The world was bathed in fire. But he remembered dying alone in the cold of space. He had so much to learn. But he thought that he had finally found peace. He wanted desperately to love. But he’d had the greatest love of all - spanning eons in the cold nothingness of life lived in-between. His hunger quelled, but his passion had not.

He had never seen the ruins glow. Yet, here, at the stone markers where vows were taken, he had made a promise. He promised that he would come back to her. He had promised that he would not forget - that he would not rest until he could find a way to spend eternity with her.

What was once John Sheppard walked calmly through the flames. They were there, yet they were not there. All reality was a dream ...Mahamaya ... it was a web like the fields of fire that twisted across this dull planet. It was bright and dazzling and oh-so-powerful, a storm that was easy to get swept up in. But he could see beyond the illusion, half in this world and half beyond. Fire was fleeting and temporary. Now in the center of the blaze it seemed as though it would burn forever, until bodies were scorched to the core and all was consumed. But this was not true - there came the calming rain to break the intense heat of the dream and they called it nibbana. There was a time when the fire did not burn and he need only bring himself there to quench it, stepping through the hole in time, in dreams, in illusions.

There were whispers in his ears, faint promises from creatures with ghastly faces. We will leave Atlantis alone. We will leave your friends if you tell us of Earth. There were cries of hunger, so much hunger. And it was more than just a pain in the belly. It was more than physical. It was dark and raw and twisted, a soul-deep need. It filtered through every sense, a myopic vision as all of reality ached. It felt like dying, slowly fading, wasting away as the mind and body grew farther apart, the wedge between them like a crown of thorns. Let us feed off you and we will spare the others.

What others?

And then he saw them, through the blaze though it still burned bright. He could feel them, because each soul, each action, was all the same. They were all part of something more and he could feel their actions the way a spider feels the struggling of a fly across its vast taut web.

They had come for him. And though he had tried to prevent it, he could not fault them. They cared. They cared enough to put aside their own attachments to follow him. And, despite himself, he felt his heart warm. He was loved.

But the Wraith were upon them, their hunger palpable as they circled close.

He saw the fear in McKay’s eyes. He saw Ford lying in a heap at the base of a pillar. He saw the hungry ghosts looming, consumed with need. He could not allow it. He was breaking the rules as it was - breaking the code that Padmapani and all the technical-theologians, so much more advanced than he, had said were there for a reason. But he was keeping a promise that he had made with his entire soul. He did not know which order was higher, or if there could be a hierarchy at all. These beings did not deserve to suffer so that he might have his way. He had already made John Sheppard suffer enough.

He let the anguish coil, for just a brief second. His mind lashed out, brighter, more purifying than even the flames that danced around him. He shaped the world - felt it shift. It unsettled him, like nails scraping down a chalkboard. It was wrong - he knew that deep down. But he knew that killing was wrong too, and he had done it so many times in order to protect, to serve, to keep his loved ones safe.

The Wraith were gone, lives snuffed out like a candle. They lived for millennia, feeding their hunger, and he banished them with a thought. All that experience cut short on a whim. If let feed, the Wraith would never die. Did that mean they had more right to live? To die early meant sixty years to a human, an infinite number to a Wraith. Then was killing it more a crime? Or was meaning in scarcity? Should a Wraith die a thousand years early so that a human might live ten years more, because those ten years were precious, because they were all there was? When was a Wraith old enough that it killing it to save a human should be justified? Surely there was no exact number.

It would always be wrong.

But the Wraith were coming to kill his friends. They were going to wipe out Atlantis, or force the humans to sink it to the depths of the sea. They were going to come to Earth, cull another galaxy in their hunger. So much suffering ... he ached thinking of that future.

He could stop it right here, right now. With a thought ... with enough conviction, he could wipe the Wraith from all of history. He could destroy every last one in a purifying blaze. What was stopping him?

It was more than a covenant, he saw now. It was life. Time was an illusion and so was identity, as fleeting as the hot summer breeze. Beyond it he saw ...

There exists suffering. He could feel it, pain stitched across all of existence, in scars, in mountains rising, in storms so cold and beautiful and bright, in the tide coming in off the coast, in meteors raining down in balls of fire, shooting stars, in forests green and vibrant and growing out of a thick compost of death and decay, in stars burning, all gas and pressure, sending out waves of heat and anger and compassion and love, in the oceans, in the sky, in the raindrops, in predators, in prey, in parents, in offspring, in lovers and those that turned that love to hate, in everything that changes.

