DISCLAIMER: I own neither Buffy the Vampire Slayer nor the Wheel of Time; they are the property of their respective authors, publishers, and probably a half-dozen other entities woven together in a more complicated weave than the Age Lace. If I could figure that out, I'd be a good IP lawyer. If I were the author, I'd be making you pay to read this. Unfortunately, looking around my rather Spartan apartment, I think it's safe to say that I'm neither, or I'd be driving a Tesla Roadster. Don't sic the Trollocs on me.

SPOILERS/BACKGROUND: All Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel through Season 4 (no secondary sources, however); all main books of the Wheel of Time through Knife of Dreams. Of course, the WoT-verse is sufficiently complex that I'd be hard pressed to get everything right.

The release of Towers of Midnight reminded me of this old fic and that I'd done some work to continue it. It's a little dated now, but I'm going to try to add a few more chapters over the next couple of months, just for fun. Of course, since it began during Knife of Dreams, much of the material from The Gathering Storm and Towers of Midnight may change, but I will try to work as much of those in as I can, too.

CHAPTER 9:

LEARNING EXPERIENCES

It was another hour before Buffy got to sleep, and even then, it was only at the combined insistence of both Faith and Willow. Buffy only acceded not because she had learned everything she wanted to know, but because every answer seemed to raise another three questions, and she was losing track of what order she wanted to ask them in or even how to ask them at all.

The Shadowsouled, as the Aiel called them, also known as the Forsaken in the wetlands, were the thirteen lieutenants of Sightblinder, the dark being from beyond space and time sealed in the cursed mountain Shayol Ghul, far to the north. They had been among the strongest Aes Sedai from the Age of Legends, a period something on the order of thirty-four centuries back. They had been sealed with him, thousands of years ago, but they were free now. When exactly they had freed themselves, none could say, but it had been a few years now—years in which the entire world had been rocked by famine, war, preternatural winter, assassinations, social upheaval, and Heaven only knew what else. No one knew how the Draghkar came to be, but they were creatures of the Dark, each and every one, almost always taking orders directly from one of the Shadowsouled themselves. The Draghkar's Kiss screamed "dementor" to Buffy: its favorite method of killing involved mesmerizing the victim with its song, then sucking its soul out through its mouth.

Some of the Shadowsouled had been killed, or so the Aiel believed. At least one had been killed by the Car'a'carn; many other Aiel who had followed him into battle that day said so, anyway. How, Hurac had no idea.

The Grey Men that Hurac had mentioned in passing were other assassins for the Shadowsouled; they were used when it was necessary to blend in to get to a target. People's eyes would apparently simply slide over them, unseeing, even as they walked right past security checkpoints, sometimes even alert bodyguards. Even if one could make the effort of will to focus on one, they would seem like just normal, unremarkable people, save perhaps their eyes. Hurac himself had never seen one, but reports of them spread; they were often used for high-profile assassinations, and the Car'a'carn himself had reportedly been attacked by them in the past. Buffy actually breathed somewhat easier at that, though she said nothing to Hurac; if they could make a run at such a high-profile figure, basically as high as high-profile got, and fail, then they could be beaten, even if it would be hard. Their stealthy aura or whatever it was that protected them was not impermeable.

She sometimes had trouble sleeping when she had too much to think about, but she had missed sleeping on terra firma, and while her muscles could have forged ahead for many more hours had she driven herself, her mind was heavy and drained from the effort of fighting off the Draghkar's mesmeric song. She shuddered as she wrapped herself in her bedroll, fully aware of what would have happened had Willow not somehow awoken and broken the thing's concentration, and also fully aware that they were probably going to be sleeping in the wagon more often than not for many days, even weeks. She wasn't sure how quickly they were covering the distance across the Waste, but she had seen the maps, and their scale.

Sleep came so quickly that it seemed that the ambient half-light of Tel'aran'rhiod simply appeared between one eyeblink and the next.

She was about to repeat the jump she had made the previous night into her Sunnydale bedroom—indeed, she felt like she had already placed one foot in the all-encompassing, directionless darkness that seemed to hover just out of reach everywhere in this world—when the hair on the back of her neck prickled, and she found that the Scythe was in her hands before she even stopped to think about it. She was tempted to make the jump anyway; there was nothing in the tent with her, and if she could get away before they got their eyes on her, they might find her vanished into thin air. However, she knew it was somehow possible to follow someone's tracks in this world even as they made seemingly impossible movements—the Aiel Wise Ones had tracked her through Rhuidean, albeit with difficulty, when she was moving hundreds of yards at a stride. There was no point in blazing a trail straight to her refuge here.

