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Alien Portals
A Sci-Fi Alien Multiverse Romance Novel
Ruth Anne Scott
Contents
Alien Portals
Limited Time Bonuses
Tales from Angondra Box Set
The New Angondra Preview
EXCLUSIVE Book
Chapter One
The sound of Galadriel's shoes reverberated through the marbled hallway as she walked along it, lost in the images around her. She was completely alone in the massive, echoing chamber that was the museum, but even if had been crawling with other visitors, she wouldn't have noticed them. The walls had claimed her; they tempted her with their images, drawing her deeper into their recesses with the promises of artifacts, documents, and quiet, slumbering moments enshrined within the exhibits that were just waiting to be discovered. She wanted to breathe in them and feel them awaken as she grew close to them. This was not a repository for what was forgotten, but a place of worship for what had been and what still was, waiting and hovering beneath the surface of reality for someone to resurrect them, even for a moment.
She had been roaming these hallowed halls for hours, taking it all in as she explored. She had no idea how long she had been there, nor did she care. There was nothing drawing her out of the museum – nothing waiting for her away from these preserved moments. She could walk these halls until they forced her to leave, and then she would return the next day and continue her devotional.
Museums had always been a source of incredible fascination to Galadriel, but this one held something entirely unique. Never had she felt the same level of intense need and belonging that she did when she entered the shadowy exhibits at the back of the museum that rarely welcomed any other footsteps beyond her own. When she stepped inside this section of the museum, she was in another place. The world closed around her so that nothing existed beyond what she could see and feel at that moment, and it wouldn't be until the guards who had learned her name and how to trace her progress through the halls found her that she would be forced back into reality. She hadn't been able to determine what it was that had transfixed her so intently. The exhibit was far from the only one that she had seen of that time or people, and it contained fewer artifacts than many of the others. This one, however, had a different feeling – a different energy about it that seemed to emanate from the objects on the walls and its acrylic cases. It kept her coming back, and it kept her exploring now.
Galadriel continued forward and walked by a tremendous stone panel that she had looked at countless times before. The small plaque to one side said that it had once been a wall of a ceremonial building, crafted by a people the world now knew little about. Though she had seen it many times before, Galadriel stopped and looked at it again. She was pulled toward it in a way that she had never felt toward anything, lured toward its rows of deeply-carved engravings and delicate, intricate patterns along the border. The edges of the wall were rough as if the stone had broken under a tremendous force. Some areas were smoother, and Galadriel knew it was because these areas had been exposed to the sun, wind, and swirling granules that polished and buffed the stone until it had weathered away the harshness, while much of the remaining wall had been buried beneath the sand.
It seemed an almost perfect representation of the years that these mementos embodied. Though broken from their original context and away from what defined them by the sheer force of passing time, that same passage had also smoothed away the harshness of reality. Even the objects that represented the greatest examples of darkness and brutality – the weapons and the tools that had been used in some of the most violent periods in history – appeared docile and calm within their crystalline cages. They were waiting to be discovered, though; the smoothed edges the only parts that could be seen by those who only took the time to look at the surface. What was hovering just below that surface, beyond the obvious and simple story that the plaques told, or the well-behaved details that most people noticed when browsing the exhibits, were what gave the item their true meaning.
She knew that the rough edges were still there. She knew that the actual stories of those items and the moments that they had lived were still waiting, captured within those objects like they were preserved in droplets of glass. This wall had one of those stories. There was more to its meaning than what could be told on that little plaque, and it called out to her, pleading with her to come closer and listen.
Galadriel stepped up to the wall, pressing against the thick velvet rope that was meant to keep people at what the museum directors determined was a safe and respectful distance from the exhibits. She knew that she wasn't supposed to. She knew that it was against the rules and that if caught, the guards might tell her that she was not allowed to return to the museum. But she had to do it. Galadriel lifted her hand and ran her fingers along the carvings in the stone.
Just like the edges of the wall itself, these letters and shapes had once been sharp and clean, but time had softened them as well. They were still deep enough, however, that she was able to link each one to the transcription on the plaque. She felt each letter carefully, ensuring that she took in every curve and dip, and looked down at the same moment so that she could commit them to memory. They were familiar already, but as she reached the bottom of the inscription, she realized that there was an inconsistency between what was carved into the wall remnant and what was written on the plaque. Galadriel moved her fingers back up to the last line of the inscription that connected the two and started tracing them again. She reached a shape that was different and ran her fingertips across it a second time. The difference was slight, but it was obviously deliberate.
