Alien Portals: A SciFi Alien Multiverse Romance Novel

by Ruth Anne Scott

“But apart,” he said. He stood up and looked out over the desert from the vantage point of the top of the hill. “They can see everything,” he said.

  “What does it mean, though? Why would you want to bring us here?”

  “When I was younger, there was an old woman in the village who told me that my father knew something that no one else did. He talked about other worlds and his need to save our world by saving those.”

  “Your father knew about the streams.”

  “He must have. I don’t know everything that he knew about them, but I did find some of the notes that he kept about them. They weren’t detailed, so I had to make a lot of assumptions. They are what got me started on this quest myself. I didn’t know my father, but somehow this made me feel closer to him. I felt like the more I learned about the streams and the portals, the more that I would learn about him. I could finish what he started for him. It’s taken me my entire life, and I feel like I’ve failed him.”

  “You haven’t failed him,” Galadriel said. “You have done everything that you can.”

  “And I haven’t been able to save any of the streams that I’ve tried. I might lose this one, too.”

  “You won’t,” Galadriel said, turning Vyker to face her. “You aren’t going to fail him, and you aren’t going to let this stream die. Your father started this, and you are going to finish it. Maybe that’s why you carved that change into the temple. You needed to remind yourself of the reason that you keep doing this.”

  “No,” Vyker said, shaking his head. “I carry that with me every day. I don’t need a reminder. There’s another reason that I intended to come here. There’s something here.”

  “Why was your father here the day that he died?” Galadriel asked carefully.

  “No one knows,” he said. “He came up here without telling anyone but my mother that he was coming.”

  “It wasn’t written in his notes?”

  “No. There wasn’t even a mention of this place.”

  He turned back to the grave, and Galadriel saw him examining it carefully. He walked around the edge of it much like he had with the boulder, his hand trailing along the smooth stone that crafted the conjoined memorial. Suddenly, he paused. His fingers moved back over the center of the curved top of the tombstone, and he leaned close to the stone.

  “What is it?” Galadriel asked.

  “There’s a seam in the stone,” he said. “It’s not one piece.”

  “So?”

  “When I was growing up, all I ever heard about them burying my parents was that my father had drawn this stone and described it specifically. His best friend – the only person other than my mother he was ever said to have trusted – was supposed to ensure that it was built to those specifications. One very precise detail that was in the instructions was that this part of the monument was meant to be made out of one piece of stone. The two pieces on the bottom were supposed to be carved out of the center of the stone, and this top part was supposed to be solid from the same stone. He was insistent about that.”

  “Maybe he couldn’t do it?” Galadriel asked. “Maybe he tried, but he wasn’t able to do it as your father wanted him to, so he did the best that he could, and this is how it turned out.”

  Vyker didn’t look convinced. He ran his fingers along the seam in the stone again and shook his head.

  “No. He wouldn’t do that. My father trusted him, and he trusted my father. He wouldn’t have betrayed his final wish that way. He would have done whatever he had to do to make sure that it was the way that my father wanted it.”

  “Can we ask him? Do you know where he is?”

  “No. No one does.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “After he built the monument, he disappeared. He wrote a note saying that he had done as my father had asked and that he would continue to, then he was gone.”

  “What did he mean that he had done as your father asked him to and that he would continue to? What else could he have asked for after building the monument?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Vyker ran his fingers along the seam again, and then followed the opening in the stone down to where it connected to the main platform. He flattened his palm against the side of the platform and followed it down to the sand. Suddenly, he started moving with greater speed. Galadriel could see the determination in his eyes as he dug with his hands into the sand. Grains sprayed around him, and Galadriel took a step back to prevent them from hitting her.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  Vyker ignored her and continued to move the sand away from the stone. Finally, he stopped and settled back onto his heels.

  “Look at this,” he said.

  Galadriel walked around the side of the monument and crouched down beside him. For a moment, she couldn’t figure out exactly what she was looking at, then she realized that it was a dark-colored key sticking out of the stone.

  “What is it?” she asked softly, somehow afraid to lift her voice any louder.

  “Do you trust me?” Vyker asked.

  She looked into his eyes and nodded, not hesitating for even a moment.

  “Of course.”

  Vyker grasped the key and turned it. There were a few tense seconds of silence, and then Galadriel heard a low, grinding sound as the sand beneath them began to shift. They both moved back as the stone in front of them trembled and then moved, slowly pulling apart. Galadriel reached for Vyker and gripped his arm, tightening her fingers around his sleeve as they watched the monument split along the seam and open. It moved until it was several feet apart and they were staring at another piece of stone – this one resting flat on the sand. Galadriel immediately noticed the engravings on it and remembered the way that Vyker had stroked their fingers along the engravings on the portal that brought them to his stream.

