“Galadriel?” he asked cautiously. “Are you alright?”
“Yes,” Galadriel said without hesitating. “Are you?”
“Yes. We need to keep going as fast as we can. There’s shelter not too far from here where we’ll be safe.”
“Can you light the torch again?” she asked.
“No. We have to stay as undetectable as possible. Each one that we have to fight will be stronger than the last. We have to stay in the dark until we are close to the shelter. Just keep following close behind me.”
****
Exhaustion was pulling on Galadriel, threatening to drag her down into the sand like the creatures, when she finally heard Vyker strike the flint that would light the torch again. The glow of the flame filled her with relief, and the thought that this meant they were close to somewhere where they could stop walking gave her a boost in energy, as if her mind and body were rallying just enough to get her beyond this final stretch of this part of the journey.
“Come on,” Vyker said, turning sharply.
Galadriel followed him and noticed that they were walking toward more open, empty sand. The relief and happiness that she had felt when she first saw the flame dissipated, and she felt even greater exhaustion pull down on her again. She didn’t want to say anything, knowing that Vyker had his own thoughts to worry about, but she was feeling overwhelmed and every moment that they continued to walk was making her feel further distant from anything that she had ever known, and any hope that she had that she would ever get back to that world and that life.
“How much further?” she asked.
“Just up there,” Vyker said.
He lifted the torch to spread the illumination further across the sand, and she saw that the desert was starting to look somewhat like it was coming to life. Rather than just open, desolate sand, there were patches of coarse desert grass and some low, scrubby bushes. The variation in the vegetation was an encouraging change of pace after only seeing sand for so long, but it still didn’t show any building, cave, or other place where she could imagine that they would be able to find shelter.
They walked through the plants, and Galadriel heard them crunching beneath her feet. She looked down at them and wondered when was the last time that the rain fell. The light on the sand stopped, and Galadriel realized that Vyker had paused and was now crouched down close to a thick patch of shrub. He adjusted the bags that he had over his shoulders and grabbed onto the grass. He separated it and reached down between the blades. Galadriel watched as he felt around what she thought was the sand, but then realized that it was darker than the surrounding ground.
“Let me hold the torch,” she said, extending her hand for the only light that was available.
Vyker handed it to her, and Galadriel held it up as high as she could to provide him with as much light as possible. He continued to feel around and then she saw his hands pause. His fingers dipped deeper, and then she heard him grunt as he yanked backwards. The ground beneath his hands gave way, and she saw a large rock dislodge and come up in his grip. He pushed it aside, revealing a hole in the ground.
“Go,” he said.
“What?” Galadriel asked.
Her chest had constricted as she looked into the blackness of the void in the sand. If it was even possible, the hole seemed darker than even the oblivion that was on the outside of the edge of the light cast by the torch. She had no way of knowing how deep the hole was or what it led to. Vyker took the torch from her hand and pointed it toward the hole.
“Go,” he repeated. “The shelter is down there.”
“You go first,” she said.
“If I go first you will be completely alone up here, and then you won’t have any way of putting the rock back into place to protect us.”
Galadriel nodded and looked down into the hole again. The depth of the hole was frightening, but the thought of being left alone in the desert, totally exposed to those creatures, was even worse. She touched the edge of the hole and felt grains of sand slip away beneath her fingers.
“Just go,” Vyker insisted. “The longer that you hesitate, the worse that it will be. I have gone down there dozens of times before. You’ll be fine.”
Galadriel inched closer to the edge of the hole and sat, swinging her legs over and letting them fall into the opening. She paused only for a second, closed her eyes, and jumped. Her body fell through the darkness, the depth of the hole swallowing her and making her feel as though she was never going to stop. After what could have been seconds or hours later, she felt her feet touch something solid beneath her, and she let her body collapse to the ground. Her hands hit and she drew in a breath, filling lungs that she realized that she had left completely empty as she fell.
Seconds later, she felt something hit her and saw a flash of light. She realized that she hadn’t moved out of the way and that Vyker had come down the hole, straddling her back as he landed. Startled, Galadriel flipped over, causing Vyker to lose his balance and stumble forward. He tossed the torch aside and it sizzled, but continued to glow. Vyker’s body crashed down onto Galadriel, and she gasped as his face came within inches of hers. They paused, their eyes locked on each other. From that proximity, she could see that the color of his stare was far more than just the grey that she had thought they were when she first saw them. Instead, they looked like thin shards of glass layered with shimmering slices of steel. The longer she looked into them, the more she noticed a light behind them that glowed through the striations.
Their breath seemed to meet and hover between the two of them, and Galadriel felt her heart speed up and slow down at the same time. They stayed that way for several long seconds before Vyker shifted, and she felt his body move away from hers. She immediately missed the weight pressing down on her, and she scolded herself for the feeling, convincing herself that she was only feeling it because of the strange, out of control situation that she currently found herself in.
