
PYRAMIDION
Sample
Thanks for clicking through to this sample. Below, you'll find the Prologue AND Chapter 1 of the action-fantasy novel Pyramidion, offered here for free! If you enjoy this and would like to read more, I've included a link to Amazon below.

PROLOGUE
Dion Wexler smiled grimly as he regarded the cage, finally able to look upon what he had summoned. Or perhaps summoned was the wrong word – kidnapped or abducted were likely more appropriate. It had taken years of study, hard work, and more than a modicum of treachery to get to where he was today... the beginning of the end. But it wasn’t the apocalypse he was chasing – he wasn’t that trite, nor was he self-loathing. He simply craved truth. And, like many men before him, he craved power. Absolute, unrelenting power.
He’d known for a long while that the world wasn’t quite as it seemed. There was something missing in the “now” that hadn’t been missing in the past. At first, he had thought it was faith – the Egyptians believed in the gods and the power of the almighty Pharaoh, and so they built glorious monuments to them. The people of Easter Island had thought their land to be so special that it needed to be guarded by great stone golems, eternally looking inward. The Greeks lived in fear and awe of the Olympians.
In his younger years, Dion had studied these religions, and always came to the same conclusion: humanity had spent eons living side-by-side with the divine... and then it all ended. The gods had abandoned humankind. Everywhere he looked, every culture, every continent, everywhere, without fail – the gods were no longer present… but people still had faith. The Bible, the Talmud, the Quran, the Bhagavad Gita - regardless of personal persuasion, faith told the stories of the gods that once lived among us.
He racked his brain for years, travelled to the ends of the Earth and back, spoken with scores of scholars, investigated thousands of tombs, examined many a dusty book of forgotten lore. Over years, via some secret organisations with which he’d come to be associated, he’d discovered the truth. But he didn’t want to just understand it – he wanted to see it and live it for himself. But more than that – he wanted it for himself.
And now, he stood in a cold, dark room, empty but for a large, oppressively heavy-looking cage in its centre, tables stacked with books lining the walls.
The thing in the cage was difficult to see – the room was dark, and inside the cage was darker, but there was clearly movement there. And breathing… The loud, laboured breathing of something very large.
He struck at the cage with the black cane he held in his left hand, and the subsequent clanging echoed throughout the room. Yet strangely, the creature trapped in the cage did not strike out. In fact, it barely moved, and remained silent.
“It seems to be intelligent, as well it should be,” said Dion, motioning to another man standing in the shadows to the right of the cage. “It knows it’s trapped for now - evaluating its options. Do you know what language they speak?”
The other man shook his head. “I’ve never actually seen one before,” he replied. His voice had a heavy South Asian accent. “I should recognise the language if you could make it talk. That is… if they still speak the same language, of course. These ancient languages haven’t been spoken on Earth in thousands of years; who’s to say things aren’t the same… where he comes from?”
Dion sighed. In truth, he had been wondering the same thing. Supposedly, thousands of years had passed since these creatures had walked the Earth. Why would he expect that their language had not evolved, mutated… changed? Even his own mother tongue, English, had changed dramatically in just the last few hundred years. He was no linguist. That was why he had brought his colleague.
And how could he make it talk? Just walk up to the cage and say “Hi”? The idea seemed ridiculous.
He lit a cigarette, drawing deeply through the filter, and leaned back on the heavy desk behind him. He watched the end of the cigarette as the embers quickly burned the tobacco and the paper that surrounded it, leaving a red and black stump. Exhaling, he flicked the cigarette away and stood up. It was now or never.
He walked up to the cage and raised his right hand in greeting. “Hi,” he said, then cringed. He shook his head at his own stupidity.
The caged creature didn.t react. It just stood and looked at him. Dion stared back. He really didn’t know what he expected – deep inside he had been hoping it spoke English, and that it would simply greet him in return, but of course he knew that was impossible.
As he turned away, a deep voice rang out behind him.
“Ma-inim ensi-nata este. Enlil-ropur simsala-et es.”
The voice was guttural and choral, like a group of people speaking at once, a disharmony. It almost sounded as if the throat that uttered the words had more than one voice box – and perhaps it did? Regardless, it was not a voice that Dion would soon forget.
The room fell deathly silent as Dion turned to face his colleague.
“Well?”
“It sounds like Sumerian,” the man replied.
“Can you talk to it?”
“I think so.” He walked up to the cage, and spoke timidly to the entity in the cage, in a language that sounded not dissimilar.
And it spoke to him in return.
The man turned towards Dion. “It wants to know why it’s here.”
“Good,” he replied. “Tell it why, then. And make sure it knows that I’m the one that holds its sigil, and I’m in charge.”
