The King Beneath the World follows an underground civilization that has survived for two thousand years as its king questions whether safety and survival have become a form of confinement. Where did the idea behind this novel come from?

The idea behind The King Beneath the World grew out of a gap in Pagalan’s history that I increasingly felt needed to be explored. The novel is set roughly two thousand years after the events of the three Pagalan Chronicles Origins books, which follow the arrival of the Patronese on Pagalan, the establishment of their civilisation, and the events that eventually lead to its catastrophic fall.

By the time The King Beneath the World begins, the Patronese have spent two thousand years living beneath the surface after their devastating war with the Verentians. What began as a desperate act of survival has gradually become an entire way of life. Generations have been born, lived, and died without ever seeing the real sky. I found that idea fascinating because it raises a more complicated question than simply how people survive: at what point does the place protecting you also become the place confining you?

That is where Mandrake Martelismore’s story begins. He inherits a civilisation that has survived against extraordinary odds, but he starts to question whether survival alone is enough. Above them, Pagalan is slowly healing. Rivers are returning, the atmosphere is becoming safer, and the world is beginning to breathe again. Yet many of those in power have become deeply invested in remaining underground because the society they have built is predictable, ordered, and controllable.

Mandrake therefore has to decide whether he is truly protecting his people by keeping them safe, or whether he is preventing them from having a future. I enjoyed exploring that conflict because there is no easy answer. The underground world is not simply a prison, and the surface is not automatically a paradise. Both choices carry danger.

The novel also had another important purpose for me. The King Beneath the World is not simply a continuation of the Origins sequence. It is also a prequel to the original Pagalan Chronicles trilogy, and in many ways it is the book that brings the two series together.

When readers first meet Morganuke Beldere in Search for Morganuke’s Roots, he is a young man living on Banton Island who seems completely out of place. He has silver hair and red eyes unlike the people around him, strange abilities he cannot explain, and no real understanding of where he came from. He has been raised by people who love him, but there is always a sense that he belongs to another history entirely.

I wanted The King Beneath the World to reveal the long chain of events that ultimately placed Morganuke there. That was one of the aspects of the story I was most excited to explore.

Although Mandrake’s story takes place two thousand years after the earlier Origins novels, it also reaches forward towards Morganuke’s life and the mysteries explored in The Pagalan Chronicles. The ancient obelisks, the portal gates, the green gem, the Martelismore bloodline, and the choices made by people centuries before Morganuke was born all begin to converge.

What initially appears in the original trilogy as mystery or legend becomes much more human when readers see the sacrifices, political struggles, and desperate decisions behind it. I wanted those connections to feel earned rather than simply explained.

That was probably the most enjoyable part of writing the novel. I wanted readers who had followed the Origins books to feel that they were finally seeing where those enormous historical events were leading. At the same time, I wanted readers of the original trilogy to begin understanding why Morganuke’s apparently ordinary childhood on Banton Island was anything but accidental.

In that sense, The King Beneath the World sits at the centre of the Pagalan story. It looks back towards the rise and fall of the Patronese civilisation, but it also looks forward towards Morganuke Beldere and the events that will eventually force Pagalan to confront its buried past once again.

Beneath all the history, technology and mythology, though, the story remains very human. For me, it is ultimately about a young king asking a deceptively simple question: if your ancestors built walls to save you, how do you know when it is finally time to open the door?

Mandrake is both a king and a deeply human character who makes mistakes and questions his own decisions. How did you approach balancing his responsibilities as a ruler with his personal doubts and vulnerabilities?

One of the things I wanted to avoid with Mandrake was making kingship synonymous with absolute power. Although he is King of the Patronese, his position does not place him beyond challenge. His council questions him, opposes him, and, at times, actively resists the direction in which he believes their civilisation must move. That tension was important because it meant that every decision he made had consequences beyond simply issuing an order. He had to persuade, compromise, and sometimes confront people whose interpretation of Patronese tradition was very different from his own.

