Disclaimer: I own nothing but the plot. All characters etc belong to Joss, I just wanted to play with them for a while.
A.N: This takes place after Dirty Girls in the build-up to the fight against the first. It might be a little confusing at first, but I swear it will make sense eventually. Sorry that the prologue is so short, I just wanted to get the main point across seperately. Enjoy and please review, it makes me write faster : )

Prologue

"I know you can help them. Why won't you just do it? They won't be able to deal with this alone!" the spirit cried. Her image began flickering and she felt herself going transparent; the work of the higher power in front of her. It had no real shape or features, it was just a glowing-green figure with a human form.

"No!" she yelled, focusing all her energies on remaining full-bodied. "You have to do something. I can't stand here and let them all die! If you won't help, let me!"

The shimmering apparition in front of her began to flash a brighter shade of green. She got the distinct impression she had pissed it off.

"Tara, this world is not the one you came from. You have no business with their fight. It is not my place to interfere with other worlds when destiny has shaped all of their decisions, so it is certainly not yours. Why do you care so much?" it's otherworldy voice echoed. It didn't move while it spoke, didn't seem to do anything but glow.

Tara stopped for a second. Her obvious answer was that Willow was in this world, and they were together. Shouldn't that be enough? It would only be right that she protect the Willow in this world since she couldn't help her friends in the other. But why did she care? Because they were her world, whether it was her own dimension of not. She had already been made to stand by while one of her loved ones died and she wouldn't let it happen the anyone else.

"Because they don't deserve to die," she replied quietly, glancing pleadingly at the higher power. She could have sworn she heard the power sigh, but if they were simply energy, could they even do that? She shook her head. More important things were going on right now, like stopping her friends from being slaughtered by the First Evil.

A moment passed. A very long, tense moment and Tara felt the lives of her friends hanging in the balance. If her friends didn't survive, she would never be able to forgive herself. She had already failed her Willow because she couldn't stop her from using dark magicks and the idea that the reason she wasn't able to move on is because she couldn't let herself leave them again. They needed her help one last time before she could truly move on.

She was interuppted from her reverie by the deep resounding beauty of the powerful voice.

"How do you plan on aiding them in this fight? You can't go there, you know this." She did know, and it was painful. She obviously wasn't allowed to go to her own Sunnydale, but she wasn't even allowed acces to this one, mostly because she wasn't dead there. No, she had an idea. One that didn't involve her taking an active role in helping them. She was going to give them a nudge in the right direction and hope that they knew what to do.

"By introducing them to someone they haven't seen in a long while," she replied, feeling confident that her idea was a smart one. The words echoed throughout the plane, washing over her like a wave. The power was mulling over it's decision before it finally spoke.

"Very well. But you will receive no help from anyone or anything else. This is on your hands. I hope you have a plan; you're going to need it," the entity conceded. Before Tara had a chance to thank it for letting her do this, she was sent from the higher plane down to the Summers' residence, where nobody even knew she was there. She just prayed that her plan worked.