He felt canyons in the earth like scars, emptied out and hollow, but remembered sitting on the edge of a canyon that they once called Grand, though now in this formless brilliance he glimpsed chasms much greater. He remembered looking up at the stars at night, leaning over and kissing a girl, her lips warm and full and her breath as sweet as the cool desert air. He remembered being young and kissing that girl and thinking that this moment was so exquisitely beautiful that it could make up all of existence. And all of that because a river took it upon itself to carve out this sea of potential in the unchanging monotony of this rock, even as it cut deep, flooded valleys, killed plants and insects and life, divided families, swallowed those stupid enough to try and cross it.

The universe is expanding, cooling even as it increases in complexity. Energy sparking, cells dividing, new life rising up from sea and ice and sand and gas, every moment. With every breath new life is born, a star sends off new light to spread warmth to new worlds. Nebulae melt from their wispy and ethereal beauty, contracting into suns and planets and places were life can grow, and it does, oh God it does.

Even if there is death, even if the world is harsh and space is oh so cold, life survives, it etches a shadow onto the ever-moving wall of time. It writes itself, fills the cracks and splits the monotony apart like water-turned-ice cracking the greatest boulders. And all life is suffering, because struggle is what defines it, struggle is part of change and so is death and that is what life is - change.

Species grow. They compete. One string of molecules forms and develops a code that can be reproduced, other strings of molecules exist for just a second and then dissolve. But that one survivor, one in a million billion trillion, does not remain. It changes, adds on, becomes more complex. It splits, flows into an infinite number of diverging rivulets, gives birth to new life and that life fights. Descendents fight descendents, like Cain and Abel, to be the one that survives. Life multiplies. Strands of meaning die out like languages, like civilizations swallowed up by the desert, like petty insignificances forgotten in the march of time. Only the strong survive and grow and become better and they do so at the expense of others. Species become extinct. The meaningless ooze, or life less well-suited, becomes obsolete and fades into the dust of time. Predators eat prey and the prey becomes stronger, faster, more beautiful, more complex. The predators become more fierce. They grow in number. They too become faster, more beautiful. They consume the prey or they die out, but regardless, they change and they suffer.

There exist worlds covered in swarms of insects he once feared. They cocoon and grow. And fear has left him, because this is what they do. This is how they live. They are unique and beautiful, even as they stumble upon a defenseless child. Many die off, but one finds a way to attach itself to the child’s neck. It feeds. It grows strong. It needs more children for, with them, it need never die. It survives. It grows, incorporating more strands of molecules, more meaning. It changes form.

It evolves because the children know now to avoid it. Their parents have told stories about this frightful insect. It grows hungry. It suffers, feels so much pain. But it learns, even as others of its kind are learning. In one, the molecules of its prey survive. This one changes form. Is it different or is it the same? Is it prey or predator? Is it more brilliant now that it has eyes and hair and fingers? Is it more worthy or more evil now that it lures in the child with its innocence? With its intelligence? Now the children are gone and the insects are hungry - the children have moved away, gone through the stone ring to escape the suffering.

But one predator learns and passes on to its children what it knows and it knows to press a combination of buttons, to step through a pool of shimmering light to find its prey. It feels their blood. It feels their fear. It evolves. It melds with them but it is not them. It hears their language. It learns to speak. It speaks to its fellows. There are voices where there was once silence and they all speak out. They write it down. They preserve it. The build tools and ships and weapons. They build a civilization to quench their hunger. They build it all to ease their suffering, but the hunger is never satisfied. The spend eternity searching for a consummation that will never come.

The prey flees. The prey cries. It pleads. It tells stories about these Wraith that have wiped the world clean, that have survived so marvelously to control and dominate. The prey does not speak of their beauty. It does not tell how they rose up from nothing ... from a mere insect to a creature with songs and literature and needs more than hunger. It does not tell how they love. It does not tell how they search for ones that can spend a thousand ... million ... billion years together roaming the stars and care for each other with more compassion than a short lifespan could ever show. It does not speak of their language of thoughts so intimate, how it hurts them so deeply to be alone. It does not speak about the want, about how hunger cuts them to the core and how they will do anything so that they might ease that suffering - so that the ones they love will one day not have to suffer.

And the prey learns too. The prey learns to be brave and strong. How to fight and how to live with joy and laughter and love even when they know that the next day might be the day of a culling and the ones they love might die. The prey learns how to kill. The prey learns solace in that strength. The prey learns art. It learns how to live in one brief moment, to not think about eternity. It learns how to make one short life so brilliant that long lives of predation might not compare. The prey makes friends, communities, whole civilizations of love and trust. It knows worlds where there is no war, where disease is not feared, where man would never dare fight man because there is an enemy far worse. Love and compassion rise up because suffering is universal, and the Wraith make that so easy to see.

