It was wholly outside of the code. Outside of her character to have struck the Mayor without even an ounce of evidence to pin him down beneath her stake. She felt the need to right her wrong, the desire to take control over the world that suddenly began to press on her shoulders simply because she wanted to exist.

Buffy kicked back a vampire, flat boot to the sternum that rocked the the demon into a triangular stone. Three more surrounded her, and each of them she knew was a gift from the Mayor.

There was no way he hadn't caused some of her problems as a young adult growing up in Sunnydale and to quell even a moment of that, to save even a single life in the process was worth breaking character to take the initiative out of the man.

One vampire lunged and was struck diagonally with a stake to the heart. Two more behind her and they fanned out to flank the slayer. The one fallen gathered himself, his bones broken and his dead flesh warped from the impact, but he had orders.

"Kill her. Wouldn't want her around when the time comes for my big day, do we? Send a message if you must, but boys, keep it clean." He told them after a mint and a laugh.

In the graveyard, Buffy staked another, the one that came in with a right fist that swung too high for the Slayer as she crouched low and stuck the wooden blade into his chest.

The one to her left came in, she wasn't ready just yet and he forced her to roll back. His brown metal toe boot clipped her chin and struck her against the gravestone she had rolled into.

Buffy cried out, blood spattered on the grass and her body was thrust to its feet. She could hear the hiss and the sprawl of a gross wet maw as it readied to bite her. The cold flesh of the vampire strangled her and neared its mouth on her, no breath, just noise that filtered into her ear like a speaker slapped against her.

As his lips, pale and cracked, pressed on the Slayer's warm neck, he felt his body begin to dry, crisp, and burst into a find dust.

"That was too close." She noted, and looked immediately for the vampire she had cracked open with the pointed grave.

The vampire was stalled. Sure, he could strike, but as he was injured, gravely if he were alive, she had the advantage.

She watched him hold his right rib cage and side. The man was thrashed, but he was still a monster. Even so, she put the stake down and stared the cold body with the sword of Damocles aimed with the power of knowledge.

She had it. The Mayor now knew this.

"Tell Dick he sends anymore vampires after me and mine, I'll make sure the demons of this town know who's responsible for the Slayer killing them."

"He doesn't care."

He turned her attention to the right. On a single casket mausoleum, almost as old as the town itself, sat the shadowy figure, the pale man that formed from the mist and glistened under the moonlight.

"You again." Buffy remarked, unimpressed by the show, and instead performed a mist act of her own with the dusting of the vampire. "Who are you?"

"I'm a million different things, and not a one you know."

"You want to play games? I want to slay." She chased after him.

Buffy quickly ascended the mausoleum, but the man was gone. His pale form had drifted into the vast only to reform six meters away on the ground.

His face was vague, not average, but perhaps she'd describe it like Ben's. Should they have tried to remember that Ben was Glory it would simply fade away and the thought become but a fog in a distant memory tucked far away in the back of their mind.

He was vaguely human, or at least humanoid. The man, assuming it was a man gave off an immense sense of power, of radiance and beauty she had never felt before. It was almost godlike, or angelic, perhaps that's what he was.

A God?

An Angel?

An Old One like Illyria?

"Why are you here?" He pondered.

She hopped from the mausoleum and cautiously approached. Arms folded, eyes bore into him. She itched for a fight, the Slayer's intuition told her they would, but if he was a God, she knew it wouldn't go well for her.

She had to know.

So did he.

"You took the hand in the mirror and you came through the portal. You merged timelines, but why?"

"To survive." Simple, but in her mind it was the best and perhaps only answer she could give. If he wanted honesty, that was it, if he wanted a long and drawn out explanation, this wasn't the night.

"Ah." He began to move around.

Buffy kept a close eye on him. The man had no weapons visible, and wore a simple black attire of shirt, pants, boots. The more she stared at his configuration, the more it felt like staring into a black hole, or the cosmos itself. She swore that the stars themselves sparkled within him, but yet he struck her from her thoughts and we felt a gravestone and called to her to follow.

"Come. I'll tell you what you need to know, then you can decide if you want to fight or not. Okay?"

"Fine."

He looked out around them, gravestones nearly as far as the eye could see and this was only one of many cemeteries in Sunnydale.

"So much death in this town, it's all a bit morbid and excessive, don't you think?"

