They stepped through the arch into the temple, and Galadriel looked around, surprised at how bare the space was. She had expected far more from the temple, using her own perceptions of the religious buildings at home to create an image in her mind of a gorgeous, elaborate shrine that would reflect Vyker’s own incredible beauty and strength. Instead, the building seemed like a hollow shell. The walls rose up like a column around a polished floor, but there was nothing but a single simple bench to break up the monotony of the stone. There were none of the dramatic pieces of art that she would have expected to embody the meaning of the temple, or to tell the story of the deities to which they were faithful.
Galadriel moved her focus from the open space of the floor to the walls that encompassed it. Three of the walls were nearly the soft, gently varied color of the sand, making the stark black of the fourth wall stand out even more.
Galadriel turned to the black wall and let her eyes lock on the engravings. Rather than covering most of the surface as it did in the museum, the engravings were only on a portion of the stone. In the center of the tall, broad wall, the engravings created a rectangle that somehow reminded her of a window. She walked toward it and traced the engravings with her gaze, the shapes immediately familiar. These were the first engravings that she had seen in the wall.
“What do these say?” she asked as she walked closer to them. “I thought that I might have some idea, but now I don’t think that I do. I don’t know anything about your culture or your religion.”
“This isn’t about religion,” he said.
She glanced over her shoulder at him.
“You said that it’s a temple,” she said.
He stepped up beside her and examined the wall as she had been. A sparkle appeared deep in the crevices of the engravings as he looked at it that reminded her of the way that the grey slivers in his eyes shimmered.
“It is a temple,” he told her, “but not to a religion.”
“Then what is it to?” she asked.
“This is a temple to all knowledge of the universe and of all time. It is protected here and used only by those who are authorized. It is the purpose of this temple, and of my kind, to guard this knowledge so that it never falls into the wrong hands. If it did, it could bring the end of the galaxy. This is what the enemies want.”
“The StarKillers?” Galadriel asked.
Vyker nodded.
“They only have the knowledge that was given to them at the dawn of their existence. They know that there is more, and that if they had access to that knowledge it would give them unimaginable power. I told you that the other streams have versions of the wall that appeared after this one was built.”
“I remember.”
“Those walls contained copies of the knowledge that applied to the beings of that stream. Only this wall, the original, contains everything. The StarKillers have never known which stream held the true wall. As they have destroyed the other streams and gained the knowledge held in those, though, they have gotten closer to this one. If they find their way here, and are able to gain control over this wall, they will become the most powerful creatures in all of existence, and no one will have a chance against them.”
“I thought that your kind was only responsible for the stars. How did you get control over this?”
“My kind is the protector and the nurturer of the light. Just as the stars are the light in the darkness of the galaxies, knowledge is the light in the darkness of life. Just as we are meant to protect the stars, we are also meant to protect this knowledge. I’ve been failing miserably at protecting the stars. I can’t fail at this.”
“You won’t,” she said, trying to reassure him. “You won’t fail. You are going to protect the wall, and everything will be fine.”
“You can’t possibly know that.”
“Of course I can,” she said, turning toward him. “I know because I’ve seen it. I’ve stood right in front of this wall, and I have looked at those engravings. I’ve seen how they’ve changed. I know that you are going to be able to understand the changes, figure out why you did them, and save the wall.”
“Only part of it. What happened to the rest of it? Those pictures only show a small part of it, just the part with the engravings. Where is the rest of the wall? Why was it found so far from here, and where is the rest of the temple?”
“I don’t know,” Galadriel said, taking a step to close the space between them as she sought the warmth and tension that had been building now seemed to be slipping away. “All I know is that I have spent more time in front of that wall, looking at those engravings, than I can tell you. Every time that I looked at it, I felt like there was a part of me inside of it, something that I had always been missing and that I had suddenly found. I don’t know how to explain it in any other way than to know that it was you.”
Galadriel trembled as the words came out of her mouth, and she couldn’t bring herself to look directly into Vyker’s face. He had already pulled away from her when she mentioned the feelings that she got from the wall, and she didn’t want to see that distant look in his eyes again. Instead, she focused on the soft dip between his collarbones and his thick, strong neck. His throat shifted as if he had opened his mouth to say something, but then Galadriel heard a rustling of voices at the door to the temple and Vyker took a step away from her. She turned and saw three women walking through the arch in the stone. They stopped when they had gotten partway into the room, and one of them noticed Galadriel and Vyker standing there. Her hand grabbed the woman’s arm next to her and all three stared at him with expressions that bordered between surprise and worry.
“Vyker,” one of them said. “You’re back.”
