Acts of Truth

Haltia's prompt: continue Met by Magic, (SG:AxHP with Todd and Harry).

*~o~*~o~*~o~*

Petrova Porskoff had been the biggest reason that Harry Potter had moved to Russia after the defeat of the Dark Lord. She had seen that flying made him feel the most alive. It was her dream to make a Quidditch team for Russia, her homeland, and it was a noble thing to do – so Harry had gone with her to the biggest country in the world to seek out wizards who would live to play like he and Petrova did.

It was, perhaps, not surprising that Harry found that most of those Russian wizards and witches preferred defending their homeland from magical threats side by side within a largely non-magical military to playing with magic.

Russia was the land of the Babayaga, the hag who ate infants and traveled by a hut upon chicken legs. It was where rock-like headed foot tall Pogrebin demons stalked in a human shadow and made them know the true despair and futility of life. It was where long legged pig-like Nogtails snuck upon farms in the dark and suckled good piglets and blighted the land like a curse where they had found a home. It made it almost sure that such a farm could not be home to humans and could not sustain crops.

Discreetly did the Russian witches and wizards keep a keen eye on such things, and once spotted, they were dealt with directly and quickly. So it might have been fate, or chance, or good luck; that Petrova's family estate in Siberia was located near Kuybyshev Airbase – and that Dr. Svetlana Markov was a witch and family friend of Petrova. She was the one that suggested that wizards in the military might take to Quidditch more readily than others.

It was a bit of a trick that Svetlana played, getting the friendly if rough around the edges Alexi Zukhov, the distant but kind Colonel Chekov to sit down with Petrova and Harry to a meal that ended in a drunken dare involving flying brooms and a game like keep-away.

At the end of the night Petrova had Svetlana as her fellow Chaser on their team, and Alexi and Chekov would be their Beaters, Harry the unquestioned Seeker – only another Chaser remained to be found – and a Keeper. Alexi managed to win his a Lt. Tolinev on his team at base, to be Chaser with Petrova and Svetlana – and his friend on another team, Valentine Kirensky to play as Keeper.

It was howPetrova got her Russian team - and Alexi became Captain of their team and joked that now all they needed was for one of their Chasers to marry Harry off to make him truly a Russian wizard.

For a long time they had been happy, and when Colonel Sakolov reluctantly granted Colonel Chekov's request to let Harry Potter see the Stargate, it had seemed things could only get better.

Yet they had died, Valentine Kirensky – gone missing, at first – and later found murdered on a mission he should not have been on. Alexi Zukhov who had died going after him with his team, and Colonel Sakolov who had destroyed Kuybyshev Airbase with himself within, and their losses had hit the Petrova's Russian Gold Double Headed Eagle hard.

It all but crippled them, but the Russian President who was now Tolinev's father made them a promise, that although they would not fly in Quidditch again – they would fly from a StarGate.

Tolinev's father kept his promise perhaps mainly because of Colonel Chekov, who saw to it that Petrova and Svetlana and Harry Potter got to go to Pegasus, while Chekov and Tolinev chose not go because of their young son Pavel Chekov's birth.

It's how Harry finds himself the only wizard in the Pegasus galaxy from Earth, and how the two Russian witches Petrova and Svetlana get Elizabeth Weir to give them (or rather, she accepts it as inevitable) that the three of them will have their own lonely tower in Atlantis, as far from the main team from Earth as can be. (It's a walking distance of a day, give or take, although with Apparition they can't properly be certain.)

Svetlana tells Weir that she and Harry and Petrova and one Lt. John Smith – a likeable English genius who in obvious opposite to them often mans the communications main network at the heart of Atlantis, where he sees all the worst kinds of trouble (he isn't quite a wizard, but a squib…they think) - will be their own team, based solely here upon the city of Atlantis.

Petrova is wildly beautiful and slim, Svetlana is intelligent and caring but both had been Chasers in Russia and the thing about Chasers is that in the end, they must be fearless. They know every inch of Atlantis and its secrets better than anyone else from Earth, save Harry. So it did not surprise them to find a Wraith caught in a cold sleep in a cage in Atlantis tower.

Perhaps they ought to have let Elizabeth Weir know about him before Harry woke him, but it wasn't truly their fault that Atlantis was keyed to their genes and woke the Wraith at their touch and curiosity. That is how they meet him; the Wraith that John Sheppard will call Todd after a pale guy he knew in college.

They call him Guide, as it is his name. A name he tells only to them, and they keep it like a secret among themselves.

*~o~*~o~*~o~*

Ganos Lal tells to Guide stories, of how wizards and witches came to be, long before Guide will meet any of that breed of Alteran. There is no reason of Ganos Lal to do so, Guide is one of many children of Wraith Queens, and has not yet earned the mantle name of Guide – not yet, that will be given to him by Coldamber (a Queen who yet sleeps beneath the city of Atlantis's sea) who will call him such because he guided her and the Hive to Atlantis, the heart of the Alteran stronghold in this galaxy.

Ganos Lal, glowing and brilliant in a halo of light, smiles in the face of his rage and tells him of her son, the builder of the Astria Porta, what the Hives know as the Rings, and those who come from Earth will call StarGates.

His name was Amelius, and he never knew her in the flesh for she had Ascended in birthing him – and he had built many more things, but his proudest creation was his son the Alterans called Moros – known upon Earth as Myrddin, or Merlin. It is this Moros who had trapped him in this cold sleep, a Lantean he well remembers, shining and silver haired.

"My Merlin has loved a maiden named Viviane, one of the second born Alteran. He has taught to her his magic, and has learned and taught to those with that magic - she will be the first true witch to walk that world, though none know it." Ganos Lal, it goes without Guide asking (or mocking), is very proud of her grandson, and that her bloodline will thrive upon a world far away.

When, one day, after knowing Ganos Lal for so long that Guide is not suspicious of her, he asks why.

"Why what…?" Ganos Lal asks with a small, almost teasing, smile.

"Why do you do this? Why come to me, why speak? I was the enemy of your people, you should hate me. Why don't you?" Ganos Lal laughs long and loudly, and tells him that Merlin knew her as Morgan Le Fay, his greatest enemy – his grandmother. She was that because of the Others, the Ascended who are her own people.

Merlin had hated her – with far more fury than he had hated the Wraith. It is strange to Guide to learn that.

"The Others have told me that Merlin's last descendent comes here, Guide, and he will meet you and you two will need each other." This too, just as Ganos Lal says comes to pass. She whispers to him of the Others and the Ori Ascended, of a war going on unseen, always.

She tells him how to end it.

Guide listens carefully, for one day- when he is waken by Merlin's wizard descendent; he will tell Harry Potter of the thing that Ganos Lal calls the Ark of Truth.

They will end the war and live on in love (if not happily ever after).