Worlds away, without the predators, prey fights prey. There is no space. There are wars over land and crops and neighbor fearing neighbor because there is nothing greater to fear. There are weapons meant to kill and destroy ones that eat and feel and love all the same, and it too is natural, even as they say it’s a shame and speak in shouted whispers that it’s wrong as they continue to kill and kill and kill. And they suffer all the same.

And which is better? The suffering of endless hunger? The suffering of seeing man kill man? The suffering of years long hunted? Or perhaps they were all the same. And perhaps they were better off for their suffering, for without suffering they would never become more. Without death, without change, there could be no evolution or complexity or beauty.

And all this is going somewhere. He felt the goal on the horizon, brilliant and beautiful and yet he could not see it, even now, its splendor was so blinding. It was the true face of God. It would burn him raw if he could know it. Because if he knew, then it would not be wondrous. He would be searching for still more. But he knew that it was there and that there is only one way to find it: life finds it. Life creates it, bound in suffering and death and change, it nurtures that which cannot be named, and that is the greatest cause of all.

And he could not bring himself to be the one to halt this great symphony traveling he knows not where. He could not make himself intervene, to secure the lives of his people at the cost of all this beauty.

Because everything in the universe is connected to everything else. A butterfly flaps its wings in China and a thousand people die in a hurricane, but that does not make the monarch’s wings less bright. The Wraith feed off a man and his son writes a poem greater than even the Odyssey, read for generations and treasured as the hope of a civilization.

There can be no hope without desperation, no heroism without an enemy, no beauty without unfairness, and no growth without change. And if he were to play god and shape the world, his wildest dreams could not produce something a millionth as wonderful.

Everything that lives suffers, even the Wraith. And he loved them all the same.

Then he blinked and reality rippled like a painting done on wet clay, images clear but shapeable. He found his body pressed up against the ruins, the text glowing so bright that he was forced to close his eyes, even as he knew that doing so would not close out his reality. He could feel it embedded deep in the central pillar. It was what Rodney called a ZPM, but once he called it Tara.

“Zero-point Energy, Major, is all around us. It’s in everything and it’s ... well, it’s immense. The problem is that we can’t measure it or utilizes it because it’s in the measuring equipment too.”

“Why can’t we just use some of that then? If it’s so damn abundant.” He was pissed off, sitting with Rodney, a little more than tipsy and a little less than drunk after another attempt to nab a ZPM left them empty handed.

“’Why can’t we just use some of that?’” McKay mumbled, obviously thinking it was beyond stupid. “Because ... because all energy that we do use is based on difference. How do you measure potential energy, for example?”

“PE equals m g h.”

“Good, Major. Nice to know you were paying attention during high school physics. Now, h is measured in height, right? So, lets say you’re going to drop something ... like, oh, say, Kavanagh, out of a plane at 30,000 feet. He’s going to have more potential energy if you’re over the Grand Canyon than if you’re over Mount Everest.”

“What if you drop him over the Marianna Trench?”

“What!”

“He can still potentially fall through water.”

“Ah, yes, that’s the same as falling through air only with a different viscosity. So it’s a different calculation.”

“But what if the Marianna Trench is filled with jell-o? And you don’t know the viscosity?”

“Then you don’t know the potential energy.”

“But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have it. Hey, what if the pilot’s blindfolded and doesn’t know where he’s going to drop the hatch?”

“You know what, forget that example. My point, Major, was that the height in the case of that equation was in relation to the difference in height of drop point and final resting point. The same is true of all energy calculations. It’s like ... it’s like sailing in a ship on a sea of water. It doesn’t matter if you’re on top of the Marianna Trench or cruising around the Mediterranean, the ship moves the same way.”

“But the depth of the ocean does change the way the water heats and cycles. creating currents.”

Rodney squinted, looking suspicious but intrigued. “Which only proves my point. We can sometimes feel the effects of Zero Point Energy - some argue that it’s what we feel when we experience inertia ...”

“ ... Where does action come from? Where does matter come from?” She smiled playfully, those bright teal eyes shining. Still, he was not sure if her joy would be enough to get him to believe.

“Energy.” He tried to sound resolute.

“But what is energy?”

He thought about it for the first time ever, he supposed. That was a question for people with far more expertise than he. “I don’t know.”

“It can be created. The technical theologians have proved it.”

“It comes from substance.”

“Substance is energy too. That’s one of the dichotomies we will be able to transcend when we achieve enlightenment. It has been proven that thought does not precede action, that action arises from some otherwhere and thought only becomes aware of it. But where is that otherwhere? Can we feel it? Could we manipulate it? What if we were not bound by the illusions of substance? What if we need not filter that pure undiluted action through the cage that is the body?”

