by Jade Allen
He nudged her back, planting a deep, wet kiss on her lips, locked in a lover’s embrace that could only be experienced with true love. He gave her an eager smile and released his arms once more.
Luke cracked a sheepish smile, “I forgot… I have something for you. Why don’t you come out to the field and see me off?”
He took Amy’s hand and led her outside to the ship, past the cattle languidly grazing in field. She knew it was selfish, but she longed to convince him to stay; to find another way to signal his people that didn’t involve that tedious journey. What if he was hurt—or worse, killed—upon his return trip? Despite her true feelings, she knew in her heart that she had to let him go. An entire race of people sat anxiously awaiting his return, their very lives hanging in the balance.
Once they reached the ship, he squeezed her hand, “I’ll be back in just a moment.” He pressed a shimmering green button, opening the door with a long hiss. He returned a minute later, holding something tightly in his hand. Facing her, Luke opened his hand; Amy glanced down to look, tears quietly streaming down her cheeks. In his palm was ring, his large hands dwarfing its size. She leaned in closer and gasped in amazement to find the most beautiful gem set inside. It was light blue with little white tufts moving through it, almost like a summer sky adorned by wispy white clouds. Amy had never seen anything like it and marveled at its beauty.
“It was my mother’s,” he spoke softly, lifting her ring finger with his free hand. “On my planet, it’s a tradition for the male to go out in search of almerade, which means ‘sky rock’ in your language, to give to his one true love when he finds her. It’s a promise of forever, as long as the skies above still stand.”
She gazed at the ring, then back to Luke’s loving smile. Was he proposing? Slowly, Luke slid the ring onto her finger and Amy felt as if the ground beneath her had caved in, her heart ready to explode. The world spun in a mixture of happiness and impending sadness, knowing that she must part ways with her love, if only for a short time. He leaned in for a final kiss, the emotions stirring in both of them, then backed away towards the door of the ship.
“I must go now, my love.” His emerald eyes remained locked with hers as he stepped aboard, the humming of his engine filling the space around her. At the door, he paused for one last loving gaze. “See ya later.” He smiled the warmest smile he could muster.
“See ya later,” she replied; the look of sadness was clear on both of their faces.
Amy watched until the ship was clear out of sight, gazing longingly at the now empty space between two stars. Half-heartedly, she trudged back to the house. Shiloh lifted her head from her place near the fireplace as Amy entered and slumped down into the chair. She felt so empty; the eerie sound of a silence house bothering her like it never had before. With a sigh, she headed towards the staircase, glancing longingly at the ring upon her finger. Just as she reached the first step, the sound of static filtered through the air around her, like a CB radio had switched on somewhere near the mantle.
“Come in, Cowgirl,” the voice was familiar, “This is Space Man… can you hear me?”
She walked cautiously back into the living room and glanced around; nothing seemed to be disturbed. Shiloh lifted her head once more as the voice echoed again.
“Amy, can you hear me?” It was Luke, but coming from where, she didn’t know. “Shiloh, Girl, go show Amy your collar!”
There upon Shiloh’s collar dangled a shiny bauble; to the untrained eye, it would appear to be nothing more than a fancy silver trinket. She unhitched it from the collar, examining it in greater detail. A tiny, emerald green button popped up on the back that Amy hesitantly pressed.
“Luke, is that you?” She lifted her finger to listen.
“Yes, it is,” he laughed, “Surprise! Now you can communicate with me until I reach the outer limits of my home galaxy. I thought this might help us both, you know, in case you might miss me or something.”
Amy rolled her eyes and pressed the button once more, “Miss you? Now why in the world would I do that?”
Luke’s laughter filled the room. Perhaps she would be able to bear their time apart after all. Regardless of what came their way, Amy knew deep in her soul that Luke was forever hers, and she would wait as long as it took for him to return to her arms once again. She walked up the stairs towards her bed to rest, clutching the silver ball tightly in her hand.
“Oh, Amy?” his voice echoed from her hand just as she reached the bedroom. “I forgot to tell you something… I love you.”
Amy flopped down onto the squeaking mattress with a bright smile on her face. Shiloh clambered up the stairs and joined her in her usual place at the foot of the bed.
Amy pressed the green button once more and sighed, “Luke, I love you more than you’ll ever know. Please come home soon.” She smiled, placing the trinket radio on the pillow beside her and gazed into the magnificent ring. Her eyes closing, she daydreamed about what life would be like, just the two of them alone on their farm. Maybe they’d raise a family of their own someday. The smile faded as she drifted into a deep sleep. Someday, soon enough, Luke’s loving gaze would be upon her again, his embrace filling her with love and desire. The whole experience had been so mind blowing, a whirr of emotions and the most amazing love story her mind could have ever conceived. She was in love with an alien, and she wouldn’t want it any other way.
THE END
Desired By The Sacred Alien
"Do you ever stop?"
Ethan stepped through the canvas flap to the tent and slid a plate of food onto the table in front of Liora. She barely glanced up, continuing to scrutinize the pages of notes spread across the surface of the rickety card table and compare them to a book open on her lap even as she reached forward to rip off a chunk of the flat bread and fold it into her mouth.
