The Wolf, the Ram and the Hart: The Final Battle
by redmoon
The Final Battle
So fades a summer cloud away;
So sinks the gale when storms are o'er;
So gently shuts the eye of day;
So dies a wave along the shore.
These were the Senior Partners, Angel thought, grown from demons scarcely above the stature of vampires to powers rivalling Destiny herself. They had found a vacancy in the needs of the world, of the living. They had found the space for evil in the minds of humans. They had filled it. Angel recalled Holland’s words from a lifetime ago We were there when the very first caveman clubbed his neighbour. Now they were here. In the flesh. As demons they still had physical form. With such immense power to control an inter-dimensional organization and hold communion with evil from every plane, yet unable to transcend from their grotesque bodies, they had remained hidden in this cave since they had corrupted the original Spanish sailors, sending them to the new world to establish Wolfram & Hart.
Now all culminating prophecy demanded that they face their rivals in the flesh. They had unwittingly brought to pass the interim which was necessary for the Challengers and the Champion to find them. They had brought forth the waves of demons, the apocalypses, the plages and everything needed to whet the blades that rose against them.
They had even tried to kill the Champion, at long last, to end the pitiful vampire with an army of slayer-demons. But the prophecy which had remained untranslated in every dimension had prepared for this. The Powers That Be had for once fully and in earnest worked against the Partners. Now the prophecy was coming to pass. The partners could do nothing but watch. All that powerful magic they wielded, all those hoards in servitude now laid to rest in the futility of struggling against Destiny. The single philosophy which guided their collective minds was appeased: They were. They always would be. There was no winning and no losing for them. This was a battle against neither Time nor Fate. This was the last line of the last paragraph of an ancient scroll. The last few curves of a long-dead dialect in a forgotten tongue. This was to be.
The hideous breath hissed through the fangs of the Wolf. He lunged.
The Ram lowered his head, falling onto all fours, the dagger-like tips of his horns now at head-level with Buffy. He charged.
The Wolf, in one quick motion, took Angel by the midsection in his great jaws, ripping him in half. His paw tore at the vampire’s chest as his teeth moved up around his prey’s neck. With the sound of tearing flesh, he tore off Angel’s head, scattering the dust of the kill to the floor.
Spike stood from the pile of ashes, looking up for the first time into his foe’s eyes. “Anyone else think I got the worst of this deal?”
The Hart blew a breath of putrid air into Willow’s face as he slowly lowered his array of stabbing points. He kept his delicate hands from the floor, but was more than capable of supporting his massive antlers with his powerful torso. He made a bleating howl and thrust his head towards the witch.
“Declinare” she shouted, holding up her still glowing canteen. The spikes jerked to one side, as if hitting a solid wall. The Hart reared up, furious, letting out an ear splitting animal scream. He plunged his head forward, throwing Willow and her spell to the other side of the room.
Buffy landed beside her, having been tossed like a doll by the wall of Ram skull which had impacted her. The slayer helped the witch to her feet, only to see the two creatures charging for them, intent on crushing their bones to the wall.
Spike held tightly onto the Wolf’s throat, his fingers pressing into his well armored jugular. He could feel the Wolf’s muscles working under his hands, each coil of powerful muscle as large as his arm.
The Wolf snarled, thrashing his head around to try and bit this thing which wouldn’t shed blood. He brought his hand up to the little clinging thing and raked his claws down its body. The little vampire howled in pain.
Willow ducked and rolled towards the Hart as he stopped his antlers just short of the rock wall. He quickly seized her with nimble fingers and lifted her to his slowly opening mouth.
Buffy leapt up just as the great mass of horn and skull met with the rock wall. The chamber shook as the wall cracked. The Slayer landed skillfully on the Ram’s head, dashing down his back to the ground as he stood and turned, bellowing in rage. He swung his head low, like a club and Buffy dodged and scurried away, finally keeping out of his sight, between his massive hooves.
Spike was torn to the ground under the crushing back paw of the Wolf. It pressed down hard as he shouted in pain. Then the fangs and slaver lowered down over his head and pulled it off with a crack.
Willow squirmed in the careful grip of the Hart as he lowered her into his mouth. “Cremare” she screamed as the guillotine-like teeth closed down over her. The Hart jerked his head back in pain, letting the little mouthful slip to the ground. His mouth was consumed with fire, his hands batting away the tongues of flame which leapt from his throat. He shrieked, expelling a great breath of flame.
Buffy delivered a vicious punch to the Ram’s kneecaps, then a kick to the back of his calves, to bring him to his knees, but the Ram just flinched, reached between its legs and pinned Buffy between the rock wall and the two sharp halves of its hoof.
