Origins
by MacGeorge
© 2005

Chapter One

The air was sultry, heavy and hot, even in the deepest hollow of the dún, so D'hethalia moved upwards, gliding across stone paths trod smooth by eons of footsteps, towards the light that was as much a part of her being as air, as time – a light that was now denied her because it had turned into a remorseless enemy.  So, she rose just to where the breeze filtering from the surface stirred the nearly transparent drapes that delineated one area of the endless vaulted underground rooms from one-another.   The luminescence of various cave-dwelling ferns brightened as her body warmth neared, providing more than sufficient illumination to eyes long-accustomed to the semi-dark.

At a juncture of several walkways, in an area of undulating stone shelves of exactly the right dimension, she found whom she expected.  C'edane was languidly stretched out on smooth stone imbued with geesta, a velvety soft moss that had, within seconds of touching his living warmth, conformed itself to his long limbs.  He was dressed, as was she, in nearly transparent robes.  The sultry, warm interior of the dun was never changing, only growing incrementally warmer as the ages passed and their decaying sun extended its deadly heat and radiation further and further into space.  Long ago, the necessity of clothing as protection had given way to a statement of self-expression which some elevated to obsessive art form.

With a sigh, she found her own similarly cushioned shelf, settling into it.  Once her warmth had become stationary, the illumination ferns increased their brightness, but it was a cool light that only emphasized the sharp contours of C’edane’s face.  The small quirk of an eyebrow, the motion of a hand and a soft hum, and she had greeted C'edane and asked him a question.  The conversation continued in their language that was a step beyond verbal, but not exactly telepathic.  It was a multi-layered communication born of such a great passage of time among the same beings that they could almost anticipate each other's thoughts.

"Any change from the latest seeking?" she asked, momentarily distracted by the arrival of a dark-eyed g'nagal.  The creature silently deposited a cool container of light blue fruit juice on the shelf next to her, then left one for C’edane as well before it disappeared. She sipped, pleased with the slight tartness that blossomed on her tongue.  It suited her mood.

The look he gave her said volumes, but in essence could be translated as, "It only gets worse, so why do you even ask?"

"It's too late to attempt any more enhanced placements, Thalia.  This one will have to be the last before the gate is opened."

"You mean before we attempt to open the gate."  From all appearances, D'hethalia's face and body didn't change, but there was just enough tension in her body, enough nuance in her murmured vocalization to express her deep frustration and uncertainty.

"Ah, Thalia, you never did like not having control over them.  Personally, I think it makes things much more interesting.  Gives it that all important element of real suspense, don't you think?"

"Suspense?  Over whether, after uncountable eons, the entire Te'atha die in the heat of a dying sun?" Thalia's slightly curled toes bespoke her intense indignation.

"Personally, I think, if anything, that we are dying of ennui," C'edane returned with a minute twitch of an eyebrow.  "Or laziness perhaps?  Seriously, there probably are a few of still us out there from the last time we ventured into the void."  A languid hand gestured upward.  "Gone so long their names have faded even from our memories.  Scattered across the firmament.  Surely some still live.  Some may even still be sane.  There may even be pockets of us sufficient enough to procreate if they felt the need.  It isn't our race’s survival you're concerned about, it's your own."

"As I recall, Dane, you were in favor of this plan over the option of developing technology all over again.  Ennui?  You are its master," Thalia drawled.  "If we had begun the research and rebuilding when this all started, what was it, over five hundred lectines ago?  We would have settled on another world by now."

"Then did we learn nothing the last time?” he answered in quiet derision.  “How many of us died in the first effort?  And how much did we damage ourselves and our world in the process?  And even we have a hard time staying sane for thousands of lectines isolated in space in the search for someplace habitable, much less comfortable.  No.  The cross-dimensions are both more interesting and more likely, and not nearly as much labor.  I know the first several were failures, but you have to admit this last one is very promising."

"It's very young, and there is its new compatriot to consider.  I hardly think their newly formed friendship is coincidental.  Perhaps it is trying to redeem itself.”