The greatest difficulty for Mandrake is the divide between the Higher and Lower Order Patronese. The Higher Orders have inherited centuries of tradition, privilege and belief in the need to preserve the structures that allowed their civilisation to survive beneath the world. Some genuinely believe those traditions are essential to maintaining stability. Others have become comfortable with a system that gives them considerable authority over the Lower Orders. Mandrake understands the historical reasons behind that structure, but he increasingly sees the human cost of maintaining it unchanged. He is therefore caught between protecting the civilisation he inherited and recognising that survival alone cannot justify inequality indefinitely. That conflict has deep roots in Patronese history and had already become dangerously entrenched long before Mandrake’s reign.

At the same time, his political problems are gradually overtaken by something much larger. Mandrake begins to realise that the danger facing his people does not come only from within Tramstell. The portal gates, which have always seemed part technology, part mystery and part inherited mythology, begin to suggest that something beyond the Patronese world is still watching and waiting. The warnings left by Olivier Martelismore, more than two thousand years earlier become increasingly significant. Olivier had herself struggled to convince the ruling council that threats beyond their borders were real, and Mandrake slowly discovers that many of the fears dismissed in her lifetime were never truly resolved.

That knowledge makes his decisions much more personal. The danger is no longer an abstract question of government or history. Tabatha, his family, and eventually his child are placed within the path of forces he does not fully understand. He is trying to protect the people he loves while knowing that, as king, he cannot simply place their safety above everyone else’s. His vulnerabilities come from that collision between public duty and private fear. He doubts himself because there is rarely a choice available to him that does not carry a serious cost.

His bloodline adds another layer to that burden. Mandrake knows that the Martelismore line is more than a royal inheritance. It is bound to the resonance, the gates, and the history of the Patronese themselves. Maintaining that bloodline therefore becomes something he feels obligated to do, not out of vanity or a desire to preserve a dynasty, but because he gradually understands that its continuation may be important to the survival of all Patronese people. That creates an uncomfortable tension between the man who wants to protect his family and the king who knows that even his family may ultimately belong, in some sense, to history.

So I approached Mandrake as someone who is never completely certain that authority makes him right. His mistakes, doubts, and moments of hesitation are not weaknesses added to make him seem human. They are fundamental to the kind of ruler he becomes. He carries the weight of tradition, social division, inherited warnings, threats from beyond the gates, and the future of his own bloodline, while still trying to decide what is morally right for people who may not always agree with him. For me, that struggle between the crown and the man beneath it is really at the heart of The King Beneath the World.

Were there particular characters whose roles or personalities changed significantly as you wrote the novel?

Yes. Two characters in particular changed quite significantly as I wrote The King Beneath the World: Gideon Soulestor and Borliac Moorlike. What made both of them especially interesting to develop was that they already had important roles in the later Pagalan Chronicles timeline, so I had a destination for them. The challenge was making the people they became feel consistent with the people readers would eventually encounter.

Gideon changed perhaps the most. My original intention was to make him firmly aligned with Yamanie Vorchester and almost completely opposed to Mandrake. He would have represented another obstacle within the council, someone who shared Yamanie’s belief in the tightly controlled underground society and resisted Mandrake’s attempts to challenge traditions that had existed for centuries. As I wrote him, though, that began to feel too straightforward. Yamanie already occupied that more uncompromising position, and making Gideon simply another version of her reduced his value as a character.

I therefore allowed him to become much more of a political fence-sitter. At times he supports Yamanie quite strongly, particularly when he believes that order, efficiency and the preservation of the existing system are at stake. Yet there are other occasions when he questions her arguments or finds himself closer to Mandrake’s position. One example concerns Yamanie’s desire to restrict the advancement of Low Order children into the higher academies. Gideon unexpectedly opposes her, arguing that Patronese society cannot afford to ignore ability simply because of someone’s origins. That uncertainty makes him harder for Mandrake to read, but I think it also makes him more believable. He is not necessarily motivated by loyalty to either individual. He is constantly judging which course he believes will best preserve the society around him.

That became particularly important because Gideon is prominent much later in The Pagalan Chronicles: The Final Quest. By then, he is High Councillor Soulestor, an older man carrying the consequences of everything that happened during Mandrake’s reign. He remains cautious, suspicious, and deeply concerned with maintaining Patronese stability, even when Morganuke arrives claiming to be Mandrake’s lost son. I needed the younger Gideon in The King Beneath the World to contain the beginnings of that man. Making him less of Yamanie’s unquestioning supporter helped explain why his eventual actions are not quite as simple as declaring him either loyal or treacherous. He makes compromises, misjudgements, and choices that he believes are defensible at the time, which is far more interesting to me.

