HONOR.
This is a Wraith centered story. I post it here since the archive is still down. It's a work in progress, but I promise to finish it.
This story takes place in the Atlantis 'universe', however it does not contain any Stargate Atlantis characters. The Atlantis 'universe' belongs to the Stargate Atlantis franchise. The original characters in this story belong to me. I make no profit out of this, in the Milky Way or the Pegasus. It's only for fun.
Rating, if we must have one, is PG, with one bad word, once. Some violence, but not graphic, or explicit; just implied. No smooching in the hive ship galleries.
I am terrible at editing my own work, so forgive the booboos.
EPISODE 1.
This is a Wraith centered story. I post it here since the archive is still down. It's a work in progress, but I promise to finish it.
This story takes place in the Atlantis 'universe', however it does not contain any Stargate Atlantis characters. The Atlantis 'universe' belongs to the Stargate Atlantis franchise. The original characters in this story belong to me. I make no profit out of this, in the Milky Way or the Pegasus. It's only for fun.
Rating, if we must have one, is PG, with one bad word, once. Some violence, but not graphic, or explicit; just implied. No smooching in the hive ship galleries.
I am terrible at editing my own work, so forgive the booboos.
EPISODE 1.
Spoiler:
HONOR
A story by Traveler64
“There are worse ways to die.”
That what it—he—had said to me as I stumbled through the perpetual twilight of that planet, the two red moons glowing through the canopy of the forest like two lanterns. The world around me was filled with deep, confusing shadows, the light from above obscuring more than revealing the shapes and forms that closed in on me. I was thrashing through the ghostly maze of branches and shades with increasing panic, cursing aloud and unconcerned of alerting enemies and predators in this place where the Wraiths had culled the natives into small, frightened patches of humanity. The moons were shifting above, and with their waning and rise of the distant sun that was no more than a dark red orb in the maroon sky, the storm of wind funnels would come. It came only once in one hundred years, and my team of scientists had come through the stargate a day before to take measurements and data about how this deadly storm was created. It would strip the land of all vegetation; and any life that was caught above ground. My words to describe my predicament were choice and colorful, festooned with imaginative swearing and framed by a mantra: “You’re not dying here. Not yet. Not now.” This would be punctuated by desperate calls on the radio that failed to respond.
It was at the end of a particularly long tirade that was particularly colorful in profanities, which I shouted into the radio to a dead world, that I heard the male voice telling me that dying in a blast of wind that shredded you into strips was not the worst. It had not been loud; more like what was known as a stage whisper.
The panic and outrage of the prospect of such a stupid death—I had taken a detour an hour before to see some quartz formation that glowed rather prettily; way to go!—drained away in a sickening pool in the pit of my stomach. A flicker of hope shimmered at the bottom of that pit. Someone was out there; someone who was on his way to shelter; one of the very few natives still left. Perhaps himself delayed, but knowing where he was going. Over the millennia, since the Ancients had settled them here, the natives’ eyesight had adapted to that perpetual twilight and their vision was catlike. That had been of great interest to our doctor.
However, something in that voice gave me pause. None of the people of that planet whom I knew and conversed with many times, spoke quite like this. There had been only a few words, hardly enough to judge anything by them, but it was the wistful tone that made me wonder. And the choice of words also struck me, although, again, there had not been many said. A man of that planet would not be wistful, but rather contemptuous of my weakling ranting; and certainly would not deliberate on the merits of one kind of death versus another. He would probably say something to the effect of ‘shut up and die.’ Not that this was a brutal people; or lacked compassion; but, their history at the hands (literally at the hand) of the Wraiths had suppressed and destroyed their softer side; if they ever had one. They were tough with themselves and tough with others.
There was one more thing about what I had heard in the darkness of the forest--it was not the fact that I understood the language—I had gone through the stargate and the nanopulse implanted at the moment of crossing would have made it possible for me to understand. What had struck me as very odd was that I had no doubt that the words had actually been spoken in English; whoever was out there, he had gone through the stargate as well. While the scientist in me considered the evidence and welcomed it, the human instinct told me that there was danger there. I was also embarrassed that he had heard me ranting.
