A/N: This is epic. Like, epically epic. I have been wanting to write this for about two years now, but always chickened out right as I sat down to start typing. Then, randomly, I get the urge to write something epic instead of my usual semi-AU angsty one-shot. So I take the plunge- my first official foray into real, multi-chaptered fanfic.
If you want to skip the history of the tii'ahna- yes, pronounced the same way as the Disney chick, and no, I didn't get the idea from that- just move on down to the line break. The real story picks up there, and there will be a sort of watered-down Tii'ahna for Dummies in some future chapter.
Beware, children, for here there be magic.
All the children know the legend of the tii'ahna. It's not a difficult story to learn- indeed, the hardest part of it is remembering which bits are truths and which bits are embellishments set in place by generations of parents wishing to teach their children a lesson. The story can be spun any one of a dozen directions to impress a certain moral upon young minds. The tii'ahna themselves certainly could not care less what their land-going cousins thought of them. Dirt-men, they call them. L'hrenli, in their liquid tongue. They scorn and scoff and turn away, and so the legend grows by abstract and absence. No one has met a true tii'ahna in over three generations. No one knows the elusive race well enough to laugh at the absurdities that become the flesh of the legend, clinging to the bones of the truth.
The legend, in its truest form, goes like this:
The men who lived on the southern coast of the northern sea all had to leave their towns one wild spring day, sailing into a storm to escape a war. The invaders settled in the abandoned homes to wait, confident of the sailors' return.
Return they did, but they were changed. They possessed powers now, inexplicable and unstoppable powers which they used to utterly crush the invaders. Here the stories vary greatly, as everyone has their own opinion of how they did this, or what that power was; some say there was no arcane involvement at all, only sound tactics and the advantage of surprise.
Say what you would, the people of the northern sea were changed, and still changing. Over three generations they took to the water more and more, for longer periods, until finally the great-grandchildren of those first sailors all at once left the land one day and did not return. They have gills now, the stories all agree, gills and a tail for swimming, claws and needle-tipped fangs for hunting. Eyes gone keen in darkness but useless in the light, ears sharper than the best hunting hounds'. And their blood-gift, stronger than ever, of magic inherited from those first changed men.
They claimed the northern sea as their own, chasing away any sailors or fishermen, haunting the overland routes that strayed too close to shore. They were wild and free, laughing as they dove into the water, children of the stoic and staid sea who were as lively and spirited as a tempest. Soon enough, the calm sea was too small for them, and they spread to the ocean beyond.
The tii'ahna are not the greatest predators in the water- in fact, on the oceanic food chain they land somewhere in the middle. But they are sharp-minded, more curious than the l'hrenli, and they work well together to stave off predators. Thus they explored their new world, gladly leaving the old behind, and thus they found the City.
The City sat underwater, protected from the ocean by a vast encompassing spell, for centuries, possibly millennia. The tii'ahna, ever curious, finally wormed their way past the spell and into the City itself.
As those who now live there know, the City has a gentle sentience of its own, a low-grade awareness of its surroundings and its inhabitants. It knew its new people needed air heavy with moisture for skin that could not be allowed to dry and thick with oxygen for withered lungs that had not been used properly for almost two hundred years. It gave them this, and they brought life to its dark hallways. They claimed this as their home and named it Atlantis, which means something in their exotic tongue, although no dirt-man will ever know what. Perhaps the land-goers have no word in their language to allow for proper translation.
Here the story once again splits into multiple paths, for here is the break between man and tii'ahna. Until this point, the tii'ahna had open, if somewhat strained, communications with the land people. There was some trade of goods and news, of spices grown inland and fish caught in deep waters. Mostly, though, there was simple talk- the tii'ahna were an anarchistic lot, falling back to the ways of clans and building among them no great, race-spanning nation, which they would not tolerate. The men took this as a good sign, for otherwise the tii'ahna held all advantages- land and sea, magic, claws and ears so keen a tii'ahna underwater could hear the heartbeat of the child standing on the dock. Or so they say.