It's not paranoia if they're actually after you, she reminded herself. She cautiously pulled back the tent flap.

There was no one in the Shaido camp but her. The sensation of being watched had faded, too. She made a quick pass around the perimeter of their tent and the few closest to it before slipping back through the folds of her tent and preparing to make the step into her Sunnydale bedroom again.

The sensation returned, and even more forcefully ... not just watchful, now, but hunting, somehow, actively seeking her out. She knew she was the object of whatever awareness it was as surely as she knew that she had a back even without being able to see it. With a hiss, she pulled herself back into the dreamworld of the Aiel camp, smothering whatever errant thoughts of Earth might inadvertently bridge the connection; she had seen all too well the power that stray thoughts had here. It was an effort; her mind was still leaden with the after-effects of the Draghkar's song, but her Slayer battle instincts were coming to her aid, now.

The sensation quieted as soon as she snuffed out her thoughts of Sunnydale.

Buffy's blood froze. It's on the other side! The sensation had blossomed twice only when she had been prepared to step into her own bedroom, back to dream-Earth. There was no one in the camp. There was someone waiting for her at home. Her eyes narrowed. Oh, no, you don't, she grated, her hands tightening on the Scythe. Not in my house, you don't!

Red rage burned in her, and she turned once more to step through the dark nowhere of Tel'aran'rhiod to Sunnydale. Not to her bedroom. Something was waiting for her there. But not far. She fixed a different image in her mind. She had crept through the back door of her house in the dark of night more often than she cared to admit, becoming all too good at doing so quietly in order not to disturb her mother, who always worried about her—and with more justification than most mothers worrying about their daughters staying out late. She reached out again, this time just with her hand, reliving the countless times when she had had to turn the latch just so to mute the click, the way you could lift slightly on the door as you opened it to avoid a creak. Her fingers closed around the doorknob, and when she opened it and stepped through, she was back in the kitchen in her house in Sunnydale.

The feeling returned. Buffy's eyes narrowed as she took a few tentative steps forward into her house. She had had some time to settle her nerves and clear her mind by now. She still felt like she was being watched, sought even, but she realized now that the siren in the back of her mind that warned her of impending threats was quiet.

Then again, the Draghkar had somehow been cloaked in a way that masked it from her Slayer-sense until it was right on top of her, and even then it had taken her looking directly at it and willing herself to see it that had pierced the veil. The Scythe was in her hand as she crept toward the stairs to the second floor—whether the weapon had been there the entire time or only appeared in the instant she thought of it, she wasn't even sure.

The sound of footsteps reached her ears.

That surprised her. The Wise Ones and Artur barely walked in the dreamworld at all; they could simply will themselves where they wanted to go, appearing and disappearing at will. The footfalls were also too light to be those of the stocky, armored warrior who had somehow found her sanctum. They certainly sounded human. A Gray Man would make almost no noise, from what she'd heard, and that was assuming that they could somehow reach this dreamworld.

Buffy was halfway up the stairs, and her head was just above floor level on the second floor, when the door to her bedroom, already open a crack, opened the remainder of the way. Buffy almost dropped the Scythe in amazement at the girl who emerged: her form was not entirely substantial, but it was not misty or indistinct, and her clothes showed only the faintest signs of rippling around the edges. She was slender, pale, brunette, and all too familiar. The other girl spotted her a moment later, and her eyes widened in shock and wonder.

"Buffy!"

"Dawn!"

"What are you doing here?" they both asked in unison.

"I fell asleep on the platform and woke up here," Dawn said. "Wherever 'here' is ..." she cut off with a sudden squeak as, between one moment and the next, Buffy's sword was in her hand, thrust forward, the point only an inch from between Dawn's eyes.

"Buffy ... ?"

"Who was the principal at St. Ursula's who always wanted to get me expelled?"

"Buffy?"

"Anything can look like anything in this place," Buffy prodded. "Answer the question. Or get out of my house."

Dawn's breathing steadied momentarily, and her hands fidgeted nervously, though she didn't make any move to back away from the sword. "OK, seriously, does wherever this place is screw with your head, too? Because you never went to St. Ursula. And Snyder was the principal who always wanted to expel you from Sunnydale High. And who succeeded for a little bit, in case you forgot."

