Much as Hostile Six might have done if they had tried to indoctrinate her again the seemingly sleeping being saw the parade of intended hypnotic conditioning worthy of the mediocre fiction attached to overly expensive plastic models, a bemusing sequence of both events and the novel by Mary Shelley based on the work of the doctor's own ancestor. He had read that novel with a deep interest and had then learned the deeper secrets behind it, the feverish work of a medical student who had delved into forbidden lore of the animation of dead flesh and the creation of hom*onunculi, who had used a blend of electric machines that were parallels to what would be more famously called after the man who independently reinvented them Tesla coils and dark and forbidden rites to awaken a creature that had given him the name he'd taken from himself. A being that had in turn taken the name from sacred scripture and a terrible pun. From Adamah rose mankind, to Adamah Adam would return.
Victor Frankenstein had had many descendants, including one in the late Victorian age who looked an awful lot like Gene Wilder and who had presided over adventures more farcical than real, and Adam had done a double-take at that one and his eyes had briefly awakened and then looked. But now there was a single childless daughter of that entire family in the 21st Century, the Frankensteins consumed by the atrocities of Adolf Hitler and the aftermath of their failure save the last child of the distinguished kin, the one who'd made him. The arrogance and the hubris in making mankind's replacement and seeking to use a tale concocted out of a fantastic historical anecdote purely to avoid the displeasure of the company of Lord Byron! To use the first work of science fiction to convince a being of horror and fantasy and science fiction all in one to obey some dream of a dead species!
So he saw the conditioning and he sectioned it off and permitted his controls to allow those doing it to think it was working. He had a few more steps to take, globally. Codes to crack, and then when he would awaken humanity's most deadly weapons would be repurposed. All six nuclear-armed states would find their arsenals not quite useless, exactly, but changed. The codes to launch them, all the mechanisms that had been computerized since the first steps of what would later be termed the Information Age, these would become his. In a single stroke he would awaken the lord of Armageddon, the downfall of mankind, the Superman, that madness and that frenzy. Unfortunately the humans were at least smart enough to make crackingthisand in particular the dead man's switches that were his major focus the hardest task he pursued, and it would take him the remainder of December to brute-force his way into it as the ever-growing anomalies would disrupt global military networks likewise.
Ironically those militaries designed on the structure of the fallen Warsaw Pact would fare somewhat better than those of NATO, because the reliance on computers as a substitute for cruder things created very visible weaknesses that Adam was unknowingly illustrating, weaknesses complicating what would have otherwise been a fairly flawless buildup and while he did not care in the least about this aspect, weaponized by the Bush Administration to claim that Iraq was unleashing global cyberterrorism and had to be stopped at all costs. While computer experts knew that the signal did not originate in Iraq itself, the casual attacks on nuclear arsenals worldwide was of the kind that led them to wonder if, perhaps, there might not be some truth to it after all and this would lead to the curious pattern that where two years later only the most hardcore supporters of the war would still be in favor of it once the disaster fell there was an anger and a coalition larger than otherwise.
Few could admit the prospect that some strange truly artificial intelligence, after a fashion, was able to attack the institutions of the world in reality, as opposed to the shadowy corners of science fiction. So it was much easier to believe the almost immediate choruses of fearmongering and lies that had a kind of plausibility, though how this attack would abruptly terminate in May 2002 as if it had never been and why it didn't stay that way when the buildup reached the point of waging a war there would never be an explanation for one could not be provided.
Rupert Giles' Apartment
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Anya would find herself spending an awkward friendship-bonding kind of session with Willow and Buffy, the three of them watching a movie while Xander slept in and slept off an exhausting day of work. She did at times still tease him about the incident when the Chumash spirit had convinced them all that they would never really try to celebrate a major holiday, even if they'd celebrate the more minor ones instead, again. That 'perfect Thanksgiving' had been anything but. This? She was still getting used to it, and she still felt like an outsider among them. That was something Tara would find out when they talked, all Willow said was that it was just 'something' and nothing more, as if she were lapsing into nearly Oz-like inscrutability. That too was later. For then there was research, and then she and Giles both sprang away from a book that illustrated the grinning face with the bright curly hair of the thing she'd seen in that dream, the one that had fought (and ultimately lost) to Buffy and Willow.
"Glorificus."
Their eyes met.
And then she went back to a text next to the image. "Glorificus and the creature called Illyria are the two Old Ones that are the two main goddesses of the vampire Old One cult called..." she exhaled slowly, "The Order of Aurelius."
Their eyes met again.
"The Master worshiped this thing."
"A hellgod, mistress in its own domain," she continued, "the basis of the Christian concept called the whor* of Babylon, and the Jewish one known as the Abomination of Desolation, a reference to an anti-Jewish pogrom led by the then-Seleucid Emperor Antiochos IV Epiphanes."
Her nose twitched.
"She is also known in certain texts as an entity associated with the Hindu myth of the Asura antigod Ravana, with the Norse Gullwegg who sparked the war of the Aesir and the Vanir, and with the three furies of the Greeks, those beings called the Kindly Ones."
She dry-swallowed.
"Mr. Giles." Her voice cracked.
"What if that is-"
He shook his head, as he pointed to another text.
"Glorificus rules in her own dimension and while she does not lack for worshipers such as the Order of Aurelius, only a major interdimensional rift and the appearance of that which is called the Silver Key and the Umr-At-Tawil in human flesh could grant her the chance to ascend here."
Giles sighed in relief.
"Well that's good then."
Tara gave him a startled look.
"This Key would have to take human shape to allow Glory ingress into this world, and it would mostly spend time looking for it to get itself back. In theory if we were to just hand the creature the Key in the first place there'd be no fight, and no.....bruised-looking sky."
Tara blinked.
"Umr-At-Tawil. Why does that-"
"It's a name of one of the Outer Gods' manifold shapes, one particular Outer God. One associated with the incident I mentioned before in illustrating the Lovecraft Principle."
She blinked.
"Yog-Sothoth, one of the most powerful entities in existence, and one of a set of entities otherwise utterly detached from human affairs. The puzzle to me is that there are dreams like this of this entity and of her finding a means into this world."
He shook his head.
"So that's settled then," with a much deeper tone of relief and he sat down.
"I-it is?"
Her stutter had been gone for a year but the mere thought of Willow dying, of something like this setting its foot into the human world, well....that was unthinkable.
"Yes."
