CHAPTER TWO: BLACK

She would never know it, but it took four years in the blackness before she stopped talking to herself.  It took seven years before she began to give up hope.  And it took twelve years before she had sunk so far into the blackness that she began to forget her own name.  This was worse than hell, with eternal torture.  This was the darkness.  This was being alone.  This was everything that she feared, and she was trapped.  It took nearly fourteen years before she completely gave up.  She was here to stay and no one would ever find her.  She didn't even have the strength to cry at that realisation.

For the first few weeks in that first year, she wondered about where she was.  Hell maybe?  She didn't know.  Perhaps she was in hell and this was her torture.  Surrounded by the dark, isolated in a cage that only just let her stand up.  It was big enough for her to lie down in, but small enough for her to hate it with a fiery passion.

She neither hungered nor thirst.  She slept only to pass the time.  It was in the moments that she was awake that she understood that this was her punishment for acting rashly.  And yet, she wouldn't have changed a thing if it meant her sister was alive.

It was fifteen years before she heard a sound that she hadn't made.  It began faintly, a far off muffled thudding that echoed down the corridor of blackness.  She tensed, immediately alert, forcing herself to stand and take on a defensive position that she didn't know she remembered.

The sounds got closer.  Footsteps.  They were slow, casual.  As though whomever was coming towards her didn't have a car in the world.  She couldn't see him (for that was how she thought of the intruder) through the darkness, and so she just listened and waited for him to get closer.

It was strange.  Fifteen years alone and she could still sense when something that wasn't of the good was about to occur.  Fifteen years in isolation, and she could still tell you exactly how far away the newcomer was.  Fifteen years in the dark and she could tell you how tall he was.  And he really wasn't tall.  Her height maybe, if she could remember how tall she was.

"How's it goin'?" the voice asked. 

The question startled her.  Her voice hadn't been used since for nearly eleven years.  Her ears hadn't heard a thing for fifteen years, and her conversation skills hadn't really been practiced since then.

She didn't answer.

"Stupid question I guess," the voice continued.  It was soft, gentle, almost teasing.  There was a strange accent to it, a kind of lilt that she had heard before.  Where she'd heard it though, she could place.  And so she let him speak.

"This whole cage thing must really suck for ya," he went on, almost conversationally.  She glared in the darkness, almost wishing for the silence back.  If they intended to break her by annoying her to death, she wouldn't let them.

"Oh, don't worry Slayer, I'm not here to annoy you to death," the voice said, laughing a little.  "I'm here to get you out."

That made her glare disappear almost instantly, a spark of hope shooting up within her.

"Out?" her voice was quiet, strained.  The word almost never made it past her lips, and in Sunnydale the question wouldn't have been heard over the usual volume that was set.  But here, in the silent darkness, it was heard.

"Yeah kid, out.  Out of this blackness, out of that cage."

She swallowed hard and squinted in the darkness, able to see the man's outline. 

"Who are you?"

The man gave a small laugh.

"I'm hurt kid," he said.  She could tell he was smiling.  "You don't remember your old pal?  The name Whistler ringing any bells?"

She quickly sorted through her memories, trying to place the name and the accent.

It came rushing back to her.  A time and a place she had tried so hard to forget when she'd been alive.  A time and a place she hadn't really given too much thought to since being stuck in the darkness.

----- "Who are you?"

"Whistler."

"What are you, just some immortal demon sent down to even the score between good and evil?"

"Good guess." -----

"Ahhh, the kid remembers.  Well done.  It took the Powers kind of a while to work out where the hell you'd gone, pun completely intended."

She stared at him, again with the vacant expression that was a constant mask. 

"So, where am I then?"

Whistler laughed a little at that.

"You jump into a portal that leads to a hell dimension and you ask where you are," he said, shaking his head in disbelief.

She wasn't amused and remained silent until he eventually sighed and stopped laughing.

"Quortoth.  Glory and two others reigned over it, but then Glory decided she didn't like sharing.  She tried to kill off the other two gods, but ended up getting kicked out of here for her troubles.  Problem with Quortoth is, there's no way in or out, except ripping through the fabric of reality.  And the Key of course.  But that was a once in a millennia deal."

Her head spun, and she tried desperately to keep up with what he was saying.  Trying to process so much information after having been in silence for over fifteen years was a little overwhelming for her.  She leant back against the rock wall, thankful to have something solid to fall against.

"Why are you here?" she eventually asked.

He grinned and stepped forward, touching the metal bars to the cage that had surrounded her for a decade and a half.

"To set you free."

She felt the air around her change as the bars to the cage that she had been trapped in disappeared.  Suddenly, the sense of how big and consuming the darkness really was, floated through her.  She had been safe in her cage,  she had known what to expect.  Absolutely nothing.

