Author's Note: Yes, I messed up the uploading and skipped a chapter. It is now fixed, and I am suitably chastised. And the author who came up with the ideas for prophecies that I lifted earlier was the late, legendary David Eddings. It just made so much sense I had to use it.

Chapter 7

Faith settled back into her new apartment. The shopping day had been... interesting. She now understood what Wesley had said about Anya; she was refreshingly blunt. The first thing she'd asked Faith was if she had any intentions of having sex with Xander again. When told no, she'd asked if she had any intentions of trying to kill him again. That also got a no. While Xander looked very uncomfortable during the brief exchange, Anya had seemed to take her answers at face value and not brought up either topic again.

Faith had briefly considered pulling the "I taught your boyfriend that thing you like" line, but quickly smothered it. She was here to play nice, and was getting off to a good start with Anya; no sense in risking things for a cheap laugh.

Overall, she found herself liking Anya. She was definitely lacking in social graces, but Faith found her bluntness and candor refreshing, especially after prison. And it seemed Anya was good for Xander; he had considerably more confidence and better fashion sense. She found herself toying with the idea about going back on Anya's first question, but that got buried extremely quickly. Turns out you can teach an old bitch some new tricks after all.

The next day, she made her way to the Magic Box for her first formal meeting with the Scoobies. Giles spoke first. "Ah, Faith. Good to have you here." He gestured around the room. "I... um... I believe you know everyone?"

She glanced around the room. "Xander, Anya, Red. Hey. Tara, B... long time no see."

She could see the displeasure in Buffy's eyes. No great surprise there. But she also saw something else – a willingness to at least try to move past their history. Faith noticed there was an empty seat, away from the others. No great surprise there, either. She took it.

Giles resumed. "Now, let's begin with this prophecy." He picked up a sheet of paper. "There shall come a day when the Chosen One shall be Two, and the two will contest with each other. The Light shall cast down the Dark, but the Dark shall not perish. Indeed, she must not perish, for two Great Evils can only be vanquished if she assists. At the depths of her fall, she will seek to end her suffering. At that point the Light shall turn to the Shatterer Of The Shard Of The Sun, who is the only one who can guide the Dark back to the path of the right. She shall re-write the wrongs as written and cleave the River Of Fate, until she is ready to face and defeat the Great Evils." He passed the sheet to Faith. "You can keep it, if you like; we all have copies."

Faith scanned it. "Looks like total crap to me. But if you think it means something, I can roll with that."

"We've deduced most of it, and most of what we've figured out has come true. The Chosen Ones are you and Buffy, and we deduced that Willow was the Shatterer."

Faith turned to Willow. "That's a pretty badass title there, Red. What'd you do to deserve it?"

Willow blushed. "It was just something that got way blown out of proportion. Stupid prophecy just wanted to make sure it was me that came to see you."

Faith smirked. "Looks like we got a bit more to do, Red. One little chat through a prison phone most likely ain't gonna cut it for guiding me 'back to the path of the right.' 'Cuz I sure as hell got no clue about the next part."

Giles polished his glasses. "Well, it appears that you need to do some things before you're ready to face these Great Evils – 're-writing wrongs' and 'cleaving rivers.'" He sighed. "I was hoping that getting you here would make what those mean clearer, but it's still completely obtuse."

After a pause, Xander spoke up. "You know, in those old tales about King Arthur and his knights, they made a big deal about 'righting wrongs.' Maybe that's what it means – Faith's gotta go out and do some heroic stuff like a knight in shining armor."

Giles shook his head. "That's tempting as an easy answer, but I don't think so. The prophecy is very clear; it isn't 'righting wrongs,' but 're-writing wrongs.' That's a very unusual verbal construction, and I don't think it was chosen by accident."

Buffy sighed. "Giles, none of us got straight A's in grammar, and you're from the place that invented the English language. Why don't you spell out to us just what the difference is?"

Giles muttered something about "bloody Colonial philistines" and stood up. "When you 'right' something, you take something that was wrong and act to make it proper. When you 're-write' something, you are changing it so that it was never wrong in the first place. It's basically the difference between crossing out a wrong answer and erasing it."

Buffy shrugged. "Still not seeing that much of a difference, but if you say it's important, that's good enough for me."

Tara cleared her throat. "Mr. Giles, I think I'm seeing something else here. You seem to be saying that the prophecy chooses its words very carefully."

"I think so, yes."

"Well, we're here talking about the difference between 'W-R-I-T-E' and 'R-I-G-H-T.' Well, there's a third word that's pronounced that way – 'R-I-T-E.' And just last week I was reading one of Anya's old spell books and I found this one ritual that was called "The Rite Of Revision And Renaissance."

Anya scoffed. "That thing? Total rubbish. It's insanely complicated, insanely expensive, and in the end does absolutely nothing. I think it's some ancient wizard's idea of a practical joke."

Willow instinctively rose to defend Tara. "Now hold on, let's not just toss it out. Anya, what is it supposed to do?"

Anya stood. "Well, if it's done by a powerful wizard or witch, it lets them send a person back in time to change things. And while that sounds awesome, it doesn't work that way. Yes, they change things in the past, but it doesn't affect the present. All it does is create an alternate time where things happened differently."

Buffy was suddenly interested. "You're certain about that?"

"I spent 1100 years as a Vengeance Demon. I ran into that effect more times than I can count." She turned towards Willow. "You all know it – remember your vampire double? She was created by Cordelia's wish that Buffy never came to Sunnydale, but when the wish was broken, she didn't cease to exist. Instead, she was part of her own little universe – until we brought her here. And then we sent her back again."

Giles spoke up. "Considering that the only other idea we have right now is to find a suit of armor for Faith, I think we can at least give this spell a look. Tara, do you recall which book had it?"