Page 65 of Claimed By her Alien Prince

Apologetically she added, "After that, we leave to spend Behlial's allotted year on Elysian, only to repeat the journey all over."

The room turned deathly still for a few minutes, so still, we could hear each other breathing, before everybody started to talk at once.

My mind reeled. A lot of Ishtar's story sounded like the old legends and myths of Egypt, Greece, and Rome. So much so, the fine hairs on the back of my neck rose. But then I realized, as bad as this sounded to me, it was even worse for Seth, and I risked a look at his face, where I found so much turmoil, it threatened to break my heart. His expressions changed from second to second, from disbelief to anger to incomprehension, back to anger, then apprehension, and so on. His jaw worked hard and the tendons on his neck stood out.

"And this has been going on how long?" he finally asked.

A faraway look crossed Ishtar's face. "This is my seventh journey with your father." She shrugged her shoulder. "My predecessor said she was with him for ten journeys. That's all I know. I don't know if there were more or not."

My head did some quick calculations before my mind shut down. I thought for sure that Ishtar looked Egyptian, but by the way I was adding and dividing, Egypt hadn't even been on the map for about another two to three thousand years when Ishtar was brought on board the spaceship.

For a while I had seriously considered whether she really was Nefertiti. But no, neither Nefertiti, nor Egypt, were even thought of at that time.

The historian in me wanted to grab Ishtar and ask her questions, so many questions. What it was like on Earth back then, what kind of civilization she came from. The questions just avalanched inside my head before I realized how rude and disrespectful that would have been. She didn't look a day over twenty, maybe even younger. But her eyes held a depth to them I had never seen on somebody that young.

And then another thought hit me, however old she appeared to be, she was really young when she was taken, but not too young to have had a family of her own. Back then, women started to have children at fourteen, fifteen, sometimes even younger, which meant there was a great chance that she had left a life behind: a husband, children, probably brothers and sisters. Parents.

She was ripped from everything she knew and thrown into a freaking spaceship.

My head did another round of calculations. Depending on where she came from, her people probably had barely started to create the first cities, turning from nomads into settlers, they had believed in gods and courses and myths.

And then, when what they thought of gods, came they took her. My heart went out to her. And her wish to go back to where she came from started to make sense to me.

The Daemons came every seven hundred years, that meant this woman in front of me had lived almost five thousand years!

There was no way for me to comprehend this, and I noticed the eyes of my sisters glazing over, as they seemed to come to the same conclusions as me. It was mind boggling. Would I be ready to die after five thousand years?

There was no way I could answer that question. A question I had a hard time forming. When Seth told me that I would be immortal once we were in space, I was happy, but now the prospect of it was starting to frighten me.

"Don't be scared child." Ishtar stepped next to me, and took my hand. "All will be well, you just have to trust."

"Trust in what?" I voiced my deepest fears. Everything I had ever believed in had been turned upside down. No, that wasn't entirely true, because in reality, I had never really believed in anything. No that wasn't true either, I had believed in history, and even that was turned upside down and not quite what I thought it was.

I felt betrayed, betrayed by everything and everybody. My parents who had never told me about the Nayphyllym, who had gone out of their way to avoid me, even my history books had betrayed me.

I was damned to fly on a spaceship for the next hundreds or thousands of years and watch my children and grandchildren and great grandchildren and so on, fight each other and die. For all eternity?

I began to hyperventilate. Concerned, Seth rushed to my side, but Ishtar reached me first. "Let me."

Gently, she took my face in both of her hands and forced me to look into her eyes. "It is not all bad. And a beginning to end all this has been made."

I tried to nod, but I still had a hard time controlling my breathing. Hot tears formed and fell from my eyes. This was too much, just too much.

Seth took my hand. "We'll get through this," he promised.

I stared up at him and couldn't help but feel a deep love for him, a love that had been steadily growing ever since I saw him for the first time in my dreams.

Ishtar took one of mine and one of Seth's hands. "You two remind me so much of Isis and Osiris, its…"

I didn't hear the rest of what she said, because suddenly a red-hot lightning bolt shot through my body, setting every single nerve ending inside of me on fire. My eyes went wide, and I jumped to my feet, never letting go of either of Seth's or Ishtar's hands.

I had heard the names Isis and Osiris so many times before—it must have been hundreds—had studied their story like so many others, but I had never experienced this kind of reaction to it before.

I didn't know what it was, Seth's closeness, or Ishtar's, or both, but something triggered inside me. I grabbed hard onto their hands while my knees buckled, and my mouth opened in a silent scream as images of a movie like quality assaulted me.

That wasn't all though because suddenly I knew things. I knew everything. A fast, incredible slideshow of the lives I had lived passed by my eyes so quickly, I couldn't grasp at one at first, it took me a moment, but then I held on to one of mine and Seth's live as Isis and Osiris

I watched a young girl, probably no older than seventeen sitting by the Nile River. Her dark olive skin glistened with sweat from the sun burning down on her. Her black hair was tied back with several small braids, while she was searching the riverbank for mussels. With absolute clarity I knew her name was Isis and that once upon a time I was her.

---