Did I say forty parts earlier? Let's try forty-three. Ish.

Clapping.

Clapping

Thanks, but ending the world? Harder than it looks.

Worth the wait, then.

Spike and Connor fell back to back against the encroaching hoard of monsters,

Homophone. You want 'horde' here.

Willow strode toward Oz, her strength quickly regaining.

You want either 'quickly regaining her strength' or 'her strength quickly regained' here.

Thanks, but ending the world? Harder than it looks.

I believe you; the effort is admirable.

Thanks, Karl. Fixes made.

Pssh. Ending the world is easy. Ending it this well and interestingly, however, I imagine would be real hard. SO ready to read it all in one go.

Pssh. Ending the world is easy. Ending it this well and interestingly, however, I imagine would be real hard. SO ready to read it all in one go.

Me to! Hope it all concludes in a satisfactory manner--what I'm attempting to pull in these last bits is ... well, hard. I think it's all coming together.

If you pull it too much, you could go blind, Victor. Ok, if that was one of my first thoughts of the morning, it must be time to write Munch again soon. Sorry.

Part Forty-Two: Start Again

“The world is older than any of you know,” said Giles, “and contrary to popular mythology, it did not begin as a paradise. For untold eons, Demons walked the earth; made it their home…their hell.”

Amy was not present for that conversation, but she can see it so clearly in their minds—Giles, Buffy, Xander, Willow—each and every one of them recalled it as they watched the First and Jasmine stare each other down—the assembled heroes, villains and monsters waiting for one of them to make a move; Wesley, particularly, fixed upon his doppelganger.

She could follow the strand of memory back in time.

“In time, they lost their purchase on this reality,” said and the way was made for the mortal animals. For man.”

Angel and his team are lost in memories of Illyria, Amy realizes, and she follows that thought to the Deeper Well. “There’s a Hole in the world,” says Spike. “You’d think we would have noticed.”

There was always something missing. She gathers time together, infinitesimal tachyons soaking into her flesh. She is not Amy Madison. A smooth British voice is reading her a children’s story. She is not Winifred Burkle, but she can see the wisps of her spirit coalescing before her—slim, beautiful woman she thinks. Fragile. All these human beings are fragile. This movement in three dimensions. It is a cage. It is a prison.

And in an instant, she is standing among the heroes and the villains and the monsters—her skin blue, armored in carcass. They tremble at her visage, for she is powerful, and beautiful.

“I am Illyria,” she says, staring at the First. “And there shall be a reckoning.”