The Alfanas Prequel: Before Nick Paleon’s discovery, Brother Alfanas survived war, betrayal, and rebirth to become the unlikely saint whose choices shaped a family’s destiny. His path reveals the origins of the mystery at the heart of Paleon: Echoes of an Empire.

In a world where the powerful lack freedom and the free lack strength, kingdoms burn, crystal cities whisper, and a mortal named Eleanor must tip the scales before creation itself unravels.

What if the universe is stranger, more imaginative, than we thought?

This book is both a personal journey and a cultural exploration, a travel log through the crumbled myths into the emerging mysteries at the edge of human understanding. It is a desperate attempt to regain the wonder and exceptionalism of the natural world that materialism has reduced to the mundane. We now find ourselves adrift in a cosmos where 95% of reality, dark matter and energy, remain unseen, represented by a variable in our calculations, and quantum entanglement defies all classical logic. Meanwhile, in the absence of evidence for intelligent life beyond Earth, imagination seems to be seeking a new dwelling. There is a sense of a rise in spiritualism and the re-enchantment of popular culture that hints at a more profound disconnect between modern materialist assumptions and the human hunger for meaning, mystery, and creativity. This project asks: What does it mean to imagine again, not as escape, but as recovery? Is modern existence compatible with, in E.F. Schumaker’s words, “the human need for creativity?” Can we, in a world dominated by predictability and data, rediscover an infinite horizon of potential? I don’t yet know where this journey leads, but I’m convinced it begins by listening for the echoes of something both older and newer than we remember.