Short prologue. Longer chapters.

Well, here goes another story. It’s very difficult to write, but I’m hoping it is worth the effort. Please let me know what you think. I'm going to start out posting once or twice a week. The prologue is short, but subsequent chapters are much longer.

Different parts were betad/edited by different people including DJ, angw, sholio and a few anonymous folks. Remaining errors are mine.

Title: Deep Down Below

Genre: Mystery/Suspense (Ghost story)

Warnings: Some Language, This story is a style guinea pig so expect some style changes throughout.

Spoilers: Critical Mass and anything before that.

Disclaimer: I don’t own Stargate Atlantis. This is done for fun.

Prologue

It was late autumn when the ancient city was put to rest, nearly ten thousand years ago. It fell into the depths of the ocean, where it began a long slumber. Abandoned by its people, it waited for the day when it would once again rise.

Nearly one hundred years before that, lost in the bowels of Atlantis, for that was what this magnificent place was called, one man’s heart was shattered into a thousand pieces. He held the corpse of his late love while he wept onto her lifeless chest.

Once his tears had run dry and his body stopped trembling, the wretched soul came to his feet. He took a seat at a musical device, an instrument he had crafted for his dearest partner. His fingers fell onto the keys and he played her favorite song as a final farewell.

When the Lanteans finally found her body, pale skinned and cold against the ship’s metal, they began a search for her widower. But he was nowhere to be found. A short time later, the lights stopped turning on along the corridor, and not a day after that, the room in which she had died sealed itself closed, refusing to open for anyone.

After years of fiddling with the equipment, even the best engineers could not fix the mysterious failures. It was as though the whole section had died with her.

It was a cold winter’s day, just years after the city had resurfaced, that a stranger arrived in the buried section. Although he set to work to once again bring power to the lifeless area, a beautiful machine soon distracted him. His fingers traced against the keys, and a nostalgic smile crossed his face as music filled the room.

Night fell upon the shimmering ocean. The scientist continued to fiddle with the instrument and then once again with the city’s wires. Not privy to this dark tale, he had no idea just how magnificent it was that the lights above him flickered to life.