When scientist Moria Chione receives an impossible letter from a colleague long presumed dead, she follows the trail into the empire’s erased north—a land of drowned maps, vanished expeditions, and whispered heresies. What she finds beneath the mountain is neither ruin nor myth nor machine, but something older than the oldest dynasties: a sentient labyrinth grown through stone and memory.
The cave remembers everyone who enters it.
The cave decides what is worth forgetting.
As Moria descends through strata of living rock and impossible architecture, visions bleed through time. Her team uncovers fragments of a doomed expedition, imperial lies buried under centuries of silence, and the first stirrings of Calor, a feathered dragon engineered by a god-machine older than humanity itself.
When the cave awakens and history begins to devour itself, Moria must confront the Empire’s greatest secret: that memory is a weapon—and forgetting is the sharpest blade of all.
Blending archaeological realism with mythic surrealism, The Cave of Past and Present opens The Echoes Saga, a sweeping epic of ruins, recursion, colonialism, and the long shadows of history.