“This is an imprint that I did of the wall when I first started visiting it. You can see the engravings on it.” She picked up another paper and held it out to him with the other hand so that the two were beside each other for comparison. “I did this one just a couple of months later. They’re different.”
Vyker took the two pages from her hands and looked back and forth between them.
“Is this the only change?” he asked.
Galadriel shook her head.
“No. It’s changed a few other times.”
“Do you have imprints of those changes?”
Galadriel nodded and sifted through the papers until she found the other imprints. Vyker spread them out as she explained their order and studied them closely.
“Did they do it?” Galadriel asked. “Did the StarKillers change the engravings on the wall?”
“No,” Vyker told her. “They wouldn’t be able to.”
“Why?”
“This isn’t their language. They can’t write in our language. Even if they could, they wouldn’t engrave into the stone and not destroy it.”
“What is the point of this wall?” Galadriel asked. “Why would they want to destroy it?”
“This is not just a wall,” he told her. “This is a temple. It is treasured and precious beyond what most could even begin to understand. In my stream, it is extensively guarded, and many are never able to even lay eyes on it.”
He looked at the pages and again ran his fingertips along the edge of the image of the wall. Galadriel noticed that his fingers were shaking. She reached out and rested her hand on his, somehow wanting to calm and comfort him with her touch. The rush of warmth moved through her again, and she let her hand settle completely onto his.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“Access to the temple is extremely limited. Being able to actually touch it is an honor that is given only through direct lineage. That means that if the engravings have been changed, there’s only one person who it could have been.”
“Who?”
His eyes met hers again, and Galadriel could see more of the shimmering light in them.
“Me.”
Chapter Nineteen
Galadriel was taken aback by the revelation. For a moment, she couldn’t speak. She let his words process through her mind, but still couldn’t make sense of them.
“You?” she finally asked.
“I am the only one of my kind still alive who is able to touch the temple.”
“Could someone have done it without authorization?” Galadriel asked.
“No,” he said matter-of-factly. “There is no authorization. It’s not that others aren’t allowed to get near the wall or touch it, it’s that they aren’t able to. If they were to try to get near it, it would kill them. I am the only one who is able to touch it.”
“But I’m able to touch it,” Galadriel said.
Vyker drew in a shuddering breath.
“That means that none of my kind exist any longer in your stream.”
“So the wall doesn’t matter anymore?” she asked.
Vyker shook his head.
“No. It is just as important then as it is now. It just means that there is no longer anyone to truly protect it. It is in danger, and that means that the entirety of existence is vulnerable. It’s up to us to ensure that it is protected for my stream and for yours.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I didn’t do these engravings,” he said, pointing out the changes that the imprints documented. “But this is my writing. I haven’t done them, but I have.” Galadriel shook her head at him, and he continued. “You are from a different point in your stream. You already said that right now, you have not even existed yet, and you will not exist in this stream. You are not made to exist in this stream. The time that you will exist, however, will eventually happen so long as the streams continue.”
“Yes,” Galadriel said. “I remember.”
“What you didn’t think about, though, was that that means that in your time, in your stream, I have already existed. These moments have long passed, as have those that are to come. When you were in your own stream, in your own time, all of this was already done.”
Her mind started to clear, and Galadriel suddenly felt like she was at once beginning to understand what was happening and becoming more confused. She looked at the imprints that she had done and the pictures of the wall again. Though they were so subtle that most hadn’t even noticed that they had happened, the changes in the engravings were now so obvious to her that they stood out starkly as if trying to grab and hold her attention for just a few moments longer so that they could reveal their secrets to her.
“You did this,” she said, then lifted her eyes to him, “but you haven’t done it yet.”
Vyker nodded.
“I did it because it needed to be done to tell us something, and I will do it because it was already done.” He picked up two of the imprints, and then compared them with the next two. “Most of the changes are only slight,” he said. “Rather than replacing the words entirely, I made changes to some of the letters. It effectively changed what the engravings say, but it also makes riddles.”
“Why would you do that? If you were going to change the engravings at all, why wouldn’t you just change them?”
“How many people in your stream notice the changes?” he asked.
“As far as I know, only me and one other person,” Galadriel admitted. Then she shook her head. “No. I told my best friend, too, but he didn’t believe me.”
“Who is the other person?” Vyker asked.
“His name is Rick. I don’t really know much about him to be honest. I only met him right before I left for the excavation site. When we talked about the wall, though, he had noticed many of the same things that I had. He pointed out that he didn’t think that the engravings were done by the culture that the researchers were studying, and that the translation of them couldn’t be accurate. When I pointed out that the engravings changed, he believed me, but it also upset him. He said that he hadn’t believed before then that the streams were able to interact.”