Borliac Moorlike changed in almost the opposite direction. Initially, I imagined him as a very traditional commander of the King’s Guard: dutiful, rigid, seemingly emotionless and absolutely loyal to Mandrake. He would follow his king because loyalty demanded it. The more I wrote him, however, the more I felt that simple obedience was not enough to explain the depth of that loyalty.

I began allowing Borliac to listen. When he encounters the grievances of the Low Order Patronese directly, he does not simply see disorder that must be suppressed. He recognises that these people have genuine grievances and that force alone would deepen the fracture within Patronese society. At one point, after hearing them describe how decisions affecting their lives are continually made above them, his response is simply, “I hear you.” That became quite an important moment for his development because he starts to understand something of what Mandrake himself has been struggling to achieve.

That growing empathy also changed Borliac’s relationship with Mandrake. His loyalty becomes personal rather than merely institutional. He sees the impossible pressures Mandrake is under, the conflict between the High and Low Orders, the danger surrounding the gates, the expectations placed upon the Martelismore bloodline, and ultimately the sacrifices Mandrake is prepared to make for his people and his family. Borliac therefore becomes one of the people who understands the cost of Mandrake’s decisions rather than simply carrying out his orders.

Again, that mattered because Borliac survives into The Final Quest. When he eventually stands beside Morganuke, his loyalty to Mandrake’s legacy carries genuine emotional weight. He is able to identify Yamanie’s betrayal and understand what was lost because he was there when those choices were being made.

I think both characters benefited from those changes. Gideon became more ambiguous, while Borliac became more human. In both cases, I was working backwards and forwards at the same time, asking not only, “Who are they in this novel?” but also, “What must happen to them here for the people we meet later in The Pagalan Chronicles to make sense?” That continuity across thousands of years of Pagalan’s history is something I particularly enjoy exploring.

If you could live in the world of The King Beneath the World, would you choose life beneath the artificial skies of Pagalan or the recovering world above—and why?

I think I would choose the recovering surface of Pagalan. There would certainly be something reassuring about remaining beneath the artificial skies of the subterranean cities, especially after two thousand years in which those cities had represented safety, continuity, and survival. Yet, by Mandrake’s time, that safety had also begun to resemble confinement. The surface was healing, rivers were returning, the atmosphere was stabilising, and Pagalan was slowly becoming a world that could be lived upon again.

If I were a member of the Lower Orders, my choice would probably be even easier. Life underground had preserved the Patronese civilisation, but it had also allowed a rigid social structure to become deeply entrenched. The Lower Orders carried much of the burden of maintaining the cities while enjoying considerably less influence over the society they sustained. The surface would therefore represent more than open skies and fresh air. It would offer the possibility of a new beginning, where those inherited divisions might finally begin to loosen.

Even if I belonged to the High Orders, as Mandrake did, I believe I would still feel compelled to support a return to the surface. For me, the important question would not simply be whether life underground remained comfortable or secure, but whether remaining there was genuinely in the long-term interests of all the Patronese people. Mandrake increasingly recognises that survival alone is not enough. A civilisation can protect itself so successfully that eventually protection becomes isolation, and isolation can become another form of decline.

Returning to the surface would also allow the Patronese to become part of Pagalan again rather than remaining ghosts beneath it. Other civilisations had developed across the planet during their long absence, and I would hope that contact with those peoples might eventually bring cooperation, knowledge and a more stable future. Of course, that would carry enormous risks. The Patronese had very good historical reasons for fearing outsiders, particularly after the Verentian war, but endlessly allowing the catastrophes of the past to dictate the future would bring dangers of its own.

I do, of course, have one considerable advantage over Mandrake when making that choice: I know what happens afterwards in The Pagalan Chronicles. I know where the decisions made during his reign ultimately lead, and I know that the wider world of Pagalan cannot be kept outside forever. That knowledge would undoubtedly influence me. Even so, I think I would still choose the surface. The underground cities saved the Patronese when they needed saving, but they were never meant to become the limits of their existence. At some point, survival has to give way to living again.

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