Alien Portals: A SciFi Alien Multiverse Romance Novel

by Ruth Anne Scott

  Galadriel didn't know what she should do next, but she did know that standing there wasn't doing her any good. She couldn't find her way back to the excavation site from where she was, so the only thing left for her to do was to venture further into the desert and hope that she would find something that would help her figure out where she was and how she could get back. Tightening her grip around the strap of her bag, Galadriel started walking forward, making sure that the boulder was directly at her back. She saw no other milestones anywhere around her, so knowing that all she had to do was turn around to make her way back to the boulder was the only thing that kept her from feeling totally out of control.

  Beads of sweat trickled down her spine as she walked; the heat of the blinding sun seemed to get more intense with every step that she took. As soft and powdery as the sand was, it was also deep and deceptively heavy, dragging down on her feet as she tried to walk. Though it felt like the sand itself was trying it keep her from moving any further away from the boulder, she kept forcing herself forward, step after step, using the resistance to fuel herself. The challenge of each step grew more difficult, and she realized that she was making her way up a hill.

  She slid and tumbled forward, catching herself with her hands on the hot sand. She tried to regain her grip with her feet, but every time she dug in with her toes, the sand seemed to slip away more quickly. Galadriel landed on her stomach and reached up to claw at the ground as she tried to stand again. There was desperation in her movements – fear as she felt like the ground was fighting against her and trying to force her to stay in place. Groaning against the effort that she was putting forth, Galadriel dug her fingers deeper into the sand and forced her knees down to prevent herself from slipping further. Finally, she felt as though she had control over the sand and her own body. Taking a deep breath to fortify herself, she reached up and grabbed higher in the hill, pulling herself up as she went.

  It took what felt like hours, but finally she felt her hand touch the curved top of the hill. It lay flat on the ground, telling her that she had nearly reached her goal. Galadriel clambered her way up and over until she was on her knees at the top of the hill. She was able to draw in a breath of air that wasn't filled with the fine powder of the sand in front of her, and she felt a soft flicker of breeze brush across her face as she tipped her head back and closed her eyes for a moment of recuperation.

  When she opened her eyes and looked ahead of her, though, it felt as if that breath that had finally found its way into her lungs was torn away, and she couldn't get it back. Her heart pounded heavily beneath her ribs, and her mouth felt dry and sticky. Sprawled ahead of her in the valley between this hill and another well off in the distance was what looked like the remains of an old village that had been tattered, crumbled, and burned to the ground.

  Chapter Ten

  The appearance of the destroyed village ahead of her filled Galadriel with a sense of dread and horror. She didn't know exactly what she was looking at, but what she could see was brutal. Structures that may have once been houses were now skeletal frames against the sky, the bones of their basic shapes blackened and frail. Stones that could have been a part of larger, more impressive buildings lay scattered across the sand. Their original purpose was now as indecipherable as the location where they once stood. It was absolutely silent.

  Despite the sick, painful feeling that was swelling in her belly while looking at the remains of the village, Galadriel wanted to be closer to them. She wanted to see as much as she could of it and try to understand what it was and what had happened there. Though she didn't know how, it was possible that this had something to do with the wall. Climbing to her feet, she started to make her way down the other side of the hill toward the rubble. This side of the hill was far shorter and less steep than the other, as if the ground had been built up on either side of the village to create a deeper valley or a more protective barrier. If that had been the case, it didn't seem to have worked.

  When she was at the bottom of the hill, Galadriel reached into her bag and pulled out the water bottle that still had a few sips left. She didn't know when she would see water again and had to resist the urge to swallow down every drop that the bottle held and then continue on with the second bottle that she knew was at the bottom of the bag. She left it in place, though, keeping it like a precious treasure only to be used when she absolutely had to. She tucked the bottle back into her bag after only two sips – just enough to soothe the dry stickiness of her mouth and quell the parched feeling of her throat, and then continued forward cautiously.

  The silence indicated that there was no one else around, but there was something about it that made Galadriel feel even more uneasy. It was like the anticipation was building around her, becoming more intense and palpable with every step that she took when nothing happened. It made her feel as if at any second something was going to happen, and the silence was going to break. Now that she was down closer to the destroyed buildings, she was able to see more of the remnants of whoever had lived in this place before whatever disaster had come along and devastated it. Long sticks with pointed ends that could have been weapons lay strewn across the ground, and pieces of torn and singed cloth added subdued color to the bitter contrast of the blackened buildings against the pale sand.

  She wondered what had happened to the people who had lived here and if she would find the actual remains of those people. The thought frightened her, but the further she went, the more she found herself almost hoping that she would find something – anything – that could tell her who had created this village, and maybe even who had destroyed it. Perhaps if she found something – a bone, a skull, anything – she could find some sort of dark comfort in knowing that at least they hadn't been captured and taken away to a fate that was likely far worse than death while defending their home. No matter how far she walked, though, she found no signs of anything or anyone that had lived in the village.