He flexed his muscles, running a finger through her hair and down her back, drawing her closer to him. There was so much sensation here. There was so much triumph in feeling your muscles burn after a good workout, of feeling the joy of your lover trembling against you, of touchling and seeing and hearing. “I am not sure I want to be separated from my body.”

“But your body is energy so you would not be separated at all. You would be closer. Imagine, every thought, every potential realized without effort. Imagine just floating on the tide that is the universe instead of constantly resisting.”

“But the tide has a will. To submit yourself to it may be easier, but you will never get where you want to go.”

“Not if you can shape the tide . . .”

“... But what if we’re dropping Kavanagh out of a plane and the bastard thinks to bring a parachute? We don’t know when he’ll open it, so how do we calculate his potential energy then?”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Major. You can’t calculate potential energy for people. This is physics, not Aunt Jemima’s psychic hotline.” But what if you knew what people would do? What if you could change it? What if Kavanagh decided not to open the ‘chute? He could increase his potential energy at will. He could make energy with the force of his will alone.

“I thought that was a type of syrup.”

“Whatever. You’re distracting me from the point.”

“You had a point?”

“Yes, I had a point,” McKay snapped. “My point was that what a ZedPM does is to isolate just a small fraction of this energy that surrounds us which used to be ‘water water everywhere but not a drop to drink.’ It needs to be isolated, otherwise there’s no difference, which is what all actual uses of energy are derived from. The problem is that as vast as this energy is, if you isolate it, you make it finite.”

“Well, if it’s everywhere, why don’t you just let more in?”

“Because ... gee, I’m sorry, but I don’t know how to create a self-contained bubble of space/time. I must’ve left the manual at home.”

“Couldn’t you just refill the bubble you already have?”

“Fill it with what?”

“I thought you didn’t like religious questions.”

He could feel it through the stone that fingers somewhere knew was cold. He could feel its hum, but he could also feel its loneliness. It struggled to return to normal time, to flow back into the sea of potential that was all existence. That’s where the Tara came from. It too was a product of desire. It wanted to help. It wanted to create action. It wanted to be connected to everything else and it wanted to love them. Becoming action, whether that action was powering the shield or firing drone weapons, or painting pretty pictures, that action was the only way for the energy to return to the world, so it did it.

He concentrated on that void, filled it up with everything he knew to be true about the world. He felt every living thing, everything changeable, everything capable of suffering and he loved them all, without qualification. It felt like flying, the universe flowing through him like a river, wiping him clean.

The void hummed, the lights shone, the world exploded into a mass of energy and his wish was granted.

Major John Sheppard slumped to the ground, kneeling before the ruins and watching the sky as a familiar wisp of energy floated off, seemingly on the wind, the ruins humming with a promise fulfilled. He could see her waiting, perched on a cloud almost, a smile on her face and her eyes melting from brown to teal as the two forms embraced.

“What was that? What’d you do? Sheppard! Oh thank God.” He felt hands on him, rough and slightly pudgy and familiar as they dragged him to his feet. He leaned heavily against the warm body at his , soaking up the small comfort to be found there. They were connected. They both suffered and they were both redeemed.

He finally tore his eyes from the lightshow in the sky and smiled at McKay.

“What’s with the dopey grin? What are you, stoned? We need to get you back to the jumper. Beckett needs to ... “ McKay’s relieved joy melted into anger in a second. “What the hell were you thinking! Sorry, Major, but the role of Joan of Arc is already taken, though you might look pretty with pigtails. Of all the stupid, suicidal, heart-stopping ...”

“Rodney. Rodney! I’m all right and they’re together now.” He gestured to the clouds still sparking with electricity - with energy.

“So all this ... all the me chasing after you -killing my knees, by the way- and the panic and the retching and the you almost dying that was all just so some ancient studmuffin could get all glowy with his girl? I’m sorry, but if he wasn’t all omnipotent, I would want to kick this guys ass. And you should too. In fact, you should do it for me ‘cause that’s what you soldier-types are supposed to do and my back is giving me problems.”

“But I’m happy for them. They love each other and that makes the universe a better place. It changes the current.”

“What current? Major, what’s wrong with you? Did the glowies mess around with that already hopelessly jumbled brain of yours?” McKay let him go and John found his knees buckling. He was still confined by the matter/energy dichotomy after all. “Okay, so standing’s a little ambitious for you. That’s all right. We’ll just take it slower,” McKay manhandled him so he was leaning up against one of the ruins. “You stay there. I’m just going to be about ten feet over here, checking on Ford.”