Buffy lowered her weapon. "Not that long."

"Oh, so it was more like an out-of-school suspension, then? Way better. Oh, and I almost forgot: What the hell, Buffy?"

Buffy winced. She hadn't had any time to come up with a better plan to see if the person she was talking to really was her sister. She also hadn't thought ahead to what it would have looked like if it turned out that Dawn really was Dawn. "Like I said, anything can look like anything here." She focused her mind for a moment, concentrating on her sister, envisioning her in her mind, and suddenly there were two Dawns in the room, identically dressed right down to the stitching on the back pocket of their jeans, one Dawn giving the other a very pointed look.

"Holy ..."

"See what I mean?"

"Kind of. But still."

Dawn's hands were still fidgeting, which Buffy knew as one of Dawn's tics for releasing nervous energy. Her sister's nerves were still frayed. Well, having a sword thrust in your face sometimes had that effect on people. Did I really just do that? Buffy thought with another wince. She reassumed her real form.

"That may be the creepiest thing I've seen in a lifetime of living with a creepy-magnet for a sister."

Buffy ignored that. Or, perhaps, accepted it. The history of her life did not give her a great deal of evidence to argue back against that. There were more important things here anyway. "Dawnie, I'm so sorry-but the fact is you got off lucky, ending up here, with only me and you. This is about the least creepy place in the dreamworld."

"Dreamworld? Seriously?"

"Come on. I've got a lot to fill you in on, and then we need to get you out of here."

"Do you think this actually does any good?" Dawn asked. She had taken a banana from the fruit basket in the kitchen and was nibbling on it absently. She still wouldn't meet Buffy's eyes after the incident in the bedroom.

"No clue. It might, though. Killing you here kills your real body. Maybe feeding it feeds your real body, too."

"Oh, that's cheery."

"Kinda learning as I go. We've only been in this Aiel world for a few days, but Faith and I have both had to learn really fast. This place is hardcore."

"Yeah, I bet. So you've been in this dream-place every night?"

Buffy nodded. "Honestly, not that it's not great to see you again, but I could go for some more normal sleep. This isn't anything near as good as the real thing."

"Maybe Willow can help with something. Have you asked her?"

Buffy started at that. She hadn't, actually. Of course, there was no reason to think that Willow would be able to do anything about the fact that Buffy and Faith entered the dreamworld involuntarily every night—but then again, their redheaded friend was the most brilliant and potent woman they knew, so there really wasn't any good reason not to have asked. Except for how much else had been going on. "Hadn't really thought about that," she admitted.

"Can't hurt to ask."

Buffy nodded. She should have thought of that herself. Her mind just wasn't at its best day in and day out since she couldn't get a proper night's sleep.

They had filled each other in as best they could on what had happened since Buffy, Faith, and Willow had been whisked away by the Portal Stone that Dawn had unknowingly activated. There were still a lot of holes, but the details were almost irrelevant. Dawn, Giles, Angel, and the Slayers hadn't given up on their end. Buffy, Willow, and Faith were alive on their end. That was all that mattered for the moment. That and figuring out how Dawn had managed to get into Tel'aran'rhiod, though the answer to that seemed obvious enough: she had fallen asleep on the white stone platform around the base of the Portal Stone, rather than in her tent some distance from the carved pillar itself. If there was more to it than that, they weren't going to figure it out by talking here.

Buffy had warned Dawn about the strange dream-wandering swordsman, Artur Paendrag Tanreall, who had either stumbled on the stretch of dreamworld adjacent to Earth, or had followed Buffy there. Dawn hadn't seen anyone else in the Summers home, or in fact anywhere in the dreamworld. She had actually been in the dream reflection of the Sunnydale crater when Buffy began to step through, and had somehow ended up in the Summers home—which was now nothing more than part of a pile of rubble somewhere in that very crater, in the real world—only when Buffy began to step through from the Aiel world. Whether Buffy had somehow called Dawn or Dawn had somehow drawn herself to Buffy, neither of them knew.

"Do you have any idea what time of night it is?" Dawn asked.

"No clue. And it doesn't even really matter." She gestured at the window. The sun was shining, or at least there was light like sunlight filtering down onto the streetscape outside. The light was more diffuse than normal sunlight, though it illuminated the landscape as easily as real sunlight would have, save for washing out most colors. "It was way after midnight when I went to sleep," she said.