She seemed to give this some thought for a moment, then her lips quirked into a hard smile.  “Perhaps he just wants to come home."

~~~~~~

It suddenly seemed to be getting dark very early, Mac observed as he pulled the groceries from his car and balanced the two sacks in one arm while he grabbed his book bag with the other.  His breath fogged gently in the sudden glare of the alley light that came on automatically as sensors picked up his movement, and he juggled the bags to punch in the key code and open the big metal door to the back of the dojo.

His footsteps rang hollowly in the empty gym, and he repeated his juggle of bags and books to get the lift gate up and the elevator operating.  The building was old, the elevator noisy, the neighborhood questionable, but still he hadn’t been able to let it go.  It was, in a time that had brought more upheaval than he thought he could stand, a familiar, comfortable space.  It was home.

The ritual of putting things away occupied another fifteen minutes until he settled at last into a chair with his notes from the class he had taught that afternoon.  Sometimes the kids asked pretty good questions, and in the admittedly unusual event of not knowing an answer off the top of his head, he always made it a point to have a comprehensive response by the next class.  It had become a sort of game he played with the brighter students.  He made a list of reference materials he wanted to check and considered whether Methos might have some insight into the details of weaponry used by the Israelites in the second century B.C.

Then he paused, considering.  He wasn't even certain Methos was in town. He had been teaching some seminar on esoteric linguistic theory at Oxford.  That meant he spent a lot of time in Great Britain, but occasionally he could be found at the local museum where he was consulting on an exhibit on Early Mesopotamia scheduled to open in another month or two. He smiled to himself and shook his head.  Even though he had been largely responsible for “Adam Pierson” getting the consulting job, Methos had never thanked him, acting instead like it was he who had done the favor for Mac by taking the job.

He and Methos came together like two bulls in the same pasture – so alike, so different.  They nosed around each other, finding some unique sense of comradeship, at least until they managed to piss each other off – Duncan with his moral dilemmas that Methos dismissed with a languid wave of a hand and a cynical quip; Methos with his derision of basic standards of ethical behavior, which Duncan found baffling and irritating, especially in light of the simple fact that Methos frequently acted contrary to his own stated opinions about such matters.

Shit.  This wasn't helping.  He headed to the lift, determined not to let this grim mood turn into one of those long downward spirals that could haunt him for days or even weeks, especially since Tessa's death...and Darius'.... and Sean Burns.... and Fitzcairn... and... Ritchie.... and Connor.  Especially Connor.

~~~~~ 

Paperwork.  It was the least favorite part of Joe Dawson’s job as Northwest Regional Director. There were three Immortals permanently residing within a two hundred mile radius of Seacouver, and another two further out, staying in the smaller towns, or even out in the wilderness, but there was fairly steady Immortal traffic in and out of the area.  MacLeod seemed to be a center of gravity for his entire race, especially since he had unwillingly taken Connor MacLeod’s Quickening, and with it that of the Kurgan, Ramirez and countless others, and then for the coup de grace – Jacob Kell.  Whether it was his multitude of friends, or the even larger multitude of Immortals on the current hunting spree, they always wandered this direction eventually.

He picked up a photo, snapped just the evening before, of an entire field blasted and burned.  The Watchers had managed to get the body away, but the timing had been close. Neither Immortal was from the area, but they had both ended up at the airport at about the same time.  Whether they had been after MacLeod, after some other Immortal in the area, or just passing through was moot when they felt each other.  From the reports, the blood lust from both of them was palpable, even in public.  They had found an empty landfill near the airport, but the Quickening had interfered with local air traffic control enough to cause the airport to shut down for over an hour while they rebooted the computers. 

Crazy.  It was getting crazy.  Millennium madness.  Gathering madness.  Maybe the end of the world was coming, Joe mused with a snort.  There was a tap on his door, but before he had a chance to answer, it opened.  Joe started to snap at the intruder, but his irritation faded to a smile when he saw who his visitor was.

~~~~~ 

The twenty minute warm up, followed by half an hour of free weight work, followed by an hour of increasingly vigorous katas didn’t manage to shake the unease that was dogging him.  Even though he had already run once that day, he felt the need to go for a long jog, he realized, but that was impractical at night, in the cold, in this part of town.  It was asking for trouble, and in his current mood trouble might too easily accelerate into a confrontation.  Spending the rest of the night in a police station explaining why a would-be mugger ended up with a broken jaw, or worse, was an unpleasant prospect.

He once again took the prescribed stance to begin one of the most difficult katas he knew, but he was having trouble keeping his mind focused as his body followed long-ingrained rituals – rituals of death, the bread and butter of the trained killer he was, and always would be.  He felt his face contort in a snarl as he swung his leg out for a sweeping, high kick, thinking of all the people he had failed to protect from the unrelenting violence of his life. Did you have to live through thousands of years, as Methos had? Have to suffer endless agonies of the mind and body before finding a balance?  Did he have the mental strength and emotional stamina to survive that kind of torture, much less achieve any kind of inner peace?  And did finding that balance mean you discarded the values that defined who you were? 

He moved through the kata faster, and then faster still, and by the time he was finished, his mind was focused at last on maintaining the disciplined moves using an over-taxed and exhausted body.  His lungs burned for air and his legs trembled with exhaustion as he knelt onto the floor, letting his heart slow and overheated muscles cool down while he stretched slowly, then settled into a meditation pose. 