Vyker looked between the three women and Galadriel, back to the women, and back to her. His glare locked on her for a few seconds as if he were contemplating whatever it was that he was going to say before the three women interrupted them. Without responding, he turned away from Galadriel and stormed back out of the temple, leaving her with the women. She felt stung and nervous, but she didn’t know what to do. She looked at the women, wondering if they knew who or what she was, and tried to offer a smile. The tremulous expression lasted only a moment before she felt the tears that she had been fighting for so long finally break free and glide down her cheeks.
Her face dropped to her hands as she cried out the exhaustion, frustration, anger, fear, and swirl of confusing emotions that had been battling for position within her since she woke in the desert sand. She heard footsteps running toward her and soon felt arms encircle her.
“It’s alright,” one of the women said to her. “Don’t cry.”
“Let her cry,” another of the women said. “If that’s what’s within her, let her let it out.”
“What did Vyker do?” the third said.
The other two tensed, and Galadriel looked up at them. She immediately noticed that they were nearly as beautiful as Vyker, and as large as he was for a man, they were for women. Galadriel felt small and overwhelmed, but she let the three women loosen the rope that held the bag to her back and take them off of her. The release of the weight was a blissful relief, but she still couldn’t stop the tears that poured out of her eyes.
“You’ll have to forgive him,” the first woman said again. “He is far too intense for his own good. He is a good man, don’t misunderstand, but there is something inside him that drives him and sometimes – most of the time – it takes over, and no one can get through to him.” The woman swung the bags over her own back. “I’m Cantu,” she said.
“Hello,” Galadriel said. “I’m Galadriel.”
“It’s nice to meet you, Galadriel,” the second woman said. “I’m Fraya.”
“I’m Drissi,” added the third woman. She then took a step back and scrutinized Galadriel as if it were the first time that she was seeing her. “What happened to you?”
“I’ve been walking for a long time,” Galadriel said.
&n
bsp; The three women nodded knowingly.
“Do you think that a bath might help you feel better?” Cantu asked.
“A bath sounds incredible,” Galadriel sighed.
“Come on,” Fraya told her.
They started out of the temple, and Galadriel took a final look at the wall, wondering if somewhere in another place, another time, the wall looked any different than the last time she saw it, and if it did, what that could possibly mean.
Chapter Twenty-Two
The three women led Galadriel away from the temple toward another building near the edge of the village. They entered and closed the heavy door behind them, ensuring that the latch was put into place to prevent anyone from coming in unexpectedly.
“Are you the reason that Vyker has come home?” Cantu asked, leaving her side and walking toward a large platform in the center of the room.
The question struck Galadriel strangely, and she wasn’t sure how to respond.
“Excuse me?”
“It’s just that it has been months since he’s been here,” Drissi continued.
They guided her toward the platform where Galadriel could now hear running water.
“The reason that he is so distracted and has such a difficult time connecting is this quest that he has been on.”
The way that Fraya said quest made Galadriel feel as though the woman didn’t have much faith in the word, or in what Vyker was doing.
“Quest?” Galadriel asked, hoping to get more out of them so that she could better understand not just the mysterious man who had taken over her thoughts, but the way that the people who he sought so hard to protect perceived him.
“Oh, yes,” Fraya continued. They had reached the platform and climbed up the steps onto the edge of a deep, diamond-shaped tub. “For a few years now, he has been talking only about this quest. He believes that we are in danger.”
“And you don’t believe him?” Galadriel asked.
Cantu held what looked like a long, white robe out to her and shook her head. Galadriel took the robe and slipped it on over her clothes, starting to undress beneath it.
“No one really does,” Cantu said. “He talks about other worlds where our enemies are getting stronger. He says that he can travel from here to these other worlds and has been fighting them to protect us and the temple.”
“The StarKillers?” Galadriel asked.
The three women paused, and Galadriel felt them all staring at her intensely.
“He told you about them?” Fraya asked.
Galadriel nodded.
“Yes. Do you not believe that they’re real?”
“No,” Drissi said. “They are real. At least, they used to be. No one has seen them for generations.”
“No one but Vyker, supposedly,” Cantu said.
The way that their words seemed to flow amongst the three women, each filling and completing the thoughts of the others, disoriented Galadriel, and she found her mind spinning even more than it already had. When Vyker told her about his struggles against the StarKillers and his fight to save his kind, she had imagined the rest of his village standing behind him, knowing what he was putting himself through for them. Instead, she found that they didn’t understand him and didn’t believe what he knew was happening around them. Just like the plants in the dying stream, the darkness was closing around them, and they had no concept of what could happen.
Vyker was an outsider, just like she was, and finally she understood the connection between them. As aggravating and dismissive as he had been, they were very much alike, devoted to something that caused others to shun them, but that they couldn’t stop even as those around them tried to convince them that they were wrong. The thought of what Vyker went through, though, made her commitment to the wall seem utterly futile, and Galadriel was embarrassed by the intensity that she had shown to him when they first met. She suddenly wondered where Vyker had stormed off to and wished that she was with him. The sound of the water and the sweet, comforting scent of the abundant bubbles forming from the golden liquid she had watched Drissi pour into the water filling the tub was too enticing to leave yet.
