A coming of age series that begins deep within the core of the Marshlands.Simon Barnacle is a boy in a perfectly balanced harvest world of light and dark. His life as a worker is ordinary until someone opens an underground chamber, releasing dark energy onto the land, killing his father, and even worse, freeing the Dark Lord Balterax.Now, strange whispers call to Simon haunting his thoughts, vultures appear on every eave just waiting to pick off the dead, and the land itself begins to crumble and decay.Desperate to find medicine for his ailing mother, Simon ventures to Bog's End only to find the land is much more imbalanced than he thought. His only hope is to team up with fellow allies who are eager to seal the chamber, but with Simon's body slowly disintegrating and his mind turning against him with each passing minute, will he have the strength to retrieve dark matter and rebalance the land and its people?Find out in Simon Barnacle's retelling of the events on the Marshlands in Book One of The Barnacle Chronicles, The Search for Dark Matter.