~~~~~ 

“The wanderer returns!” Joe exclaimed, pleased to see the hard-edged planes of the face of the ex-Watcher calling himself Adam Pierson peering around his door.  “Come on in,” he waved in his friend of over a dozen years.  “Set that skinny butt down and tell me what you’ve been up to.”  In celebration of the visit, Joe pulled a bottle out of his desk drawer.  He rummaged around for a couple of glasses, blew the dust out of their depths and filled them halfway with golden liquid.

“Hey, Joe,” Methos replied.  He set an over-filled backpack on the floor and settled into the well-worn leather guest chair before propping booted feet up onto Joe’s desk with a contented sigh, pointedly ignoring Joe’s frown at the abuse of his furniture.  Methos accepted the proffered glass and took a sip.  He scrunched down further in the chair, laid his head back and smiled.  “One of the great rules of life, Dawson, is to get in good with the boss.  That way you can get first class treatment and rarely have to pay for it.”

“Is this in reference to the grand accommodations?” Dawson asked, his gesture encompassing the grungy, dusty back office.  “Or is it the admittedly superior company you find yourself keeping?”

“It’s the free booze, of course,” Methos smiled, sipping again at the fine liquor.  “Although my own tastes in alcoholic beverages run to the more mundane.”

Joe’s thick, graying eyebrows furrowed in mock annoyance.  “Live with it,” he said.  He took another sip, carefully inspecting his visitor.  "What brings you back to this part of the world, other than the superior company and free alcoholic beverages?"

Joe paused, and would have liked to say something profound and meaningful but he knew Methos would instantly retreat behind a screen of sarcasm and biting humor.  "Well, I'm sure Mac and I are deeply honored by your presence," he finally responded with a smile, raising his glass in an almost-mock salute.

"As well you should be," Methos smiled, nodding imperiously.  "Speaking of the honorable Clan Chief, what's he up to these days?"

Joe shrugged.  "Teaching at the University and at the dojo, mostly.  He's been really staying to himself since he came back to the States." 

“What?  No sex-starved students stalking him?  No socialites convinced he’s the answer to their dreams?”

“If they are, he’s not saying.”

“And you’re not watching?” Methos asked, sounding dubious.

Joe smiled.  “Well, Mac isn’t real pleased with the Watchers these days.”

Methos snorted and took a swallow of his drink.  “Can’t imagine why,” he answered softly.  “Awfully petty of him to hold a trivial thing like drugging, kidnapping and imprisonment against them.”

~~~~~

Mac's eyes closed as the silence enveloped him.  After an extended period of absolute stillness, he found his sense of hearing and smell, heightened by centuries of training and an overabundance of Quickenings, providing an eerily fine-tuned perception of his surroundings.  He relaxed into the unusual, intensely welcome sense of disconnection from his body and allowed it to take over his senses.  

He felt a surge of mild euphoria at last, the kind of release he had been seeking with his strenuous exercise, then froze in fascination when he felt the presence of a weary cab driver passing by a few blocks away.  Curiosity, along with an extraordinary feeling of freedom and lightness of spirit, prompted him to push his perceptions even further until he was aware of a freight train lumbering through the night to an unknown destination, moving its cargo through the early morning hours, a cat scrounging through the trash in the alley behind the dojo, all forming fleeting impressions at the edge of his awareness. 

~~~~~~

The Watcher stiffened in surprise as MacLeod’s intense gaze stared directly into his magnified view.  Just coincidence, he nervously surmised.  He was much too far away, sitting motionless in a darkened room. But as their eyes met and locked over the quarter-mile distance, instinct fed the Watcher’s absolute certainty that MacLeod knew he was there.  He snatched the binoculars down as gooseflesh rushed along his arms and crawled up the back of his neck.

This watching assignment was a new one for the young man, who usually confined his activities to research and writing.  Fieldwork, long considered the glamour job among Watchers, had mostly brought boredom and discomfort. Tonight had started like many other nights during his month’s stint of field training that every Watcher was required to undergo at least once before final assignment to whatever department The Powers That Be in their Great Wisdom, decided you belonged. When MacLeod’s marathon exercise session had finally ended, Matthew had been relieved.  He was bored and sleepy, his coffee had gone cold and he had a shift starting in – he looked at his watched again – exactly six hours at his cover day job in a bookstore. At this point he’d get a maximum of about three hour’s sleep. 