“Go ahead,” Fraya said. “Relax. You’ll find everything you need in those baskets behind the tub. We’ll be back a little later with some clean clothing for you.”
The women started down the steps, and just as they were nearly at the bottom, Cantu turned toward her.
“Be patient, Galadriel,” she said. “If he brought you here, it’s for a reason. You will get through.”
Galadriel didn’t know how to respond. Instead, she nodded. The women left the building, and Galadriel let the robe drop away from her shoulders so that she could step down into the blissfully warm water. She had never appreciated the feeling of water against her skin like she did in that moment. She felt like it was washing away not just the dust and the sand, but the feeling of the creature that grabbed her and the image of the other parasite as she killed it. It washed away the fear of the darkness that they walked through and the worry of not knowing where she was or what she was going to do. As it cleansed her skin and took the tension from her muscles, the water and soft, scented bubbles left behind a renewed sense of focus and a calm, mellow awareness of her feelings toward Vyker.
She had known him for only two days, yet she knew that her heart had known him for so much longer. She still didn’t completely understand how, but she knew that what was inside her reached out to the wall in the museum because it was reaching out to the presence of Vyker within it. His intermittent coldness and the almost tangible distance that he kept between them only made her wonder about him more, and though it hurt and angered her that he refused to acknowledge them, she knew that the feelings that she had were real and couldn’t just exist within her.
****
Galadriel dipped her hands down into the water and filled them with bubbles. She poured the suds over her chest and tilted her head back to allow them to glide down over her skin. The tiny bubbles popped, sending shivers of sensation over her skin. As they ran along the upper swells of her breasts, Galadriel drew in a breath, her mind filling with images of Vyker. She allowed her body to sink further into the water, parting her legs slightly so that the warmth could flow between her thighs. She let her head slide beneath the surface and washed her hair, relishing how the water encapsulated and stroked her.
As her head came up again, she realized that the door to the building had opened again and Fraya had come back inside. She was carrying a small pile of pale, blue cloth in her arms and settled it to the side of the platform after climbing the steps.
“How are you feeling?” she asked.
Galadriel let out a long sigh, hoping that her expression wouldn’t give away the thoughts that the water had brought to her mind.
“Much better,” she said. “Thank you so much.”
“Of course,” Fraya said. “I brought you some clothes. I’m afraid we don’t have anything like what you were wearing.”
“That’s fine,” Galadriel said. “After the last few days, I don’t really think that I want to see those clothes again for a while.”
Fraya laughed.
“Whenever you’re ready, you can go to the building just beside the temple. There will be food for you, and I can help you to settle in more.” She started down the steps and then paused. “But if you’d rather, the oasis just outside of the village in this direction is where Vyker usually spends his time when he wants to be alone.”
“But if he wants to be alone…” Galadriel started to protest.
“Sometimes the thing that we are running from the most is what we should actually be running toward the fastest. I’ve never seen him look the way that he did when he was standing next to you.”
“He was so angry.”
Fraya shook her head.
“Maybe. But angry at what?”
Without giving her any time to respond, Fraya turned her back on Galadriel again and co
ntinued out of the building, closing the door behind her. Galadriel stared down into the bubbles for a few moments, thinking through what the woman had said. She finished bathing as quickly as she could and then grabbed one of the towels from a basket behind the tub. She dried herself carefully, appreciating the new softness of her clean, fresh skin.
She picked up the first piece of blue cloth from the pile and found it was what looked like a delicate piece of lingerie. Galadriel stepped into it, feeling the surge of enticing feelings like what she had felt in the water flow within her again. She reached for the next piece of cloth and dropped a long, thin dress over her head. It settled over her body and skimmed her curves, making her feel beautiful and feminine. At the bottom of the pile, she found a pair of light leather sandals that she hadn’t noticed before. She slipped into them and tied them around her ankle. Fully dressed again, she left the clothes that she had shed lying next to the tub, not wanting to touch them now that she was surrounded by these ethereal fibers.
Galadriel walked out of the building and didn’t hesitate. She turned in the direction of the oasis and started toward it, not caring about anything but being near Vyker. The long skirt swept across her feet, and Galadriel grabbed the sides of it to lift it away from the sand so that she didn’t trip over it. She continued through the village, already able to see the end of the buildings ahead of her. The brilliant sparkle of the stars above her gave her enough light to guide her steps as she moved beyond the village out into the open expanse of desert beyond. She walked for several more minutes before she saw a small hill ahead of her. The height and severity of the incline was nothing like the hill that she had discovered in the last stream, and she started up it without hesitation.
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