Galadriel lowered herself to her knees so that she could see the shapes more closely and examined it. Something changed in her as she touched the carving. This is what was calling to her, what was drawing her to this section of the museum. She could feel it flowing through her fingers as though it were melding her and the smooth stone into one.
"Galadriel?"
She heard the voice of one of the guards coming toward her from the hallway and panic rose in her chest. She couldn't leave just yet. She couldn’t stand the thought of being away from this piece of stone and the strange, unexplained symbols carved into the weathered surface. The guard came around the corner just as she stood, and she stepped far enough back from the stone that he wouldn't notice that she had been touching it.
"Alright, Galadriel," the older man said in his calm, smoky voice that always reminded her of the grandfather she had lost when she was only a child, but who still remained in some of her most precious memories. "You know what time it is."
"I know, Leo," she responded. "Just a few more minutes."
"What is it that you're looking at?" Leo asked, coming to her side. "You come here every day and this is the only wing that you ever visit. You've been doing it for all six months that it's been here. Don't you want to see everything els
e that's in the museum?"
"I've seen everything else," she said. "I saved this wing for last."
"You didn't spend as much time in those that you did in this one, did you?" he asked.
Galadriel laughed and shook her head.
"No. Only a couple of days in each one. This one just keeps bringing me back."
"It certainly does."
"Leo, tell me something."
"What's that?"
"These symbols," she said, pointing at the plaque, "who did translated them?"
"I'm not sure. I'm guessing one of the archeologists who uncovered the wall. Why?"
"The symbols aren't the same on the plaque as they are on the wall. See this section?" She pointed out the segment of carvings that were inconsistent with the plaque. "They are different on the description."
The guard looked from the plaque to the wall and then gave her a strange look.
"No they aren't. They look the same to me."
"They are really similar, and before today I thought they were the same, but look at them really carefully. Some of the symbols are just a little different, and then a few of them are in a different order."
"I guess they got it a bit wrong, but does it really matter? They don't even know who carved it."
"But there's a partial translation."
Leo shrugged.
"Some of the symbols look like they came from another language, and so they used those as a foundation for the translation, but they couldn't figure everything out.
“Come on, now. The museum's closed. You can come back and ponder all of this tomorrow."
"Just a few more minutes, Leo. Please? Just a few more minutes. Go do your rounds and then come back and get me, and I'll go along. I promise."
Leo looked at her for a few seconds like he was trying to evaluate her motivations, and then Galadriel saw a hint of a smile cross his lips.
"Alright, Galadriel. But you only have a few minutes. I've already done the other half of the museum, so you only have until I can get through the other two wings on this side. I'll be back."
"Thank you, Leo."
Galadriel watched as the guard disappeared from the exhibit room and immediately dropped her bag to the floor, crouching down beside it so that he could rummage through the items inside. She pulled out a legal pad and tore a page out, then grabbed a pencil from one of the inner pockets. Checking the doorway to the exhibit to make sure that Leo hadn't come back yet, she leaned across the velvet rope and pressed the paper to the engravings. Tilting the pencil on its side, she scribbled over the paper until the imprint of the symbols in the stone appeared on the page. She had just finished when she heard Leo calling to her. She shoved the imprint, pad, and pencil back into her bag as she swung it over her shoulder. She was walking toward the door as Leo came back into view.
"Did you solve the mystery of the poorly-edited stone?"
Galadriel gave a short laugh and shook her head.
"Not yet. Maybe it's nothing. Just my imagination running away from me."
She walked out of front door of the museum and turned to wave at Leo.
"Goodnight, Galadriel," he said. "I'll see you tomorrow?"
She smiled.
"Of course."
The guard shut the door and locked it, giving her a final wave through the glass before she bounded down the steps and toward her car that was parked a few blocks over. She climbed behind the wheel and let out a breath, reaching beside her to pull the imprint out of her bag before tossing it onto the passenger seat. She spread the paper across the center of the steering wheel and looked at it in the glow of the streetlamp above her. The differences in the engravings were even more obvious now, and she felt even more compelled to understand it. She wished that she could go back into the museum and look at the wall again – to touch it again and feel the energy that had seemed to flow through her when she traced the symbols with her fingertips. Instead, she cranked the engine over, turned onto the street, and started home as she reached for her phone and pressed the first number on her speed dial.
Chapter Two
"I'm telling you, Ty," Galadriel said, pulling a mug down from a cabinet and shutting the door, "there's something strange about that wall."
She brought the mug over to the counter and set it down beside the coffee maker so that she could walk over to the refrigerator.
"Of course there's something strange about it," her best friend said from where he sat perched on the edge of a barstool at her kitchen island. "It's about a million years old, and it was carved by people that nobody knows anything about."
