But at my back in a cold blast I hear
The rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear.
T. S. Eliot
She seemed to be crying.
The television turned on, or at least it appeared to. There wasn't even a hint of activity on the screen, but a voice came over the speakers. It was quiet, too quiet to actually understand, but it sounded as though it was just on the verge of being intelligible. The voice itself could have been male or female or both or neither. Everyone got the distinct impression that they really didn't want to hear what it was actually saying.
She seemed to be crying.
A laugh started. It didn't seem to have any particular source, just a dark chuckle that rolled in from every corner of the room, creating odd echoes and rebounding in ways that no laugh should.
She seemed to be crying.
Someone started speaking, quite apart from the voice from the television and the eerie laugh. The thing was, the voice was Buffy's. It was Buffy's, if you took her voice and threaded an odd, inhuman resonance through it. The voice wasn't muffled, though it should have been. Buffy was curled up in a foetal position. But the voice was as clear as if it had spoken directly into their ears, as though the speaker was so close that they could just reach out and touch them. Several of them looked around, so sure that the speaker had to be right behind them that they couldn't help but look.
She seemed to be crying.
But she wasn't.
"Do you think that I am some mewling newborn? Do you think that you can drive me away with your puny magic?" Buffy's voice said in a voice dripping with amusement.
Willow looked around the room, so sure that it couldn't be Buffy speaking, couldn't be her doing any of this that she looked for any evidence, any whatsoever, that there was someone else there. But she couldn't see anyone. There was just them, and Buffy. So she swallowed and said "Guess not."
"I was old when this planet was formed. I was ancient even before the universe began. I am from before time and light and space and matter. I am not the kind of thing that runs when a human says a handful of words."
"What are you then?"
Buffy stood, slowly unfurling herself from her foetal position. She stood, and at that moment you could have been forgiven for thinking that she was much taller than someone who stood a scant couple of inches over five feet.
But, even though Buffy seemed to take up considerably more space than she really should, even though she looked as though she was something very large which nevertheless managed to fit itself into a very small space, that wasn't the most noticeable thing about her.
Nor was the most noticeable thing the runes that adorned her skin, a kind of script the likes of which had never been seen on Earth. An ancient writing which made everyone's teeth hurt just looking at it, a language which made everyone nauseous just because it happened to be in the same room as them. No. That was not the most noticeable thing.
The most noticeable thing was her eyes. They were red. Not the kind of red that is usually meant when speaking of human eyes, which is achieved by crying. No. Her irises were red, and it was the kind of red which spoke of Hell and damnation and fury. Her eyes were red, and they were completely, utterly inhuman.
"I am Buffy." She said in a twisted perversion of Buffy's voice.
In another situation, perhaps Willow would have laughed at that, because this quite obviously wasn't Buffy, general appearances to the contrary. Buffy wasn't some eldritch abomination. She was human, and if this thing was human then the definition had changed radically in the last few seconds without her noticing. But she didn't laugh, because she was scared half out of her mind. "No. No, you're not Buffy."
"I am Buffy. Everything that has been done since you brought me back has been Buffy. The words that I have spoken, they have been her words. Words buried so deep in her subconscious that she would not have spoken them had I not drawn them forth. But they are her words. They are her feelings." The thing that spoke with Buffy's voice said. "I am Buffy. But I am also… so many things. How can it be that you do not know what I am? You have looked upon my works countless times over the last few years. You have seen the things that I have wrought, suffered because of things that I have made. I have been a part of your lives before you even had lives, and yet now that I stand before you and you do not know me."
"What are you?" Willow asked again.
"I am hatred. I am fear and I am fury. I am the dark." The voice said, as though these things were so obvious that they almost didn't need saying. "I have been called many things. Which name would you like to hear? I am the breaker of worlds. I am the Adversary. I am Satan. I am the Devil. All of them. I am despair. I am the undying. I have been called so many things, but here and now… you do not need to know what I am called to know that I am here, and I am free."
"Right." Xander said slowly. "So we brought Buffy back, and now she's the Devil. Like, all of the Devils. I hope you don't mind if we don't buy that."
The voice shrugged Buffy's shoulders. "It is no concern of mine if you believe or if you do not. If you choose to ignore what is right in front of you… that is your own affair."
