by Meg Ripley
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 p
yramid 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 together 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.
Behind her she heard a snap like a twig breaking and she spun around. The world around her was serene and after a moment, the frantic pounding of her heart calmed. She turned back to the pyramid and noticed a large engraving beside the sharply rectangular opening she had exited. It closely resembled the symbol of the hands and the pyramid, but the pyramid cupped in the palms had the slimmer, sharper dimensions of the pyramid she had been exploring.
"They're connected," she whispered to herself, the astonishing realization hitting her so suddenly she couldn't hold it inside.
"Who are you?"
The sound of a deep, rumbling voice behind her startled her, and Liora turned so quickly she almost stumbled backwards. A man stood several yards away at the edge of a thicket of dense trees, poised on top of a moss-covered boulder so he loomed above her. Her breath caught in her throat as she looked at him, stunned in place by impossibly blue eyes that seemed to pierce through her.
He jumped down from the boulder, landing in a crouched position that made the muscles beneath the bare skin of his back tense and shift. Liora's mouth watered and she felt her belly tighten as he rose slowly to his feet and took a step toward her.
"Who are you?" he repeated.
His voice was like the roll of thunder just as the air heats up right before a storm begins. He took another step toward her, staring at her with unwavering intensity.
"Liora," she replied, her voice coming out softer than she had intended.
"How did you get here?" he demanded.
He had stopped approaching and Liora felt a flicker of disappointment, wishing he would come closer so she could get a better look at his eyes. She struggled to come up with the words to respond, but even she wasn't sure how she had gotten where she was.
"I came through that building," she said, gesturing behind her.
"That's impossible. How did you get here?"
A spark of frustrated anger joined the combination of fear and excitement roiling through her. She gestured at the building again.
"Apparently, it's not impossible because that is exactly what happened. I was researching a pyramid in Egypt, I found a false wall, I stepped through it, I touched some hieroglyphics, and now I'm here."
It all came out of her in a rush as she went step by step telling him how she arrived in the new place, trying to clarify it for herself at the same time.
"I told you, that is impossible," he said harshly, rushing past her so that he could walk into the building.
She followed him toward the building but stopped just outside, afraid that if she entered she would end up back in the pyramid, and she wasn't ready to leave this beautiful place, or the equally beautiful man, quite yet. He stalked down the corridor into the chamber and flattened his palms on the walls as she had, pressing into the stone and turning several times to touch different areas of the walls. After several moments, he strode back toward her with such power Liora stepped back to create more space for him.
"I don't understand," he said, the low tone of his voice saying he spoke more to himself than to her.
He looked sharply at her and closed the space between them with one long step, forcing her back against the stone side of what she realized now was a small, single-chamber pyramid. His body didn't touch hers, but was only inches away, the warmth radiating toward her so she felt it heating her skin almost painfully. Her eyes met his and the boldness of the color along with the seething heat of his skin told her that he was not human.
"Where are we?" she whispered.
"You mean you don't know?" he asked, his voice dropping to nearly match hers.
"No."
"What are you doing here?"
"I told you, I was studying a pyramid. I'm an Egyptologist."
"But you don't know where you are?"
"No."
"We are at the center of Orion's belt."
Liora narrowed her eyes quizzically at him.
"The center of Orion's belt is a star."
The man scoffed.
"Is that what you think?"
Despite the desire building in her stomach, Liora felt the anger increasing at the man's arrogance.
"What are you?"
"I suppose you could call me a researcher, too, and right now I want to know how you got here and why you are here."
Liora opened her mouth to respond when another voice from close to the trees broke through the thick tension that had formed between them. The man stepped away from her and Liora felt relief as the cooler air soothed the slight sting from the heat pulsating from his body.
"Leave her alone," the female voice said.
Liora looked around the man to see a tall, willowy woman standing in the same place the man had been standing when she first saw him. She had a soft smile on her lips and her voice held a hint of laughter despite the chastising words.
"She's a stranger, Akusaa."
"Only until we get to know her."
****
Akusaa. The name reverberated through Liora's mind as the woman leapt gracefully down from the boulder and approached her. Liora had heard the name before during her studies. It meant "sunset", and as Akusaa grew closer Liora felt like the name fit her perfectly. She was lovely and mysterious, her eyes a shade of violet that reminded Liora of the streaks across an autumn sunset. There was enough brightness in her to remind Liora of the sun, but she was soft around the edges like the gently coming night.
> "Come with me," she said, reaching out her hand.
Liora took her hand and allowed Akusaa to guide her away from the pyramid and toward the trees. She could feel the man's eyes on her as they walked, but she didn't look back at him. Akusaa didn't release her hand as they passed through the trees, but her skin didn't have the heat of the man's and Liora found the touch comforting as she moved away from the only connection to Earth and deeper into the unknown planet.
"What is your name?" Akusaa asked.
"Liora."
Akusaa nodded as if pondering the name and determining if it was appropriate.
"You'll have to forgive my brother. Amasis has a strong temper, especially when it comes to the pyramids."
The name brought a smile to Liora's lips.
"Why is that?" she asked.
"He is very serious about their history and our link with Earth. That is where you came from."
She said it as a statement rather than a question and Liora nodded.
"I don't know how," she admitted.
"You were meant to be here."
Liora didn't realize they had approached another building until Akusaa released her hand and opened a large wooden door. She followed the dark-haired woman into the building and down a short hallway into a massive room that seemed to take up the entire space of the building. Steam rose out of the center of the floor and Liora walked toward it, letting out a sigh when she saw it came from a tub sunken into the stone floor. Even though it got her clean, the outdoor shower at the camp never felt like enough and the idea of a bath made her feel weak in the knees.
"Go ahead," Akusaa said from the doorway as if she had read Liora's mind, "I thought you might like to bathe."