WILLOW: Thaumogenesis!

ANYA: She's possessed!

WILLOW: Thaumogenesis.

DAWN: (to Anya) You're right.

WILLOW: I'm not possessed. I-I think I figured it out. This demon, i-it's not a demon we let out. It's, it's a demon that we made.

XANDER: We made a demon? Bad us.

WILLOW: Thaumogenesis is when doing a spell actually creates a being. In this case it was like, a, a side-effect, I guess. Like a price.

DAWN: What?

WILLOW: Think of it like, the world doesn't like you getting something for free, and we asked for this huge gift. Buffy. A-and so the world said, 'fine, but if you have that, you have to take this too.' And it made the demon.

ANYA: Well, technically, that's not a price. That's a gift with purchase.

DAWN: Um, but, if we made the demon, how come we can't see it? I mean, all we see is us. Doing stuff.

WILLOW: Well, I, I think it's out of phase with this dimension. Like, its consciousness is here, but, but its body is caught in the ether between existing and not existing.

TARA: It doesn't have a body, so it's borrowing ours. I-it borrowed Dawn and Anya...

WILLOW: Or, or it's manifesting copies of them, like, like it did when Buffy came at us...

TARA: It's using them to do stuff. To scare us, attack us.

XANDER: So we need to uncreate it, right? We need to send it the rest of the way out of our world.

WILLOW: Uh-huh. Except that ... it's linked to the spell. So, if we sent it away ... it would be like the spell doesn't exist. Like it never happened.

DAWN: Like it never brought Buffy back.

WILLOW: (softly) Yes.

DAWN: You can't do that. You can't think for a second that you're going to do that.

TARA: Dawn-

DAWN: If you think you can give her back to me and then take her away again? No. That's worse than if you'd never brought her back. You can't mess with people's lives this way!

WILLOW: Dawn, we're not going to do it that way.

DAWN: How can you let her do this? How can you even talk about letting her go?

TARA: Honey, you're not listening. She said we will find another way.

XANDER: We will.

DAWN: Then do it!

WILLOW: Wait. Wait. Dawn. Everybody hold on.

ANYA: What? Why are you smiling? That's inappropriate.

WILLOW: Because it's temporary.

XANDER: What is?

WILLOW: The demon. I-it's gonna dissipate. The only way for it to survive on this plane is if it were to kill the subject of the original spell.

TARA: It would live if it killed Buffy?

WILLOW: That's not gonna-

POSSESSED XANDER: Thanks for the tip.

• Willow's Witchiness

written by: Jane Espenson; transcribed by Joan the English Chick; action descriptions condensed by me. . Full transcript at:
http://www.studiesinwords.de/103afterlife.html