"What do you want?" Anya said. "Why are you here?"
All signs of amusement dropped from the warped, inhuman version of Buffy's face. The laugh, which had still been echoing throughout the room, cut out so entirely that the silence was as overwhelming as the laughter had been.
And into that silence the voice from the television spoke, and at last it was intelligible.
These are the words of the Beast…
"I will spread across this world like a plague. I will sow fear and hatred and guilt and I will watch as humanity turns on itself. I will watch as men gun down their families. I will watch as they fall to their knees, so overcome by despair that they cannot bear to live. I will watch as his comrades kill him. I will watch as your world burns. I will make your kind burn this world down until it is nothing more than a husk, the slightest remnant of what it once was populated by revenants that stalk through the ash and wail for what they have lost."
…the Legion shall be many…
"I will make you tear down your own world."
…the Beast will rise...
"B-but why?" Tara said, and she knew what the answer was going to be before she had even finished asking the question. It was going to be the same reason that any evil creature gave. They were evil. Evil was what they did. You might as well ask why the sun rose each day. It was just something that they did.
To her mild surprise, the Beast actually seemed to pay some thought to the question. Eventually the answer came, and it wasn't the one that Tara had been expecting.
"What else is your kind for?"
…He is awake…
"We'll stop you." Willow said forcefully. "We'll stop you and we'll bring Buffy back. We'll stop you."
The Beast laughed, and it was the same laugh that had earlier filled the room. Willow and the others suddenly found themselves hovering perhaps a foot above the ground. It wasn't magic. It wasn't telekinesis. The Beast wasn't using any kind of energy to hold them aloft. It was simply that the Beast wanted them to be there, and if the Beast wanted something then a little thing like gravity wasn't going to have a say in it. "Please. Go ahead. You have the power to wipe this body off of the face of creation with a wave of your hand. You can stop me before any of this goes any further. You can stop me right here and now. So come on. End this."
The seconds dragged by.
"I didn't think so." The Beast said. "You're afraid. That's why you brought Buffy back in the first place. You are so scared of being left alone that you would break down the doors of death to get your friend back. You could save the world, right here and now, but not without damning yourself in the process. You could end me before I even begin, but the cost… killing your best friend without even trying to save her? No, you'd lose your soul."
"We'll save her." Xander said simply. "We'll save her and stop you."
The Beast looked at him and smiled, showing too many teeth for it to be friendly. "Would you like to hear a secret, Xander? Would you like to know something? I don't think you would." The Beast paused. "But then I suppose that you've kept enough secrets over the years, so maybe you're not the best judge. So I think I'll just tell you. Buffy threatened to torture someone today. Not me. I just watched. She threatened him all by herself, threatened to do such unspeakable things that even a man acquainted with everything that goes on in this town was afraid. I had no hand in that. She's beyond saving, little boy. She's going dark. You've seen that before. You've seen what happened to the last Slayer you… loved, when she went dark and came so close to choking the life out of you. She's long gone, the Slayer you knew. She's still rotting in the ground where you left her. There is only the dark. There is only me now."
Xander blanched, but Willow stepped in. "We stopped Faith. We'll stop you too."
"No." The Beast said simply. "You won't. You can't. I am going to leave this room, and you won't stop me. I will continue what I'm doing, and you won't stop me. You can't. This town thinks that I'm a hero. Do you think that anyone, anyone at all, would believe a single word you said? How long do you think you'll last, as you watch me warp the people of this town until they are no better than the demons that feed upon them, knowing that there is not one single thing that you can do… I don't think you'll last very long. Your minds are too fragile." The Beast turned to Tara. "I think you'll go first. You've already tasted madness. You know what it is to live without hope. It shouldn't be very long before you let go and slip back into the warm embrace of insanity. But of course, you're welcome to try and stop me. Futility and exasperation and frustration… all too soon they lead to despair. And then I win."
And then the Beast turned and left, and there was only the parting words from the television before everything returned to normal and you could have been forgiven for forgetting that Evil Incarnate had stood there not one minute before.
…and you will worship Him.
And when the Beast left, the markings in it's skin faded, and the red eyes faded, and once again it was Buffy. And a blanket fell over her memories, and she forgot all that had just occurred.
