Hi folks-- I feel I have to apologize for really falling off the ball with
this. The story is actually sitting in its word files, completely
finished, and here I haven't been updating. I'll post all the chapters
over the next few weeks as I go through and edit them.
Also, this chapter features a song lyric written by one of my favorite poets, macha. Please tell her that you liked it at Or check out for more writing by both her and myself, and others you'll probably enjoy.
Again, I really have to apologize for this incredible delay, because if you know me you know I don't usually go anywhere near this long without posting something. I'll get the rest out to you, now, though. I hope you enjoy it.
--- Part Eight: Observations ---
It was two years after she had found him in the gentle spring of the Mount Holyoke campus, when they were hunted in the New York ruins.
Buffy's hand clenched fiercely around his as they stumbled into the subway station. The shadows were long and the night was silent. Dust had settled quietly over shattered tiles that hadn't known footsteps in a decade, and the mangled bones of those who had been here when the world had frozen in place. Buffy's foot knocked a femur out of place on the stairwell, and it tumbled down with a lonely rattling.
He heard her sharp intakes of breath, the hiss of pain in them. He could smell the blood that was coursing down her shoulder from the open wounds.
"We lost them...?" she asked through the gasps, turning and leaning against the wall. In the shafted light, flowing from a grating above, an advertisement for a movie smiled back at her. The release date was one June first, ten years gone. No one attended the premiere.
His eyes trailed down his own arm, following the acidic sting where the claws had raked him, too. He knew the creatures would smell the blood.
"Might have," he said irresolutely, the dead cold night pulling in all around him. There was a dread reality about the moment that was entirely different from their other fights.
"For now..." he added, quietly.
Leather hung in shreds around his arm. Dangling with the skin in ribbons, where it burned with the toxic wounds.
"They don't even have faces..." she said, swallowing hard, "There's nothing left... not that's human..."
He looked up, eyes darting for a clear exit.
"There's no one alive here..." she whispered, looking up with him with a face he would never forget. The shine in her eyes was fear.
She looked left and right into the blackness of the subway tunnels.
"There's nothing but those things. Who knows how many...."
Somewhere, the soft echo of a screaming, inhuman shriek cried out. The scrabbling of claws. She looked up at him again, face white.
"Nothing in this whole city..."
---
"When her sister bled, on that last clear night / and the world around her changed too far / she ran from life, with her eyes shut tight, / and he lost her as his star..."
The song floated softly over the campground. The corn waved softly around them in the dark, and the single voice wavered with the firelight in the darkness.
"So he wandered alone through the afterlife / and he followed the light he recognized / in the eye of the dragon he kept the key / and his promise was realized..."
There was a woman on the outskirts of the group. She'd come in a half hour earlier, with a hard looking man who stared at them like quarry.
She crouched on her heels, looking distantly into the fire that flickered its light on the corn sheaves. She had broken the leg off of a shattered chair, flung aside in the looting, and was sharpening into a stake with her knife. She listened to the music, and seemed deeply intent on its words.
"While she gave up duty, and gave up pain / and she wandered alone in a landscape stark / where she could not stay and she would not slay / and the monsters owned the dark..."
Ellie sensed she didn't belong with them. The woman was from Away. Turning back to her statuette, she tried to avoid the woman's gaze. She didn't want their eyes to meet. She looked into the small, carved face of the statue and whispered a small prayer, as the music flowed over her.
"She ever talk back?"
Her head darted up. The man stared down at her. Her pulse quickened. There was no one to protect her now that Samuel had run off to the whore. She wished vainly that he would have understood. She looked away from the man, staring at the fireside in pointed silence. And still the singing continued.
"In a sea of blood he waded in / till he made a world she might remember / love and tears and loss and years / contained in a single ember..."
"Come on, now," he said, crouching down to sit beside her, "Someone might take that as unfriendly."
He plucked the statue up casually, turning it in his fingers. When he looked up again, his eyes were full of a strange, gentle humor that surprised her.
"How'd you come to this way of thinking, love?"
"What..." she whispered, "What-- what way...?"
"Talking to the statue," he responded, "Someone might've put you in a padded room for it, before. Course, the situation's drastically altered now..."