After a few chews, she looked up at Ethan with an intense expression that belied the exhaustion behind her eyes. She swallowed the bite of bread and reached for her canteen.
"I can't," she replied, taking a long sip and setting the canteen aside again. "I am positive I'm onto something. I just have to figure out what it is."
"What you are onto is the beginning of delirium," Ethan said, trying to scoop the notes up into a stack but she stopped him by slamming her hand flat onto the papers.
"I know I'm right, Ethan. Just look. Look at these sketches I made of the new hieroglyphics we found in the pyramid," she held one of the pages of notes out to him, "Now look at the key from what we know about the language from the time that particular pyramid was built. There are at least six distinct hieroglyphs that aren't in the key and that haven't shown up anywhere else."
"That doesn't mean anything, Liora."
"Of course it does," she said, dropping the page back down to the table and turning back to the book in her lap.
Ethan sat down in the chair beside her, careful to tuck his gangly body sideways so that his knees didn't hit the side of the table and send all of her work onto the tarp beneath them. He reached up and moved the camping lantern she was using for light a bit further away from him and rested a hand on the table.
"Liora, you're an Egyptologist. You've been studying the culture for years. That means you know that we didn't just suddenly stumble on a completed key that was like 'Hey, this is our complete written language from the time'. It took extensive studying and investigation to piece together the language and we're still finding ways that it evolved. Just because you found a few hieroglyphs that don't fit into our current understanding of the language doesn't mean that it confirms your theories."
Liora sighed. She had heard all of this so many times before. Ever since she started deeply investigating the link between extraterrestrials and ancient Egyptian culture she had been subjected to a seemingly never-ending onslaught of conversations with colleagues that always balanced somewhere between artificially perky pep talk and condescending mockery. It didn't matter what any of them said, though. Her research was thorough and
intensive, and what she found made far more sense to her than some of the explanations other researchers gave.
She picked up the sketches she had made again and stared at the series of markings. As always, her eyes were drawn immediately to two markings that appeared among a block of easily translated hieroglyphics in several places throughout the pyramid. The first of these markings featured interlocking circles, one beneath and to the diagonal of the first. The second looked like a crude pair of hands, wrists touching and fingers turned away from each other, cradling a tiny pyramid of slightly wider and deeper dimensions of the one they explored.
These two markings were the first anomalies Liora had noticed in her investigation of the writings within the recently-discovered pyramids, and the ones that excited her the most when she looked at them. They were nothing like any of the accepted and translated hieroglyphs, and they convinced her that she had discovered a secondary language not written by the human ancient Egyptians, but by extraterrestrial visitors who had come to Earth and shared their technology and culture with the people they encountered.
"It will be sunrise soon and you'll have to start a whole new day of your actual work," Ethan told her, "Don't you think you can at least get a little bit of sleep? I'm really worried about you."
Liora nodded and pushed back from the table, putting the heavy book on top of her notes in case a breeze stirred up. She took the plate of food Ethan had saved her from dinner and stepped out of the tent to breathe in some fresh air. The sky was massive and clear above her and she stared up at it as she finished eating.
"Don't you ever wonder, Ethan?"
"Wonder what?" Ethan asked, his voice sounding strained as he tried to speak through a yawn.
"Why there are so many planets and stars just in this galaxy alone if we are the only creatures in it? It just doesn't make any sense that there is this expansive universe around us and somehow this is the only planet that got any living creatures on it."
Ethan sighed and joined her gaze up at the sky.
"I don't know, Liora. I honestly never really stopped to think about it."
"You should. What if everything that we think we know about the history of the world and all of the cultures in it is wrong? There is so much technology and architecture and signs of cultural interactions that just cannot be explained by our current understandings of the world, but people just ignore it. If more people would choose to be open-minded and look beyond what is spoon-fed from generation to generation maybe we would discover that there is a whole bigger existence out there that is inextricably tied to our history and is the key to our future."
Liora felt Ethan rub her back and without another word he ducked into his tent and zipped the flap closed. She stayed outside a few minutes longer, pondering the stars above her and the shadow of the pyramid where her tent sat. Finally she felt the ache in the back of her eyes and knew she needed to rest. She placed the plate on the table set in the center of the ring of tents and climbed back into hers, zipping the flap closed and falling back onto her sleeping bag without even bothering to remove her boots.
****
Liora had only been asleep for a few hours when the sounds of other members of the dig team preparing for breakfast woke her. She resisted the feeling of consciousness for as long as she could, feeling the heaviness and exhaustion of her body now even more than she did before she went to sleep. Finally she couldn’t resist it any longer and she groaned, dragging herself out of the tent and immediately over to the outdoor shower set up behind the main tent.
This was not her favorite part of her job. She loved the feeling of stepping into a room no other human had touched for thousands of years and brushing away the dust, coaxing out the secrets held just beneath the surface. What she didn't love was the days spent sleeping in tents, the oppressive, burning heat, and not seeing a bathtub for the entire length of the dig.
