Luna stepped forward—
—and the universe changed.
There was no tunnel. No rushing light. No sense of motion at all.
One moment she was surrounded by alarms and angry footsteps, and the next her shoe met stone beneath an open sky. The air was cooler here, thinner somehow, carrying the faint scent of dust and something long untouched.
She wobbled.
"Oh," Luna said softly. "That was fast."
We have arrived, Egeria noted internally after a fraction of a second. For her, the transition had been abrupt—one instant of heightened alert, the next a blank discontinuity, like a thought interrupted mid-syllable. Stargate travel is not normally perceived as—anything at all.
"I didn't really notice it," Luna replied aloud, which was mostly true Wile ignoring Egeria's confusion. "Just that I'm not where I was."
She took another step and promptly collapsed.
The ground rushed up to meet her, and Luna landed on her side with a quiet oof, blinking at the sky above. Two moons hung low there, pale and mismatched, watching in silence.
"Well," she said mildly, "that explains it."
This world is wrong, Egeria realized but not knowing exactly why.
Not hostile. Not poisoned. Simply… empty.
It's Magic Egeria... There is not natural magic on this planet. Luna thought to Egeria as talking was to tiring currently.
How did you know that? I am unsure what magic feels like exactly only that I can sort of feel that emptiness here? Egeria questioned her young host.
My mother's workshop had this sort of cage where magic didn't exist. She called is a Faraday cage, it was unsettling so I only went in the one time.
Luna's magic started reacting upon her finished thought.
Not explosively. Not defensively. Instead, it folded inward, tightening like a cloak pulled close against the cold. Egeria could not see how it worked—only that it did.
You are stabilizing me... stabilizing us, Egeria said slowly. Faster than projected.
Luna hummed faintly as she rolled onto her back, hands folded on her chest while she stared at the stars. "That's good. It would be very inconvenient if either of us fell apart."
Egeria said nothing.
She was recalculating.
No human host she had known could adapt this quickly. No biological system alone should be capable of performing this magics while also compensating for an old symbiote... at least not without a sarcophagus to heal.
And yet—
Something in Luna was doing exactly that.
This world had always been a dead world, nothing to mine, nothing to eat, nothing to drink always dead. Egeria said at last trying explain why this world could be without magic. It was once a Tok'ra refuge. Abandoned centuries ago.
"It feels lonely," Luna replied.
She pushed herself upright more carefully this time, fingers brushing against the stone platform that held the gate for balance. Behind her, the Stargate stood silent and dark, its surface dulled with age. Pale crystalline growths crept along its base, scattering faint starlight like frost.
Egeria turned her attention inward again.
You are aware of things you do not explain, she said.
Luna smiled. "People say that quite often."
Egeria knew better than to press. Whatever allowed Luna to act with such certainty was not something she could access. Not memory. Not instinct. Not anything that followed Tok'ra logic.
A sealed chamber in a shared mind.
They rested for a time, letting their systems settle into an uneasy balance.
When Luna's breathing evened out, Egeria spoke again—this time deliberately.
The Goa'uld are not like us, she explained. They rule by force. They take hosts without consent. They call themselves gods.
She spoke of Ra. Of Apophis. Of the hierarchy of false divinity and the endless cycle of conquest. Of the Tok'ra, who broke away, who chose partnership, and who paid dearly for it.
Luna listened without interrupting, her gaze drifting between the moons and the stars beyond them.
"That's very sad," she said at last. "You should have had better friends."
Egeria felt something tighten—not pain, not fear. Something unfamiliar.
Your kind would make ideal hosts, she said carefully. Long-lived. Resilient. Powerful.
Luna tilted her head slightly. "But you don't want hosts."
No.
"You want partners," Luna said. "That's very different."
Yes.
"That's good," Luna decided. "I don't think I'd like sharing my head with someone who didn't ask nicely."
Egeria felt something dangerously close to amusement.
Silence settled again, gentle this time.
After a while, Luna spoke.
"Egeria?"
Yes, Luna.
"Does Hogwarts have stars like this?"
Egeria followed her gaze, ancient memory and present uncertainty overlapping but never quite aligning.
I do not know, she admitted.
Luna smiled.
"I think it does," she said. "They're just easier to miss when you're busy looking down."
Under a sky untouched by magic or empire, they rested—one guided by truths she could not share, the other learning that some mysteries were not meant to be solved, only respected.