“He understands the concept of the streams?” Vyker asked.
“Yes. He tried to explain them to me.”
“And he said that he didn’t know that people could travel through them?”
“He said that he didn’t know that they could interact. Finding out that the engravings had changed proved that they could.”
“No, it doesn’t,” Vyker said. “That is not proof that the streams interact. It is, though, proof that we are capable of altering what happens in the future. It’s up to us to ensure that the temple remains safe in my time so that it can persist to yours.”
“And what then?” Galadriel asked. “You said that the segment of the wall that’s in my stream is in danger.”
“We’ll have to figure that out from there,” he said. “I don’t know what put it in the danger that it is in now, and until we understand that, there’s nothing that we can do to save it.”
The sound of his voice referring to them as ‘we’ was making Galadriel’s belly tight and her heart beat faster. She felt her body trembling and a pull in her chest that was so strange and yet so familiar. Her eyes lowered to the picture of the wall where it stood in the museum, and the feeling surged even stronger within her. She realized that this was the intense draw that she had always felt when standing in front of the wall. This was the feeling that had brought her back to the exhibit day after day, and what had led her to get on that plane and head into a place that she didn’t know just to find out more about the chunk of stone.
“It’s you,” she whispered. “You’re why I care so much about the wall. It’s not the wall itself. It’s you.”
Vyker’s eyes darkened as he looked at her, and Galadriel didn’t know how to interpret the change. His body pulled back away from the papers that she had spread across
the ground and he tucked himself into his own stack of blankets.
“We need to get to sleep,” he said, all of the excitement now gone from his voice. “There is a far way to go in the morning.”
“Will we see the wall?” she asked.
Vyker turned onto his side so that his back was to her and pulled his blankets up over his shoulders.
“If we make it to where we intend to go, we will be with the temple in its original form.”
“What do you mean its original form?”
“My stream is where the temple was originally built. It later appeared in other streams, like yours, but the one in the home of my kind will always be the one of its truest form.”
“What do you mean they appeared in other streams? They just showed up?”
“We need to sleep,” Vyker said again, his voice harsher now as he cut off her question.
Galadriel slid her blankets a few more inches away from his and eased down into them, resting her head on the folded blankets that she had placed at the top by way of a pillow. A few moments later, she saw Vyker get up and extinguish all but one of the torches. The one that remained lit was at the far end of the chamber, providing just enough light that she was able to make out shapes in the darkness. She was thankful for the light, but at the same time didn’t want to see Vyker as he returned to his blankets and turned again so that he faced away from her. The emotions coursing through her were like nothing that she had ever experienced – at once emerging and a memory.
****
Galadriel didn’t know how much time had passed before the sound of Vyker’s voice shook her out of the sleep that had claimed her. She felt her mind moving toward the sound of her name, but her body resisted waking. She still felt the exhaustion that she had struggled with the day before, and wished nothing more than to just curl further into the blankets and keep sleeping.
“Galadriel,” he said more insistently. “It’s time to get up. We need to keep moving.”
Finally, Galadriel dragged herself out of the sleep and climbed reluctantly out of the comfortable warmth of the blankets. Vyker had already packed up everything that they had unloaded the night before, and Galadriel quickly gathered up her blankets and handed them to him so that he could put them back into his bag. There was a simmering tension between them, and Galadriel knew that it was because of her confession the night before. It was as if her words were churning through his mind repeatedly, and he wasn’t able, or willing, to react to them in any way other than to shut her out and push ahead.
Vyker handed Galadriel a cloth-wrapped packet of food, and she ate eagerly. She hoped that eating breakfast would give her the energy that she felt like her body was gravely lacking so that she was able to continue on whatever journey lay ahead of them. She finished as quickly as she could and tucked the cloth into her bag before swinging it into place again. She struggled with tying the heavier bag in place around her chest, and Vyker stepped up to help her. He took the ends of the length of rope in either hand and tied it tightly around her as he had before. His hands brushed against her breasts and Galadriel fought the return of the breathtaking response to him. He didn’t look directly at her, and she realized that he was purposely avoiding making eye contact with her, continuing his efforts not to allow the connection that was obviously building between them to move forward.
When he finished tying the bag in place, Vyker took one of the torches from the wall and forced it into what little space was left in her bag, then took the one that was lit and started out of the chamber. Galadriel followed him, and they made their way back through the cavern until they reached the chamber where they first entered. Vyker turned toward her just enough to hand her the torch and then used deep gouges in the rock wall to help him climb up to the portion of rock protruding from the ceiling. She imagined this was the same way that he had covered the access hole the night before. He pressed his hand to the wall to stabilize himself and then reached above him with the other. With a deep grunt, he forced the rock up and out of the way. It moved only slightly, but he adjusted his position and pushed again, this time succeeding in moving the block completely away from the hole.