Her eyes darted to the side, searching for an escape. Before he spoke again, he laid the statue on the damp grass with something like tenderness.
"When the world turned white, and the candles burned / and the people gathered to know the light / she awoke to find that gift he gave / of connection in the night..."
"Don't worry pet," he said softly, "I've no plans to hurt you."
"Then what do you want...?"
"I lost something," he said simply, "And I need to find it again."
---
Samuel hated the stare of the crone at their doorway. But it didn't hold him back. He clutched his bag against his chest tightly. He could feel the spiral binding through the nylon.
A building. Grey stucco coated walls, stained darkly by the years of neglect. It sprawled all around. Saplings rose here and there in what was once the parking lot. He tried not to look out into the street with the rows and rows of collapsed houses and shops all around it. Somehow, the thought of all those crushed, empty rooms loomed in his mind, crawled at the back of his neck.
The heavy scent of blood and incense struck him hard as he pushed through the revolving doors. He entered the place that was once a department store, and now something darker and empty. The space he stood in, wide and open, felt small and close through the thick, scented haze.
He walked through the long open spaces of linoleum floors, where store racks had been removed. The cordoned off tented spaces hung with their fabric walls around him, like little islands in the murky dark.
He didn't stop to stare at the painted girls, crowding around in clusters, their legs long and white. Their eyes trailed after him, black and thoughtless. He tried not to meet their gaze.
He passed the bloody pool that was once the store fountain. A wishing- well. For children. Now a beacon in the stark, suburban ruins. He shrunk closer into himself, trying to suppress a shudder as the discomfort crawled through his skin. And even so, desire pulled him forward. He knew what mattered to her, and he had to be brave enough to go through with this.
---
"A notebook could be anywhere," she said shortly, turning away. The woman, carving the stake, was watching them intently.
When Ellie continued, her tone betrayed her with the swelling fear for her brother.
"What is it? Why's it important, anyway...?"
---
A shriek had filled the kiosk spaces above them, where they had entered from the desolate, silent streets. The subway filled with a growing, echoing rustling like an onrush of spiders through the night.
"They're coming..." she whispered to him intently.
He looked down into the tunnels. Pitch black darkness, even to inhuman eyes, stared back at him. Like holes into oblivion.
But the green light danced like little bells on the rails. It swirled around the concrete walls in ribbons. He could see it, still. He could see it in any darkness, and he knew where they had to go.
The sound of scratching claws echoed louder through the stairwell above them.
He took her hand once more, pulled her to the edge of the platform. She looked at him a moment, nodded at the intent she saw in his face. She leapt lightly onto the subway rails.
As the sounds of pursuit grew closer, he dropped down after her, and they darted together into tunnels as black and empty as the grave.
---
"Oh, the old world dies, and the new world burns / but the Slayer in her knows that light / she left behind at the end of love / still shining in him so bright..."
"So the Queen of Light now walks the worlds / and the bells ring time that has gone away / and the Pilgrim carries the Green Saint girl / in his memory of today..."
"I don't know why it's important," the man replied simply, "But I need it back. I can tell you know something. Elsewise you wouldn't be looking away like that. Help me, here..."
"And the world we make is the world she gave / out of hell on earth, in the dragon's eye / when her blood was shed, when she died to save / when the sun went down and he could not die..."
"So we thank all three for the green they bring / and we offer hope that they hold the key / and we honor them every time we sing / for they chose to walk in the world we see..."
The woman-- the stake bearing woman with the dark hair and the battle scars, appeared by his side, walking from the other side of the fire. She placed a hand on his shoulder.
"Spike," she said calmly, and leaned down to speak into his ear, quietly.
"She has gone so far, but he calls her home / and together they guard the world we know / for one was called and the other was claimed / and she cannot stay and he cannot go..."
"And we live in the Shadow the Passing made / and the Green Girl holds the key to time / where her Veil protects this world gone cold / as her Gift to us, at the end of rhyme..."
Spike smiled at the statuette then, and turned to the woman..
"Her hair was longer than that, wouldn't you say, love?"
And Ellie understood suddenly. The song and the statue converged to her and she saw them standing in front of her.