  She looked at Vyker and he stared back at her, his expression telling her that he was thinking the same thing. She felt like she was struggling to breathe. Her heart was pounding in her chest so hard she was sure that Vyker could hear it. Without speaking, they both reached forward and rested their fingertips on the engravings. They followed the deep grooves in the stone, both of them holding onto each other with their other hands, knowing what they anticipated was going to happen. As they reached the last character on the engraving, Galadriel ducked her head down onto his shoulder again. If this was a portal, she wasn’t looking forward to the uncomfortable transition.

  Galadriel drew in a breath as they reached the end of the character and squeezed her eyes closed. She expected the pulling feeling as her consciousness was drawn from her body, but she didn’t feel it. Instead, she felt a brief moment of sinking as if her body were being drawn down through the sand and then the impact of landing on top of Vyker on hard ground.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  “I’m sorry,” Galadriel said, trying to push herself backward off of Vyker. “I really need to stop falling on you.”

  “It’s alright,” Vyker said as they finally managed to disentangle themselves from each other. “I like having you on top of me.”

  Galadriel gave a short laugh and lifted her head. She hadn’t known what to expect from this hidden portal, whether it would behave as the one that she and Vyker used to bring them to his stream and bring them to the same location but in a different stream, or if it would be like the first one that she went through and leave them somewhere else. As soon as she looked around, she knew that they were not in the same place they had been when they discovered the hidden portal beneath Vyker’s parents’ monument. Instead, it looked like they were back in the cavern that Vyker had brought her to when they first met, similar to the cavern where she had accidentally stumbled on the portal that took her from her stream.

  Vyker stood slowly, looking around the cavern carefully. She noticed that his hand rested on the blade that he wore in a sheath at his side. As she watched, his hand moved from the sheath to the bag that she knew con
tained his star stones, and then back to the blade as if he couldn’t decide whether he needed to protect the stones or himself. The thought of whether she should pull out her own blade flickered through Galadriel’s mind, but she resisted it. She knew that if she had to, she would be able to use the weapon again, but it wasn’t something that she wanted to do. She didn’t want to feel the sharp metal slicing through flesh or the blood as it rushed out of its body. She didn’t want to watch the life disappear and leave the empty shell collapsed on the ground.

  Her eyes drifted to Vyker’s back, and she realized that no matter how hard it had been for her, she would willingly do all of it again to protect him.

  “What do we do now?” she asked.

  “I don’t think that I have ever been to this stream before,” he said. “There has to be a reason that my father wanted his grave to protect this portal.”

  “Do you think that his best friend knew about it?” Galadriel asked.

  “He must have. That would be the only way that he would know how to protect it properly.”

  “Why do you think that your father would go to the portal before dying? Could he have known that he was going to die?”

  “His notes didn’t have anything in them that indicated that he did. The only danger that he ever talked about was when he was talking about what I can only guess was the other streams. Like I said, he was never really detailed enough for me to understand exactly what he was saying. I think that he wrote them assuming that he would be the only one who would ever read them. He thought that he was going to save the streams himself, and maybe if he wasn’t able to he would be able to pass it along to me.”

  “If he planned his grave, he must have known that this stream was dangerous. There has to be something here that he thought could kill him.”

  “But he died in the other stream,” Vyker said.

  “Which means that either he was injured in this stream and returned to the other one to die,” Galadriel said.

  “Or whatever injured him made it to our stream but came back here after injuring my father.”

  A long breath slipped out of Galadriel’s lungs as the realization settled in. Until now, she hadn’t really feared for what might be to come from their streams. She had believed that everything would work out fine because she thought there was no other option. It was going to be alright simply because it had to be. Now she had to admit to herself that that might not be true. The danger that Vyker knew was so real truly was, and if the creatures had been able to access his stream so many years ago, the risk was imminent.

  “You stay here,” he said, walking toward the entrance to the cavern. “I’m going to go out and survey the area. Once I figure out what we are facing, I’ll be back, and we’ll go from there.”

  “No,” Galadriel protested. “I’m not staying here.”

  “You’ll be safe. I won’t be gone long.”

  “I don’t care if you think that I’ll be safer here. I’m not staying. I’m not letting you be alone. If you are going out there, I’m going out with you.”

  Vyker straightened and glared at her. The look was much like the one that his face had carried the first time that she saw him, but this time Galadriel wasn’t intimidated. She knew him now, and there was nothing that he could do to force her to stay away from him, especially if she thought that either of them was in danger. After a few tense moments he relented, and they started together toward the entrance of the cavern. As they walked by, Galadriel glanced at the wall that had held the engravings of the portal in the cavern in her stream. This wall was smooth.

  “Where are the engravings?” she asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “At each of the portals, there are engravings that we have to touch to go through them. That’s what I was doing when I went through the portal the first time. But when we get to the other side of the portal, there are no engravings. Why can you not go through the same portal in the other direction?”