"And it's barely after ten on Earth," Dawn noted, getting the point. Time didn't line up neatly between the two worlds, though it didn't appear that a hundred years in one was a day in the other, either. It had been just under a week since the Slayers' and Willow's disappearance in both worlds. "But still ... I want to know when Faith's going to wake you up." She stretched out her hand tentatively. Buffy took it silently, giving her sister the warmest smile she could manage.

"At least now you know we're alive," she said.

Dawn still didn't meet Buffy's eyes, but she smiled. It was a start, perhaps. "Oh, we already all knew that. We just weren't sure you were leaving anything else alive."

Buffy let go of Dawn's hand, threw back her head, and laughed. "Nice to know someone still has confidence in me!" she said, once she regained her voice.

"All three of you," Dawn said. "But seriously, now we can at least have the Wolfram & Hart people start looking into something specific. Maybe someone's heard of Aiel or Rhuidean or something like that. You never know. And now I know I can find you if I sleep right next to that Portal Stone thingy."

"No!" Buffy replied sharply, perhaps more sharply than she intended, but her instincts had taken over again as soon as Dawn mentioned returning to the dreamworld.

Dawn's eyes widened, and she flinched back as if struck. "What?"

"Don't come back here, Dawn, even if you can—it's not safe. Did you completely miss everything I just told you?"

"Well, no, but if I just came here when you do ..."

"You didn't start here, remember? And time flows differently in our worlds? What if you fall asleep next to the Stone and have a nightmare? It could kill you, Dawn! I saw the bruise I left on Faith's face. If I'd hit her with a sword, she'd never have woken up. And you don't know how to get out of the dreamworld and back into normal sleep any better than I do. Stay off that platform."

"I'll be careful."

"You'll what?" Buffy snarled at the note of sullen defiance in Dawn's voice.

Between one heartbeat and the next, the room around them vanished, and they were no longer in the quiet little home on Revello Drive. A sudden burst of wind swept their hair out to the side, and brilliant, flickering argent light bathed them from below. Buffy saw Dawn begin to reach up to try to control her hair, and saw the look of horror dawn on her face as she realized that she couldn't, because her hands were bound to her sides by hemp cords. She opened her mouth to scream at Buffy, and her mouth was suddenly filled with a silk handkerchief, with a scarf of the same material wound around her face to hold it in place. She began to stumble and looked down, and her eyes widened in horror as she realized where they were, and whence sprang the radiance beneath them. They stood atop a crane above a construction site, hundreds of feet above the ground; in the air between them flashed and flickered the nascent silver-white portal from where all the dimensions of existence had begun to bleed together when the might of the Key—of Dawn's inner nature—had been poured into the weak point between the worlds. Even as they watched, a huge, horned, winged beast of some alien realm burst through the portal and soared into the moonlit sky.

A muffled scream escaped Dawn's lips and she lost her balance. Between one heartbeat and the next, Buffy was there, holding her sister up by nothing but the knot in the cords binding her arms. Had Dawn been watching instead of facing downward, she likely would have seen Buffy's form blur the way Buffy had seen Faith's streaking across the serene landscape of Rhuidean on their first night in the Aiel world.

"This could happen to you anytime you come here," Buffy grated in her sister's ear. "That what you want?"

Dawn shook her head madly, wildly, though whether that was in response to Buffy's question or simply a product of sheer panic was beyond her to say.

The human side of Buffy's mind finally reached Sergeant Summers with the message that she had crossed a line. Suddenly disgusted with herself, Buffy returned the two of them to the Summers kitchen. The ropes and cloths that had bound her sister vanished like they had never existed. Perhaps the Wise Ones would say that they never really had, but Buffy wasn't much for metaphysics. If it could kill you, it existed, as far as she was concerned.

"You could have gotten out of that," she continued, forcing herself to finish the lesson she had begun in anger and frustration. She wished she could take back the last thirty seconds of her life, but this was hardly the first time she'd thought that, and she was no more likely to have her wish come true in this dreamworld than she was in the waking world. "You could have stopped to think and realized that it was only a dream; you could have realized that it was your blood that opened the portal, and you weren't bleeding. But you didn't. And even if you did, you'd have had to force that reality on me, with me concentrating on holding it together—and I know for a fact that there are people out there in this dreamworld better at this than me, and not likely to suddenly let you go once they have you. You starting to get it?"

Dawn was still in tears.

