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Angels and Demons by TalesofSpike
 
Chapter 7.15
 
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Note: Thanks to my beta t_geyer for her unending patience, perseverance and support.

SECTION 7 - LAKE OF FIRE

People cry, people moan.
Look for a dry place to call their home.
Try to find some place to rest their bones.
While the Angels and the Devils try to make THEM their own.

(Nirvana, Album - MTV Unplugged with thanks to Zanthinegirl for the suggestion)




Chapter 7.15
Thursday, July 18th, 2002


Buffy looked around the ballroom that had been converted to a gymnasium. For this meeting, they had pulled in not only the older potentials who had been taking part in their training program, but as many of the others as they had thought would be mature enough to understand the implications of their decision. There were girls out there who were barely eight or nine and they were being asked, under the worst possible circumstances, to make a choice that would affect the rest of their lives or even whether there was a rest of their lives... but that was the problem. No one else had the right to make that choice for them, or even for the younger girls who were happily playing upstairs but they had needed to draw the line somewhere. There were times when civil liberties had to take a back seat.

Of course, this many girls, not all of them able to speak English, came with more than a handful of watchers, not all of whom were happy with the idea that it wasn't the council making the decisions. Some of them seemed to be getting a little hot under the collar but they had already thought of that. The last doors had been locked as soon as the meeting began. No one was going to sneak out part way through to warn Quentin, not unless they were so rabidly loyal to the council head that they would take a dive through one of the conservatory windows. When she, Faith, and Lydia left the building, assuming that the vote went as expected, then Giles, Ha Nath and her friends were ready to take up a rear guard position to ensure that they got a good head start. Tara was already waiting for them in Giles' car, a cloaking spell in place that would mask the presence of anyone within twenty feet of her from detection by magical means.

"Alright, ladies," Faith continued, stopping her restless pacing for the first time since she began speaking and watching the crowd, trying to look as many of the girls in the eye as she could. She handled the gaudy axe in her hands as if it were some sort of personal good luck talisman. "That's all she wrote. Now, it's up to you to decide.

All those who want to be able to hit back just as hard when those ubervamps come at ya, gimme a 'hell, yeah'!"

There was a roar of assent. Only a handful of the watchers interspersed amongst the crowd were deluded enough to try to argue, and they were soon silenced by the glares, or even the occasional fist of the potentials around them.

Faith waited for the crowd to settle. "All those who want to face these things without slayer strength or slayer speed because once upon a time some guys decided that was how it should be, speak up now!"

A deathly silence ensued. Before the other watchers in the crowd could absorb the import of the quiet, Giles, who was positioned by the exit at the top end of the room, twisted the key in the door at his back. As Ha Nath and her friends formed a line at right angles to the door he pulled it open and with the demons between them and any unfriendly watchers in the crowd, Faith, Lydia and Buffy slipped away. The door was closed and locked again before Ha Nath kicked the first of the protesters into unconsciousness.






 

"Careful," Wesley called out as he heard the scuffing of shoes on stone.

Buffy slowed her pace and, as she neared the bottom of the narrow stone stairway, she realised the need for Wesley's warning. The guardian, who apparently was otherwise known as Ruth... and that somehow freaked Buffy out far more than if she had come up with something that sounded completely alien, had set out a large and intricate ritual circle in the pyramid's main room. The circle was so large that, had Buffy stepped straight into the chamber, rather than edging to one side immediately she reached the bottom of the stairs, then she would have been standing on it.

"Hey..." Buffy's greeting was generalised, a smile forming as she noticed that Wes and another four watchers, who were clustered near the corridor from which Caleb had emerged, had several empty juice bottles and discarded Krispy Kreme boxes by their feet. Nevertheless, when she asked what was going on, it was to Wes that she looked. She hoped that Wes had been able to get the remaining details out of the old woman, and that he understood the workings of the ritual that was about to be performed.

Buffy skirted around the room until she could reach the watcher, keeping an eye on where the old woman had looked up from her work to greet Lydia and Tara. It was as if there was a whole culture of which the slayer knew nothing. First the old woman took both Lydia's hands in hers and then both women bowed until their foreheads almost touched the backs of their hands. Even more disconcertingly, when she reached Tara the ancient didn't stop at a bow but dropped to her knees in a way that obviously made shy, helpful Tara wish for nothing more than to help her up.

