Spike is laying back on the bed, in his room, aboard his interdimensional pod. Buffy has just come out of her first shower in days. She feels amazing. Who would have thought that a ship full of cockroach creatures from another dimension would have working plumbing and hot water? Spike asks her, as she’s drying her hair, if she fancies an explanation as to what’s going on. Buffy groans. She thinks they’re going backwards, back to ‘Suckydale’. She’s more interested in the Seed of Wonder and what exactly it is. And why does it have to be there? Spike laughs. It’s always been in Sunnydale, he explains. Before them, before the humans, before even the First, which he considers ironic. And it is exactly what it’s name implies: a seed.

He tells her more, the history of the Seed: the world, as they know it, all came from the Seed. The Seed found demons and horrors. It had somehow drawn them to itself, it’s power unimaginable. So it kept the demons around. Kept them on Earth, kept them from seeping through to other dimensions. It kept magic on Earth, and then rested, laying there, silent and alone for time immemorial, waiting, holding the magic in place. Spike calls it the equivalent of corking a bottle. If you pull the cork out, the pressure releases: once the Seed is broken, there’s nothing to hold it all back. So it’s been there, under the town of Sunnydale, protected by a guardian. As Spike puts it, “Bottle corked: world safe, nothing to fear. Unless a couple of super-powered morons who never got a higher education decided to shag a universe into existence.”

Buffy yells at him. “It wasn’t our fault!” Spike says that nobody said it was – until he did, right now! Buffy tells him that the universe planned the whole thing, set them up. “It was like we were out of control. I was elemental. Like we were outside ourselves… like we were the wind that swept us up.”

Spike looks at her, angry look on his face: “Can you think of a single creature on any plane of existence that wants to hear this less?” She apologises, but he was the guy she always told stuff to. She always told him the things she couldn’t tell anyone else.

“You’re my dark place, Spike,” she says and pulls him into a passionate kiss.

Buffy shakes awake, having missed all of Spike’s conclusions, daydreaming about kissing him. She missed a chunk of exposition. Spike recalls a time Giles told him she was a crap student. Spike knows who she was thinking about, but he’ll survive. He tells her to get to bed. “Bed? For sleep. Alone. Tired. Super tired. Need to rest.” Her thoughts right this second are not suitable for younger audiences, she blushes.

Elsewhere, huddled, knees pulled close to her, is Dawn Summers. She’s trying not to think about the bugs. It would be a good thing to not think about the bugs. Of course, since she’s surrounded, she can’t help but think of the bugs, and she’s starting to mumble insanely to herself in the corner. Xander comes up to her, bends down to her side and tells her that he’s not a fan either, and what if they got a place together?

This stops her thinking about the bugs. Instantly. “A place?” she asks.

He nods. “Assuming we survive, and I assume, we could get an apartment. Just us, not a hundred Slayers. You could go back to school, I’d get work, support us in barely-above-the-poverty-line style…” He pauses and looks at her. “Too much, too soon?”

She smiles and moves forward, putting their foreheads together. “Too good to be true. It’s what I’ve wanted for a while, but this war, Xander… how can we hope to get through it?” Through a grate nearby, the General hears them talking.

In Japan, a demon runs riot through the streets. The Slayer Squad of the city are not having much luck corralling it away from the citizens. Suddenly the creature is beheaded by a blur, and Angel, swooping down towards the Slayers, asks if they need a hand.

On the craft, Giles is feeling rather silly. He cannot understand how he couldn’t have known the location of the Seed. Willow tells him that with the amount of prophecies he had to work with, it’s kind of understandable. Spike says the only advantage they have is that they know where the Seed is. And the demons on Earth don’t want Twilight-demons getting their hands on it. That’s when the cork gets removed.

Willow, without any warning, collapses to the deck of the ship, hitting her head. She wakes in the realm of magicks, her guide, Aluwyn the Saga Vasuki, a short distance away. Aluwyn tells Willow that soon she’ll have no way of getting here to this realm. Willow knows – and thinks that’s kind of unavoidable when the world is ending. The Saga Vasuki refuses to look at her lover: Twilight will not win this. Willow and her friends, the heroes, will not allow that to happen, she reasons. “But Hell only pours in, if you remove the Seed. To belabour your vampire’s metaphor,… have you ever broken a cork inside the bottle? You will never get this one out, and the wine will be trapped forever.”