"Look at me!" Buffy took Dawn's head in her hands and locked her eyes. "You said you'll be careful. Now listen. The only way you can be careful here is not coming back. I'm forcing myself to learn this because it's not my choice to come here. I either figure this stuff out or I die. You're not in that boat, and we should both be thankful for that."

She had either reached Dawn, or Dawn had simply cried herself out. That had been a horrible memory to bring back for Dawn, but Buffy had needed something that she could remember with crystal clarity and fix in her mind even through her anger at her sister's intransigence.

You tended to remember the places you died. Well, assuming you survived.

That made absolutely no sense, she thought a moment later. Except that in my world, it kind of does.

"So what should I do?" Dawn asked. Her voice was still hoarse and weak.

"It sounds like Angel and Giles and the others have the right idea," Buffy replied. "Figuring out how to work the Stones so that they can get through and get back. Maybe you'll figure out something on your end before Willow has a chance to figure things out in Tar Valon. Egwene already said that they don't actually have anyone who knows how to work them, so we're relying on Willow's book skills. Which, you know, I'd never sell short, but that's going to be one ginormous library to work through, and there's no telling that they actually have what we're looking for at all."

"I get it," Dawn said flatly, her voice showing signs of tight control. "But seriously, Buffy—what if you want to get in touch with us? Or us with you? This could be the only way we've got."

Buffy was about to explode again, thinking Dawn was just trying to get her to reconsider, but she controlled herself. Dawn was asking a serious question.

The answer was obvious enough. "The other Slayers," she said. "Let some of them sleep on the platform if you've got news. I'm usually asleep second shift, so graveyard hours. Faith doesn't come here, so coming when she's sleeping won't do any good because none of the Slayers know what the Hyperion basement looks like. But they all camped out at la Casa de Summers. Slayers at least start out stronger here than most other things. At least, from the impression I got from the Wise Ones, they were glad we were raw and untrained, and I know I've been learning fast. If you've got to risk someone, they can make the try ... but seriously, even they should try this only if there's something big going on."

"What if you want to get in touch with us?"

"Might have to live without that."

Dawn simply nodded. Buffy cringed. There was a dullness in her eyes that hadn't been there before, and Dawn wasn't pressing the issue—as if she no longer really cared if Buffy wanted to communicate with Earth or not, even though she'd brought up the issue.

"Dawnie ... I'm really sorry ..."

Dawn fixed her with a flat stare, and Buffy could see written there what she already knew—she'd hurt Dawn. A lot. Buffy didn't lose many staring contests, but she looked away resignedly and conceded defeat without even fighting this one. She still told herself that she had to have done it, that it was better her than the Wise Ones or something much worse, but she wasn't completely sure she believed it herself anymore.

"I know why you did it," Dawn said, softly, almost too soft even for Buffy's ears to hear. "But I still kind of hate you right now."

Buffy's spine stiffened at hearing that word fall from Dawn's lips, especially in such a quiet voice—Dawn, always the emotional one, almost never had that kind of ice in her words. Well, it wasn't like she didn't deserve to be a little hated at the moment.

"Come on," Buffy said. "Let me put you to bed. I'll stay with you until you wake up in the real world. The monsters under the bed may actually be real here, but they'll have to get through me first."

Dawn managed a wan smile. It wasn't much, but Buffy was grasping onto whatever she could. It was a start. Of course, she had thought much the same in the bedroom earlier when Dawn had finally managed a faint smile a few moments after having a sword in her face, too.

Buffy was as good as her word, though her promise put less demand on her time than she anticipated. She talked about anything, everything—just babbled, albeit softly—for a time, then realized Dawn was actually falling asleep, and fell silent, just looking at her sister, wondering how deeply she had cut her. A tear clouded the vision in one of her eyes, and she angrily flicked it away and repressed the others that threatened to follow it, telling herself that she'd need both eyes sharp if anything did happen upon her ephemeral sanctum while Dawn slept here. Dawn's breathing steadied into the natural rhythms of sleep.

A heartbeat later, she faded from view.

Buffy tensed and straightened; had that been supposed to happen? Was that a good thing? She and Faith didn't vanish in the dreamworld when they fell asleep here. They vanished when they woke up-Buffy had knocked Faith awake from within the dream during their first night here. Then again, the Wise Ones seemed to step in and out of the dreamworld without necessarily waking up. They did, didn't they? They had to. Hadn't two of them been trying to teach Faith how to step back into her own natural dreams-into normal sleep? But even if the Wise Ones stepped in and out of the dreamworld with ease, and vanished when they left, did that mean Dawn had gotten out, or did that mean that Dawn might have simply woken up somewhere else in the dreamworld?