  “It’s the same as everything else about the streams. Things are similar, but not quite the same. I have yet to find a portal that can be used in both directions. That’s one of the reasons that I was so surprised when you showed up. I knew that there was a portal near that boulder, but I thought that it was in the other direction. It was sealed when I found it, and I assumed that my father sealed it. That means that you shouldn’t have been able to travel through it at all, much less from your stream to that one.”

  “How did you know that there was a portal there? There weren’t any engravings on the boulder or on anything around it.”

  “My father had a map of it. There wasn’t any mention of a boulder or what had the actual portal, but I knew that it was somewhere around there. When I went, I found the boulder, and there were scars on it that showed that it had been sealed.”

  “But they weren’t there when I arrived?”

  “No. I don’t know what could have happened to them.”

  “Things change.”

  Vyker drew in a breath, and together they stepped out of the cavern into the desert sand.

  The intense, stinging cold was the first thing that Galadriel noticed. The cavern had created a protective barrier from the painful temperature drop, and when she stepped out of it she felt as though the chill ambushed her. It sank through the thin fabric of the clothing that Vyker’s guardians had set out for her and burned on her cheeks.

  “What the hell?” Galadriel screamed into a sudden swirl of icy wind.

  “The streams are all different,” Vyker shouted back. “Some of them are far more different than others. It is like all of the possibilities in all of existence. Some of those possibilities are almost exactly the same as others, and some are so different they don’t seem like they are even remotely related. That is part of what makes it so difficult to preserve them. You have to figure them out before you can protect them, and sometimes there just isn’t enough time.”

  Galadriel reached into her bag and pulled out one of the blankets that she had packed. Shaking it out, she wrapped it around her shoulders and covered her head to cut some of the cold. Vyker followed her example, bundling himself in one of his blankets. The ground beneath their feet was covered in several inches of ice that crunched with each step. They pushed through the wind that wailed around them, ducking their heads down to protect their faces from the pain of the cold and to make it easier to breathe.

  They had been walking long enough that Galadriel’s legs were numb, and her lungs were burning with the struggle of processing the freezing air when she heard Vyker let out a grunt and saw him rear back. She screamed as he dropped to his knees on the ground and saw a long, tapered arrow sticking out of his shoulder. He grabbed the arrow and yanked it out of his skin, tossing it aside before clamping his hand down over the wound. Galadriel looked around frantically, trying to see who had shot the arrow at them, but the frozen tundra seemed empty. Vyker took his hand away from his shoulder and Galadriel saw his palm covered with blood. She dropped her bag to the ground and pulled out one of the shirts that she had tucked inside. She tore it into long strips and then drew her first aid kit out and opened it on the ground beside them.

  “At least you’re getting good use out of that thing,” Vyker joked, hissing in pain as she pushed his hand away from his shoulder and pressed a strip of cloth to it to stop the bleeding, then wiped an alcohol swab across it.

  “I’ve gotten more use out of it on you than I have on myself,” she told him.

  She worked as quickly as she could to dress his wound, not wanting them to be out in the vulnerability of the open space for any longer than they needed to. Someone or something had shot that arrow at him, and the longer they were sitting there, the greater the chance of it happening again. She had just finished tightening the final bandage around his arm when she heard the shuffling of footsteps coming toward them. Galadriel jumped to her feet and squared herself toward the sound. A figure appeared in the near distance an
d for the first time, Galadriel realized that they were in only partial light.

  Fearing that she was about to face either one of the parasites or a StarKiller itself, she ducked down and took the blade into her hand, accepting the weight that she hadn’t wanted to feel again without hesitation. The line had been crossed and she was no longer afraid.

  The figure continued to approach, and Galadriel drew the blade back, preparing for the conflict. Beside her, Vyker had taken the weapon from his own sheath and was holding it in front of him as he turned his injured shoulder away. The figure got to within a few yards, and Galadriel realized that she was looking at a woman only a few years older than herself holding a roughly hewn bow and arrow. The weapon was poised to strike again, but the woman’s face held an expression of terror rather than violence.

  “Who are you?” the woman screamed, her voice tremulous. When Galadriel didn’t respond, the woman took another step toward them and screamed again, “Who are you?”

  It was as if she thought that if she got louder, they wouldn’t be able to hear the fear in her voice, but the screaming only made it more evident. Galadriel lowered the blade slowly, hoping that she would be able to reassure the woman enough to disarm her as well. Beside her, she could see Vyker still holding his weapon toward the woman, and she rested her hand on his arm.

  “Put down your blade,” she told him.

  “No,” he growled. “She shot me with an arrow.”

  “Put down your blade,” Galadriel repeated. “She’s afraid.” She paused and narrowed her eyes slightly to look more closely at the woman. “I… I think she’s human.”

  At those words, the woman dropped the bow and arrow, and her body seemed to sag beneath a tremendous weight.

  “Are you?” Galadriel asked. “Are you human?”

  The woman nodded, but before she was able to speak, she heard a roar echoing around them and saw another, larger figure running toward them. She stumbled back a few steps, lifting her blade again, but the woman turned and held her hands up.