I moved slowly now, feeling the pain in my legs and back. The drop in air pressure as the storm was gathering across the mountains and valleys over the horizon, cut my breath. I squinted and strained my eyes to see among the shadows.
And I saw him in the form of a deeper shadow than the rest and a pale, ghostly orb above it that indicated a face framed in long hair, luminous in its whiteness.
My breath stopped.
A Wraith.
A thin thought, like a warbling alarm formed in my mind as my breath returned. It—he—had seen me before I had seen him. He had listened to me and had watched me. Yet, he had not attacked. He had actually warned me about his presence.
I stopped and looked carefully, trying to make him out. He was still, as if frozen in that pose, standing against the massive trunk of tree, the branches irradiating around him. His head was tilted forward, his face half hidden by the hair that fell down his shoulders and his chest. Some of his hair was tangled in the bark behind him, looking like a halo.
His head lifted a bit. “I am in no position to harm you,” he spoke again. “You can easily harm me.” Those words, spoken as something of a challenge, were followed by an angry, frustrated hiss.
I’ve seen Wraith from a distance; I’ve seen them in pictures and videos. I’ve never seen one close. I was certainly seeing this one closer than any human had the right to do and live.
And there was no reason for this one to be where he was. The humans on this planet had been culled a month before. The Wraiths had gone leaving just enough behind to procreate and grow, ready for culling fifty years from now. True, the Wraiths were getting hungrier and more brutal in their culling as humans dwindled in numbers. At times, they finished off the population, or taken what was left with them to cut off the feeding ground for a rival hive. Still, there was no reason for them to come back to this planet so soon. And only a one?
That sickening and unwelcome human fear fluttered again through me.
“You are afraid even of a Wraith’s shadow,” he said in response to my fear. I have heard that they could tell fear in their victim; now I knew that it was true. I fingered my gun and pulled it slowly. Let him sense THAT!
“You will not kill me,” he said.
A very talkative Wraith. I started to hum a song in my mind to cover anything that the Wraith might detect.
“You fight your fear well.”
A very clever Wraith indeed. And why wasn’t he attacking?
Instead of attacking he was… conversing. He was almost chatty, having suppressed even the slightest hint of a hiss in his voice.
My fear drained away. I turned on the light at the tip of my weapon and directed it at him. I had kept it off because it would only confuse the shadows and darken my vision; and also, although a peaceful planet with inoffensive animals, I didn’t want to alert anything or anyone. And how clever I was… I allowed a Wraith to observe me at leisure. Way to go, girl!
The light slipped over him. He was a Wraith, all right! One of the more impressive specimens, which told me that he was of a higher rank. Perhaps even a commander. He wore a long, black leather coat, exquisitely crafted with intricate work of silver and embossing. The hair, looking quite uncharacteristically disheveled, had once been braided and carefully combed. The face had long facets and the skin looked almost translucent. The wisps of hair of his chin were also braided. Absurdly, I wondered who did that for a Wraith. They were vain creatures—
“Sorry to meet you like this,” he positively drawled.
I put the light on his face and caught a—smile? Oh, great! Wraith humor.
It was the face that confirmed to me that something was wrong. The skin was a pale gray, covered by a bluish sheen of humidity; and it was haggard, looking old although this was not an old Wraith and Wraith did not really show age. It looked fragile. I shone the light in his yellow eyes. It looked back at me with a feral glint in them. Defiant and arrogant, of course.
“Satisfied?”
“What’s wrong?” I asked rather foolishly, really. Yeah, right. Ask a Wraith ‘what’s wrong’.
He didn’t answer.
I shifted the light and the glowing circle slipped down.