"Dawn? Dawn?" she cried into the empty room.

She thought of attempting what she had done to call Faith to her, but that only risked pulling Dawn out of peaceful sleep if she had in fact gone back into her own body. She had tried to call Willow to her side on that night and had failed, but she had learned that that was because Willow had in fact still been awake at that time. She had been able to call Willow into the dreamworld to meet Egwene. She wasn't going to risk pulling Dawn from what might be a natural—and safe—sleep right back into the world she had just warned Dawn to avoid.

On the other hand, if she couldn't bring Dawn back to her, it might still be possible to go to where Dawn was. She knew it was possible. The Wise Ones certainly found their way around easily enough. She just needed to figure out how.

She cleared her mind. "Dawn … where are you … ?"

The world around her spun and stretched, dissipating like an ink stain on water. Replacing it, or perhaps behind it the whole time, was only blackness, punctuated by unnumbered pinpoints of light like distant stars. They were smaller and closer, though, in some way Buffy couldn't quite describe. The ones that were nearest looked like phantasmal glass orbs; she could see things moving in them. She tried to look down at herself, but it was too pitch black for her to see her own body. The endless rush of crystal stars appeared to shine in the darkness, but none of their light reached her. It gave her the sense of being nothing but an incorporeal spirit in the void, an awareness detached from anything resembling eyes and nerves and a brain. She shook her head to clear her mind of those thoughts. The pattern of stars before her did not so much as wobble as she did so. She allowed herself a shiver, and there was no sense of her muscles or limbs moving as it went through her. She shivered again.

She turned her attention to the stars. Some seemed almost close enough to touch. As soon as she focused on one, it appeared to grow nearer in her vision, even though she felt no sense of movement. Perhaps it was moving towards her. Perhaps the very concept of movement was alien in this place. Regardless, in a matter of moments, the star came to rest before her. Not a star at all. It was a perfect globe of light that rippled like water. There were people moving within it. She recognized one. Hurac plodded across a land so bleak and featureless that it made the Aiel Waste seem lush. The sun in the sky above him was vast, low, dark, and red. The color seemed pale in the dreamlit globe at first, washed out as most of Tel'aran'rhiod, but the color deepened the longer she looked at it until it was as vivid as a real dream. Suddenly, Hurac's dream was accompanied by sound, as a rush of insectoid hissing and chattering reached Buffy's ears. Suddenly, from either side of Buffy's field of vision, as if coming from behind her, black scorpions scuttled across the featureless landscape on Hurac's trail. They seemed to match his pace perfectly, never getting closer, never allowing him to lengthen his lead. Buffy didn't want to think what might happen if his stride faltered, but it was as perfectly uniform as the land itself as he plunged doggedly onward.

Buffy pulled away. The globe receded until it was no larger than a golf ball, though it remained closer than any others she could see. No, that wasn't true. Out of the corner of her eye, she caught a glimpse of one that was even closer, perhaps the size of a tennis ball. She concentrated on it and it grew again, and this time, it was still several paces away-if paces they could be called-when she recognized whose it was. Even through the ghostly, luminescent membrane of these dream-windows, there was no mistaking that hair-or the library of Sunnydale High, long since destroyed in their world.

Willow stood alone in the middle of the rotunda in the center of the library. She had somehow moved the furniture; long tables made a square that had been wedged open at one corner. Every square inch was covered in books and manuscripts.

She was using magic, too.

Diagrams scribed in fiery golden and silver letters hung in the air, ringed with ancient runes. Traceries of the constellations orbited in the air above her head, changing with her movements, and their presence was no accident; Willow would occasionally stare up at them and then back to a chart on a page, comparing or interpreting, Buffy couldn't tell. The books on the tables changed, too. Buffy watched her reach for a thick red volume bound in leather and come up with the cracked, black volume Vampyr that Giles had first shown her when she hadn't yet known he was a Watcher. Once, she reached for a thin, spiral-bound notebook and picked up a polished stone tablet. If it were as heavy as it looked, Willow shouldn't have been able to lift it; she held it as if it weighed no more than the notebook that had been there originally. She copied some writing on it into the air in letters of dark red flame, intertwining them with a diagram already hanging there in rippling silver moonlight.

