A/N: I'm so sorry about the long wait. Hopefully things should be much faster now that the semester is over! Happy The World Didn't End Yesterday!

Cassie spent the next three days steadily working on her son's blanket in silence. Utter and absolute silence of the sort that crept into your bones and made you start to go mad. Eliot and his friends hadn't been in contact since they told her that they were coming for her. Mitchell and the others from the SGC hadn't been by to see her.

There was a low electric buzz in the air. She could taste it, like the calm before the storm.

With nothing else to do, Cassandra let her mind go over the information her mother had spent the last two months slowly depositing in her cranium. One thing that was common throughout her mother's teachings and the information/memories in her head was the importance of patience. Although it was difficult to accept, she knew that patience was the way to go at the moment. She would bide her time and wait.

In a far different sort of prison, thousands of miles away, off the coast of Australia, a woman sat before an art easel, paint brush in hand, surrounded by half completed canvasses and high quality oil paints. The painting in front of her was done in greys and blues that swirled together to imply shapes and letters that she had never seen before. At least, she had never seen them in her waking hours.

The yacht rocked gently back and forth with the waves of the ocean, but her hand and easel were used to such treatment as she continued to paint. Behind her she could hear the sounds of a man entering into the room, stepping over the threshold loudly to make sure she heard.

Not sparing him so much as a pause in her work, our artist gritted her teeth slightly at the intrusion when the intruder's perfectly manicured hand came to rest on the shoulder attached to the hand holding the brush.

"More abstract art, my dear?" his cultured, South African accent asked. Only years of practice and discipline kept her from recoiling at his touch.

"Nothing but abstract, Solomon," she replied in a small voice, not wanting to anger him.

His hand tightened its grip on her shoulder, causing her to tense. She was already bruised by those fingers and she didn't relish repeating that experience. "Not always, Sari." He released her shoulder and stalked over to a stack of finished paintings on the other side of the room. Pulling one out he held it up and turned to face her, his steel eyes glinting dangerously. "I want to see their faces, my dear."

Sari's soft chocolate eyes flickered to the oil painting he held in his death grip. It was of a woman dressed in a white sundress, something like lightning surrounding her body as her hand reached out toward the unknown, a threat unheard hiding behind her eyes. In the back of her mind, far out of the reach of Solomon and his power-hungry hands, she recognized the woman as being like her, an outsider, who held power but couldn't use it. Maybe this woman, too, was gifted with paranormal abilities. Her eyes were an unfamiliar hazel, and her hair a light brown that fanned out as if it was blown back by the wind. She wasn't particularly beautiful, by any means, but Sari knew they were the same.

She let her lightly made-up eyelids hood her eyes as she reminded him, "I can only paint what I see." Outwardly she let her body relax as much as she could as Solomon stalked back over to her. He reached out and caressed the stop of her head, messing up the perfectly combed locks of black hair.

"Then you'll simply have to See something a bit more worthwhile." He let her go and turned to walk toward the door. Once there he paused and turned to look at her again, "Or perhaps you've outlived your usefulness, my dear. Pity, I was sure you had a few more months in you before you joined our sister and mother in the whore house."

After the door slammed shut behind him, Sari felt the familiar hot tears well up behind her eyes. She slammed her hand down on the table that held her paints, stifling a scream filled with rage. Faces swam behind her eyes, men and women –the woman whose picture Solomon pointed to. Cassandra. She knew that was her name. Just as strongly as she knew if she painted any more faces or locations for her brother, he'd start moving against his employers and he'd win.

But if she didn't … she couldn't paint while drugged out on a dirty mattress while fifty men a day pounded in to her without the simple protection of a condom.

Sari composed herself while the voices she heard in her sleep vied for her attention and tried to beg her to stop, that there was another way. She shook her head and dried her tears. If there was a better way, she didn't see it.

She focused her mind on a scene that had appeared to her weeks ago. Not a face this time, but something equally important for her brother. With a calm and steady stroke on a fresh canvas, she started to paint a mountain.

In a galaxy far, far, away, in the not so distant past (in fact, 4.38 Earth hours before Sari's confrontation with her brother) the boy awoke.

Awoke is possibly the wrong term for what happened, but it is the closest one that the great, all powerful narrator can find. You see, the boy's body was already awake, but it wasn't something he was in control of when his mind woke up.

