He looked into the mirror and sighed. Normally he would never think about wearing such a rediculous costume, but he had found nothing better at Ethan's store, after a pre-schooler had taken the last gun in the shop.
Xander sighed. The only thing this costume had going for it was, that it had been cheap and still avaible... of course, who would want a costume that consisted out of a blue shirt with some white print that should be bones on it, a huge colorfull plastic sword and a brown shawl thing that covered the bottom half of his face?
The worst thing was, that Xander knew which character this should represent, but he had seen costumes made by other, rabit fans of the series that were tons better than his... his was poor, plain and simply.
Well, it was better than nothing. And with a sigh he left to meet the girls at Buffy's home.
When Willow realized that something was terribly wrong, she ran to find Buffy and Xander. In her non-corporeal form she couldn't do anything to stop the madness, but her friends might know of a solution.
Then she found Xander. And things went from bad to worse. Where her body had simply collapsed and had gone through the change painlessly, Xander's body was fighting the transformation. Fighting and loosing.
Willow watched him change, helplessly and with a growing horror of knowing what he would become... Xander had played the games on her PC, so she knew the entire story behind the games and she really, really prayed he was the version from Defiance.
The change was over and he stood. Willow swallowed ghostly air. Time to find out.
He sat on top of the clock tower of the highschool, thinking.
The others had gone hime for the night, after the costume episode had been cleared up... for them.
There had be no such closure for him.
He had been about to tick Kain into stabbing him with the reaver, the future prison of his soul after he had finally realized that the destiny of the land was hinged on his choice of allowing himself to be caged or not. But then he had ended up here. In a different world, with different rules and magics and no Kain and no Bloodreaver to imprison him.
His body, formed by greater magics and destiny, had not returned to its previous form when the spell had been shattered. His memories had returned to him and part of him was quite upset that his life, his sufferings, were only a set of games for the mortals to amuse themselves. Here, in this world, his destiny would never come to its closure. And he had no idea if he should be upset about that or relieved.
He sighed once more and looked down at the wraithblade still attached to his arm. The spiritreaver was still part of him and somehow he knew that it would never leave him, it would always remain as it was now, empowered and cleansed through all the souls of the balance guardians before Kain.
The light of the reaver flickered as he dematrialised the blade.
This was not the time to think about might-have-beens or the paradoxial question why the wraithblade still could exist if he had never been absorbed into the reaver.
Once more his existence had been forced through a radical change of happenings and while the other half, the younger half of his strangely shared body had curled into a mental ball, unable to deal with it all at the moment, he had a bit more experience with earth shattering relevations. And deal with it he would. But not right now at this moment.
He stood up, jumped and used the remains of his wings to glide towards the closest graveyard. All this thinking had made him hungry... time to find some lost souls... and feed.