"Yeah, Wes..." Faith echoed Buffy's curiosity as she came to stand at her side. "What's with the meet and greet? And I hope you understand enough of this..." She jerked the axe in the drection of the symbol that sort of reminded her of the cover art for the albums by The Fields of the Nephilim that one of her mom's string of deadbeat boyfriends had used to own. The first time she found out that he had hit her mom, she had burned the whole damn lot. Then he had hit her. When the school had called her in, her mom had told her teacher that she had fallen down the stairs. No one had asked where in their trailer the mythical staircase was. "To be sure that this isn't some con trick from The First to get all the slayers and the axe and our best magic users all in one place and suck the life out of them or something."

Wes nodded. "As best I can tell, everything is consistent with what we've been told. As a ritual to Isis to empower the feminine, none of us," he said, nodding to the other male watchers who had accompanied him, "is able to take part or help prepare, but I haven't seen anything contraindicative to the purpose as stated. As for the welcome, I believe Ruth has been waiting for someone to whom she could pass on the wisdom of the guardians, so that when she completes her part in this she will be free to die. If I were a betting man, I would say that she thinks that Tara is her successor."

"You got all that from her?" Buffy asked in a slightly mocking tone. "You've only been here overnight... or does she save the cryptic for slayers and vamps?"

Wes gave a slightly superior smile though his tone when he continued was more self-depracating. "My résumé does include watcher. Picking out the facts from overly long narratives is part of what I was expected to do, especially after Quentin Travers became council head."

"Hey! Wait a minute!" Buffy looked around the chamber in distaste. "This doesn't mean that Tara has to move into some musty windowless basement with no indoor plumbing, does it?"






 

"As your role is to represent the virgin, you must take your place here at the beginning of the cycle," Ruth said to Tara, indicating a clear area in the wide band of symbols that made up the outer circle. She shifted her attention to Lydia. "For your part, you shall represent the mother and take your place here, in the part of the diagram representing summer and fruitfulness."

The watcher shifted slightly uncomfortably. "Wouldn't it be better to have the more powerful magic user as the mother? I know I'm older than Tara, but it just seems more appropriate and I would say that she has the more nurturing character."

Ruth gave another of the enigmatic smiles that Buffy was beginning to find irritating in the extreme. She reached out a hand and placed it over the watcher's flat stomach. "Then, I suggest that over the next few months you try to cultivate that area of your personality, my dear. The time is close at hand when those qualities will stand you in good stead. Our co-practitioner is also best qualified for her role due to her innocence in the ways of men."

"What? No! That's..." The watcher turned chalk white as she remembered a day of whisky induced vomiting and realised that her normal method of contraception might not have been fully effective under those circumstances. She had been far too busy to pay attention to the rhythm of her body, but the more she thought about it the more plausible the idea seemed.

Faith lifted an eyebrow and barely managed to contain her wide grin at the thought of Daddy Giles before it became a laugh.

Buffy took a few moments to try to work out what such a change might mean to the group, especially since Giles had only just been talked back into staying in California and now he was going to have a baby with his English girlfriend. After a few seconds she gave up, deciding that working out where everyone was going to live could wait until after they knew who was going to live. However, she mentally reassigned the blonde watcher in the vague battle plans that she had partially formed in her head, moving her from the second line of defence and giving her responsibility for the safety of the smallest children and the wounded. If she had thought that Giles would accept it, she would have moved him as well... and Dawn and Tara and Xander and Wes and... With a sigh, she turned her attention back to the guardian's explanation of the ritual that the three witches were about to cast.

It seemed hard to believe that the ancient had been here since the time of the last true demons, waiting for her and for Faith, for the axe to reappear in the world and for evil to rise up as it never had before.

"The scythe, as was always intended even when we first set it within the molten rock of the gate to hell, will be at the very centre of the circle as befits its use. It shall rest in the hands of both slayers that its power may pass through them to their sisters. It would be best if you were to be seated but the sigil must on no account be damaged."