"Oh my God..." she whispered, "You're them... you're the ones, aren't you...?"
"They are three who stand against the Dark / in the eye of love we will not fall / for in love he has not failed her yet / and the Green Girl keeps us all"
"If the Bright One falls (she is mortal yet) / will the world still end? can faith be broken? / yet in constancy he will never fail / till an end to this world is spoken..."
"Oh my God..." she whispered, her eyes suddenly pleading, fear of them replaced with a different kind of fear.
"You'll help him, won't you? You won't turn him away...?"
"Help who...?" The woman—the Slayer asked. Every inch the warrior, with eyes that told of innumerable battles—of love and war that Ellie could hardly imagine. They knew the Key. They knew her as Human.
"My brother... I should never have let him go..." she said, softly, "Oh God... if you're here, he must be in such trouble..."
"It is love that made this world we walk / where the Dark Knight pierced the dragon's eye / and the monsters could not own the dark / since he would not let her die..."
"So we leave in their wake our offerings / and we try to honor the gifts she gave / since the light of the three has pierced the dark / we live in the world they save"
---
When Sam pushed the velvet curtain aside, he was struck by the simplicity of the sleek office furniture around him.
A small man with sensitive hands was writing something at his teak and steel desk. It looked weirdly incongruous surrounded by red velvet curtains and thin ribbons of blood scented smoke.
When he looked up from the paperwork, he smiled an ingratiating smile. His wedding ring glittered silver on his long ring finger. He pulled off wire rimmed glasses and squinted up at his visitor. The smoke wasn't good for his lungs, and his voice was gruff with his long years in its embrace.
"Samuel," he said in his heavily laced accent. Sam knew it was Eastern European, but couldn't place exactly. Ukrainian, Belarusian. Somewhere far away. The man smiled that unnerving little smile, the smile of the bureaucrat, and replaced his pen in its brushed steel holder.
A crowd of painted girls looked up from the floor with their white skin and rouged lips, clustering around his feet like house cats. The man brushed his fingers across the small, fiber optic palm tree that sat on the edge of the desk, glowing its strange colors, reflected across the desk. It was his prize possession, and battery operated. He tried to draw visitor's attention to it when he could.
"Hope is not a thing with feathers, I see," he continued with a sarcastic humor, "It is a thing with legs and feet and an annoying way of coming back to bother me..."
"I..." Sam started, faltering. He could feel the painted girls' eyes on him, and it always made him quiver with discomfort. They shifted in place on the floor, arms a tangle together.
"Out with it, boy," said the man before him, leaning back in his chair, "I am a busy man."
He thrust his bag forward.
"I—I have something for her."
The man snatched the bag carelessly. He shook the notebook out on his desk. The mud was dry and flaked its dust on the wood.
"Samuel," he said, brushing the dust away, "It's soiling my blotter."
"But look... she'll like it," Sam responded, stepping towards the desk eagerly, "It's got power, I'm sure... there's been trouble back at the convent. I got into some of the stuff—"
"The things you are not meant to have by your witches," supplied the bureaucrat, nodding, "They like to hold too tight a reign on their prizes—they are not as... magnanimous with their resources, as we are here with our own. Each alike to his brother, am I not right?"
Sam nodded nervously. He was beginning to worry about how he would make it out of here, if they rejected him.
The man flipped through the book, and laughed a gravel filled laughter that chilled Sam's spine.
"Samuel—I am sick of you. I was born brutally honest, and this is trash. You take too much of my effort and I fear I have no choice but to dispose of—"
Suddenly, the curtain behind the desk rustled, and a tall woman slipped through. The bureaucrat fell silent. Her silent eyes fell calmly across them all. They shone beyond the black, sooty stuff that obscured them, clearer than any of the other painted girls. She walked with the confidence of a ruler to the bureaucrat's side.
Samuel's heart quickened. She was more beautiful than he remembered.
He turned and met her eyes. She reached down, over his shoulder with serpentine grace, and touched a filigreed, green knotted page. The edge was stained with mud. She did not speak, but the bureaucrat nodded to her with a grave quiet.
"It seems," he said, turning to Sam, "That we know what you wish for, and that the terms are more than acceptable. I have nothing more to do with you. Go to her now."
