Page 17 of The Alien in the Archive

But she’s not saying anything.

She’s waiting for permission.

“I imagine you have questions.” I lean back, steepling my fingers.

She doesn’t answer right away, her gaze flicking down to Ashlan, then around the room, then back to me. “Who are you?” she finally asks, voice steady.

“Thorne Valtheris,” I reply, my name a weapon I haven’t used in centuries—once known and respected across the galaxy, now a long-forgotten memory. “Former Magister of the Boreal Academy, turned dissident, turned fugitive, turned…well, whatever this is.” I gesture around the room. “Just Thorne now, I suppose.”

She sorts through the information, catalogues, and files it away. “You were a teacher?”

“Yes, before my people shut down our universities and academies,” I tell her.

“So you’re…you must be very old.”

“I’ve been around a while.”

“Meaning…?”

“Four or five millennia,” I shrug. “It’s easy to lose count after that long.”

Her jaw drops, grey eyes sparkling. I’m not sure if she’s even noticed, but that grey…it’s unnatural. I can see the Elixir mingling with her blood, swirling silver in those eyes.

“I have so many questions,” she says.

“Ask away.” I huff out a laugh. “I don’t have anything else planned for today.”

Her foot keeps up that steady rhythm—tap tap tapagainst the floor—as she splays her hands out on her knees and draws circles on them. The way she lives fully in her body excites me; she’s fidgeting to help her collect her thoughts, her mind moving too fast for her body to keep up. There’s so much intellect in that beautiful mind that it’s like her body is a vessel too small to contain it.

She’s remarkable.

“Okay,” she says, finally deciding where she wants to start. “I have to know—the Lost Expeditions. They were real?”

I nod. “Yes.”

“You’ve got to give me more than that,” she mutters, then rakes a hand through her short brown hair. “What do I want to know…ah—give me a brief history? Do you mind if I take notes?”

I actually smile then, the expression twisting my mouth in ways that are unfamiliar after so long. “Go ahead.”

She grins and reaches for her bag—the commotion disturbs Ashlan, who hops down from Page’s lap and disappears into the stacks—then she pulls out a purple notebook and pen. The supplies look deeply out of place in my corner of the Archive, where everything is dusty and old. She opens the notebook to a page of blank white paper with faint blue lines, then she glances up at me.

“I’m ready,” she says.

I lounge back in my chair, crossing my ankle over my knee, feeling downright academic and nostalgic. “Alright…the Lost Expeditions, then. Early on, after we—the Borean Empire, then the Borean Republic—had given interstellar travel technology to the Skoll in exchange for their service as mercenaries, a few broke away from their people. They feared we were manipulating them; they were, of course, correct?—”

“I want to circle back to that at some point,” she says, scribbling something in her notebook. “A lot of your histories were lost.”

“Not lost; destroyed,” I tell her. “We kept our past and our secrets carefully guarded. An empire can only appear eternal if it doesn’t have a history.”

“Right,” she mumbles, frantically taking notes. “Okay…keep going.”

I slow my pace down, giving her time to write. “At this point, we still had a somewhat equitable relationship with the Skoll. Before we started using large amounts of Elixir, we had no way of matching most other species in the galaxy in terms of physical strength. We needed them. So they were able to freely traverse space…and they discovered an Elixir wellspring on Earth.”

Page inhales sharply, looking up at me. “Avalon.”

“No,” I chuckle. “That was the third wellspring the Skoll discovered. The first was Kshira Sagara, in what your people later called India. The second was Atlantis. And there were five others, all kept by creatures even we never fully understood.”

“What kind of creatures?” she asks.

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