NOTES: Written for the SGA Santa challenge 2007. This is a long, multipart story that will be posted over the next couple of weeks, and I hope you'll read and enjoy it!
- Here Only To Wither -
- prologue -
The husk of the corpse lay in dry grass beneath a violet sky.
She stood over him, his life rolling through her in a fierce flush of energy, her expression tense with the struggle to accept what she had just done. She had killed before, in cold blood and hot.
This was different.
He would never trouble her again. She fought back the sensations that coursed through her, rich and warm and intoxicating. If it were only the relief of freedom, she would have exulted in it, but the tide of darker knowledge dragged down her pleasure.
And she was not alone.
There were eyes upon her, a dozen or more watchers, who had seen her take life. They were not to know that, to her, it was not life but death. A death to everything she had been, everything she had known. It was not in them to understand.
They watched her, silent and waiting.
She lifted one hand, almost wondering at the smooth skin, leathery but without scales, at the fingertips that now turned into pointed claws, the nails darker than the skin. A breeze rustled the grass around the drained husk of the Wraith and tugged at her hair, and she pressed that hand to her temple as the dry wind sucked moisture from her skin.
"What would you have us do, my Queen?"
Within her, something recoiled, revolted. Within her, something stirred, awakening. My Queen.
The speaker stood close by, his hands already closed about the weapon he had taken from the dead man. His tone was respectful but his eyes showed his cunning. Of them all, this one, she should best be wary: he would understand the most and he would understand the least.
What would you have us do?
No going back - no returning. The life she had known was gone as her people were gone.
"What now?"
She looked at the shrewd eyes of the speaker, his skin a pale green like Lantean mint-cream, and closed her eyes against another wave of dry air that washed over her. Every caressing eddy seemed to drain her strength, sucking at the life she had so recently taken.
They could not stay here.
"Follow me," she said.
And she turned away, walking to the hiveship settled down in the dry gully, leading the Wraith males to what must ultimately be all their deaths.
Behind her, the susurrus of the wind echoed empty around the body of the Wraith who had once been called Michael, and the ghost of the woman who had once been Teyla Emmagen of Athos.
- tbc -