But something distinctly different had happened a few minutes before, something odd, catching his flagging attention and causing his heart to pound unexpectedly with the possibility that he might add a new and interesting chapter to the already-infamous Chronicles of Duncan MacLeod. At first, he thought it was just his imagination, but as the Watcher viewed the lone Immortal resting in the dark, an undeniably visible aura seemed to emanate from the still figure, like a gray formless mist.  After a moment the mist thinned and vanished. 

He rubbed his stiff and bloodless arms against the chill, and decided that the endless hours of watching must have inspired his imagination to flights of fancy.  He raised the binoculars to his eyes again, focusing on the still figure in the darkened gym.  His heart almost stopped as once again, MacLeod’s penetrating gaze met his own through the magnifying lenses.  Feeling exposed, silly and somewhat embarrassed, he decided to call it a night, quickly packing his thermos, binoculars and other gear, and scurried down to his car parked behind the abandoned warehouse, anxious to get home to a warm bed.

~~~~~~

“That’s weird,” he muttered as he wearily gathered his long-discarded, soggy shirt, carefully wiping the remains of his pooled sweat from the wood floor.  The oddness of the evening’s experience was chased from his mind by a wave of dizzy weakness, and his knees almost buckled beneath him as he lifted the door on the freight elevator connecting the gym to his apartment upstairs.  In bleary resignation, MacLeod decided that it would defeat the purpose of his hours of effort to spend time contemplating the phenomenon, and dawn was edging over the horizon by the time he had drunk a full liter of water, showered and collapsed into bed.

* * * * *

Thalia roused from her Ka’queha with a small gasp.  Something had touched her across the boundaries.  Something that held within its spirit a tendril of her own essence.  But there were many of those across the vast stretch of fanshea – both time and space.  This one, however, felt intriguingly close.  She rose from her seat in the center of the circle of heavy stone monuments placed at carefully measured distances in specific geographic locations that had been known, since time immemorial, as dun'a'queha.  They were set in a pattern designed to focus and guide the energies of body and mind.  That pattern had persisted down through the ages, following their migration from the surface of their planet, to the depths of the caverns below, and even across the dimensions in days before their own sun's magnetic field's became so discordant that the veil between this world and those few others that could sustain life became thick and clouded.

This particular dun'a'queha was one she had used for thousands of fan and she knew every bump and indentation on every stone, could sense the subtle lines of energy that shimmered across the basalt bastions and, with effort, she could weave those lines into her own and skim across them, following them across fanshea to places where the light was golden, the sun a warming yellow disc instead of a blazing inferno, to where cool breezes caressed her face and snow-topped mountains painted a jagged edge across a brilliant blue sky.

But this one, this presence she felt now, was not from them.  It was from one of her own.

Thalia found her way to the crossroads of numerous paths within the D’un that also served as a traditional meeting place.  There she found Ce’dane, G’utanea, T’nekt and three others who had all been her caresh mates at one time or another, all some of the oldest inhabitants in this very old world, but only once had they all joined their spirits towards one creation.

“You all felt it, then,” she indicated with a small gesture.  Rather than lounge on the undulating surfaces of time-smoothed, gheesta-covered rock, she moved around the meandering paths, deliberately generating a soft brush of hot, humid air that caressed her skin.  Several silent g’nagal either moved among them or sat quietly, awaiting the needs of their creators.

“It reaches out,” T’nekt remarked on the obvious.  “That we all felt it speaks to energy amassed quickly, perhaps too quickly to be controlled.  I warned that this might happen with such a joining.”

Ce’dane made a derisive noise.  “We have waited too many fan to find even one who moved in the realm of Ka’a, and now you wish to quibble over whether it can be controlled?”  Then his languid gaze drifted to D'hethalia, and with the quirk of a thin eyebrow, conveyed the consensus of the group.

“Our progeny are not ‘its’, Dane,” she responded with a twist of her mouth and a small hand gesture.  “This one was given all the physical gifts we had to ensure survival, tempered by my… by our sense of responsibility for the welfare of all.  They all have our spirits entwined with their own, and while they are not of the Sidhe, with time this one…”

“Time is something that, for a change, we have little of, my dear,” G’utanea interrupted, moving her soft, straight, white-blond tresses back over a narrow shoulder.  “And whether this one is ever of the Sidhe is both unlikely and irrelevant.  The question is whether it can open the gate.”

With a soft sigh, Thalia indicated her recognition that, as the group’s eldest, indeed the eldest of her kind and the primary v’tah for this progeny, she would reach out to it – to him, she corrected herself firmly.

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