The Cave of Past and Present is a short novel of ruin, memory, and awe—the opening entry in The Echoes Saga . Moria Chione, once a rising scholar of stone and time at the Imperial University, follows a vanished colleague’s trail into a mountain the Empire has literally erased from its maps. What she and her small party find on Pico da Neblina isn’t a ruin so much as an intelligence: a cave whose walls seem extruded rather than carved, inscriptions that shift when no one is looking, and a feathered dragon wrought from mineral and will that watches them back. The Empire thrives on erasure; the cave remembers everything. And it measures those who enter it. Guided (and sometimes endangered) by Makaran—the obsessive archaeologist who first reached the site—Moria must reckon with an artifact that behaves like a machine for memory and forgetting, a sanctum where cities fold into cubes, children are etched with spirals, and history repeats until it burns clean. Outside, imperial censors close their fists. Inside, something older decides what survives. Expect: A scholar–narrator with forensic precision and a stubborn heart. - South American highlands, airships, temples of Hathor, and an empire that edits reality by renaming it. - Bas-reliefs that move, corridors that bend light, and a dragon whose “breath” is the return of silence. - Themes of memory vs. machinery, colonial extraction, grief, and the cost of telling the truth. Where it fits: A compact, atmospheric blend of archaeological realism and mythic terror—an entry point to the larger Echoes cycle. Readable as a stand-alone; richer as the beginning of the saga. Content notes: peril, imperial violence, ritual sensuality, existential dread. From the book (context for tone): Moria introduces herself—“I once lectured … stone and sequence”—before naming the mountain the Empire removed from its maps and the intelligence waiting beneath it. Field reports describe a fissure that looks grown , not carved, with panels where monarch, machine, and flame recur, and fauna from impossible eras share one wall. Deeper in, a chamber of stone beasts and hybrid guardians encircles a feathered dragon—carved as if observed , not imagined—whose gaze makes lamps falter and lungs forget how to breathe. 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.