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Feedback: Always appreciated
AN: I was planning to start on this later, but decided to push this one ahead of the 'queue' after another fic required too much effort for too little reward. This story will be a crossover, but I'll move it to the crossover section when the plot reaches that point, but in the meantime, see if anyone can guess what the other element of this story is before I get there…
AN 2: For SG-1, this is set in the first half of Season Seven, after Daniel returned from his time Ascended but before Anubis introduced the Kull Warriors; the timing of the second crossover will be clear when it becomes relevant.
The Guardian and the Gate
Ever since his official return to SG-1, the thing that troubled Daniel the most about his Ascension was what he didn't remember.
He had been told that he'd paid brief visits to Jack and Teal'c during that year before the final reunion with the whole team on Abydos, and he guessed that he'd done far more than that over the year, but no matter how hard he tried to strain his memory, he had only remembered that incident when he saw Bra'tac and Ry'ac being captured and nothing else.
He appreciated that he had probably been returned to his human form as a punishment, and he should consider himself lucky that he was able to remember anything considering what they could have done to him, but that didn't change how frustrating it was to have this gap in his memory. Learning had always been his passion, and the knowledge that there was a whole chunk of his life missing was something that continued to trouble him even months after he had returned to the SGC. He was as committed to ensuring Anubis's defeat as the rest of his team, and he'd never jeopardise their chances just to satisfy some personal need, but ever since his session with Teal'c, he spent at least one night a week attempting meditation to unlock further memories.
He had spent the last hour or so sitting on his bed to try and find any further memories, but when this private session concluded with no more stirring of memory than any other attempt since the mission to Erebus, Daniel gave up for the night and settled into bed…
He was looking down at a vast planet, from a perspective that was just about acceptable in dreams but would have completely baffled the conscious mind. The cities of the planet below were much like what he was familiar with from Earth, but a casual closer glance at each made the differences clear. No matter what city he tried to focus on, the streets were always filled with people and small groups of strange animals, ranging from large rats, cats or dogs, to creatures he would have been prepared to swear were some kind of dragon.
He was trying to take a closer look at the cities when he felt his view shift, moving from the heart of the cities to spread across the world. He saw even more creatures walking alongside humans as he moved, with further creatures playing and fighting in the wild, but his senses soon drove him towards a few key figures.
He didn't know what was so significant about these creatures in particular, apart from the fact that he never saw more than one of them where other creatures existed in their multitudes, but he soon found himself watching three large creatures that tentatively reminded him of dogs running through fields…
Three small blue creatures literally floated above three different lakes…
Four large figures that almost seemed to be made of stone were stomping through mountains…
Seven awe-inspiring birds, two of which looked particularly similar to each other, flew through the sky…
A long green Chinese-style dragon flew through the upper atmosphere…
A large red creature slumbered in a volcano…
A creature resembling a long-flippered whale rested at the bottom of the sea…
Three creatures flew through stormy skies, resembling men with clouds for legs…
Four strange creatures ran through the fields, one of them particularly fat but all looking like horses to some degree…
A large blue creature that put him in mind of a stag with rainbow-coloured antlers…
As these and further, less comprehensible images flew past his eyes, there was a sudden flash of intense white and Daniel found himself staring at a DHD as six chevrons lit up, displaying a clear and unmistakeable gate address that he had never seen before, only for the view to vanish as a white glow filled his vision.
As the white glow intensified, Daniel squinted against the glare, before it dimmed to a more tolerable level. Looking ahead, Daniel was surprised to find himself facing a creature that he could only think of as a giant llama with a golden ring around its waist, staring at him with a surprisingly solemn glare for something he couldn't help but think of as just an animal.
"She will come to claim the birds," the llama 'said'; its lips didn't move, but Daniel somehow knew that the creature was speaking for itself, rather than something speaking through it. "You must protect my fellow magical creatures."
"Magical… creatures?" Daniel repeated, looking uncertainly at the figure. "What-?"
For a moment, everything blurred again before he was hovering over a sizeable archipelago of differently-sized islands, some densely populated for their size and the others basically deserted, before his gaze was focused on a collection of four islands in the centre of this archipelago, one large island and three smaller ones forming a shape that reminded him of a paw. Just as he registered its shape, he was suddenly turned around to face up to the sky, in time to see a ha'tak emerge from the clouds-
Sitting sharply up in bed, Daniel could only gasp and look around himself before he calmed down, the shock of that strange dream fading as he reminded himself of the facts.
"It's just a dream…" he told himself, settling back down in bed. "A very weird dream… but just a dream…"
Maybe he should give up on meditation as a possible solution to his memory issues; an open mind was one thing, but if he started seeing things like that he had more problems than he thought.
What kind of planet would have all those creatures?
Then again, that gate address was a bit too specific for it to be some random dream…
SG-1 already had a mission scheduled for the morning, but Daniel made a note to check the database for anything similar to that planet's address once he was back from the mission to work out where it was…