The Pagalan Chronicles Book 1

On the remote shores of Banton Island, eighteen-year-old Morganuke Beldere has spent his entire life knowing that he is different.
With silver hair, startling red eyes and a pale complexion unlike anyone around him, Morganuke has never truly blended into the quiet farming and fishing communities of the island. He was found abandoned as a baby in a mysterious container and raised with love by his adoptive parents, Stovin and Plarem, yet the question of where he really came from has followed him throughout his childhood.
There are other differences too, ones Morganuke understands even less.
When anger or fear overwhelms him, strange things sometimes happen. People fall without being touched. Objects appear to respond to his thoughts. Vivid dreams come to him with an intensity that feels disturbingly real. In one such vision, he wanders through an impossible metallic place and confronts a vast structure bearing the symbol of a lidless eye. It is an image he cannot explain, yet one that seems less like fantasy than a memory waiting to awaken.
Morganuke wants answers, but on Banton there are few places to find them.
The one person who has always encouraged his curiosity is Fraytar, the weather-beaten sailor who found him as an infant and has remained part mentor, part uncle and part father figure throughout his life. Fraytar’s stories of distant continents, dangerous seas and strange peoples have fuelled Morganuke’s longing to travel beyond the familiar fields and cliffs of his home.
Then Fraytar returns with troubling news.
War is spreading across Pagalan.
On the mainland, the brutal Cordinens are advancing against the Epleons, and the conflict is moving dangerously close to the trade routes surrounding Banton. More disturbing still, Fraytar has seen unusual men accompanying the enemy. They are pale, silver-haired and red-eyed.
They look like Morganuke.
For the first time, the mystery of his birth and the violence consuming Pagalan appear to be connected.
When Fraytar offers Morganuke the chance to sail aboard the three-masted carrack Aurora, the young man seizes it. What begins as the adventure he has dreamed about since childhood quickly becomes something far darker.
Life at sea introduces him to a world far larger than Banton, but it also places him directly in the path of the spreading conflict. At Tannisport, danger reaches the ship itself when an attack sets pitch barrels ablaze. Acting instinctively, Morganuke displays extraordinary strength, using a soaked sail to smother the flames and helping save the Aurora. It is an early indication that whatever lies within him is becoming harder to dismiss as coincidence.
Then comes Cradport.
Morganuke has seen the place before.
Not on a map, nor in one of Fraytar’s stories, but in his dreams.
The cliffs, harbour and streets are unnervingly familiar. Reality begins to echo visions he had previously dismissed as nightmares, and Morganuke is forced to consider an unsettling possibility: his dreams may be showing him events before they happen.
The possibility becomes horrifyingly real when violence erupts.
Captain Amannar and members of the crew are caught in a deadly ambush linked to the widening Cordinen conflict. Amannar is killed and many of the crew fall with him. Morganuke, still barely more than a boy when he first boarded the vessel, is confronted with the true cost of the world beyond Banton.
Adventure has become war.
His strange abilities no longer feel like curiosities.
And the dreams he could once ignore now carry the terrible suggestion that he may be seeing fragments of the future.
Returning to Banton does not restore the life Morganuke left behind. The conflict follows him home. His island, once seemingly distant from mainland rivalries, becomes another battlefield as Cordinen influence spreads and local resistance grows.Morganuke is drawn deeper into fighting alongside the people he loves. Friendships strengthen under pressure, particularly with Lengrond, while formidable women such as Chanterly and Calarel, the blacksmith’s spirited daughter for whom Morganuke once harboured awkward youthful feelings, prove themselves every bit as capable of facing the dangers around them.
Yet another relationship begins to matter even more.
Melinor enters Morganuke’s life as more than simply another companion. As events grow darker, she becomes an emotional anchor, someone capable of seeing the uncertain young man beneath the mysterious powers and the expectations steadily gathering around him.
Morganuke’s search for his past is therefore never merely an archaeological mystery. It becomes deeply personal. Every step towards discovering who he was threatens to change who he has become and possibly separate him from the people who have given his life meaning.
When circumstances eventually carry Morganuke and his companions away from Banton and towards the mainland, the scale of the conflict becomes impossible to ignore.
The Cordinen advance has become a struggle capable of reshaping nations. Epleon forces fight desperately to hold their territory, alliances shift, cities live beneath the threat of attack and ordinary people find themselves drawn into a war they never chose.Within this turmoil, something even stranger emerges.The Cordinens possess weapons unlike anything the known societies of Pagalan should be capable of creating.At the centre of this mystery stands the Optoglean.
To many who witness it, the Optoglean appears magical, an artefact capable of releasing terrifying destructive power. Yet Morganuke begins to suspect that what others interpret as sorcery may be something entirely different, a surviving technology from an earlier and far more advanced age.
The distinction between fantasy and science begins to collapse.
Pagalan is a world of swords, ships, armies and fortified cities, but buried beneath that familiar civilisation are the remnants of something astonishingly sophisticated. Ancient machines survive beside legends. Forgotten technologies have become objects of religious fear. Stories dismissed as myths may be distorted memories of events that truly happened.
And Morganuke appears able to interact with these things in ways no ordinary person can.
His abilities grow more powerful as the fighting intensifies.