There was something inside him that called itself a god. It had been inside him for the past fifteen Earth years, halting the boy's growth just prior to puberty setting in. One day he had been a regular boy on the planet Lyrica, protected by the Asgard, and then the Evil Ones came and he had been Chosen by the Gods to be one of their children. Every day since then had been nothing but pain and torment for his mind, body, and soul. There was nothing he could do to regain control of his body or his life, and so he let his mind go to sleep.

But now something was different. In his sleep state, the part of his mind where the Evil One couldn't reach, a voice reached out to him and a woman appeared.

"Lief," she whispered into the quietest recesses of his mind. "My son, you must awake now. There is work to be done."

"Who are you?" his dream-self asked. He saw inside his mind as two spheres of energy. His was a dark green color, similar to redwood needles, hers –for he was positive it was a female who was talking to him –was a pale blue, like the sky just after midday, when the suns have begun to descend and go away for the night.

"My name is in the wind through the trees, the sunlight on the flowers. I am your mother."

"My mother is dead. I watched through these eyes as my body killed her." The Evil One had to push down the sudden urge Lief's body had to cry. Outwardly there was barely more than a twitch.

"There is much that you must know, my son, and little time," she replied inside his mind. "You must trust me. Peer into the darkness and you will find the clarity you seek."

And he did. The knowledge and truth of who and what he was hit him like a tidal wave, that most deadly form of water. He felt his mother in his mind tell him to let the chaos and information ripple through him and carry him along, don't fight it.

Lief wasn't sure how long it lasted. It would be impossible to say considering he had just woken up from a fifteen year dream. But he knew now. He knew how to repress the Evil One inside his body. He knew how to be soft and overcome; he knew how to create unity without weapons; he knew the way to Tera to find those like him who were also awakening.

He couldn't remove the Evil One himself. No, it must be another like him who performed the cleansing for him. But it was okay now, as he gave the command in the voice of the Evil One to transport down to the planet below them from this ship.

His hand was on the device known as the DHD according to his mother whose name was Blodeuwedd. Lief hesitated. He looked down at the weapon that was wrapped around his hand. The hand he was using to press in the coordinates for Tera.

Almost in a trance he stopped and stepped back from the platform. Lief took off the weapon and started clawing at his clothes with both hands. Soon all of the finery was in a pile on the ground. Townspeople he was supposed to lead as god and king stood watching from the shadows, the same as the guards the Evil One had managed to keep with him during the years of war and rebellion.

In the place his mother showed him, Lief called up a gift of fire hot enough to melt the naquadah laced through the things on the ground. With a wave of his hand it transformed from a set of recognizable items to a pile of molten metal and then to barely a mark on the ground as the earth welcomed it back home.

Lief looked up at those hiding in the distance, unabashed by his naked form. "You are free."

With that he turned back around to the DHD and pressed the coordinates for what his mother was calling the Theta Base. When the rings in front of him began to spin and connect to some other part in the universe, Lief smiled slightly. He knew better than to allow himself to feel more than calm at the moment. He knew he couldn't openly desire the removal of the Evil One or his defenses would slip.

But as he stepped through the Stargate into a world unknown, Lief was at peace for the first time since his body stopped aging and became the host to a creature so horrible he refused to mention its name.

There was work to do.

It was 03:42 in the morning. Cassandra didn't know why but she was suddenly wide awake. From what she could tell the twins were still sleeping inside her womb, having worn themselves out with all the growing they were doing. They seemed to be done with the game of "Who can stand on Mommy's bladder the longest?" and had moved on to "Who can push harder on Mommy's ribs?"

That didn't matter, though. The babies hadn't woken her up.

She quickly and quietly scanned the room her cell was in. Her gaze quickly settled on the black device in the corner that the SGC thought was still disrupting her telekinetic and telepathic powers. With her eyes firmly on the rhythmic white light, Cassie let her mind probe out along the edges of herself to the room around her and the rooms around that.

Oh. That was interesting.

It look less than thirty seconds before she was back in her own mind, staring at the door intently. She sat up in the bed and put her slippers on her stockinged feet without thinking about it. One hand self-consciously went up to attempt to smooth her hair as much as possible.

He was coming.