But here the tii'ahna turned away, for here the men took the one thing that was not theirs to take: Atlantis.
The City rose from the ocean floor of a sudden, rising to float on the ocean's surface. It shed its shielding spell and flung open its doors. And it blinded dark-keen eyes and burned sensitive skin, and finally forced the tii'ahna to leave, for in their complacency they had allowed their lungs to wither too much. They could not breathe the thin surface air.
The first man to set foot on Atlantis paid for his transgression with his life, as did the second and third. When a military unit, assigned by the king, made the journey, they found a half-dozen rotting corpses desecrating the City's surreal beauty. The men had been butchered, cut to ribbons by claws sharpened on fish bone and shark skin.
The bodies were given a proper burial at sea and nothing was said of it- under any other circumstances, such slaughter would be an act of war, but the king understood the tii'ahna's plight. He offered to share the City with them, should they somehow find a way to return to it.
This, evidently, was not the right thing to say, for the tii'ahna had not been seen since.
So men had claimed Atlantis, and so men came to love it as much as the tii'ahna had. The king moved there, and his court, and the brightest minds of his time. He would not repeat the tii'ahna's mistake. Should the City someday return to the depths, he wanted to know about it before it happened, not be caught off-guard. So he set a special class of soldier to exploring the city, to look for signs of its builders and anything they might have left behind.
And so goes the story of the tii'ahna in bare-bones form. The City grows and prospers, and for eighty-six years only human children have roamed its halls. The tii'ahna, all but trapped now in their prison of water, can only watch in envy.
As a child, John Sheppard had heard the story. As a teenager, he had taken the near-ritualistic night swim alone, taunting the fish-men with such easy prey. As an adult- and the commander of Atlantis' military forces, a position which he had not truly aspired to so much as slid sideways into- he saw things a little differently.
Countless times, he found himself bumping shoulders with someone while walking down the hallway, only to turn and find no one there. He heard the echoes of voices, a fluid language, and children's laughter. He smelled scents he could not properly describe, scents that did not appeal to a human.
"Echoes and ghosts," Teyla said, smooth and serene, the one time he had asked her. "The City remembers those who came before."
"The City betrayed those who came before," John replied, brutally honest because Teyla always deserved honesty. She mere smiled sadly at him.
"Perhaps. Who can say? Perhaps the City rises and sinks on a set pattern, and the tii'ahna merely ignored the signs."
No one would believe that. It wasn't fair to either one or the other, to say the humans or tii'ahna are the smarter. But the tii'ahna are, assuredly, the more voraciously curious, and they would have noticed and investigated any changes.
"Had you been a child of Atlantis, the ghosts would not bother you anymore," Teyla said, smoothly returning to a subject they won't butt heads over. "Although you do seem unusually sensitive to them."
"Thanks," John muttered, not entirely sure if he meant it sarcastically or not. She smiled again, her people-pleasing smile, and moved away.
John wandered the halls for a while, searching for one intersection in particular. When he found it, he ran his hand along the wall as he knelt.
There. An etching, scratched painstakingly into the metal by small hands. It took a keen eye to see that the tool used was not a knife, but a claw. John had no idea what it was supposed to be, perhaps some deepsea creature no human would ever see, but he always liked this little piece of artwork for some reason. Maybe just because it was nice to know the tii'ahna, for all their differences, retained some fundamental similarities.
Three weeks later, he was out on his morning run when his comm line bleeped. He slowed up, collapsed against a pillar as he answered.
"You might want to get back here, sir," said the voice on the other end of the line. Ford, John knew- a rookie, but a good kid. He did fair enough acting as John's right-hand man now that Lorne was playing shadow for the Queen.
As if summoned by the thought, the Queen's transport slowly drifted into view around the corner. Judging by the waves the ship was kicking up, she was moving at a decent click. It just didn't show well from there.
"I see her," he told Ford. "I'll be there."
Then he stretched his legs out and ran to greet his Queen.