On the battlefield, emotion triggers devastating bursts of force. Men are hurled through the air. The earth itself is torn apart. Morganuke can influence the Optoglean with a power he neither understands nor fully controls.
Eventually, confronting one of the terrifying devices and the Patronese associated with it, his rage unleashes something extraordinary. Light engulfs the Optoglean. The ancient machine collapses into itself and disappears, leaving scorched, glass-like ground behind.
Morganuke has destroyed something that armies could barely comprehend.
Instead of reassuring him, the experience frightens him.
If he possesses enough power to destroy such a weapon, what else might he be capable of destroying?
For the first time, Morganuke begins to fear not merely the enemies around him but the force growing inside himself.
His questions multiply.
Who are the silver-haired Patronese assisting the Cordinens?
Why do their ancient machines respond to him?
Why does the lidless eye continue to appear throughout his dreams and discoveries?
And why does every road seem to lead back towards his own unknown birth?
Searching old books and fragments of forgotten history reveals references to a civilisation long believed to belong only to legend. Morganuke encounters descriptions of strange black structures rising from the sea, guardians associated with an ancient world and powers almost impossible for modern Pagalan to understand.
Then he sees one.
Near the terrifying waters of the Nebulee, an immense black structure emerges from the sea. It resembles the ancient descriptions with impossible precision.
For Morganuke, this changes everything.
Legends are no longer legends.
The distant past of Pagalan is still present.
Somewhere behind the wars of the Epleons and Cordinens lies an older conflict, a forgotten civilisation and technology powerful enough to alter the destiny of the world.
Religion offers little comfort.
The Casdredon priests, guardians of an accepted version of history and belief, have little tolerance for questions that challenge their teachings. Morganuke’s increasingly open fascination with ancient technology, forgotten civilisations and the possibility that supposed miracles have physical origins places him in danger of being branded a heretic.
His search for truth therefore brings enemies from more than one direction.
The Cordinens fear what he can do.
Those who control dangerous ancient technology have reason to fear what he might discover.
Religious authorities fear the questions he asks.
And Morganuke himself fears the answers waiting at the end of his search.
Yet he cannot stop.
His companions remain beside him even as their paths become increasingly dangerous. Fraytar continues to act as the steady presence who has been there since Morganuke’s infancy. Lengrond proves fiercely loyal. Chanterly and Calarel become hardened companions through battle and hardship. Melinor grows ever closer to Morganuke, giving him something worth returning to even when his search carries him further from anything resembling a normal life.
Their journey ultimately takes them across vast distances, through war-torn lands and dangerous seas, towards the mysteries surrounding the Nebulee and the scattered Patronese.
There Morganuke learns of someone known simply as the Wise One.
The meeting becomes the moment towards which much of the novel has been quietly moving.
The old Patronese does not give Morganuke the simple explanation he desperately wants. Instead, he gives him something far more unsettling.A name.
Mandrake Martilismore.
Morganuke is told that he comes from a High Order Patronese house and that his roots lie in a place called Denesthear.
The name is almost meaningless to him at first.
Then the pieces begin to move into place.
Denesthear is connected to the Nebulee.
The Patronese are connected to Denesthear.
The ancient technologies, the Optogleans, the strange powers, the lidless eye and Morganuke’s own abilities all appear to belong to a history far older than the nations now fighting across Pagalan.
Most disturbing of all, the Wise One tells Morganuke that his origins are not simply important to him.
They may be important to the entire world.
He comes from a significant Patronese bloodline, and his destiny may be tied to restoring stability to a civilisation that has remained hidden for generations.
The revelation does not bring Morganuke peace.
It overwhelms him.
For most of his life he wanted one answer: Who were my real parents?
Now the answer threatens to tear apart everything he thought he knew about himself.
Morganuke Beldere is the son of Stovin and Plarem in every way that love and upbringing can make him so. He is Fraytar’s boy. He is the friend of Lengrond, Chanterly and Calarel. He loves Melinor. He knows Banton’s fields, its winds and its sea.
Yet somewhere beyond those things lies another identity.
Another family.
Another name.
Another world.
And perhaps a responsibility he never asked to inherit.
This is the central struggle of Search for Morganuke’s Roots.
The novel begins with a young man longing to escape the small island on which he was raised and discover where he came from. By its end, Morganuke has learned enough to realise that finding his roots will not simply complete his identity.
It may destroy the comfortable version of it.
His extraordinary powers are real.
His dreams may reveal the future.
The Patronese are not mythical.
Ancient technologies still survive.
Denesthear exists.
And the war spreading across Pagalan may be only the visible surface of a far older struggle.
The humble island orphan who once stood beneath the stars asking who he was now faces a far greater question:
What will he become when he finally discovers the truth?
The Pagalan Chronicles Book 1: Search for Morganuke’s Roots is therefore both an adventure and the opening of a much larger mystery. It blends battles, voyages, romance and friendship with lost civilisations, forgotten technology, prophetic visions and the first awakening of a remarkable inheritance.
At its heart, however, it remains the story of a young man searching for somewhere he truly belongs.
Morganuke sets out looking for his past.
What he finds is a destiny.
And somewhere beyond the dangerous waters of the Nebulee, hidden from the rest of Pagalan, Denesthear is waiting.