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NOTES : Told as if by Sam.

Daniel taught me a new word.

I thought we'd seen everything. I thought... Sometimes it's just better to stop thinking.

We were too experienced to be complacent. We were a team, a close unit, with a leader, with a command structure, not four individuals acting on our own initiatives, going off in all directions. We were...

We followed orders.

We hadn't always followed them to the letter, but that was what made us different, better. We knew when to question what was asked of us, and we always served to the best of our ability. No one within the SGC could ever doubt that.

Perhaps the worst that could be said was that it was intended to be a routine investigation of yet another Earth-like planet. A MALP was sent through first, but that only showed distant woodland and even greener hills and loftier peaks stretching as far as its lens could see. Aerial reconnaissance added little to what we had learned from the ground.

It was exactly the kind of place where we would send in a survey team to scout out the land. The air was cleaner than clean; there were no pollutants, no signs of habitation or industrialization, even on the smallest scale. Its single sun was an un-typical G-type star.

Of course, we'd fallen into that trap before and almost got ourselves scorched. Procedure had been tightened, and the surveys were now much more extensive before we'd actually commit personnel. Or at least a team that wasn't SG-1.

Several days worth of data was assiduously accumulated, collated, pored over and examined down to the smallest detail. The assumption was always that if there was already some local population, signs of it would be in the vicinity of the stargate.

Daniel taught me a new word, and I learned a new one of my own.

Whenever we encountered new civilizations, he always wanted to know if they were truly native, if they had traveled there themselves or had been transported. We tended to think in such simple terms. The Goa'uld transported their slaves much as we once did. So we think incorrectly of abandoned people as indigenous when we find them centuries later.

Aboriginal is another word we misuse, often derogatively, crudely and disparagingly, because we imagine ourselves so grand and superior.

There is a much better, and more precise, word that rarely sees the light of day. What makes it worse now is that I didn't understand why Daniel was so nervous when he told me, the expression on his face almost unreadable. If I thought I could close my eye and still come away sane, I'd think back to that moment and... all that's left that I know was his half-choked off laugh and his shudder as a shiver ran down his spine.

Autochthonic, he called it: originating where it is found; like animals peculiar to one specific place; like the people or races that arise in that place; like the stories they tell of themselves and their past... If they could speak; if you could stand to hear their tales because most certainly if you still had your wits, you would not still be there to listen.

I know I'm getting ahead of myself, but there has to be at least one word of caution, of warning. This report, this tale, if it ever escapes my nightmares, will surely be classified and sealed. It is a part of my healing process, the process they tell me I have to go through before...

Autochthonic, he called it; there really was no other word he could have used. Perhaps it might have been better if he hadn't used any word at all; perhaps it would have been easier if he hadn't given it a name, a sense of being, of age, implying an existence far older than anything I didn't want to think of then or imagine now or ever again.

There is another word I learned, although I don't remember who first spoke it to me; if indeed it ever was. But I do know that it lives on in my mind, and that it will outlive me, and succeed me for as many millions of generations as it has already lived.

If the aerial recon hadn't ceased abruptly on the fifth day perhaps the General wouldn't have changed his mind, perhaps he would have still sent SG-7, perhaps we would all be dead now instead of...

There is the other dilemma; that once a new world has been declared safe, that once we go to it, or even just send the MALP, that we won't bring something back that would challenge us, or destroy us, or even change us.

It's all part of the risk assessment. General Hammond reads the reports and listens to the advice of all the technical people, but ultimately it is his decision.

It all started so brightly. Colonel O'Neill didn't want the mission. As far as he was concerned, now that we had more SG teams than he could count on his fingers, a simple malfunctioning UAV was hardly reason enough. And poor Daniel only had to take one look at all the trees and flowers before he sneezed. Teal'c had no knowledge of the world; the coordinates were unknown to him; he had never heard of such a world in that region of space.

That region of space.

The next time, if ever, I see the night sky, I wonder if I'll imagine I'd be lucky to die. All the constellations are an illusion, as much as anyone can paint glowing dots on a flat canvas, the black vastness of space cannot describe the depths they contain. I wonder if I'll ever be able to gaze at the Great Bear now that I know what it hides.