Willow is starting to understand, her face filling with dread as Aluwyn, still not turning to face her, continues: “Destroy the seed, the gate and the path are gone. Hell will have no avenue to your world.”

She finally turns to Willow, her white hair somehow slightly less shinier than Willow remembers it. Her face is filled with sorrow. “And you will have a world without magic.”

Willow’s mouth opens in shock. The snake lady starts to get emotional, tears beginning to form. “There would be vestiges, remnants of demonic power – like vampires, the Slayers already called, but the connection to all other realms will be severed and your world will lose something it doesn’t even know it needs.” She looks at Willow, who pulls her mentor in closer. Aluwyn can barely speak. “And those who draw their power from elsewhere, the witches, lose everything. It’s not only Twilight you have to stop Willow.”

Willow asks her one more question: she knows who betrays Buffy, doesn’t she?

In the real world, Willow shakes violently awake. She turns to Buffy urgently. “We have to protect the seed.”

Elsewhere, Angel has finished one battle and has started another. He tells one of the Slayers there what’s happening, and he’s trying his best, but more demons, more creatures, keep coming. And worse, he thinks, he’s starting to smell like them. But he doesn’t care that much because Buffy was right: he really needed this.

On the craft, Faith is sitting alone. Giles approaches her, wearily, unsure of his reception. He tells her the facts: they have to go to Sunnydale to find the Seed and prevent it’s removal. He knows she’s angry with him and that she wants to get on with her life, but the situation escalated quicker than he anticipated and he… “Needs the big guns.” She gets it. She just hopes she still has Slayers to help when all this is over.

At an observation port, Spike tells them that they’re above Sunnydale. He urges them to look below.

It’s a war zone: high above the Sunnydale crater, at it’s edges, are the US Army. Different demons are battling around, magic swerving in and out through the air, mixing with the very real human weapons being used to fight back. Buffy looks down at it, as Spike prepares cannon fire.

War, she thinks. My war. This is it. Spike asks if she’s ready, as does Willow. The witch looks her in the eyes. “We have to protect the seed. No one can get it.” Buffy rises, standing next to the open hatch, the wind blowing her hair.

“No one will,” she declares, as she leaps from the pod, Spike holding onto her waist for dear life, as they drop like stones to the Earth below.

As Willow is about to float down towards Sunnydale, Xander stops her. “Willow, it’s Sunnydale. You can’t leave me out of this.” He looks back behind him, at Faith, Giles and Dawn. “Take us home,” he asks.

At the bottom of the crater, having literally punched her way through into the buried epicentre of the town, Buffy stops. Spike looks around, amazed at the destruction. “Did I do all of this?” Buffy tells him that he did. But she’s not wasting time: “Where’s the Seed?” she asks, prepared for a battle.

Unfortunately for Buffy, the Master, a foe she killed over seven years ago, is behind her in seconds, throwing her aside like a rag doll. She’s unconscious without knowing what hit her. Spike recognises the protector of the Seed, but doesn’t seem to recognise the Master. The older vampire turns and seems disappointed: “It said you’d come, although she was supposed to be with the other one.” He smacks Spike to one side, blood now pouring from his nose.

“Twilight,” the Master scoffs. “You think your new world is worthy of this power? You have created nothing. A soulless shell, no matter what you might think of it. And this is what you bring for protection?”

He picks Spike up by the throat, effortlessly holding him steady. “Not protection,” Spike gloats, almost spitting in the Master’s face. “Distraction.”

Buffy stands behind the Master and reminds him: “You were talking about power?” With that, she slams the Master down, head first into the concrete floor. Spike smiles at her from out of the shadows. “My hero,” he jokes.

Elsewhere, after another gruelling battle, Angel surveys all the destruction around him. It’s massive. He sighs and looks around. “Okay,” he whispers to himself. “Got to continue the fight.”

A cat and a bird, separately come up behind him. The cat talks first, telling him that it’ll be a fight all right – he’s nowhere nearly finished with his work yet. The bird sits on the cat’s back, as Angel mentions he liked the dog better.

The entity is growing impatient. “I was just talking through those forms, father. The real me wasn’t born yet.”

Angel turns to face the cat, but it’s changed appearance, somehow, magically transformed. In it’s place is a Griffin, with green fire in place of it’s mane. It has large wings on it’s back, and a glowing tail. “But I’m here now, father,” it says. “You cannot deny the universe you created.”

“You will finish what you started.”