Overview

Some caves echo. This one remembers. When archaeologist Moria Chione receives a letter from a vanished colleague, she follows his trail into the empire's forgotten north, where maps fail, old names have been erased, and the land itself seems to remember what power tried to bury. Beneath a mountain called Uchiza, she and her companions uncover not a ruin, but a vast living labyrinth: a sentient cave system that records every life, every loss, and every lie carried into its depths. As the expedition descends through impossible chambers and the remains of an earlier doomed venture, Moria begins to understand that the empire's history rests on a buried fraud. The forces that shaped civilization were never fully human, and the past has not stayed dead. At the center of that buried history waits Calor, a feathered dragon bound to an ancient machine-intelligence and to cycles of power, erasure, and destruction older than any empire. What begins as an archaeological inquiry becomes a struggle over memory itself. With the cave shifting around them and the empire closing in, Moria and her allies must navigate a world where records are weapons, myth is a form of control, and truth survives only if someone is willing to witness it. Every discovery draws them deeper into a history of vanished civilizations, engineered gods, and forgotten catastrophes that refuse to remain buried. Blending the tactile detail of archaeology with the scale of mythic science fantasy, The Cave of Past and Present is a haunting novel of exploration, empire, and memory. Atmospheric, ambitious, and rich in historical texture, it is the first volume in The Echoes Saga.

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9781069724441

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From the rugged farm fields of Meigs County, Ohio-where dawn's hush and the wild tang of soil first taught him that all stories begin in the churn of memory-Scott Justin Bradley has forged a singular career at the crossroads of myth, museum, and manuscript.Holding a Bachelor of Arts in History (2003) and a Master of Arts in Public History (2005) from Wright State University, Bradley spent over sixteen years with the National Museum of the United States Air Force in Dayton, Ohio. There, he oversaw major exhibitions and curated collections that included uniforms, firearms, and munitions, earning the U.S. Air Force's Exemplary Civilian Service Award and Meritorious Civilian Service Award for his distinguished contributions to aerospace heritage.In 2020, he moved to Thunder Bay, Ontario, and took on the role of Executive Director at the Thunder Bay Historical Museum Society. There, he shaped the museum's strategic direction, managed daily operations, led curatorial and financial initiatives, and grew community programs-bringing history to life for a diverse and inclusive audience. He also teaches Museum Studies at Lakehead University and chairs regional heritage boards, including the Arts & Heritage Alliance of Thunder Bay and the City of Thunder Bay's Tourism Investment Committee-a reflection of his dedication to local history and civic engagement.Parallel to his archival and institutional work, Bradley is the founder of his imprint, The New Appalachian Workshop, conceived as a place where craft meets conscience. His fiction is alive with archaeology, echo-memory, and the clash of empire and wilderness. His novella The Cave of Past and Present channels ruined giants, imperial legions astride megafauna, and subterranean reckonings. This work is rooted in the medieval re-enactor's hands-on sensibility, as seen in the Society for Creative Anachronism, where he was knighted in 2012, and the historian's archive of the fantastic.When not writing or directing museum exhibits, Bradley gardens, hikes in Northern Ontario's wilds, cares for his dogs and cats, and gamely returns to the RPG table for sessions of Dungeons & Dragons-a hobby begun in 1990 that now feeds his mythic sensibility and narrative imagination.Scott is married to Jennifer; together, they raise two children in Thunder Bay, in a home where the buried traces of hill-giant ruins sit in metaphor beside the maple trees and lake winds of the north. He writes toward what lies beneath and beyond: ruin, renewal, the echo of story through machine and myth.

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