The woman took his arm with a cold gentleness, and led him away.
---
Also, this chapter features a song lyric written by one of my favorite poets, macha. Please tell her that you liked it at Or check out for more writing by both her and myself, and others you'll probably enjoy.
Again, I really have to apologize for this incredible delay, because if you know me you know I don't usually go anywhere near this long without posting something. I'll get the rest out to you, now, though. I hope you enjoy it.
--- Part Eight: Observations ---
It was two years after she had found him in the gentle spring of the Mount Holyoke campus, when they were hunted in the New York ruins.
Buffy's hand clenched fiercely around his as they stumbled into the subway station. The shadows were long and the night was silent. Dust had settled quietly over shattered tiles that hadn't known footsteps in a decade, and the mangled bones of those who had been here when the world had frozen in place. Buffy's foot knocked a femur out of place on the stairwell, and it tumbled down with a lonely rattling.
He heard her sharp intakes of breath, the hiss of pain in them. He could smell the blood that was coursing down her shoulder from the open wounds.
"We lost them...?" she asked through the gasps, turning and leaning against the wall. In the shafted light, flowing from a grating above, an advertisement for a movie smiled back at her. The release date was one June first, ten years gone. No one attended the premiere.
His eyes trailed down his own arm, following the acidic sting where the claws had raked him, too. He knew the creatures would smell the blood.
"Might have," he said irresolutely, the dead cold night pulling in all around him. There was a dread reality about the moment that was entirely different from their other fights.
"For now..." he added, quietly.
Leather hung in shreds around his arm. Dangling with the skin in ribbons, where it burned with the toxic wounds.
"They don't even have faces..." she said, swallowing hard, "There's nothing left... not that's human..."
He looked up, eyes darting for a clear exit.
"There's no one alive here..." she whispered, looking up with him with a face he would never forget. The shine in her eyes was fear.
She looked left and right into the blackness of the subway tunnels.
"There's nothing but those things. Who knows how many...."
Somewhere, the soft echo of a screaming, inhuman shriek cried out. The scrabbling of claws. She looked up at him again, face white.
"Nothing in this whole city..."
---
"When her sister bled, on that last clear night / and the world around her changed too far / she ran from life, with her eyes shut tight, / and he lost her as his star..."
The song floated softly over the campground. The corn waved softly around them in the dark, and the single voice wavered with the firelight in the darkness.
"So he wandered alone through the afterlife / and he followed the light he recognized / in the eye of the dragon he kept the key / and his promise was realized..."
There was a woman on the outskirts of the group. She'd come in a half hour earlier, with a hard looking man who stared at them like quarry.
She crouched on her heels, looking distantly into the fire that flickered its light on the corn sheaves. She had broken the leg off of a shattered chair, flung aside in the looting, and was sharpening into a stake with her knife. She listened to the music, and seemed deeply intent on its words.
"While she gave up duty, and gave up pain / and she wandered alone in a landscape stark / where she could not stay and she would not slay / and the monsters owned the dark..."
Ellie sensed she didn't belong with them. The woman was from Away. Turning back to her statuette, she tried to avoid the woman's gaze. She didn't want their eyes to meet. She looked into the small, carved face of the statue and whispered a small prayer, as the music flowed over her.
"She ever talk back?"
Her head darted up. The man stared down at her. Her pulse quickened. There was no one to protect her now that Samuel had run off to the whore. She wished vainly that he would have understood. She looked away from the man, staring at the fireside in pointed silence. And still the singing continued.
"In a sea of blood he waded in / till he made a world she might remember / love and tears and loss and years / contained in a single ember..."
"Come on, now," he said, crouching down to sit beside her, "Someone might take that as unfriendly."
He plucked the statue up casually, turning it in his fingers. When he looked up again, his eyes were full of a strange, gentle humor that surprised her.
"How'd you come to this way of thinking, love?"
"What..." she whispered, "What-- what way...?"
"Talking to the statue," he responded, "Someone might've put you in a padded room for it, before. Course, the situation's drastically altered now..."
Her eyes darted to the side, searching for an escape. Before he spoke again, he laid the statue on the damp grass with something like tenderness.