He pulled back so that he was on his knees and grabbed the torch as he stood up.
“Are you alright?” he asked.
Galadriel felt like she had been asked that question more times by Vyker than she had been asked by anyone in her entire life. She nodded and adjusted herself into a more modest position than she had been in while sprawled on the ground.
“I’m fine.”
“Do you have the blade from the creature that you killed?”
The question was so stark and straightforward that it startled Galadriel, and for a moment she couldn’t respond. A few seconds later, she nodded.
“I put it back in the bag.”
“Give it to me.”
Galadriel released the tie on her chest that held the bag in place and let it drop to the sand. She tossed her other bag to the side and reached into Vyker’s bag for the blade. She felt the hilt in her hand and withdrew it, feeling it settle onto her palm like it had when she pulled it out to attack the creature. It felt heavier now, as if the heavy energy of the task that it had committed had added actual weight to it. She stared at the long metal point of the blade itself and saw streaks of blood that had begun to dry on the once shining surface.
Vyker took the weapon from her hand and looked down at it the way she had. He turned it from side to side, evaluating it and seeming to appreciate it from every angle. Without saying anything, he took a cloth from his own bag and carefully drew the blade through it to wipe away the blood. He handed it back to her, and Galadriel tucked the blade back into the bag. It felt like something had changed in her, but she didn’t want to dwell on it. This wasn’t the life that she knew, and it wasn’t the one that she intended to live. They would get to where he was leading her, and she would find a way to get home. Once she got there, Galadriel knew that she would put this all behind her and convince herself that it was nothing more than her imagination. She glanced up at Vyker again and saw him staring back at her. His eyes burned into her, and she knew in that moment that no matter how hard she
tried, she would never be able to rid her mind of that stare.
Galadriel pulled her eyes away from Vyker’s and moved the bag away from her.
“Is this where we are going to stay?” she asked, more to fill the air with the sound of her voice rather than allowing it to remain heavy with the tension that was so obviously building around them.
“Yes,” Vyker responded, his voice softer now than it had been.
“How long will we stay here?” she asked.
“Just long enough to rest,” he said. “It’s going to be a long journey tomorrow. You’re going to need your energy.”
“I’m going to need my energy?” she asked, slightly offended by the implication of the statement.
“I have done this many times before,” he said by way of explanation. “I’m used to it. You don’t seem as though you are quite as accustomed to trekking across the desert.”
Galadriel’s hands came to her hips.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked, feeling self-conscious.
“You just don’t strike me as the kind of woman who spends much time going on adventures out in the wilderness. I don’t know what your stream is like, but somehow I don’t think that it’s like this.”
Galadriel gave a short laugh.
“You are definitely right about that.” She paused. “Well…”
“Well, what?” Vyker asked.
“I told you that where I was before I apparently went through the portal to get here, I was somewhere that looked very much like this. The cavern is almost the same. The area looks slightly different, but I’m sure it’s the same desert.”
“It looks different?” he asked. “How?”
“The hills aren’t the same. Where I came from,” she hesitated again, “my stream,” she said, testing the words, “has an excavation site in it. That destroyed village isn’t there.”
At the mention of the village, Vyker tensed, and Galadriel saw his jaw twitch as he clenched his teeth to prevent either emotion or words that he didn’t actually want to say from coming out. He took a breath and stood suddenly. She watched him pick up his bags again.
“Come on,” he said. “We need to move further into the shelter. They’ve never found me here before, but if they do, I don’t want to just be sitting under the entrance.”
Galadriel hauled the bags she had carried off of the ground again and followed Vyker further into the underground cavern. She looked around as far as the light of the torch would let her and saw that this chamber wasn’t like the ones of his other shelter. There were no rock formations like she would expect to find in a cavern. Instead, it looked like a smooth space carved directly out of the rock. They walked for several yards down a corridor that got progressively more narrow until Galadriel felt as though at any moment it would tighten around her to the point that she wouldn’t be able to pass through it. She kept her eyes focused on Vyker ahead of her, though, knowing that if he was still able to move through the corridor, she would as well. As she watched him, she tried to convince herself that her fascination with Vyker’s incredible size was purely out of interest in ensuring that she wasn’t going to get stuck in the corridor, not because of the shiver that rolled through her belly when she looked at him, or the memory of his weight pressing down on her as she lay on the ground beneath him.
Chapter Eighteen
Just when the corridor was getting tight enough that Vyker was having to turn sideways to fit his shoulders through the space, they stepped into another open chamber. This one was larger than the first, and Galadriel noticed that there were several unlit torches positioned along the walls that she was able to see in the illumination of the torch that Vyker was holding. The promise of more light was a relief, and she was happy to see him walk over them and pass the flame as he went. He settled the torch he held into an empty holder near the entrance of the chamber before walking toward the far wall and dropping the bags from his back to the ground.