I saw what was wrong; and I shuddered, even if it was a Wraith. He had been impaled, the tip of the branch that had been sharpened for the purpose I had no doubt, protruding through the area of his diaphragm; if a Wraith had such a thing. Apparently it had not touched any vital organs. He had healed, of course, and healed around it. It pinned him to the tree.
I heard a rattle of metal and shifted the light. He was chained to the tree, the links around his middle and his left arm, rather loosely I noted. His right arm was not chained—
He lunged forward and in the split second it took me to move, his right arm flew at me to grab me, but it brushed against my chest and failed to grip me. The arm stopped midair, in front of my face.
A stump where his hand should’ve been, pointed at me.
(Go to episode 2)
A story by Traveler64
“There are worse ways to die.”
That what it—he—had said to me as I stumbled through the perpetual twilight of that planet, the two red moons glowing through the canopy of the forest like two lanterns. The world around me was filled with deep, confusing shadows, the light from above obscuring more than revealing the shapes and forms that closed in on me. I was thrashing through the ghostly maze of branches and shades with increasing panic, cursing aloud and unconcerned of alerting enemies and predators in this place where the Wraiths had culled the natives into small, frightened patches of humanity. The moons were shifting above, and with their waning and rise of the distant sun that was no more than a dark red orb in the maroon sky, the storm of wind funnels would come. It came only once in one hundred years, and my team of scientists had come through the stargate a day before to take measurements and data about how this deadly storm was created. It would strip the land of all vegetation; and any life that was caught above ground. My words to describe my predicament were choice and colorful, festooned with imaginative swearing and framed by a mantra: “You’re not dying here. Not yet. Not now.” This would be punctuated by desperate calls on the radio that failed to respond.
It was at the end of a particularly long tirade that was particularly colorful in profanities, which I shouted into the radio to a dead world, that I heard the male voice telling me that dying in a blast of wind that shredded you into strips was not the worst. It had not been loud; more like what was known as a stage whisper.
The panic and outrage of the prospect of such a stupid death—I had taken a detour an hour before to see some quartz formation that glowed rather prettily; way to go!—drained away in a sickening pool in the pit of my stomach. A flicker of hope shimmered at the bottom of that pit. Someone was out there; someone who was on his way to shelter; one of the very few natives still left. Perhaps himself delayed, but knowing where he was going. Over the millennia, since the Ancients had settled them here, the natives’ eyesight had adapted to that perpetual twilight and their vision was catlike. That had been of great interest to our doctor.
However, something in that voice gave me pause. None of the people of that planet whom I knew and conversed with many times, spoke quite like this. There had been only a few words, hardly enough to judge anything by them, but it was the wistful tone that made me wonder. And the choice of words also struck me, although, again, there had not been many said. A man of that planet would not be wistful, but rather contemptuous of my weakling ranting; and certainly would not deliberate on the merits of one kind of death versus another. He would probably say something to the effect of ‘shut up and die.’ Not that this was a brutal people; or lacked compassion; but, their history at the hands (literally at the hand) of the Wraiths had suppressed and destroyed their softer side; if they ever had one. They were tough with themselves and tough with others.
There was one more thing about what I had heard in the darkness of the forest--it was not the fact that I understood the language—I had gone through the stargate and the nanopulse implanted at the moment of crossing would have made it possible for me to understand. What had struck me as very odd was that I had no doubt that the words had actually been spoken in English; whoever was out there, he had gone through the stargate as well. While the scientist in me considered the evidence and welcomed it, the human instinct told me that there was danger there. I was also embarrassed that he had heard me ranting.
I moved slowly now, feeling the pain in my legs and back. The drop in air pressure as the storm was gathering across the mountains and valleys over the horizon, cut my breath. I squinted and strained my eyes to see among the shadows.
And I saw him in the form of a deeper shadow than the rest and a pale, ghostly orb above it that indicated a face framed in long hair, luminous in its whiteness.
My breath stopped.
A Wraith.