"It's not a million years old, Ty," Galadriel said, reaching into the refrigerator to grab the creamer. "A few thousand, maybe, but not a million."
"Does that change the fact that nobody knows anything about these people?" he asked.
She let out a sigh and poured the thick hazelnut-flavored creamer into her cup before pouring in the coffee and stirring.
"No," she admitted, "but it does make them closer."
"What do you mean closer?" he asked. "People that lived a million years ago are pretty much the same distance from us as the ones that lived a few thousand years ago."
"People didn't live a million years ago."
"As far as you know."
Galadriel took a sip of her coffee and shook her head.
"I don’t know how to explain it. It's like the wall is talking to me."
"Oh, here we go."
"No," she said, stepping away from the counter and toward him. "Listen to me. I'm serious. I can't stay away from that place. Every time I go there, I tell myself that I'm going to go look at something else, or at least check out one of the traveling exhibits, take in a lecture – anything. But I never do. I walk in, and no matter where I think that I should be going, I end up there. It's like I can't control my steps. I spend the day there, and then I leave, and I'm still thinking about it. I've been doing it for months. At first, it was just a couple of times a week, and then a couple more. Now, I go every day."
"It must be nice to live off of a trust fund."
"Do you think that you could take a brief pause from your elitism for just a few minutes so that I can talk about this?"
"We've talked about this. Elitism would be if I liked the fact that you are a part of an entirely different social class than me and thought that you were better than other people because of it. I'm more anti-elitist."
"What if you are a non-elite elitist? You think that you are a member of an elite group because you are not in the elite?"
"We need to stop saying elite."
"The point is that I just can't get over this…" she took a deep sip of her coffee as she tried to come up with the right words to describe what she was feeling, "compulsion. It's like something inside the museum is reaching out to me, and I think that it has to do with this wall."
"What do you mean it is reaching out to you?" Ty asked.
"I don't know. I wish I could explain it better than that. I just can't get it out of my mind. Don't you find it odd that the plaque is wrong?"
"Not really, Galadriel. This is a wall covered with a language that nobody knows. It's easy to get things wrong. Even you said that some of these symbols look a lot like the ones that are on the plaque."
Ty was looking at the imprint that Galadriel had made, and he dropped it on the counter as he gave up in his examination.
"That's not it, though," she said, coming to his side and climbing up onto the stool beside him. "These symbols," she said, pointing to a few of the shapes on the paper, "are very much like the ones that are on the plaque, but these," she pointed to another series, "are in a different order. There are only two symbols that are different, but they are in the wrong sequence. I can't help but feel like it is on purpose."
"On purpose? How could it possibly be on purpose? Why would archeologists who don't even know who made this wall or what the language says purposely change t
he meaning of the plaque?"
"That's the thing. A few of the symbols are translated on the plaque. If they don't know what the language is, how did they translate those symbols? Leo said that they are similar to another language, but if that's true, then why don't they use that other language to decipher the rest of it? It might tell them who these people were and the significance of this wall."
"Leo?" Ty asked.
"The security guard."
"OK, Galadriel, you know that I adore you, but this is getting out of hand. If you are making friends with the security guards, I think you are spending too much time in the museum. Why does this matter so much to you, anyway? Even if there is something wrong with the plaque, and you were able to figure out what that was and what the wall said, what do you think that that would do? What do you think you would accomplish?"
The question struck Galadriel, and she couldn't find any words to answer him. The truth was that she didn't know why it mattered so much to her or what she thought would come out of her discovering why the engravings were wrong on the plaque, or even what the ones on the wall meant. That didn't matter, though. It didn't change the undeniable draw or the continuous, unrelenting questions that rolled through her mind. This was something that she needed to understand.
****
A few hours later, Ty had left, and Galadriel laid in bed, staring at the ceiling and willing herself to sleep. His last words to her before leaving still reverberated through her mind.
"You need to let this go, Galadriel. History is written. It's done. The archeologists and the historians know what they are talking about; they know what they are doing. Just let them tell you what happened, and enjoy the story."
He was wrong. She knew deep within her that he was. History wasn't stagnant, and it wasn't something that could just be written out in simple terms and then considered complete. So much more went into every moment that had ever existed than could ever be put into the words that filled history books or covered simple museum plaques. Those words didn't breathe like the people had. They didn't have color or smell or taste. They couldn't show the layers that existed in every second of time that passed. The people who had made that plaque were wrong when they wrote it, and that was changing what people knew of the wall and why it existed. There was a reason behind it, and Galadriel felt like the hands that had carved the wall and the lips that had spoken those words as they were engraved into it deserved to not be forgotten.
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