========================================================================= Date: Wed, 20 Mar 1996 17:02:00 -0500 Reply-To: "Sean A.Simpson" Sender: Highlander TV show stories From: "Sean A.Simpson" Subject: Rules and Consequences 1/3 REPOST This got somewhat scrambled the first time around. I didn't look too far down to see how bad the damage was, but I'm reposting anyway. Here's the third story in the Angus/Terry series. "And So It Begins" and "Shapes in Shadows" are the first two parts of The Sands of Time, in case you're wondering. They can be found at: http://www.moravian.edu/people/students/stsas02/hl.htm ============================================================================== Highlander is a production of Panzer/Davis and is a copyright thereof. This story is not intended as a threat to that copyright. This story (c) 1996 Sean A. Simpson. It may be freely distributed provided that this statement, and the above concerning Rysher Entertainment, are included, and that the text is included in its entirety. ============================================================================== Rules and Consequences Part Three of The Sands of Time By Sean A. Simpson >From the journal of Terence O'Brian, dated 3/3/93 Right now, I'm on a plane back from Germany. Angus took me to meet a friend of his, who had some antiques that Angus thinks I would be interested in acquiring for my business. I did come away with a few good pieces. My guess is that it was one of Angus' "old" friends, "old" being the term he uses to describe other Immortals. At the moment, however, it seems that Angus is attempting to convince the woman in the next seat that he's a history professor at the University of Albany (she said she liked intellectuals). He's certainly doing a good job at it -- so far, he's given a brief outline of the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, the history of fuedal Japan, and an outline of the tenets of ancient Egyptian religion. However, his unbound shoulder-length hair (he told me that he hasn't had short hair since the second World War) and rather scraggly beard (he learned to shave with a bronze dagger) seem to indicate to her that he might simply be well read. Personally, I think she's just admiring his chest. (She did ask him if he played "chest -- er, chess.") Well, at any rate, he's certainly enjoying it. It's these kind of incidents that make me wonder about the kind of man Angus is. He goes from sounding like an ancient wise man -- despite the fact that he doesn't look a day over thirty-three when he's clean shaven -- to what he shows in these kinds of interactions. He's still young and vital in a very real way, but he can look at you in a way that makes the weight of millenia so incredibly apparent that it's unreal. It's the same kind of feeling that I get when I look at things like Stonehenge and the Pyramids. These are things built millenia ago, telling tales about a world buried in the sands of time. And Angus is older than most of them. This was never made more apparent to me than on this trip to Germany. We went to the oldest German city, Trier, which was built two thousand years ago by the Romans. It was there that I met the "old" friend of Angus', a woman who looked to be about thirty-five, but my guess is that she's much older. Neither she nor Angus gave any hint about her being Immortal, and Angus never answered any questions I put to him about her age. We arrived in Trier a week ago. Angus said that he had been in China and Japan when the city was built, but that he had arrived in the city sometime around 220 AD, when he was exploring the Roman Empire. He pointed out buildings that had been built by that time, and a few that had been built while he was living in Trier during the third century. This was when the shear immensity of Angus' age really hit me. Those buildings were falling apart from age and from disrepair, and the man walking beside me, as healthy as any thirty-year-old man could possibly be, was twice as old as them. He was older than the Pyramids. He had seen times and places modern historians make vague guesses about, and he had lived through them. I had to stop and lean against the wall to take it all in. "These buildings are truly beautiful, lad, but there's no reason to faint over them," Angus said. "Angus, how do you do it? Four thousand years? Most Immortals, I imagine, watch their friends and loved ones grow old and die while they remain the same, but their world doesn't change in a fundamental way. You don't have a single remnant of the world you were born into. No one speaks the language you grew up with. The buildings and people you knew as a mortal are so much dust. The world you knew when you were young is vanished, almost as if it never existed." Angus regarded me for a moment before answering. "Lad, it's something you learn to live with. I learned four thousand years ago about changing myself to fit into a culture. When I went to Sumer I abandoned my given Egyptian name and took a more Sumerian name. When I returned to Egypt I took on a wholly new name. Truth