The water broke through the haze of sleepiness and washed away the fine layer of dirt that always seemed to cover her when she was working. When she felt like a person again, Liora dressed and joined Ethan at the long table in the center of camp to choke down breakfast and swallow two cups of black coffee.
Twenty minutes later they were climbing down into the pyramid and the combination of carb-laden flat bread and caffeine had kicked in so that she moved confidently along the tight corridors to the section they had just had the opportunity to enter the day before. Impatient as usual, she didn't bother to wait for the crew behind her to set up the floodlight that would illuminate the work area ahead of her and instead held a lantern up to splash light on the path at her feet and penetrate the intense, almost tangible darkness that filled the chamber.
The incredible darkness was one of the most terrifying elements of her explorations. This was a darkness unlike any other, so deep it was almost as if the ancient people who closed the chamber thousands of years before had trapped the night within it.
Liora took several strides into the chamber until she felt like she was near the place she had been the night before when they had to stop their research. She held the lantern up so it glowed across the wall and made the hieroglyphics visible in the aged stone. The stone had a finely grained texture beneath her fingertips as she traced the shape of the symbols etched into the wall, translating the message in her mind as she went.
The space around her suddenly lit up as the crew managed to get the floodlight in place and direct it into the chamber. Ethan came up beside her and she saw him running his eyes along the hieroglyphics.
"They tell about when the pyramid was built. This section," she said, running her hand along a series of hieroglyphs, "says that this pyramid was meant as a monument to cooperation and civility among strangers."
"What does that mean?" Ethan asked, glaring at the symbols as if convinced that they didn't actually say what Liora said they did.
"You know what I think it means," she said softly, "Look."
She pointed out one of the markings that did not fit with the other hieroglyphs. It was positioned slightly to the side and beneath the rest of the symbols like a signature or footnote to the message. Liora touched it carefully, feeling an inexplicable connection to the marking.
"I don't see any other entrances," Ethan said, gazing around the chamber, "This must be the end of that corridor."
"Maybe," Liora said.
She continued along the wall, following the hieroglyphics as she walked. When she reached the corner, she found that the symbols seemed to disappear into the seam of the two walls, breaking off in the middle of a phrase and picking up on the other wall in the middle of another thought. She took a few steps back and followed the symbols again, taking note of the symbols that didn't fit in with the others and translating as she went to try to understand the odd separation of the two phrases. Her fingers touched the final symbol at the seam and she felt the wall give slightly.
Liora withdrew her hand sharply. During her career she had learned that stones within a pyramid suddenly moving often had devastating results and she braced herself. When several seconds passed without anything happening, she cautiously raised her hand and applied pressure to the symbol again. A section of the wall shifted and she was able to push it completely out of the wall. She glanced back at the rest of the crew, but none seemed to notice her and she stepped forward through the false wall and into the space beyond.
The false wall slid closed behind her and Liora raised her lantern to illuminate the newly discovered chamber. It was a small space, no larger than a walk-in closet. It was the smallest chamber Liora had ever seen within a pyramid and panic started to rise in her chest as she realized that the purpose of such a chamber was probably to trap those trying to compromise the pyramid. She lifted her hand to the wall beside her and felt the deep grooves of hieroglyphs beneath her fingers.
Liora illuminated the wall with her lantern and found the surface covered with scattered symbols. Some seemed to stand independently of the others, while others were clustered t
ogether like sentences.
These carvings looked newer and more precise than the others she had studied, almost as though they had been carved only recently. She didn't recognize them as the language she had been translating in the larger chamber and the longer she looked, the more she noticed the six unusual symbols she had shown Ethan. A new one stood out to her and she felt compelled to touch it, drawn to it with an even stronger appeal than the interlocking circles that had entranced her since she first discovered them.
As soon as her fingertips rested on the symbol she saw a flash of blinding light and felt her body lifted from the floor. An intense pull within her made her feel as though she were being sucked toward the wall in front of her and she prepared for impact, but it never came. Nearly as quickly as the sensation came, it ended and she hit the ground. She had dropped her lantern, but the darkness around her was not as deep as it had been only moments before. Ahead of her was a narrow corridor and beyond it, the bright flare of sunlight.
****
Liora climbed to her feet carefully, wincing at a sharp pain through her hip from the impact with the stone floor. She looked around and found that she stood in a chamber nearly the same size as the one she had discovered in the pyramid, but the air was fresher with the movement of the breeze coming in from outside and only shadowy thanks to the sunlight that could come through the door only a few yards away.
She pressed her hands to the walls around her, feeling the hieroglyphics engraved beneath, but the stone didn't give. There were no other doors, no way to leave the chamber but the hallway. Realizing she had no choice, she swallowed the fear building in her throat and started down the corridor toward the glare of the sunlight.
She stepped out into surroundings so lush it felt as though she had walked into a tropical jungle. Vibrantly green plants grew up around the base of the building she stepped out of and created a thick, springy carpet beneath her feet. Liora walked forward a few feet and then turned around to see the building she had just left. It looked like a smaller version of the pyramid she had been researching and the image of the unexplained hieroglyph of the hands cradling the pyramid appeared in her mind.