"When the world turned white, and the candles burned / and the people gathered to know the light / she awoke to find that gift he gave / of connection in the night..."
"Don't worry pet," he said softly, "I've no plans to hurt you."
"Then what do you want...?"
"I lost something," he said simply, "And I need to find it again."
---
Samuel hated the stare of the crone at their doorway. But it didn't hold him back. He clutched his bag against his chest tightly. He could feel the spiral binding through the nylon.
A building. Grey stucco coated walls, stained darkly by the years of neglect. It sprawled all around. Saplings rose here and there in what was once the parking lot. He tried not to look out into the street with the rows and rows of collapsed houses and shops all around it. Somehow, the thought of all those crushed, empty rooms loomed in his mind, crawled at the back of his neck.
The heavy scent of blood and incense struck him hard as he pushed through the revolving doors. He entered the place that was once a department store, and now something darker and empty. The space he stood in, wide and open, felt small and close through the thick, scented haze.
He walked through the long open spaces of linoleum floors, where store racks had been removed. The cordoned off tented spaces hung with their fabric walls around him, like little islands in the murky dark.
He didn't stop to stare at the painted girls, crowding around in clusters, their legs long and white. Their eyes trailed after him, black and thoughtless. He tried not to meet their gaze.
He passed the bloody pool that was once the store fountain. A wishing- well. For children. Now a beacon in the stark, suburban ruins. He shrunk closer into himself, trying to suppress a shudder as the discomfort crawled through his skin. And even so, desire pulled him forward. He knew what mattered to her, and he had to be brave enough to go through with this.
---
"A notebook could be anywhere," she said shortly, turning away. The woman, carving the stake, was watching them intently.
When Ellie continued, her tone betrayed her with the swelling fear for her brother.
"What is it? Why's it important, anyway...?"
---
A shriek had filled the kiosk spaces above them, where they had entered from the desolate, silent streets. The subway filled with a growing, echoing rustling like an onrush of spiders through the night.
"They're coming..." she whispered to him intently.
He looked down into the tunnels. Pitch black darkness, even to inhuman eyes, stared back at him. Like holes into oblivion.
But the green light danced like little bells on the rails. It swirled around the concrete walls in ribbons. He could see it, still. He could see it in any darkness, and he knew where they had to go.
The sound of scratching claws echoed louder through the stairwell above them.
He took her hand once more, pulled her to the edge of the platform. She looked at him a moment, nodded at the intent she saw in his face. She leapt lightly onto the subway rails.
As the sounds of pursuit grew closer, he dropped down after her, and they darted together into tunnels as black and empty as the grave.
---
"Oh, the old world dies, and the new world burns / but the Slayer in her knows that light / she left behind at the end of love / still shining in him so bright..."
"So the Queen of Light now walks the worlds / and the bells ring time that has gone away / and the Pilgrim carries the Green Saint girl / in his memory of today..."
"I don't know why it's important," the man replied simply, "But I need it back. I can tell you know something. Elsewise you wouldn't be looking away like that. Help me, here..."
"And the world we make is the world she gave / out of hell on earth, in the dragon's eye / when her blood was shed, when she died to save / when the sun went down and he could not die..."
"So we thank all three for the green they bring / and we offer hope that they hold the key / and we honor them every time we sing / for they chose to walk in the world we see..."
The woman-- the stake bearing woman with the dark hair and the battle scars, appeared by his side, walking from the other side of the fire. She placed a hand on his shoulder.
"Spike," she said calmly, and leaned down to speak into his ear, quietly.
"She has gone so far, but he calls her home / and together they guard the world we know / for one was called and the other was claimed / and she cannot stay and he cannot go..."
"And we live in the Shadow the Passing made / and the Green Girl holds the key to time / where her Veil protects this world gone cold / as her Gift to us, at the end of rhyme..."
Spike smiled at the statuette then, and turned to the woman..
"Her hair was longer than that, wouldn't you say, love?"
And Ellie understood suddenly. The song and the statue converged to her and she saw them standing in front of her.
"Oh my God..." she whispered, "You're them... you're the ones, aren't you...?"