be told, I'm not even sure what my given name is. I've had so many names over the millenia that they all just blur together. If you were to try to track down an Angus MacGregor, you'd find the birth certificate for one in Scotland. Angus MacGregor, according to the birth certificate I forged thirty-five years ago, was born in 1958 in Edinburgh to John MacGregor and Debra MacGregor nee Donnelly. John MacGregor was the identity I used before this one. Before that I was Douglas MacGregor, before that Giuseppe MacGregor-Satorelli, before that Jerome du Lac-MacGregor, and further back. I've told you before how important the name and clan MacGregor are to me. For four hundred years, I've been a MacGregor, whether the name came from my 'father,' 'mother,' or was simply a made-up identity. "Of course, that means that I've left a visible trail for four hundred years for those who know how and where to look, but that is limited to Immortals and Watchers." "Angus, who are the Watchers?" Angus smiled his slight smile. "I've never told you of the Watchers? Ah, now, that's a story. "The Watchers are a group of mortals who watch and record the lives of us Immortals. I don't particularly like them, but I tolerate them. I've tried many, many times to get rid of them." Angus indicated a man leaning unobtrusively against a wall across the street. "There's the one that's been following me since the airport. He's one of the better ones; I had to look for a bit to find him. Most of the time I have them picked out in only a few minutes; he took me nearly half an hour to find." Angus smiled slightly. "One nearly took me a week and a half to find." "How did you learn about them? I gather that they don't go out of their way to make themselves known to you." "You see strangers watching you for long enough, you get suspicious. I don't know how long they've been watching me. I didn't even put it together until the fifth century AD, about the time of the fall of Rome." Angus scratched at his beard. "Which reminds me...I haven't seen Darius in sixty years. I should go visit him this summer." "Who's Darius?" "Darius is one of the greatest of our kind. Fifteen hundred years ago he was a Roman general who sought to conquer the known world. His armies rolled up to the gates of Paris, where he was stopped by a holy man, the oldest of our kind alive then. Older than me. Older than Methos. He beheaded the holy man, and he was changed by that Quickening. He became a monk, and has lived in a church in Paris ever since, occasionally leaving the church to go where he is needed. I hope that may be the 'only one.' No one deserves it more." "How did you meet?" "I heard of the death of the old one and I wanted to see what kind of man had taken his head. Since then, Darius and I have passed much time playing chess and discussing philosophy. We have a wonderful relationship, and I only hope it lasts as long as possible." "Sounds like how you met MacLeod." Angus thought for a second. "Oh, yes, Connor. Something like that. I went to find Connor because I needed to know if an evil Immortal's power had been amplified by the Quickening of the Kurgan, or if it had been a good Immortal, as I'd heard of Connor, if he had been overwhelmed by the evil so powerfully dominant in the Kurgan." "What if you had been...unsatisfied with MacLeod or Darius?" Angus' expression darkened. "I would have killed them." "I thought you didn't like to kill." "I don't. Not young ones like Hughes or Bennett or any of those others who have come for me in the past year. But I would have dragged Darius off of holy ground myself and torn his head from his shoulders with my bare hands if he had been the ruthless man I'd heard of. I would not have hesitated to take Connor's head if he had been darkened by the Kurgan's Quickening. There have been others I've had to kill to prevent their evil from spreading out into the world. Like Ikenegoro." "Who?" Angus sighed. "I've told this story to only a few. Ikenegoro was a student of mine from the interior of Africa in the thirteenth century BC. I taught him for six years, and then he tried to take my head like a thief in the night. "No teacher likes to have to kill a student, so I let him live, saying that he would have to mend his ways, or I would take his head. He left the village in shame and vowed revenge. "Fifteen years later he found me in what is now Morocco. He had taken heads of several young ones, and even a few older ones using trickery and under-handed techniques. Feeling cocky, he came for my head, but once again I let him live. "I didn't see him again until nearly eighty years had passed. I was living in the Egyptian city now called Heliopolis as a merchant, and I had a mortal wife and an Immortal student. Ikenegoro murdered my wife and student and set about destroying my life in the city before finally coming after my head. I did not let him live that time." Angus would say no more. After I had met Angus' friend Helga, and bought several pieces from her (including a beautiful three-hundred-year-old scimitar), Angus told me about more of his