Now, here this demon was, setting her free, taking away her security net and telling her that she could go.  Something akin to fear settled into her bones.  Home.  Home.

Whistler made a small clucking sound as that particular thought ran through her mind.

"You're not going home just yet kid.  The Powers don't have that kind of power.  Which, if you're into the whole irony thing, is kinda funny."

She glared at him in the darkness.  He reminded her of Spike.  Annoying, but still wanting to help.

"You gotta find your own way home.  See, it's kind of a test too.  To see if you're strong enough to get out.  Smart enough."

She swallowed hard and tried not to let her knees collapse beneath her.  A test?  She hadn't had to do a single thing for so long and here she was being offered a chance to get home if she passed the test.  But how would she get home?  What were the trials that she had to endure.  It didn't make sense!

"Course not," Whistles said, startling her out of her thoughts.

"Huh?"

"You think it doesn't make sense.  It doesn't.  And you don't have to pass any trials.  You have to figure out your own way back."

"You just said there's no way in and no way out."

"Not just a pretty face," Whistler teased.  "Good to know you can think on your feet."

She shifted her weight, wondering if the Powers would approve if she killed the messenger.

Whistler stepped back when that thought reached him.

"No killing anyone just yet kid.  What's the first thing you remember after you jumped into the portal?"

She thought back and immediately grimaced as the memory came to her.  A voice.  Harsh, violent.  Being kicked around and locked in the cage.  Not the most pleasant of memories. 

"Right, what do you remember him saying?"

----- "You FAILED!"

"Your sister will die.  Everyone will die." -----

She closed her eyes.  She had replayed those words over in her mind for the last fifteen years, conjuring up images of her friends, her family, everyone she had ever cared about dead because she had failed.

"You didn't fail kid," Whistler whispered gently.

"I killed them," she whispered sadly.  A tear rolled down her cheek, the first tear in nearly seven years.  She hadn't allowed herself the luxury of self-pity before now. 

"They're not dead."

"I don't know how long it's been, but it's been a long time.  They're dead.  No one would remember me now.  No one would want to."

"You've been here for fifteen years.  But your fifteen years here have been under a week there."

She stopped, completely shocked.

"A week?"

"Yeah, kid.  A week.  They haven't even buried you yet."

She remained silent.  Thinking about your own burial was just a little too much to take in, let alone make an intelligent comment about.

"They're alright kid.  They're not too happy, but they're not dead.  None of them.  You saved them."

She sniffled and wiped her tears away, hating to indulge in this self pity in front of someone she barely knew.

"So why?"

The question caught Whistler off guard.  He hadn't been anticipating it, and considering he had been following her thoughts, it was a definite surprise.

"Why what?"

"Why did whoever it was tell me I'd failed?"

"You're in a hell dimension kid.  They're gonna tell you whatever they want to make you feel like crap."

It made sense, she thought quietly.  Kick her while she's already down.  Cos how much farther down can you go than death?  That's a pretty far decline from life.  Although, the last six months of her life hadn't exactly been brilliant at all.

"So what am I meant to be remembering then?" she asked.

She was slowly getting reacquainted with the whole talking thing.  After fifteen years it was a little stilted, but she found it easy to pick up, especially when it came to business.  Especially when it came down to a matter of life and death.  Those, she was pretty good at.

"Circle of Three," Whistler replied.

"Which would be what?"

He smiled in the darkness and touched her shoulder.  She flinched, startled by how unfamiliar it felt to have someone touching her.

"You'll find out."

The air shifted again and she could tell he was gone.  She wanted to cry, yell, scream, curse the Powers that Be for leaving her there.  Why couldn't they take her out of the hell dimension when they could send the most annoying messenger in all history in.

She sat, trying to think about what she could possibly do to get out of her predicament.  The phrase 'been through worse' flitted through her mind.  She almost laughed at that.  What could possibly be worse than being alone in the dark for all eternity. 

She sat for several hours, eventually drifting into a light doze.

She had stopped dreaming years ago, her days and nights filled with the endless blackness that consumed her, swallowed her whole.  There was no real sense of time, though she knew that it had felt like an eternity.  Whistler had said fifteen years.  But, even in the darkness, she knew she hadn't aged.

Her skin was still smooth, her hands still felt young, her strength still there, even though it was unpractised, lying dormant.  She would have thought that she was undead if it weren't for the heartbeat and the necessity to breathe.  She didn't understand the science behind what she now was.  She was never hungry, never thirsty, never tired, though she slept to kill time. 

But on this night, when Whistler had visited her, she dreamt.

~*~