Angel stood beneath the hairy behemoth as it coughed the ash that was Spike. In a moment of clarity, after the disconcertion had left him, he drove his fist up into the great beast’s gut. It whined and stood up, swatting Angel aside in a great blow of its hooked paw. He thudded against the wall, falling forward beside Willow. “We need weapons,” he said half to himself.
The Hart slammed a heavy foot down beside the witch. He sucked in the raging fire in his mouth and swallowed, expelling two columns of black smoke from his nostrils in a great, angry snort. He reached low and grabbed Willow by the face, preventing her from casting any more spells. He turned again to eat her.
Angel, standing neglected between the Hart’s slender legs began to wave his arms and shout to the Wolf who was on the other side of the chamber, rubbing his belly. “Hey!” he bellowed at the top of his lungs over the panting, growling and crashing around the room. The Wolf caught sight of him and charged.
Buffy ducked out of the scissor grip of the Ram before he could fully turn and see her. She somersaulted past his other grasping hoof and dashed for the door. They needed weapons
Angel lunged to one side as the Wolf slammed into the back of the Hart’s legs. The Hart toppled, again dropping the little witch. The Wolf, however, slipped out from under the shadow of the falling beast to snatch Angel again in his vicious jaws. This little creature just wouldn’t die.
Buffy skidded to a halt by the pool of black fluid surrounding the body of the fat giant she had slain. Her hand reached into the ooze and took the hilt of Spike’s short sword. The Ram burst through the great door, smashing chunks of stone from its frame. He gave a bleating bellow and fell to all four hooves, charging across the goblin chamber.
The chamber shook. Not in time with the hoof beats. Buffy glanced up as a chunk of sculpted ceiling stone, the size of a motorcycle cracked loose and fell to the floor. The Ram veered around it, picking up speed. The Slayer raised the blade to one side, like a baseball bat. Light was flooding into the chamber from the bright place above, through the gaping hole in the ceiling.
All in a flash the Ram was upon her. She leapt into the air above his head, as she had before, and he raised his horns, preparing to toss her when she landed. In that instant, as his great charging mass looked up, he took his bloodshot eyes from the floor and planted a heavy hoof down into the black ooze of the great dead monster before him.
Buffy slashed the blade across his brow before her feet even touched his hide. His eyes closed and he lost his balance, slipping through the flabby monster’s bile. Buffy jumped from the tipping Ram and landed expertly on the stone floor as the Ram ploughed into flabby, his powerful legs giving way beneath him as the chamber shook more violently.
Willow dodged the falling body of the Hart as he tried to steady himself without landing on his delicate fingers. Finally he stood, howling and snorting through his sweating nostrils. He lowered his antlers again, all eight spears aiming for the witch. Willow, exhausted and depleted lifted her dimly glowing canteen. She took a deep breath and closed her eyes as the Hart took all weight to one foot to impale her. “Pavitere!” she cried hoarsely. The chamber shook sickeningly, tilting to one side, like a small boat on a rough sea. The Hart’s hoof gave and he fell to his side, his antlers crashing into the floor sending reverberations through his skull.
A fault tore through the chamber, the sound of splitting rock overwhelming the sounds of battle. Pieces of debris fell from the ceiling as the bubble in the lava intrusive began to split.
Spike looked up from where he was laying, his face grey with Angel’s ash. He coughed once, not from the ash. “Sulphur,” he choked, rolling away from the Wolf’s back paw as it crashed into the floor, into the pile of ash.
A hissing plume of smoke broke free from the crack in the wall, catching the Wolf in the face, sending him whimpering and pawing at his eyes to the other side of the chamber. Spike scrambled to the great door to this chamber, past the Hart who was struggling to get up. Willow followed.
Buffy held the sword at the ready as the Ram made his way from the very pulverized body of the fat monster towards her. The chamber rocked again, sending a piece of stone the size of a small car tumbling down onto the Ram’s head. He paused only momentarily to shake away the dizziness, then charged forwards again. Smaller blocks were now crashing around them throughout the goblin chamber.
With a shriek, a man in a black suit fell from the ceiling. He was followed by three others. Each carried sophisticated looking, high powered machine guns, which fell away from them as they dropped in front of the charging Ram.
The Ram crushed the first into the floor with its massive, unforgiving hooves, despite that fact that he had summoned these agents from Wolfram & Hart to intercept those who would fulfil the prophecy.
The second tiny, black clad creature, a lawyer, was brushed aside with a blow of the Ram’s great head. The third and fourth scrambled aside in time, falling to the floor as the chamber shook again. The violent tipping of the floor sent the Ram to his knees, then sliding backwards as the end of the room where the fat monster lay dropped down suddenly.