early life. We were sitting in his hotel room, enjoying a good German beer (Angus greatly enjoys beer; after all, he says, it's one of the few things still in existence that's older than he is.) "It was the end of the nineteenth century BC, I think, that I left Egypt to see what more there was to the world. About twenty years later, in what is now India, I met a woman and married her. I stayed there for nearly fifty years before she died, and then I headed further east. "It was in those lands to the east, in what is now Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, and the other countries of Southeast Asia that I met my third teacher. He was a mortal mystic who taught me philosophy and the ways of the natural world. I studied with him for about twenty years, in which time he had many other students come and go, but I was always there. "After he told me that he could teach me no more, I wandered further south and east until I found a fishing town that has since vanished. There was an expedition there planning to set sail for some land to the south that a sailor had landed on and barely returned to tell the tale. He'd been gone for six months, and everyone believed that he was dead, until his boat drifted in, and he was dehydrated and delirious. After he returned to health, he told everyone of this strange land with strange creatures to the south, and that he believed riches awaited anyone willing to make the journey. I signed on, figuring I had nothing to lose. "I was the only one to survive the trip to what we now know as Australia. "I wandered the Outback until I was captured by a group of the people living there. There was an Immortal healer named Dreamwalker among them, and recognizing me as being different, as being like him, he took me in, and I taught him the Rules of the Game, and he taught me, in return, to heal and to explore mysticism. "After about sixty-five years, I grew tired of wandering Australia, and longed to see home again. I found my way back to the place where I had first landed on the coast of Australia, built a boat, and set sail northward. After nearly nine months at sea -- the latter three with no food or water -- I landed on the coast of China, and set my way back to the land of my birth. I arrived there after twelve years of wandering and seeing the changing lands. It was not until then that the weight of my nature began to sink in. Before, I always moved on before I spent too much time in one place. But now, I saw the world as changing while I stood still, and I resolved to change that. Since then, I have done my best to blend in with every culture, become a part of it, so that when the time came to leave, I was a different person than when I had arrived. "However, the span of those intervals has changed. I ceased to think in years around the time I turned three hundred. I ceased to think in decades a thousand years ago. I think in centuries now, lad. To me, my four hundred years in Western civilization is but a small part of my life." Angus fell silent. I waited for a moment before I began to ask my questions. "There's something I've been meaning to ask you. Fei once mentioned that you studied with several people who claimed to be sorcerors, like Nakano. I want to know just what you have to say about them." Angus looked me dead in the eyes, in a way he's never looked at me, a way that I've never seen him look at anyone. Suddenly I found myself doubled over in pain, and my lunch was threatening to make a fast exit. Just as suddenly, it had passed. Angus pulled me to my feet and said, "An Aztec priest named Athlicoatl taught me that. I've learned many other things as well." Angus pressed the index and middle fingers of his right hand to my left temple, and a sudden feeling of well-being flooded my body. "An Immortal shaman from a long-vanished tribe in North America taught me that. It's all tied up in the Quickening, in the life-force that binds every living thing together. Nakano was an illusionist who was able to use the power of the Quickening in a very unique and powerful way. Dreamwalker, who I know Fei has told you about, could learn things about the world around him with his power. Sethihotep, an Immortal Egyptian sorceror I studied with, had some kind of unusual mind-control powers. However, there are inherent dangers in these powers, especially for Immortals." "How so?" "When a mortal learns magic, sorcery, his share of the Quickening is so small that he learns rituals and methods that help him to draw it from other sources, so that he may perform great deeds. However, this channeling can burn out and kill mortals. ============================================================================== Sean A. Simpson -- Trekkie, X-Phile, Highlander, etc. stsas02@moravian.edu http://www.moravian.edu/people/students/stsas02 Rogue FW for Duncan and Methos Head DFW for the first Highlander Gathering bearing a @}-`--,--- and a /| O====[]======================-- \| "rathlaHebj wa' neH" (There can be only one -- Klingon) "We're Starfleet officers. 'Weird' is part of the job." --- Capt. Janeway