Buffy watched, spellbound, as Willow worked in her dream. Did she often dream like this? Unlike Hurac, she seemed to know what she was doing. This dreaming Willow had much more of a purpose than Hurac had-in fact, even more than Willow herself had had when Buffy had called her mind into Tel'aran'rhiod to talk to the Aiel Wise Ones. Willow appeared to finish what she was working on, and turned to a rough ceramic chalice sitting in the middle of one of the tables, atop a stack of books that looked a lot like the Encyclopedia Britannica. It was covered with a small square of white cloth; Willow cast this aside and held the chalice up before her, just above her eyes. A vortex swallowed the fiery letters, gold and silver and red swirling down into the chalice as if caught in a whirlpool. When Willow lowered the chalice, it was filled with swirling, liquid light of pure white, dim enough not to blind the eyes but bright enough that Buffy didn't want to look at it overlong. She didn't have to. Willow emptied a small vial of what looked like just water into the chalice, then drank. She swallowed carefully, then gave a long sigh.

The globe went dark and faded.

Buffy stood still-if "standing" meant anything in this place-for a while after that, puzzling over what she had seen and where she had landed herself. It didn't get her anywhere, but it let her clear her head again. It took her a few moments to remember what she had been doing when she stumbled into this tenebrous void in the first place.

Dawn, she thought.

The great constellation of dreams shifted slightly, but none drew closer.

DAWN! she projected the thought with all of her might. Another slight shift, like the stars drifting across the night sky. No nearby globes presented themselves the way Hurac's and Willow's had. It occurred to her that Dawn might not be dreaming at all, but she had a sad, sinking feeling that that wasn't the case. After what Buffy had just put her sister through, it was unlikely that Dawn was sleeping soundly at the moment. And Buffy was well aware that somewhere out there in this dreamworld, there was a border with Earth. She had crossed it herself in the more realistic-looking part of this dream every night since coming here. Somewhere out there, Dawn was dreaming, and if she was dreaming, Buffy could find her. She was sure of it. She cast her gaze out amid the stars once again.

Suddenly, she gave a start, or at least, her mind did; the constellations of dreams continued their slow, stately dance. There, in the farthest distance, so faint that even Buffy wouldn't have believed even her own preternatural eyes had her heart not suddenly pulsed with the certainty that she was seeing truly, there was a faint sparkle of green.

Pure green energy.

The moment it flashed in her vision her heart leapt-as did the entire star-studded void. The sensation of motion was so sudden and so unexpected that she would have tripped, had there been anything to trip over. The dream-lights around the distant green sparkle fanned out into blurred streaks to all sides as Buffy rocketed past them. Onward and onward she soared, seeming to cast herself forever through that abyss. There was a brief period of near-total darkness when she cast herself beyond the boundary of one galaxy of dreams, but the lights of another shone in the dark, and it was from there that the green spark came. Down into the new mass of dreams she plunged, darting past dreams so quickly that they seemed to form a tunnel of striated lights around her. Then, almost before she realized she was doing it, she stopped. The streaks of light resolved into soft, shimmering globes dancing with the images of millions of unwary dreamers, suspended in nothingness. The fleeting sense of motion vanished. And hovering in the near distance before her was one lonely sphere, closer than any of the others, was a sphere, argent like all the others at its core, but limned with pulsing emerald radiance that cast flares and streamers of light into the void.

Dawn. There was no one else it could be. Thinking on how many millions of dreams she had to have passed to get here, there was no one else she could possibly have sensed at that distance.

She breathed a silent sigh of relief. Dawn was safe in her own dreams again-probably not pleasant ones, particularly after what Buffy had just put her through, but ones that wouldn't leave cuts and bruises, or worse. She turned to go.

The flaring green orb drew nearer.

Buffy's eyes widened. She was definitely not trying to move towards it. It was moving towards her.

She surged backward through the dream-spangled void in the general direction from which she had come. The points of dreamlight stretched into filaments again around her as she retreated.

The green spark was even nearer to her when she stopped moving than it had been when she started.

Startled, she burst away through the void again, this time in a random direction. Again the green light was nearer when she stopped than when she started, despite the endless rush of other dreams that she had flown past in her mad, bodiless dash to get away. The green orb was almost near enough that if she reached out with one hand-or whatever passed for a hand in this place-she could touch it. Panic welled up in her awareness as she surged away one more time. The orbs around her seemed to stretch to filaments once more, then spread to ribbons just before the world flashed green.