Galadriel followed his lead, sighing in relief as she lowered her baggage with the knowledge that she was not going to have to pick them up again for a while. She lowered herself to the floor beside them and reached down to pry her shoes from her feet. Her skin burned, and the muscles ached as they relaxed. The heat from the flames of the torches allowed a little warmth into the room, but she still shivered in the cooler temperature. Vyker seemed to have noticed, because he reached into one of his bags and pulled out a stack of blankets. He handed them over to her, and she took them gratefully. He took another similar stack from the bag and went to work setting up his pallet like the one where he had slept in the first chamber.
Galadriel watched him for a few moments before building her own bed. Craving a bath to wash the dust and sand away from her skin and ease the tightness in her muscles, she relented to the idea that she was far away from her rainforest showerhead and favorite bath gel, and she slid beneath the layers of blankets. Their warmth and weight were comforting as it pressed in around her, and she almost immediately found herself falling asleep.
“Why did you go to the desert?” Vyker asked as her eyes closed.
Galadriel opened her eyes and looked at him.
“I told you that I went to see the excavation site for the HM-1313 wall,” she said sleepily.
“I don’t know what that is,” Vyker responded.
Galadriel realized that he had told her that before, but that she hadn’t gotten the chance to explain it to him. She tried to come up with the words to explain the wall and why it drew her all the way to the desert, but the exhaustion clouded her mind so that she wasn’t able to clarify her thoughts. Instead, she sat up and reached for her bag so that she could pull her papers out and show them to him. Holding the papers again felt strange. Though it couldn’t have been more than 24 hours since she walked into the desert, it felt as though she hadn’t touched those papers in far longer. They felt distanced and unfamiliar, as if she hadn’t actually made them and brought them with her. At the same time, just feeling the texture of the paper on her skin was grounding, bringing her back to a reality that seemed more tangible than the existence she had been experiencing since the moment her eyes fell on Vyker.
Taking her blankets and their comfort with her, she slid closer to Vyker and held the papers out to him. He didn’t take them, and she sifted through them to show him the clearest picture of the wall. She showed it to him and saw his eyes widen immediately. There was a moment of him staring at the picture as if he couldn’t believe what he was seeing, and then he grabbed the picture and brought it closer.
“Where is this?” he asked, sounding almost frantic.
“In a museum,” Galadriel told him. “It’s in my hometown. That’s the HM-1313 wall.”
“This is the reason that you came into the desert?” he asked.
He touched the picture and traced the edges of the image with his fingertips.
“Yes,” she said. “I have been fascinated by the wall since I first saw it. It only came to the museum a few years ago, and I saw it a short time after that. I haven’t been able to stay away from it since.”
“What do you know about it?” he asked, sitting up straighter as he examined the picture more closely.
Galadriel spread the papers out on the ground between them and tried to explain the origin of the wall and the language that was carved on it. She told him about the researchers and their theories about what the words said, but that she didn’t agree.
“Why?” he asked. “Why don’t you believe it?”
“The engravings that are in the wall are very similar to the language that they used to interpret it, but they aren’t exactly the same. They are just different enough that I’m convinced they aren’t the same language. The language that they used belongs to the culture that they were studying in the desert when they found the wall because they didn’t know who else it could belong to.”
“But you don’t think that it is the same.”
Ga
ladriel shook her head.
“No. I think that the language, and the wall itself, belongs to a culture that the researchers didn’t even know about. I think that it is a lost culture that has never been researched. They didn’t – and still don’t – even know that the culture exists.”
“What if it’s a culture that doesn’t exist?”
His voice had changed, and Galadriel looked at him, searching his face for an explanation of the odd question.
“What do you mean?”
“I told you that I am the only remaining one of my kind that exists outside of our stream. I am the only one who will go through the portals and cross the streams. Even you said that we are a myth to your time.”
Realization hit her, and Galadriel drew in a breath.
“Your kind created the wall,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper.
Vyker nodded.
“This,” he said, pointing to the picture of the wall, “this is what holds all of the power of the streams. The StarKillers are not just consuming the starlight in the streams. They are destroying this. And once it’s gone, the stream is no longer viable. If it still exists in your stream it means that I was right. There is a stream other than my own where it survived and has continued to survive well into the future. That means that your stream was protected in some way. Something was done to save it, and that gives me a chance to save mine. The condition, though,” he said, looking mournfully at the picture, “it’s not good. There’s been a lot of damage done. That means that they might be working on it even there, and that your stream might also be in danger.”
“Are they the ones who have been changing what the wall says?” Galadriel asked.
His eyes snapped to hers so suddenly that she felt her body recoil from his, frightened by the intensity of the reaction.
“What do you mean changing what it says?”
Galadriel picked up the paper that held the first imprint that she had done and showed it to him.
Alien Portals: A SciFi Alien Multiverse Romance Novel Page 11