A thin thought, like a warbling alarm formed in my mind as my breath returned. It—he—had seen me before I had seen him. He had listened to me and had watched me. Yet, he had not attacked. He had actually warned me about his presence.
I stopped and looked carefully, trying to make him out. He was still, as if frozen in that pose, standing against the massive trunk of tree, the branches irradiating around him. His head was tilted forward, his face half hidden by the hair that fell down his shoulders and his chest. Some of his hair was tangled in the bark behind him, looking like a halo.
His head lifted a bit. “I am in no position to harm you,” he spoke again. “You can easily harm me.” Those words, spoken as something of a challenge, were followed by an angry, frustrated hiss.
I’ve seen Wraith from a distance; I’ve seen them in pictures and videos. I’ve never seen one close. I was certainly seeing this one closer than any human had the right to do and live.
And there was no reason for this one to be where he was. The humans on this planet had been culled a month before. The Wraiths had gone leaving just enough behind to procreate and grow, ready for culling fifty years from now. True, the Wraiths were getting hungrier and more brutal in their culling as humans dwindled in numbers. At times, they finished off the population, or taken what was left with them to cut off the feeding ground for a rival hive. Still, there was no reason for them to come back to this planet so soon. And only a one?
That sickening and unwelcome human fear fluttered again through me.
“You are afraid even of a Wraith’s shadow,” he said in response to my fear. I have heard that they could tell fear in their victim; now I knew that it was true. I fingered my gun and pulled it slowly. Let him sense THAT!
“You will not kill me,” he said.
A very talkative Wraith. I started to hum a song in my mind to cover anything that the Wraith might detect.
“You fight your fear well.”
A very clever Wraith indeed. And why wasn’t he attacking?
Instead of attacking he was… conversing. He was almost chatty, having suppressed even the slightest hint of a hiss in his voice.
My fear drained away. I turned on the light at the tip of my weapon and directed it at him. I had kept it off because it would only confuse the shadows and darken my vision; and also, although a peaceful planet with inoffensive animals, I didn’t want to alert anything or anyone. And how clever I was… I allowed a Wraith to observe me at leisure. Way to go, girl!
The light slipped over him. He was a Wraith, all right! One of the more impressive specimens, which told me that he was of a higher rank. Perhaps even a commander. He wore a long, black leather coat, exquisitely crafted with intricate work of silver and embossing. The hair, looking quite uncharacteristically disheveled, had once been braided and carefully combed. The face had long facets and the skin looked almost translucent. The wisps of hair of his chin were also braided. Absurdly, I wondered who did that for a Wraith. They were vain creatures—
“Sorry to meet you like this,” he positively drawled.
I put the light on his face and caught a—smile? Oh, great! Wraith humor.
It was the face that confirmed to me that something was wrong. The skin was a pale gray, covered by a bluish sheen of humidity; and it was haggard, looking old although this was not an old Wraith and Wraith did not really show age. It looked fragile. I shone the light in his yellow eyes. It looked back at me with a feral glint in them. Defiant and arrogant, of course.
“Satisfied?”
“What’s wrong?” I asked rather foolishly, really. Yeah, right. Ask a Wraith ‘what’s wrong’.
He didn’t answer.
I shifted the light and the glowing circle slipped down.
I saw what was wrong; and I shuddered, even if it was a Wraith. He had been impaled, the tip of the branch that had been sharpened for the purpose I had no doubt, protruding through the area of his diaphragm; if a Wraith had such a thing. Apparently it had not touched any vital organs. He had healed, of course, and healed around it. It pinned him to the tree.
I heard a rattle of metal and shifted the light. He was chained to the tree, the links around his middle and his left arm, rather loosely I noted. His right arm was not chained—
He lunged forward and in the split second it took me to move, his right arm flew at me to grab me, but it brushed against my chest and failed to grip me. The arm stopped midair, in front of my face.
A stump where his hand should’ve been, pointed at me.
(Go to episode 2)
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