Buffy leaned over and whispered to Wes. "How much of all this do we really need and how much is just icing on the cake? I mean twelve hours of chanting?"

"I think when you're asking for something this big, you want to make the cake as perfect as you can. There might be other ways. You could open up the seal and harness the power of the hellmouth if you really wanted, but I think burning some extra herbs, drawing some more complicated symbols and taking a few hours to pay obeissance to Isis is far the more polite way of doing things. This is asking nicely. The other would be like the petulant tantrums of a two year old demanding to have its way now. The end result may be the same, and it may save time but it lacks a certain style. When you're dealing with a goddess, it's best to be polite."

"The sun is almost at its zenith," the old woman announced. "We should get into position." With greater ease than the lines on her face would suggest, the guardian took her place in the outer circle and settled herself into a the lotus postion.

Tara and Lydia settled into similar positions so that the three of them sat at the vertices of an equilateral triangle. Faith and Buffy moved to the circle's centre, taking care not to scuff any of the lines as they moved. They, too, took up cross-legged positions, letting their forearms rest upon their knees, and then Faith uncurled her fingers from around the axe and they found the position where it was balanced equally on each of their fingertips.

The guardian began to chant, slowly and with great care so that each syllable was ennunciated clearly enough for Lydia and Tara to follow her lead.

Buffy fixed her attention on the axe, narowing her focus down and down until she felt she was aware of the smallest fleck in the grain of the wooden handle. She let the chanting wash over her without touching her, in the same way that she used to filter out the New Age tapes that Giles had occasionally played in their meditation sessions. It was going to be a long time until fullest dark, which apparently wouldn't actually be at midnight thanks to daylight savings time, or so Wes had said, though Buffy couldn't help but wonder why they still called it midnight if it wasn't. If she could pass into a trance state for the intervening hours, so much the better, otherwise she just knew that a couple of hours from now she would be wishing that she hadn't had that third cup of coffee.






Friday, July 19th, 2002
 

Wes spared another glance at his watch. Five to one. He was almost surprised that it was still ticking. The air of the chamber seemed laden with electricity, like the pregnant heaviness of the atmosphere before a long awaited summer storm... but only in the same way that the breath of a butterfly's passing felt like the violence of a tornado. His mouth tasted of metal, although he had had nothing to eat or drink since the doughnuts Spike had brought for breakfast this morning.

Soon... Whatever was going to happen, it had to be soon.

As if to answer his thoughts the axe that rested on the hands of both the slayers began to glow. At first it was little more than a nightlight, then a torch, soon it became as bright as looking straight into a car's headlight, though it somehow seemed more diffused. The light seemed to seep into each of the slayers so that first their fingertips and then their hands and then their whole arms seemed to glow with a pure welcoming light. It spread from their shoulders both up and down, and though from the angle where he was sitting, he couldn't see Faith's face, it seemed as if Buffy's irises were darker than he had ever seen them, contrasted against the translucent glow of the surrounding tissue. Strands of hair were whipped away from their faces, as if by a strong but playful breeze that somehow seemed to blow east for one and west for the other. From the roots on out, the light claimed the locks of their hair, making them look like magnificent and alien Valkyrie.

He lowered his gaze to see how far the transformation had moved down the slayers' bodies and found to his amazement that both girls now floated several inches above the floor. The complicated sigils that had been marked out on the hard-packed earth seemed to writhe with life, the light pulsating outward through them until it reached the women in the outer circle. It saturated the three in its glow, from the ground upward. Soon, they too seemed to be touched by the mysterious multidirectional wind that didn't so much as stir the air in the corner of the room where Wes was seated.

Time passed unnoticed and Wes found himself transfixed by the glory of the light, which filled the whole circle now, and all the women who were favoured with its touch. Even this close, it never fell upon any of the men who waited, banished as they were to the corners of the room while they stood guard over the participants. Its beauty, as befitted Isis, a goddess consecrated to the feminine, was equally alluring and alien. When, finally, its work was done the godess's power drained away. It flooded back into the earth, returning the slayers to their previous positions and leaving all the women unmarked by the experience, save for their gasping breaths and glowing smiles that indicated an almost post-coital euphoria.

It was, Wes noted, five past one.
 
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