A Star Foot Adventure
Cradle of Memory
The city wasn't dead. And they weren't alone.
What's the Story?
A civilization forgotten. A city still alive.
Far in the future, humanity has forgotten its greatest age. The Eternal Cities still stand — monumental ruins powered by forces no one understands — but the civilization that built them destroyed itself in a war over what it means to be human.
Now, naval expeditions explore these cities for salvage and profit. When the crew of the survey vessel Furious breaches an uncharted city on a jungle coast, they expect dead infrastructure and scrap metal. What they find is a city still alive — and an elephant civilization living inside it.
Four young protagonists — two human, two elephant — are caught between escalating military forces and ancient machines waking from centuries of sleep. When an alien spacecraft activates deep within the city, all four are swept aboard and launched toward the Moon, where something has been waiting for a very long time.
Meet the Protagonists
Kai & Dom
Young sailors from the ship Furious. One acts on instinct. The other calculates every risk. Together they stumble onto the discovery of a lifetime — and into a conflict far bigger than they imagined.
Sola & Alvin
An elephant rebel and her devoted trunk-twin. Sola asks the questions her herd forbids. Alvin follows her into danger because he can't imagine letting her face it alone. Their search for truth will take them farther than either ever dreamed.
When these four meet, it's the first peaceful contact between species in living memory. When they're forced aboard an ancient spacecraft together, they'll have to trust each other with their lives.
A Taste of the World
Dom always said the moon was like a mirror, showing us what Earth used to be — and what it might never be again.
“What if all those points of light in the sky are worlds?” Sola posed the ultimate question. “What if the moon is just the closest one?”
“That’s not ownership. That’s art. Or they did it to themselves. Look at how precisely they’re working that telescope. These aren’t just trained animals, Kai.”
From the Author
I'm Scot Noel, a speculative fiction writer and editor of DreamForge Magazine — a publication dedicated to optimistic, adventurous science fiction and fantasy. Cradle of Memory is the novel I've been building toward for a long time: a story about empathy between minds that think nothing alike, about young people making impossible choices, and about what happens when curiosity is braver than caution.
If you love stories that make you see the world through different eyes — stories where the wonder is real and the stakes matter — I wrote this for you.
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Cradle of Memory is being published here as it's written. Follow the story from the first moonlit encounter to a journey across space. New chapters are released as they're completed.
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