"Welcome to the Hellmouth."

"You don't care?"

"I'm the Slayer, it's my job to care."

He mused, "you don't care, or perhaps you just don't know."

She took offense to this. He pulled himself up to his feet after he had spoken, crouched by the grave to touch the name of the dead. He glared, and spat back.

"Get to the point. What are you and why choose now to be a pain in my ass?"

"Why did you attack the Mayor? Why now?" He added, "Did you know Glory is Ben and Ben is in Sunnydale as we speak? Did you know Warren is currently in Highschool, and maybe we should have Willow kill him right now. So Tara can live. Isn't that the right thing to do?"

This stopped her in her tracks. Who was this? This entity that knew her, her life, her friends, everything that happened it seemed.

"You're not here to right your wrongs, Buffy, you're here to die."

"No. I came to escape death. I–"

"What about Spike and Angel? Willow and Faith and everyone? They didn't escape, did they?"

"What's your point?"

"We all have to die. Even myself, though I promise you, it won't be at the hands of the Slayer." He continued, "everybody lives in their own world line, and tell me if I lose you, because I'm told I can be a bit droll, but as I said, we all live in our own individual world lines." The entity explained, "in a single world line you can see your birth, life, and death. All of it at once or even just pop in to part of it, but no one can do that, not like you did and that demon with you."

"Guess I'm built different."

"Not really, you're just very lucky." He mocked her posture. Arms folded, eyes stern and his demeanor as serious and almost sarcastic as hers. "Everyone dies, Buffy. The Three Women always weave and end to the web. Y can't escape Fate. You only decide who and what you are when you meet it."

"What are you? Some demon philosopher?"

"You are merely a fly on a web being dragged slowly closer to the spider." He approached her with slow certain steps. Not a single wasted movement, he leaned toward her and in the same ear the vampire hissed and gnarled its teeth, he gently whispered, "I am the web. I am a way for the universe to know itself. An aspect of time and space."

"You're a God?"

"Celestial. I am the universe itself. However, you, Buffy don't belong here."

She pushed him away. If she remembered what it felt like to force Glory away, it was similar but yet he moved freely from her with the fluid motion of The Master, or perhaps it was Toth that wafted like him.

So much force, so much power, and and gravity, yet passive.

"So, what then? You kill me?"

"No." He smiled, hands dropped to fold and his posture more passive, almost as if he expected her to strike and gave her the opening to do so. "It's Fate that will take you in the end."

One step forward.

He was a fist's throw from her. She could reach out and touch him if she wanted. The man pulled the shirt from his flesh and let it float above them into the atmosphere.

"Please, show me what it means to be a Slayer."

The past few days she realized she had acted rash. Perhaps in their attempt to save their lives, Illyria and Buffy acted far too rash even despite the will to live. She would not in this moment. Not now, not with all these words that jumbled in her head. She needed to speak to Giles.

She backed away.

All too much to process.

"Give me time."

"Why me?"

Wesley, sat upon his sad flat's couch with a glass of scotch on the rocks, with a bottle near and dear on the seat with him glanced over at the blue demon that gazed out his window to the strait just off the city line.

"You were not like this." She did not look back. "I don't like you this way."

"Are you going to kill me?"

She turned to him. Slow, eyes cold as ice and sent a chill down his spine to see them stare straight into his soul.

"No, but now that I have changed the order of events in this world, I cannot leave you alone to drink, and smell like a frightened dog."

"Dear lord." He contemplated what little of his life he could muster was worth the memory.

The clacking of ice in the glass as the alcohol washed over the rocks to bath his tepid tongue with brittle bravery so that me might engage her before his death soothed him far less than he had hoped.

So many nights spent here to cry, to wallow, to wish he had never become a Watcher. Buried in his studies, and family affairs, and the world they pointed him toward with scowls and threats, he now looked to her, a creature of nightmares tucked neatly within the beautiful confines of a cold and callous corpse.

He pondered who the girl might have been before this demon monstrosity took over. The little flicker of light, the fragmentary glimpse of Winnifred did not go over as well as Illyria thought it might. To see her so casual, so gentle and almost fragile before him was even more terrifying. It reminded Wesley that anyone and anything could be a demon.

Even the glass.

He looked at it, fixed his glasses and poured another few hard gulps into it.