Thwack!

A scream burst from Buffy's lips as the sting of the lash coursed down her back again. She could feel heat on her naked back and chest, but couldn't see a thing; a thick, soft blindfold covered her eyes, darkening her world to midnight and more.

Thwack!

Buffy had been beaten before; in some remote corner of her mind, the rational corner that retreats and hides in dreams, she knew that she had been hit harder than this before and endured it without so much as a gasp, but this hurt, somehow, more than the weight and sharpness of the blows should have allowed it to hurt. She struggled, but whatever held her hands above her head was as unyielding as steel, and a high, thick collar of leather or hide around her neck prevented her from twisting her head from side to side or up and down.

Thwack!

She tried to speak, to rage, to plead, to demand answers, but her voice refused her commands. Instead, another gasp and cry of pain tore from her lips.

"How about now?" Buffy started. The voice was Dawn's! Of course-it was Dawn's dream. She had known that since the moment the green light started moving toward her. But-Dawn? Seriously? Dawn's voice continued. "You look like you've got something you want to say to me. Of course, that's just because I'm looking at you. You always have something to say. Come on, Buffy. What's tonight's lecture about? Did you forget your syllabus, professor?"

Thwack!

"Dawn, this is enough," Buffy began, and Buffy started. She had not tried to speak this time! Her dream-self, her Dawn's-dream-self, was acting on its own. And it didn't sound like her. Its voice held nothing of the concern for Dawn's safety that Buffy always made sure she put first in her mind when she had to try to remind Dawn that she wasn't a Slayer; this was condescending and patronizing. It was, indeed, like she was beginning a lecture. "I'm not trying to lecture ..."

"Oh, no? It's just that effortless?" Buffy felt Dawn's hands at either side of her head, and a moment later, the blindfold tore away.

Dream-Buffy and real-Buffy-should I even call myself that? I'm dreaming, too?-Both Buffies gasped. The Dawn that stood before her was nothing like the innocent, often-petulant younger sister that Buffy remembered growing up fighting to protect. She stood before Buffy in a short-sleeved black jacket and form-fitting trousers of supple, oiled midnight leather, the jacket held together by only a single button just below Dawn's chest. Fingerless gloves of the same material helped her maintain her grip on a long, curved whip that pulsed darkly with an umbral radiance beyond the range of seeing. Her hair was pulled back away from her face. Her eyes were bright, focused, and predatory, and deep within them, Buffy could see sparks of green fire, emerald suns burning at the bottom of a fathomless ocean.

They stood on the glassine floor of a high, domed cavern. Buffy was naked from the waist up save for the high collar, and her arms were held aloft by soft-lined but unforgiving manacles of some unfamiliar dark hide. The cord holding them up vanished into impenetrable blackness.

"I've got a better idea," Dawn said. "Why don't I give you a lecture for a change?"

Buffy, the part of her that remembered being sucked into this dream, this nightmare, tried to simply grit her teeth and fight to free herself. The dream-her that she had come to share bodies with since entering Dawn's dream had other ideas. "Because you need to know what you're talking about first." She couldn't believe that the dream-her had just said that.

Dawn's eyes burned. One minute, she was standing three strides away from Buffy; the next, she was next to Buffy, who, despite her struggles, and despite what should have been vastly superior strength, couldn't stop Dawn from forcing a thick, balled knot in the center of a long black scarf past Buffy's teeth, winding it around her mouth, and tying it off tightly behind her head. The tiny sliver of Buffy's consciousness that was still her own goggled.

"Lesson one," Dawn began, pushing Buffy's head down from behind, her arms somehow able to accommodate the move, though she could no longer see to where the cord above her head led. Buffy found herself bent forward at the waist, looking at the high, black boots inlaid with silver that Dawn had dreamed upon herself. "Helpless screaming."

Buffy learned well.

AUTHOR'S NOTES: Thanks again to everyone who has viewed this and reviewed this over the years; it's rewarding to be able to make a somewhat rarer Buffy crossover stand out on . My free time has become more limited over the past couple of years, so it's possible that there will just be another few chapters and then another long hiatus, but nevertheless, I've thoroughly enjoyed writing this and certainly intend to work on it as best I can in the future.

COMING SOON: Chapter 10, "Sisters and Rivals." Buffy and Dawn wake with their thoughts of Buffy's excess; meanwhile, Faith meets another of the Heroes in Tel'aran'rhiod.