  The further she moved, the more the village struck her as strangely familiar. The sense of familiarity wasn't exact. It wasn't as though this was precisely something that she knew; it was more a shadow of a memory from the deep recesses of her mind. She dug into her bag again and pulled out some of her notes. She scanned through them, searching for anything that might trigger the memory that was trying to come forward. Not finding anything that seemed to link the notes that she had to what she was seeing, she dug further into her bag, looking for her phone so that she could call Rick. She didn't know how she was going to explain to him what had happened or what she was seeing, but he might know something that could help her.

  When her fingers didn't find the phone in her bag, she looked down into it, shifting as much of the contents around as she could to reveal the bottom. She still didn't see her phone, and then the sinking realization hit her that she didn't have it. She remembered the feeling of it falling out of her hand as she tumbled forward in the cavern. That meant her phone – her only connection to the world – was gone. In that moment, she felt even more lost and afraid than she had when she first found herself in the strange desert. It was as though she had been cut off from everything else, not even able to hear someone else's voice and let them know that she was at least still breathing. The thought made her stomach turn as she realized that she truly was completely on her own.

  Trying to distract herself from the gradually increasing feeling of fear that was filling her mind and heart, Galadriel pulled out her papers again and flipped through them another time. Suddenly, her eyes fell on an image that she hadn't seen the first time through. It was a sketch done by one of the archeologists in the first excavation that discovered the segment of the wall. They had taken the pieces of the building foundations that they had found throughout the excavation site and done their own rendition of what they thought the Gylex settlement may have looked like when it was thriving in that area. She compared it to the layout of the building remnants where she once stood and immediately realized that they were not th
e same.

  Disappointed, she started to flip through the pages again, but then her eyes fell on the corner of the sketch and she saw a few simple marks that looked like they could have been places where the artist had tried out different thickness of their pen. Looking closer, however, she realized that it was actually lines that indicated a series of hills and then what looked like it could have been the ridgeline where she had gotten into the cavern. Galadriel turned slowly, scanning the horizon again, trying to see if she had somehow missed the ridge. There seemed to be nothing in the distance, but she started walking anyway, letting the sketch guide her away from the center of the village and further into the hills.

  One of the large stones lay in the middle of her path, and Galadriel walked up to it. There were streaks of black across it like a smear of soot from one of the burned carcasses of the buildings, and when Galadriel drew near to it, she realized that there was the shape of a hand in it. She lowered her bag to the sand and dropped down to her knees in front of the stone, unable to pull her eyes away from the elongated shape of a palm and fingers pressed to the stone and stretched across it as though whoever had made that shape had grabbed for the rock and then slid their hand across its surface to leave this trail.

  Galadriel lifted one trembling hand and placed it on the rock, lining the tips of her fingers up with the shapes of the fingers on the surface. Even with the warped shape caused by the hand dragging down the side of the rock, it was obvious that whoever had made this shape was far larger than she was. As she touched the shape, she realized that it was not flat against the rock as she would have thought that soot would be. She lifted her hand, expecting to see the soft powder of ash smeared across her skin. Instead, she saw that the black was more like tiny, irregular pebbles. Galadriel wiped her other hand across her palm and felt the grit of the stone digging into her skin. She looked around at the sand at her feet and saw that there were other rocks strewn across the ground surrounding this larger stone. Many of them were dark like the fragments on her hand.

  She reached down and picked one of them up so that she could look at it better. It sat heavy in her hand, the weight of it seeming to come as much from some unseen force as from the actual mass of the piece. She flipped the piece over in her palm a few times to look at it from every angle and realized that there were tiny hints of etchings in one side. Looking more closely at them, she touched her fingers to the shapes in the stone and realized that they were engravings. Her heart beat faster, and she looked back at the tiny fragments still clinging to her other hand.

  Suddenly, she heard a crack that echoed through the intense silence of the valley and brought her to her feet. She grabbed her bag like a weapon and spun around toward where she thought she had heard the sound originate. The rest of the village still seemed as still and unchanged as it had been when she walked through it. She took a few steps forward, looking around to see if she could detect any movement that would tell her that there was someone else in the village with her. There was nothing. As she walked, though, she felt a tingle on the back of her neck, and the hairs on her arms stood up. Her breath became shallow and ragged, and suddenly it seemed like she had tunnel vision, preventing her from knowing what was going on around her.

  Tightening her grip on the strap of her bag, Galadriel turned slowly. A scream tore out of her chest and swelled through the quiet area when she saw a massive man standing on the other side of the rock, glaring at her with fury in his eyes.

  Chapter Eleven

  Galadriel took a few steps backward, unable to pull her eyes away from the enormous man staring at her. Her throat was so tight with fear that she felt like she couldn't breathe. Suddenly, the man lurched at her and she turned, running as fast as the sand would allow her back toward the main part of the village. She could hear his breath as he ran behind her, and she felt like he was getting closer with each step. As soon as she got to the destroyed remnants of the buildings, she started weaving through them, hoping that she would be able to hide herself and confuse him enough that she would be able to escape.

