He awoke the next night feeling strange. Something was different about the basement room. Something was missing.
The girl!
He stood up, feeling more and more uneasy. As he combed the cavernous space beneath his crypt, he felt a sudden unwelcome draft from the ladder leading upstairs. Climbing it, he laid eyes on the half-open door and his heart leapt into his throat.
Stumbling across the room, he threw the heavy door aside and saw, of all things, a pile of ash on the steps.
She had burnt.
In the middle of the day, she'd gotten up, walked by him and went outside in the blazing sun. He fell to his knees and touched the gray dust that lay in a pile beneath him. Torn, he unearthed a small charred white feather out of the ash and held it tight.
Oh, he was gonna get hell for this from Buffy. She'd never let him live it down. But somehow, this feather told him that it was all right. She was in her place now; even if it was the underworld. And nothing bad had happened. The fact that the world wasn't gone told him that much.
He watched as a breeze scattered the dust across his "doorstep". Standing up, he realized the scent he couldn't remember was water. She had smelt of a gurgling brook on a summer dawn in the middle of the woods, with the beams of sunlight bathing the loamy ground in beauty. It had been a sight he'd only seen once or twice when he lived. It was a magic scene.
The night closed in around him and suddenly he couldn't tell where the ash ended and the dirt began. But the feather was still in his hand; the singed shaft that was half black and half white. He turned around and went back inside, grabbed his leather duster, and with the feather in hand went to talk to Buffy.
