Death becomes him: Life, the universe...
by bob_obo
Life and death. Most people think of them as quite distinct, immiscible states, with the former as as brief but interesting interlude en route to the latter. Of course, boundaries always tend to get blurred when magic is involved.
Xander had spent his entire life living on that border. A lifetime growing up in Sunnydale, going to school directly above the worlds largest hellmouth, had merely been the equivalent of a 3.0 on the supernatural Ricter scale. Once he'd met Buffy, he'd been hurtled non stop through a magical maelstrom like a chicken in a hurricane.
He'd started to suffer from random moments of undirected terror at rare, seemingly calm moments in his life (usually around 3 am). This is because magic is not necessarily linear. Magic obeys its own rules, like a French motorist those rules can seem completely arbitrary to an observer. Effect might just follow cause, but there is no guarantee that it would even be the right effect. It might just as likely be an effect from a spell cast last Tuesday, or a random magical squall half way round the world ripples across the world.
Of course, for most of us this is completely invisible and undetectable. Random background magic washes over us with no more ill effect than random radiation. If you were able to see it somehow, like mystical thermal goggles, it would be like finding another world all around us.
Scientists know about it. They know that the universe should be much, much lighter than it is. Newton called it the universal constant, then felt slightly silly about it. Now they call it dark matter, and for some reason feel less silly.
The universe has mass - far more than it should.
It's found here.
Magic drifts across the world everywhere, thick as soup. Sometimes it is swept by invisible currents, sometimes it hangs in the air - becalmed and dancing like dust in the sunlight. Sometimes it forms great clouds, glistening crystalline nebula like formations that have driven people mad with their beauty.
And things... live in this. Not just vampires and demons - parasites that uncomfortably straddle the fence between both worlds, existing only though leeched magic and surviving through taking from our world. Other things. Creatures of pure magic, intangible to us as we are to them, drifting majestically through the the universe, feeding on raw magic like humpback whales feeding on plankton.
And then there are the wizards, the warlocks and witches. Directing and shaping the intangible currents around them, compacting them into almost a solid thing, then throwing out magic like great fireworks, mostly ignorant or uncaring as they ripple out like stones in a pond, changing and being changed by the great pattern all around us.
Most people walk through this oblivious, without causing or feeling any kind of effect. At most they pick up a trace of magic, like a thin layer of dust as magic settles momentarily, then is shifted and caught back in the stream. But... if someone is saturated with an unusually large amount of magic – things become a little different.
They begin to congeal - the coating becomes a film; the film becomes a layer; the layer becomes a shell.
Unknowingly they begin to affect the invisible pattern around them. Usually it manifests as just little things that the individual can even pass of as just luck or 'fate'. Maybe you know someone who always seems to get lucky with dice, maybe you seem to run into long lost relatives more often than seems plausible. For the most part, such individuals are relatively harmless.
But occasionally, just occasionally, some unfortunate individual is subjected to repeated 'doses' of magic. If by extraordinary chance they survive, they start to take on... mystical weight. They start to find themselves drawn towards magical beings and occurrences, and conversely magic begins to gravitate towards them. A whirlpool of energy envelops them, sucking more and more magic in until it reaches a critical point -
Xanders unofficially status as 'demon magnet' was more true than he knew, and after a time even the slight background magic started to coalesce faster and faster around his oyster like essence.
Unfortunately, there were things in this world (or at least in neighboring dimensions close enough to stick their heads through the window) to whom that became a beacon. Some were drawn with no more thought than a moth to light, and with no more regard for the consequences, others regarded an oyster as nothing more than a pleasant snack. There was a third kind however – possibly even more dangerous than the first two. The kind that considered a pearl as a rare and precious treasure, to be protected and possessed and controlled. And if by some cruel quirk of fate they could not posses it, then they would see it destroyed utterly.

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