Once through the gate there was no reason to turn back. The sky was clear and the open land one great meadow. We followed the flight of the UAV with no obstacles in our path until we came to the trees. Even then there was no sign of what was to come, no notion of anything to fear.

The trees were much like our own, tall and green and beautiful with the dappled sunlight. The trees marched on forever, more a great forest than a wood. We walked with our spirits high despite the distance of the journey ahead of us.

Imperceptibly, a burden descended upon us as we got deeper and the trees became older, darker, closer together so that the first shape, the first sign of life was almost an illusion. Bloated and turgid, it was such a corpulent monstrosity that no raised eyebrow could define the injustice of its disfigured misrepresentation, of its iridescent nacreous hide.

Even then there was no thought of turning back.

We had come too far, gone in too deep. We carried on even when it got dark, when the twisted and gnarled trees blocked out all the light. We carried on even as the misshapen creatures massed around us, impeding our progress. We carried on even as we saw them fall, saw them blister and burst, undying in vain.

We strode on, driven by an eldritch force we could neither hear nor see. We strode on even when our boots would stick and suck in ooze and slime heavier than mud and blacker than death.

We strode on to the very edge of the deepest, darkest, blackest pit. To a thing that had no shape, no form, that was the very epitome of evil incarnate.

There is another word that needs to be said before the one that Daniel could not say, and perhaps may never yet.

Chthonic. It tells me where it came from.

It means of the underworld; the nether regions; of the underworld gods, whose worship is widely considered as more primitive in form; and the propitiatory and magical rites, the generalized or euphemistic names of what were supposed to have been ghosts.

But how generalized and euphemistic is its name?

I have looked upon it not only with my own eye. I have beheld it where no one ever should: I have seen it in its own realm, where it was spawned, where it still grows unholy and unchecked, where it lives and thrives as no natural creation should, sucking and stealing the souls from the slathering slime that is all that survives surrounding that sable sepulcher.

And it looked upon me and knew me.

It looked upon me and knew me; not as the individual that stood before it, but as the nemesis of its kind that had seen it vanquished once before, that still dreamed in its eternal infernal destiny that one day it would return.

And as I remain here, trapped within its glare, the unbounded horror lives within my mind, dreaming of being free. It has given me an eye of its own in place of the one it had taken from me. And neither was it any ordinary eye that could fit in the empty socket or hope to find a place in any kind of symmetry. It was pale and bulbous yet sleek and slick, like the eye of some giant squid in its form and workings, as it occupied the whole of the side of my face where my cheek and ear had once been. And yet there was no pain in the giving and taking, only the despair that transcends its insidious incision upon my psyche.

It has given me an eye of its own so that I might see for myself all that it is and all that it knows, for this world is its home, of that there is no mistake. It has given me an eye of its own so that I might see into its own realm, to see it as it truly is, a thousand times more hideous than the greatest, the grossest of the monstrosities as that had earlier sought to save us.

With its own eye, I was the beholder of the extent of its self.

And it looked upon me with my eye in turn, and knew me for it had seen me before. It, too, and its kind had once journeyed the vast distances between the stars. It, too, had once lived in a glorious demesne where their steeples and spires had touched the sky; where great and glorious cathedrals and demonic palaces rose high into the air; great, monstrous vaulting flues of foul and fetid air, of green and black basalt, of bitumen and tar, of fire black and brimstone.

My nightmare is real and so now it is yours.

For the world that I saw, the world that once was, is the world where you live. And the world that I saw, the world that once was, is but a heartbeat away.

What was ancient was gone, but not from the earth. It bides its own time, waiting and wailing, casting black hope into the black light of the night to whatever would hear.

And you that reads this now, if indeed this is my voice, and these my thoughts, perhaps the healing is ended, that I have survived and so has my tale, and that finally I rest in peace and forget.

Or perhaps this is the tale that has survived my demise, that is told in the dead of the night to frighten the young of whatever yet lives; that whatever tells it might choke if it should laugh at the autochthonic remains of what's left of our world.

If that world and the word still has meaning.

Or perhaps my nightmare never ended, and I live in it still, one of them, my mind and soul eternally damned to dream this one dream, relentlessly destroying and being destroyed, devoided of emotion.

And yet I know that the word still exists, still survives. And I know that its name and all that is chthonic still carries on, still alive to be heard.

And the name?

And the word?

Cthulhu.