He turned to his wife, who had marched without complaint for these past few days. He leaned in close.
“I think this will be our new home.”
She looked up in surprise.
“This?” she asked, sweeping her arm to indicate the clearing.
“No. That,” Winten-ak said, pointing up.
The heads of the twelve people with him—his hunting group and the few survivors who had managed to run and hide during the massacre—looked up as one.
Winten-ak did not bother to explain further. He was the leader. They would do as he said, or he was not the leader after all.
He did point to a small waterfall, though, and say, “Water falls from above. We won’t have to trek any distance to find fresh water.”
He strode up the small incline to the first level, where the water pooled in a natural opening.
He knew he had made the correct choice. This could be their home for many years. Many generations, perhaps.
Winten-ak skirted along the edge of the pool to see what was beyond it. He tripped over a rock buried in the dirt and stumbled. When he looked back to see what had tripped him, he saw the edge of a corner sticking above the dirt.
Curious, he knelt and dug at it with his knife.
Something compelled him to keep digging, though his wife called his name.
After a few minutes of digging, he pulled out a neat rectangle.
Finally, his wife approached and said, “What are you doing?”
“I found this strange thing. It reached up and tripped me, almost as if it had been waiting for me to come and find it.”
Winten-ak pulled his stone hammer out of his belt and tapped at the rectangle. Underneath a thin veneer of rock was a shiny surface.
Warrior of Kragdon-ah
Alex Hawk will return in February of 2021 with an all-new adventure called Warrior of Kragdon-ah. It is available for preorder here.
Author’s Note
There it is. The end of the trilogy that popped into my head in the summer of 2019.
It started with a single image: a man stepping through a door in his basement and into a strange land.
I lived in a tiny town on the Washington coast as I wrote this entire series, so it’s not surprising that I saw Alex step out of that door and onto a sandy beach, even though he thought he was a hundred and fifty miles inland.
Here’s a little behind the scenes info. I was walking on a stretch of sand as I was daydreaming about that scene. Ahead, there was a colony of seagulls. Hundreds of them, just sitting, thinking their gull thoughts. In a flash, I decided I would use gulls to attack Alex when he first came through the door.
But then, my cover designer, Michal Karcz, gave me the cover for the first book, with the funky-looking flying creatures on it. I liked his creation so much better than the gulls that the karak-ta were born. I’m not sure where the idea that the karak-ta eggs were psychotropic came from. Some dark recess of my imagination, I guess.
I had originally conceived of this story as a trilogy only. Three books, then done.
But, as I wrote the final pages of this third book, another image popped into my head, once again set in Alex Hawk’s basement. I can’t tell you what that image is, but it led me to an entirely new story. Possibly even three more new stories.
So, if you enjoyed these Alex Hawk Time Travel Adventures, I have good news for you. I am planning on writing at least a fourth book, and possibly a fifth and sixth.
The fourth book will be called Warrior of Kragdon-ah.
I have promised readers of my Middle Falls Time Travel series a new book, so I will begin writing that first. I will publish that book—The Stubborn Lives of Hart Tanner—in December.
I will start writing Warrior of Kragdon-ah then and will publish it in late February 2021.
If you’d like to make sure you never miss one of my new books (I have a whole new series planned that will begin in late 2021) please join my New Release Alert List. Here’s the thing about my New Release list: I only send an email when I have something new coming out, so you’ll only get six or seven emails per year from me at the most. Also, of course I will never share or sell your email address to anyone. I value your privacy as I do my own, and I very much care about my own privacy. And, there’s a bonus! When you sign up for my New Release list, I will send you a free ebook—Rock ‘n Roll Heaven. It’s a rock ‘n roll fantasy about a small-town rocker who dies and wakes up in the afterlife, face to face with Buddy Holly, Elvis Presley, and other icons of rock ‘n roll.
Now, about Return from Kragdon-ah itself. When I started this trilogy, I knew that the first book would be about Alex leading an army into war, and that the second book would be a mission to save Lanta-eh, The Chosen One. The third book remained mysterious in my mind, even as I sat down to write it.
Now that it is done, I am pleased with it. My intent with this third book was to answer all questions the first two books asked. Two questions loomed larger than all others: would Alex ever return to Amy, and how did the doors get there in the first place? Unless you skipped to the Author’s Note at the back of the book, you now know the answers to those questions.
From the moment I sat down to write the first book, I knew that Alex would make it home, though the trail would be long and twisty to get there. And yes, I knew from the beginning that the doors were placed there by human beings before they left the planet for greener pastures.
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