They stood before her, more powerful than she in their collective unity. She had the power of the storm in her fingertips, the ability to touch the life of a child born to evil and to help him to rise above his birth, but she did not possess the absolute strength of those who now stood before her.

There were no platitudes, no polite courtesies of the kind in which the lesser races indulged. They went straight to the point, like a knife to the heart. We offer you a rejoining.

"After I was cast out for daring to interfere?" There was no bitterness in her voice; her choice had been the right one, whatever consequences she had weathered for choosing it.

You knew the rules then as you know them now, one said - Daletha. We are not to interfere with the lives of the young. They must make their own choices.

"If there is only one path, then there is no choice. The child had only one path - I gave her another so she could choose his own way."

Your interference was unnecessary. She should have been left to her fate.

"I made my choice," she stated. "So that she could make her own. As I have done for another since that time. And this is history, past and gone. You offer me a rejoining - what price is asked?"

The price of our people is always the same: you must leave behind that which holds you to this plane.

A harsh price, indeed.

She had given much to the people among whom she lived, and to leave it all behind...

Yet there was something else. Something else in the 'feel' of their presence, as if they held back some knowledge.

"What else?"

There is one you have met before. One you taught a little of our ways. He came seeking the child.

She remembered. Few ventured to Kheb in a spirit of inquiry, fewer still cared to learn what she had to teach. The young man had been willing to learn, to look beyond what his friend called 'mumbo-jumbo'. So she had shown him as best she could that what he sought was in good hands.

And in the end, he had entrusted her with the care of the child who was his own in heart and spirit, if not in body. Shifu was not the first of his kind, but she had learned her lessons from the first child in whose life she had intervened - and been cast from her own kind for the act.

"What of him?"

He dies. The potential exists within him to become one of us, and he has encountered your kind before.

"And my task is then to guide him?"

Your task is to help him accept his worthiness.

It would be no easy task. The young man had knowledge and a willingness to learn, yes; but doubts, fears, and fears of failure marred his soul.

"And if he chooses otherwise?"

Then he makes his choice. Yet if you show him what good he can accomplish...

"To stand with his hands tied as he watches evil overtake those he loves?"

There is a greater picture at hand.

There always was.

"What if I choose to refuse this task?"

Then you shall go on as you have before and we shall send another who has had dealings with his kind.

She considered it. Her existence had been satisfying and worthwhile, but she was aware of the larger picture - the larger picture in which she presently had no part. Her work among the lesser races was satisfying in its own way, but lonely. While Shifu had achieved his own ascendance through her help, there were no others of her kind on Kheb. The monks were still of the physical world, choosing to remain and to point those who sought the higher path in the right direction.

"What of Shifu?"

The Goa'uld child's time has not yet come. The student will never be greater than the teacher, but the true disciple outstrips the one whose lessons he learns. He will have his own path to tread. We offer you this choice now.

Perhaps the time had come to cease dabbling in the affairs of the young and rejoin those she had rejected - just as they had cast her out for seeing a child who knew only evil and showing her what good she could do.

It would mean leaving her haven.

And yet, to go on a journey to a distant land, one must be willing to leave the house.

She lifted her chin, and looked Daletha in the eye before inclining her head in assent. "I accept."

Then your task is before you. Return among us, Oma Desala, seek out the one known as Daniel Jackson and show him his own potential. Embrace your true destiny.

Around her, the glow of the many suffused her being, and she felt the sudden echo of power through Daletha. So much power, and yet kept and hoarded rather than used. There had been others who had seen the storing of power and rebelled against the holding of it for the time yet to come, as she had once done.

That time was over.

So she spanned the boundaries of time and space to a room where a woman helplessly repeated the words: "I'm sorry. I'm sorry..." and another woman worked over a dying man.

The man's spirit was easily drawn to a place where she could offer him ascension; his mind provided the details of the place - Oma was merely the one to bring him there.

He stared up at her with faintly puzzled eyes, and she smiled and told him only the truth in a place where only the truth would serve to open his mind to the possibilities.

"Your fate is in your hands..."