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fated to be alone, it thought bitterly. But that was not fair. The others had hunted the woman to extinction. She had not left willingly. Her only crime was that she had not come back.
    So it pressed its back up against the warm wet stones and rocked slowly forwards and back, forwards and back, each time a little further forward, a little harder back, until the rough points of the stone dug into its flesh. It needed to feel physical pain. Nothing else would block out the spiritual hurt.
    It screamed out into the dark, a wretched, primal cry torn from its ragged lips.
    It was alone.
    Again.
    How long would it be before others came through the dead eye looking for it? How many more eruptions would it count off before the eye lit up blue with its own fire? How much longer would it be before she came back to it?
    It cried silent tears into the rough cloth covering its face, and sang again the song it had sung for her, hoping somehow she would hear the harmonics and come back to it.
    It was never meant to be alone.

Chapter Seven
     
What Price Victory?
     
    SG-1 kitted up.
    Daniel sat with Jerichau learning all he could about the prison planet. The woman was fascinating. Quite unlike many of the Tok’ra they had encountered. For one thing, she had a sense of humor. He had rather enjoyed seeing Jack squirm while she toyed with him. It was usually Daniel’s role to play tongue-tied and twisted whereas Jack was always so together. It was part of that bad-boy charm of his. It was funny, with all this talk of archetypes, he couldn’t help but think of them in the same vein. He had thought it would be easy to hang a label on each of them, Jack the hero, dynamic and strong, Teal’c the shapeshifter who had begun his time in the shadows only to come over to the light, Daniel himself as the mentor, offering knowledge instead of brawn, and Sam another aspect of the teacher, like Daniel but then so unlike him, but their roles weren’t remotely so straightforward. Sometimes Teal’c wore the mantel of hero, at other times Sam, or Daniel himself. It was as though collectively they owned the attributes of the hero, the best and the worst, and together they were so much more than the sum of their parts.
    But then that was what being a part of a team like SG-1 was all about, wasn’t it?
    Vasaveda lacked a breathable atmosphere: indeed if everything Jerichau said was the truth they were about to willingly enter a Miltonesque landscape of Paradise most certainly lost. She talked of a world so harsh it beggared belief; volcanic fissures venting steam, red lava leaking out of the ground as though the planet itself wept for the Hell it had become. She described wonders that resonated with the Christian iconography of that blasted place, the unending barren wasteland, the unbearable heat, the volatility of the oxygen in the air that caused the sky itself to ignite in flame and burn for days on end. He listened to it all and understood that no amount of planning or forethought could prepare them for Vasaveda. She was painting a picture of a place so wretched it was impossible to imagine finding it inhabited at all. The worst of it, though, was her contention that the Ancients had somehow made it that way, and that it had not always been so.
    “We believe the Mujina has taken refuge in an elaborate subterranean network not far from the Stargate itself. Nyren Var’s transmission was cryptic: see the world through the old man’s eyes.”
    “Well that makes a lot of sense,” Daniel said.
    “It is all we have, but hopefully it will be clear when you arrive on the prison planet.”
    She wrote out seven symbols on the scrap of paper Daniel placed on the table between them. “The co-ordinates to hell,” he said to himself as he studied them. He felt a thrill of fear chase down the ladder of his spine as he picked the paper up. It wasn’t just that the place she described so vividly unnerved him, far from it actually — he’d been to hell and