One of the agents in black caught sight of Buffy and raised his automatic weapon.
Spike held tightly onto Willow’s arm as he dragged her into the now slightly wider tunnel entrance. The tunnel tipped forward, sending Willow sliding past Spike towards the far opening and the rain of falling rocks beyond.
Spike caught a lip of stone and held on as the tunnel tipped even more steeply, a deep vibration filling all surfaces. He pulled Willow back up the steep slope that was the floor and into the relative safety that was the tunnel inside the great door. At the top, the Wolf thrust his head inside, his breath filling the enclosed space as he sniffed for them.
With a yelp, he found himself fully inside the tunnel, a tight fit, but the antlers of the Hart behind him left him little choice. He snarled as he slid down the floor towards the two hiding heros.
“I’m going to let you go,” Spike told the redhead. And without another word, he dropped her down the slope, just as the chamber tilted violently in the other direction.
The Ram had just got to his feet when the chamber lurched the other way, sending him sliding off balance on ooze-coated hooves towards the Slayer. As he scrambled for footing, lowering his head for a final, lethal blow, he caught one of the black suited figures as it was rasing its little weapon. With a scream the little thing fell under the Ram’s heavy haunches, silenced with the sound of crushing bones.
Buffy raised her sword again. Her legs were trembling as she crouched low to avoid sliding down this crazy floor. Not from fear, but from the trembling of the entire chamber. The room was now angled back the other way, dipping down at a twenty degree angle towards the great door and its tunnel to the final chamber. With a shout of surprise, Buffy fell to her backside, Willow’s hand on her ankle.
Spike almost smiled as the slip-sliding Wolf’s snarl turned into an expression of confusion, his direction of slippage now carrying him away from the little vampire. As the tunnel tipped farther backward, the Wolf exited the tunnel, falling past the waiting Hart, thumping painfully over the lip of the now disjointed fault which ran horizontally across the floor, and slamming into the far wall.
Spike’s almost-smile disappeared as the tunnel shook him loose of his footing and sent him falling after. His hands futilely scraping the walls of the tunnel as he slid, he fell hard against the ankle of the waiting Hart, who, with a great kick, sent him flying down past the Wolf who was now charging back up to the tunnel.
There was an ear-splitting sound, as of a stone building falling down, and the end of the final chamber upon which Spike now stood jerked upwards, leveling relative to the tunnel and the other room. With a hiss of sulphur dioxide, the fault split wide open, great plumes of heat blasting up to the cracking ceiling.
The volcano, the center of the Abandoned place, the center of a bubble-portal to the lonely hell dimension in which the Senior Partners found their security, cracked across its middle. The crows scattered.
The great hall, in which lay the countless bodies of the unsuccessful challengers and champions, collapsed in on itself in a titanic cloud of shattered cinder. The cone of the volcano was reduced to a pile of hissing and trembling rubble. The wall of incantations lay unbroken across the rocky debris, its edges releasing plumes of yellow gas as the pressure in the vent beneath it built.
“Digerere!” Willow said as the last of the light in her canteen failed, throwing herself and Buffy to opposite sides of the goblin chamber as the Ram slid between them. Seeing now the furnace which awaited him on the opposite side of the tunnel, beyond the great door, the Ram urgently tried to check his fall, his hooves sliding mercilessly through the black ooze which trailed behind his coated legs. He let out an animal scream as his slid easily through the door he had earlier widened with his great horns.
Spike’s eyes widened as the ground beneath him dropped suddenly another four inches. His side of the final chamber pulled away from the tilted side, widening the red hot rift between each half. Spike scrambled to the edge and looked down as pieces of the cinder cone from above began to fall into the chamber through the fault. Far below the edge upon which the vampire knelt churned a river of magma.
Spike’s gaze lifted as he heard the braying of the Ram as he slid unchecked out of the tunnel towards the chasm. The vampire backed up to the wall of the narrow ledge upon which he now found himself as the terrified Ram slid between the Hart and the Wolf over the edge and down into the molten river below. His matted wool burst into green flames almost immediately as he crossed the furnace of heat emanating from the fault and his screams were lost.
Now Spike did smile. He waved his arms back and forth, shouting to attract the attention of the Wolf. As the vampire looked up, he could see the red daylight of this dimension streaming down through the top of the chamber. The daylight met the glow of the lava river near the ceiling of this bubble in the mountain. The Wolf looked across the gap and let out a blood curdling howl.
Spike simply grinned and charged.
Buffy slid down the floor, against the side wall of the goblin chamber to come to rest against the bottom wall. She looked sideways past the great door, which was shimmering with heat from below, and saw Willow, in the opposite corner.