  The blood rushed in her ears so loudly that she could hear it as she struggled against the depth of the sand around her feet. As she continued to weave her way through the collapsed and burned buildings, and the scattered rocks that seemed to rise up in her path without warning, Galadriel realized that she had lost track of where she was or how far she had gone since running from the rock. She looked ahead of her and saw the hill rising in the distance.

  She pushed herself harder, forcing her feet to go as fast as she could make them. Her hand still gripped her papers, and she reached to shove them back into her bag so that she could move her arms more, hoping that would give her a bit of an edge as she ran. She reached the edge of the village and ducked down behind a large piece of burned wood. It didn't occur to her in that moment to wonder where in this vast desert the people who had once lived in the village would have found the wood to build these structures.

  Struggling to control her breath, Galadriel listened for the sound of the man's feet pounding against the sand. The silence seemed to have fallen over the village remnants again, but the lack of sound was even more disconcerting to Galadriel than it would have been for her to actually hear the man. At least then she would have known where he was. It would have made her feel safer to at least know how close he was and how much time she might have to get away. When she still couldn’t see him, she glanced back up at the hill. Her eyes followed the expanse between where she was hiding and the foot of the hill. In the distance, she could see the deep trail of her footprints in the side of the hill, showing her just how far she had traveled from her original path.

  Seeing those footsteps sent a sinking feeling into her belly as it made her think of the struggle of climbing up the hill on the other side. The sweat still rolled along her skin and her hands shook, but she knew that she had to go. She had to get to the hill as fast as she could to have any chance. Galadriel closed her eyes for a second, drawing in a breath to try to calm herself. As soon as her eyes opened, she shot forward, forcing herself not to look anywhere but the footsteps in the sand ahead of her.

  She felt exposed as she ran across the open area with nowhere to hide. She heard a growl behind her, telling her that the man had seen her running and was now chasing close behind her. Despite the head start that she thought that she had gotten when she left the cover of the ruined house, she could feel that the man was quickly gaining on her. No matter how hard she pushed, no matter how much she forced her body forward, the sound of his breath was getting closer, and soon she could feel the sting of the grains of sand that he kicked up digging into the backs of her legs.

  Galadriel resisted the urge to scream again as she finally reached the bottom of the hill and started up it. She reminded herself with each dig into the side that it wasn't as steep as the other side of the hill. This side was gentler – easier for her to maneuver. She told herself that she was going to be able to get up it without the struggle and that once she hit the other side, she would be able to get back to the boulder. She would figure out however it was that she got to this part of the desert, and she would find her way back. It wouldn't be long now until the tour group came through, and she would be able to simply slip in and follow them until she got back to the front of the excavation. She could get into her car, go back to the hotel, and get home as soon as possible.

  Continuing to coach herself, she dug harder into the hill and took a leap to one side, hoping that the sudden change in her direction might disorient the man and allow her to get further away from him. Instead, the movement seemed to put her even more directly in his path, and she heard another grunt before she felt the tips of his fingers brush down her back as if he had lunged to grab her but had just missed. She arched away from the touch, letting out a strangled cry. She was only a few feet from the top of the hill, so she gathered all of the energy and force that she could, and threw herself forward, reaching for the top. Her body slamm
ed down into the sand and she tucked herself in, allowing herself to tumble down the side of the hill rather than getting up to run. The sand was soft around her, but as she fell, she picked up speed, making her roll faster and faster, causing each bounce to become harder and more painful. It seemed like the hill would never end, but as long as she was tumbling through the sand, she wasn't in the grip of the man who was still following her.

  Finally, she crashed onto flat ground and scrambled to right herself. The fall had left her feeling dizzy and weak, but she knew that she couldn't just lie where she had fallen. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see a cascade of the powdery sand pouring down the side of the hill and she knew that the man was coming down after her. Her head was still swimming as she forced herself onto her feet and stumbled a few steps forward before falling again. Not allowing the fear or the pain to take the upper hand, she pushed up again and continued forward.

  Finally, she could see the massive, moss-covered boulder again. She focused on it like she had focused on her footsteps on the hill and let it compel her to keep going. Soon, she could see the dampness of the moss and the rough texture of the stone. She threw herself toward it, crashing into it and slamming her palms on it over and over, doing everything that she could think of to open whatever had brought her to the desert. Nothing was happening. Galadriel glanced over her shoulder and saw that the man was only a few feet away from her. She scrambled around to the back of the boulder, still hitting it, trying her best to figure out what had happened.

  It was no use. The boulder did nothing. Finally, the tears that she had felt welling in her eyes poured free, and she felt them running down her cheeks, burning into her skin. She sank down to her knees behind the boulder, unable to run any further, not knowing what was going to happen to her. She waited for the man to find her. She knew that at any second she was going to feel his massive hands grab hold of her and yank her from behind the boulder. The rage in his eyes was almost palpable, and the thought of what he might have planned for her when he finally did get his hands on her was terrifying, but she didn't have anything left in her to try to get away from him. The realization of her situation had truly sunken in, and there was nothing left for her to do. She didn't know where she was or how she had gotten there, and she felt helpless to get out of the stretch of sand that seemingly expanded endlessly on all sides of her.