“Wait until I tell you to, and then come up after me,” he said.
He put his hands on either side of the hole and launched himself up away from the wall so that he disappeared back up into the desert. He was gone for several seconds, and Galadriel started to worry that the parasites had discovered where they were hiding and had been waiting for him. Finally, she heard his voice.
“Alright. It’s safe. Hand the torch up to me and then climb up. I’ll help you once you are at the top.”
Galadriel held the torch up as high as she could, but she was not tall enough to get it close to him. She walked over to the wall and used the same gouges in the stone – cuts deep in the rock wall that she assumed Vyker had made when he as creating and outfitting this shelter – to climb up a few feet. Her body felt off balance and out of her control as she moved away from the wall and reached up with the torch so that he could grab it. She started to have much the same sensation as she had had when she was in the cavern and tumbled through, and she squeezed her eyes closed, taking a moment to center and calm herself. The torch left her hand, and she immediately grabbed for the wall. Vyker stood above her, holding the torch so that she could see where she was climbing. The air rushing toward her from above the ground was even colder than the air inside the chamber with her, and she could only guess that their body heat and the meager warmth the torch flames had created were greater than the open desert could provide.
“Come on,” Vyker said.
“I can’t,” Galadriel told him, feeling her body shaking under the weight of the bags on her back, the strain of the climb on her exhausted muscles, and the stress of the fear making every effort to pull her back down into the cave.
“Yes, you can,” he said. There was a solid quality to his voice that drew her focus to him and helped to take her mind off of the swirling thoughts. “Just climb up one more foothold, and I will be able to help you.”
She hesitated, and she saw Vyker turn, slamming the end of the torch down into the sand so that it stood without him having to hold it. The light dimmed, but she was still able to see him above her as he reached down for her.
“I’m right here,” he said. “You have to trust me.”
It was the second time that he had asked her to trust him. Galadriel knew that she hadn’t wavered the first time, and she couldn’t do it this time either. She had committed to him that she was going to trust him and do as he asked, and she knew that this moment was no different. The fear of heights that had plagued her since she was young and kept her from even the most mundane of activities like going across monkey bars was trying to maintain dominance over her, but she had to fight against it.
“You will be fine. You can do this,” Vyker said. “You already have.”
A wave of emotion washed over her, and Galadriel knew that he was right. All of those times that she had spent standing in front of the wall in the museum were because of this moment. The pull that she felt coming from the stone was the pull that she was feeling from Vyker, and the only way that she could ever have experienced that was if she let go and allowed herself to trust him. Her hands slipped away from the stone wall as she pushed with her legs, jumping up as high as she could. He immediately latched onto her wrists and started drawing her up. Galadriel pushed against the wall with her feet to help him and a few seconds later found herself sprawled across the sand.
“Thank you,” she breathed.
“Of course,” he said.
The darkness beyond the light of the torch was palpable, and she found herself disoriented.
“What time is it? Is it still night?”
“No,” Vyker said, picking the torch back up out of the sand. “It’s early morning.”
“Has the sun not risen yet?”
He looked at her, and she felt like hi
s eyes were boring into her.
“There will be no sun, Galadriel,” he said. “I told you. It will stay dark here always.”
As if fog were lifting away from her brain, she made the connection that the sun, too, was a star and would have been stolen along with all of its residual light by the StarKillers. That was why it had become so cold, so quickly. There was only the residual heat stored within the ground slowly emanating out that, but she knew that would soon be gone. She gave a nod, and he turned away from her to start walking through the desert again. Galadriel followed, staying as aware of her surroundings as possible so that she could detect the feeling of being watched if it happened again.
****
Just as he had promised, their journey seemed to sprawl out until it seemed that they would never stop. She couldn’t imagine what had brought him so far from the portal that connected to his stream, but then wondered if it was like the one that she had used, leaving her out in a place far from where she had entered.
The further they walked, the more she became lost in her thoughts of what was happening around her. She could feel the crunch of the dried desert plants beneath her feet and the soft brush on her legs of those still thriving. She knew that it would not be too much longer until these plants could no longer survive the oppressive darkness and intensifying chill. Just as Vyker said they would, these plants would wither and succumb to the loss of the starlight, leaving this stream barren and even more desolate than it had originally seemed. Just thinking of that made Galadriel feel as though she were suddenly more aware of everything that was truly happening around her. When she first walked across the sand, she felt like there was nothing there but emptiness. Now she was aware of the plants, the soft breath of the occasional breeze, and warm, earthy smells that told her that this land, this planet, was very much alive. Her heart sank at the horrifying thought. She was not just walking through eternal darkness. She was walking through impending death.
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