"They are three who stand against the Dark / in the eye of love we will not fall / for in love he has not failed her yet / and the Green Girl keeps us all"
"If the Bright One falls (she is mortal yet) / will the world still end? can faith be broken? / yet in constancy he will never fail / till an end to this world is spoken..."
"Oh my God..." she whispered, her eyes suddenly pleading, fear of them replaced with a different kind of fear.
"You'll help him, won't you? You won't turn him away...?"
"Help who...?" The woman—the Slayer asked. Every inch the warrior, with eyes that told of innumerable battles—of love and war that Ellie could hardly imagine. They knew the Key. They knew her as Human.
"My brother... I should never have let him go..." she said, softly, "Oh God... if you're here, he must be in such trouble..."
"It is love that made this world we walk / where the Dark Knight pierced the dragon's eye / and the monsters could not own the dark / since he would not let her die..."
"So we leave in their wake our offerings / and we try to honor the gifts she gave / since the light of the three has pierced the dark / we live in the world they save"
---
When Sam pushed the velvet curtain aside, he was struck by the simplicity of the sleek office furniture around him.
A small man with sensitive hands was writing something at his teak and steel desk. It looked weirdly incongruous surrounded by red velvet curtains and thin ribbons of blood scented smoke.
When he looked up from the paperwork, he smiled an ingratiating smile. His wedding ring glittered silver on his long ring finger. He pulled off wire rimmed glasses and squinted up at his visitor. The smoke wasn't good for his lungs, and his voice was gruff with his long years in its embrace.
"Samuel," he said in his heavily laced accent. Sam knew it was Eastern European, but couldn't place exactly. Ukrainian, Belarusian. Somewhere far away. The man smiled that unnerving little smile, the smile of the bureaucrat, and replaced his pen in its brushed steel holder.
A crowd of painted girls looked up from the floor with their white skin and rouged lips, clustering around his feet like house cats. The man brushed his fingers across the small, fiber optic palm tree that sat on the edge of the desk, glowing its strange colors, reflected across the desk. It was his prize possession, and battery operated. He tried to draw visitor's attention to it when he could.
"Hope is not a thing with feathers, I see," he continued with a sarcastic humor, "It is a thing with legs and feet and an annoying way of coming back to bother me..."
"I..." Sam started, faltering. He could feel the painted girls' eyes on him, and it always made him quiver with discomfort. They shifted in place on the floor, arms a tangle together.
"Out with it, boy," said the man before him, leaning back in his chair, "I am a busy man."
He thrust his bag forward.
"I—I have something for her."
The man snatched the bag carelessly. He shook the notebook out on his desk. The mud was dry and flaked its dust on the wood.
"Samuel," he said, brushing the dust away, "It's soiling my blotter."
"But look... she'll like it," Sam responded, stepping towards the desk eagerly, "It's got power, I'm sure... there's been trouble back at the convent. I got into some of the stuff—"
"The things you are not meant to have by your witches," supplied the bureaucrat, nodding, "They like to hold too tight a reign on their prizes—they are not as... magnanimous with their resources, as we are here with our own. Each alike to his brother, am I not right?"
Sam nodded nervously. He was beginning to worry about how he would make it out of here, if they rejected him.
The man flipped through the book, and laughed a gravel filled laughter that chilled Sam's spine.
"Samuel—I am sick of you. I was born brutally honest, and this is trash. You take too much of my effort and I fear I have no choice but to dispose of—"
Suddenly, the curtain behind the desk rustled, and a tall woman slipped through. The bureaucrat fell silent. Her silent eyes fell calmly across them all. They shone beyond the black, sooty stuff that obscured them, clearer than any of the other painted girls. She walked with the confidence of a ruler to the bureaucrat's side.
Samuel's heart quickened. She was more beautiful than he remembered.
He turned and met her eyes. She reached down, over his shoulder with serpentine grace, and touched a filigreed, green knotted page. The edge was stained with mud. She did not speak, but the bureaucrat nodded to her with a grave quiet.
"It seems," he said, turning to Sam, "That we know what you wish for, and that the terms are more than acceptable. I have nothing more to do with you. Go to her now."
The woman took his arm with a cold gentleness, and led him away.
---