Willow looked back to Buffy, letting the now dark canteen fall from her exhausted grasp. She sighed and fell back against the wall, unaware of the small green spot which played across her chest, moving up over her face to her forehead.
The last man in the black suit tightened his grip on his weapon. He blocked out the commotion from the chamber below and gazed through his scope to the witch in the far corner. His sweating finger closed over the trigger.
Out of nowhere, another man in a suit appeared. He stepped right into the agent’s line of fire. It was not a standard suit. His finger relaxed as he looked up from his scope. Andrew smiled down at him.
Spike charged forward, his legs pumping as fast as they would go. The Wolf let himself slide down towards the edge, then pushed off hard, making a great bound over the chasm, intent on catching this little thing in mid flight.
Spike likewise jumped into the air over the furnace, closing his eyes and flinging himself into the opening jaws. Intense heat washed over him. Over the raging heat, the jaws closed over nothing. The glowing cloud of ash of the incinerated vampire rose carelessly up the chamber, carried on a column of hot air, out the crack in the ceiling into the hellish daylight.
The Wolf’s jaw snapped shut, his eyes opened. His paws swept through the air, looking for purchase, finding none. With a yelp of desperation, the Wolf fell through the sweltering air, his hide already consumed in green flame. He vanished into the river of flowing rock.
The Hart let out a howl of such rage that for a moment the mountain was quiet. The triumvirate was in tatters. The pact they had held with Destiny was broken. Fury boiled up inside him as his nimble hands carried him up through the tunnel towards the white lit goblin chamber above. Black ooze ran past his feet.
Andrew’s hand reached down for the agent’s face. The agent’s eyes widened. The man before him had received a bullet between the eyes from this very gun. He now took eleven more. Andrew didn’t even flinch as the bullets tore through his suit and out his back.
The agent scrambled back from the rock behind which he had been hiding. Andrew advanced on him. The agent stood and turned to run and stopped suddenly as Giles appeared in his way. Giles reached out with both hands for the agent’s face, making him cry out in horror. He threw down his gun, seeing the already bullet riddled body of the Watcher he had killed. He turned in a new direction only to find there the young girl he had nailed to the wall. Dawn’s hand gripped his face with terrifying force. He squealed as his jaw cracked under her fingers. He tore himself away and dashed down the chamber, dodging the form of Xander who stood with both arms outstretched.
The agent finally reached the great door, near the body of his crushed comrade, one of the four best agents Wolfram & Hart had ever trained. He reached down and took the man’s gun. With a snarl of hatred, he turned the gun on the four figures which slowly walked towards him from further up the floor. The gun dealt out round after round into their bodies as they slowly made their way towards him. He ignored the Slayer and the witch as they scrambled up the sides of the chamber to the far exit which led to the plateau. He screamed over the roaring of falling rock and the shaking of the whole mountain as he emptied his magazine into the figures before him. Finally, in a sudden instant of total calm, all four of them stopped, their blank expressions unreadable.
The agent’s battle cry was abruptly silenced as four long spear-like points drove themselves through his armored vest, sticking out like the tines of a fork. He gasped in surprise as the spears lifted him off the tilted floor and into the air. The gun slipped from his hands just as the two Challengers slipped from the exit, over the crack in the door frame to the relatively level plateau.
The Hart raised his head. The agent impaled on his left antler sagged and was silent. “Idiot” the Hart said in a hissing, terrible voice. The four figures before him made no move. He raised his slender hand and aimed a long clawed finger at them. “Our arrangement,” he said slowly, his voice cutting through the ruinous sounds around them, like the voice of all death in vain, “our arrangement is over,” he breathed. With that he balled his fists and raised his head to the light that poured in from the broken ceiling.
A great swelling darkness, as of noxious fumes, was expelled from every pore on his towering body. He seemed to grow ever taller, his antlers twisting and enmeshing as if they were the branches of some horrid tree. The agent caught in them was snapped and broken like a toy as the tines which pierced him twisted and coiled together. Each antler, as the Hart now stood in the cloud of vile blackness, was a thick pointed horn, growing backwards from the skull, but immediately curving out and forwards with a gentle curve to bring their wicked tips just ahead of his brow. His hide grew thick and mottled, lumpy horns and spines jutting out across his back and shoulders. His legs lost their slender nature and became bulky, muscular pillars of power. He raised his arms to either side, the cloud about him crackling with red lightening, arcing between his hands.
His horse-like face grew longer and more disproportionate, his eyes growing to enormous size. His pupils thinned to slits and began to glow with the force he now granted himself.
The arrangement was over.
This story archived at: The Slayer\'s Fanfic Archive
The Slayer\\\\\\\\'s FanFic Archive - http://www.slayerfanfic.com/viewstory.php?sid=9698