Embraced by time...
Deep within her soul Lady
Victoria Quinton Mallory knows she has a gift. Since childhood she has
dreamed of a sacred long-lost past, of ancient mysteries and buried
passion that will reawaklen with a vengence. Growing up at the mission
at Valle Del Sol , Peru, Quin has never understood her powerful
connection to the place, a connection that draws her to a badly wounded
man left for dead by local rebels.
Sealed with an eternal
kiss...
Brought to the mission to
recover, Jay Lomax is enchanted with Quin - a woman strangely familiar
to him. And when he's hired to protect the ancient ruins of a recently
evacuated temple city, the voices of the lost world lure him and Quin
back into an unfinished odyssey. Now the two lovers will discover the
shattering secrets of a great legacy, and the danger and destiny that
have bound them together for eternity ...
Valle Del Sol, Peru.
The interconnecting series of chambers
lay buried deep beneath layer upon layer of rich soil and gritty rubble,
protected and enclosed by massive blocks of granite--a complex
outer-sheathing in the form of a maze, which had been constructed with
exquisite care to conceal the secret within.
Millennia had passed, civilizations had
risen and fallen. The landscape itself had altered-re-sculpted by
violent deluges of rain-rich frontal weather forced high over the Andes,
and the slow, ancient grinding of tectonic plates. But despite the
powerful external stressors the hidden chambers had remained locked
beneath the ground, although with the passage of time the crumbling
outer bones of the maze had been laid bare in places.
The western sector had sustained the
most damage, situated as it was on the floor of a crescent-shaped valley
that, with the erosion of softer limestone at its southern end, had
become the natural conduit for the Agueda river. Over the years the
Agueda had meandered and braided, its banks dissolving as it broadened,
greedily eating away at the rich alluvial soil of the valley floor until
it exposed amongst the chaotic tumble of river-smooth rocks the
unmistakable edges of precision cut stone.
Destructive as the Agueda was, beneath
the valley floor an infinitely more powerful force was at work. The
damage was invisible but profound as the hot inner sea of the Earth's
mantle flexed and strained at cooler crustal layers, undermining the
age-old rift that formed the cradle of the valley.
Tension built, rock compressed, softer
materials began to liquefy, and the raucous community of parakeets
perched on the thick canopy of trees that rimmed the valley went silent.
The first shockwave radiated from a
point just fifteen miles away, and only two miles beneath the Earth's
surface, vibrating up through the still, silent chambers, disturbing
deposits of rock dust ground as fine as talcum powder, and shimmering in
glass-smooth pools of water formed by the slow leak of blocked
aqueducts. The cleverly fitted granite blocks encasing the hidden
chambers groaned beneath the flexing-shivered and crumbled-no match for
the power that had thrust the Cordillera De Los Andes more than twenty
thousand feet up into the atmosphere.
Long seconds passed in which decayed
and misshapen blocks moved an infinitesimal degree-enough, finally, to
undermine the technical and engineering brilliance that had produced a
structure that had withstood century upon century of seismic shock
waves.
Abruptly, on a densely forested slope,
an entire wall collapsed and the ground itself ruptured, spewing rubble
amidst the tangle of undergrowth and vines and baring the northern gate
of the maze.
Jewel bright parakeets, tiny motmots
and noisy jacamars exploded into the clear blue arc of the sky,
squawking their displeasure, eyes sharp as they wheeled above the
disturbance.
But, collateral damage aside, deep within the hillside, cushioned by
layers of granite and soft, malleable dirt-the most primitive of shock
absorbers--the inner chambers themselves remained, as always,
protected...impervious.
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