“I charged a ZPM,” John said dazedly. It had been amazing - better than flying because he was everywhere and everything at once, surfing the tide of energy that was existence.

“You’re delusional,” McKay said, even as he was fumbling with his vest looking for the Ancient scanning device. After a second’s consideration, his eyes lit up. “How’d you ... what’d you ... Can you do it again?”

“I showed the universe that I loved everything equally. That’s what the Tara is - undiluted compassion.”

McKay gaped.

“And, no, I can’t do it again.” That was part of the condition after all - the greatest catch-22 of all time. He could have infinite power by loving everything equally, but loving everything equally meant that he could never use the power to benefit one side or another. He couldn’t act. And he understood that now ... understood why, no matter how much McKay bitched or the people at the SGC whined, the Ancients couldn’t intervene - not in big ways at least.

McKay’s face fell, only to brighten again. “That’s okay. One fully charged ZedPM is more than enough to power the shield for as long as we’re alive, at least. I’m sure once Ford wakes up, he’ll be able to get me some C4 and we could ‘extract’ the ...”

“No.”

“What do you mean, ‘no?’ ZedPM here, hello.”

“I mean that it wouldn’t do anything. These ruins are here to fulfill promises. They are shaping the universe in subtle ways as we speak. You can’t just go and blow them up. Jesus, Rodney, I’m out of it for a few days and you get all military on me.”

“Well someone has to be, seeing as how you’re about one step away from nature walks and Kumbayah. Are you sure you’re not stoned?”

“I’m high on life.” Clichéd, but true.

“O-kay. Well, then ...” McKay was interrupted by a groan as Ford sat up, rubbing his head. McKay helped him to his feet.

Ford looked over at John and grinned. “Good to see you, Sir.”

John returned the smile, which seemed to make Ford even happier. “You too, Lieutenant.” And he meant it. “Now, let’s blow this Popsicle stand before the darts I saw rushing to get here actually succeed.”

“You mean you didn’t destroy them when you had the ...”

“No.”

“Well, let’s just get the Zed...”

“After we talk to Elizabeth about it.” Though he had a pretty good idea with whom she’d side.

“But didn’t you use the brainwashy-collar on her?” Ford asked, limping ahead as McKay put one of John’s arms over his shoulder and hauled him up.

“You let him name it?” John asked, giving McKay a poke in the ribs.

“No. I’m not stupid. But he does have a point. You did ...”

“It was not a brainwashy-collar.”

“Fine. Then what was it?”

“It was ... well, it ... it let me and Elizabeth ... Dr. Weir ... it let us connect.” John flushed, looking at the ground. It really wasn’t like it sounded.

“You and Dr. Weir had glowy-sex!” Ford nearly yelped.

“No, Ford. We ... shared. Besides, don’t think you’re a little young for that sort of language?”

Ford glared. Rodney smirked.

“So this ‘sharing ...’ You showed each other the deepest most intimate parts of your souls? How touching. And then you whipped her into letting you ...”

“You know, Major, the Doc sounds almost jealous.”

Rodney rounded on Ford. “I’m sorry, but I don’t remember ordering a talking GI Joe doll. Seriously, Major, if there’s any chance you could have permanently damaged ... er, realigned Elizabeth’s perspective ...”

“Drop it, Rodney.”

“But ...”

“How about we discuss this when we’re back on Atlantis, with no Wraith?”

That shut Rodney up for most of the trip back to the jumper. But the second Rodney sat down in the pilot seat (John’s desire to fly dampened by exhaustion and by what had happened last time he tried), he turned and had this look on his face - like he’d just made Kavanagh redo a day’s worth of calculations or proved some sort of theoretical physics postulate. McKay smirked, asking. “So, if you learned to love everything in the universe equally, does that mean you love me the same?”

John grinned. “I might have to make an exception for you.”

McKay just puffed up his chest, ignoring the intended insult. “I am rather exceptional, aren’t I?”

“Yes, you are.”

McKay seemed to stop and consider it for a second before replying. “Yep, definitely stoned. High as a stratospheric weather balloon ...”

John smiled as they lifted off through the clouds, leaving the last dying embers of the fire on the planet far below them. He could still feel the universe humming, the jumper connected to the sky, connected to space, connected to worlds far away where stars died and gave life, where people lived and loved and fought wars gruesome and bloody.

He thought back to the ruins, glowing happily to the magic of the Tara and the last inscription made there. It read, ‘I, John Sheppard, promise to change.’

And that was enough.

FIN