"I will take you to Sunnydale." She caught his attention.

"Sunnydale? That's where–"

"You will be useful there. If at least–"

"Rupert. Yes, her Watcher." He tightened his lips and exhaled deep before he pulled himself together and stood to meet her. "When."

"We're already there."

The Library was dimly lit. A desk lamp in the office cast only the faintest glimpse of light through a shaded window. Emptiness filled the halls of the school, save for a single room with a presence she could feel, but it was not Giles, nor the Slayer.

"They are not here." She looked as though the dark was hindrance to her.

Wesley wrestled the lamp on the table ahead of them and looked around at the volumes and stacks of books, the cage and all that Giles had compiled for the Slayer.

The resources given to him by the Council was only matched by that of the Council itself.

"I'm sorry, why are you here?"

A voice startled Wesley. He jumped and cried and lunged for Illyria, the demon beast he'd been so frightened of moments ago.

Illyria stared back at the figure that formed before the portal doors. The great circular glass that looked out to the hall blocked by a shadow, then a man, then a presence of power that rivaled even hers.

"You don't belong here." He approached.

She narrowed her eyes to see him more clearly. Wesley cleaned the fog from his glasses, but try as they might, he was as vague as the stars themselves. A human form of meat or pale flesh, or some semblance of what you might think a human should look like. The rest adorned in all black that seemed to move and sparkle like the stars themselves. She recognized several of the constellations that swirled through him and stood her ground.

She had no fear of this entity, which could no be said for the frightened and quickly shriveled man behind her.

This coward was most unlike the Wesley she knew.

"Are you here to right your wrongs, Illyria, or Winnifred Burkle?"

"I hold no sentiment for my prison."

He chuckled to himself, and his eyes, like stars glossed over her to Wesley.

"Is it to save him? The only attachment you have to this new world?"

She was silent. Had he caught on? He probably knew already, in fact, she knew he did. The beginning, the middle, and the end.

"An army couldn't save you all." He added, "the shadows killed them, you know this right?"

"Yes."

"It was you, though, you were the one who tried to save the world."

Before either could speak as Wesley finally pulled himself to his feet, the entity continued, almost as if it loved to hear itself talk.

"No, you don't care about worlds and dimensions, only yourself. Only you matter, Illyria. Not Winnifred, not even Wesley here. The Slayer is your means for you change how it all happens."

"If you know how it ends, then tell me?" She tested. She had a suspicion of the origin of the creature before her, but not an answer.

"You know what I am. You're not new to traveling dimensions and ripping through time and space. You were a God once, Illyria. However," he stepped closer and closer, with hands in what constituted as pockets, unassuming, unthreatened. "Even Gods have to die."

"If, I could–" Before Wesley could finish, Illyria punched a hole through the entity.

The humanoid form trapped her from elbow to fist within its chest. Her gloved hand began to freeze and the ice grew like vines up the red and black leather until it reached her elbow and barely, just barely before it could ascend to her neck did she manage to pull free with all of her might.

The shadow before her, a void, an expanse of space itself would switch from humanoid to gaseous to the body of a man, to the concept of time. To Wesley, it could only appear as a man with pale flesh and the vague features that could only render it humanoid to him.

"The elements of life are most common throughout the universe." He responded to her attack with a calm gesture and voice. His arms open for her to take another chance to puncture him, but she knew better. "However, Gods and Old Ones only exist as a single entity. So, I'm guessing you know once the Three Women find you, there's no coming back. No Qwa Ha Xahn to resurrect you."
Illyria stared into him, the forms of the being before her. This was her consequence. She pulled Buffy into the realm of shadows and in a desperate attempt to escape her own fate, had destroyed this dimension. Now, as she realized from the presence before her, it wasn't Buffy the Universe was truly angry with, but her.

A God knows better.

She had only one thing over him.

"You cannot kill me. You are powerless before even I, Illyria the Merciless of the Primordium."

He smiled, no teeth to reveal, and no real breath to draw in, but that form could peel and the posture of a smug man, hands in pockets, arrogance on his shoulders betrayed the vague expressions of time and space before her.

This time, he back away.

Step by step he took, slow and methodical.

Wesley pulled from Illyria to stand to her right side and watch the entity as it reached the portal doors.

"Give me time." He repeated in Buffy's voice.