The Immortal Stalk: (The Boy in the Balloon: Chronicles Through Time, Book 2)

By CL IRE

After drifting away from the peninsula, the boy and the Builder descend into a hidden valley where everything bends toward one impossible thing: a towering stalk worshiped as a miracle.

Pilgrims travel for days to see it. Priests guard it. An entire village has built its life around it.

The boy sees something else.

Water. Pressure. Structure. Method.

The stalk was not born holy. It was engineered long ago by another child who noticed the world more clearly than anyone around him, then vanished into story when no one bothered to keep the record. Now the temple is standing on a truth its custodians do not understand, and the boy must decide what matters more: protecting the myth, or preserving the method.

Then he meets Vale, a girl who has been keeping her own secret observations in stone.

With Vale aboard, the balloon becomes more than escape.

It becomes a witness apparatus.

And when the hum returns over the coast, they realize the stalk was never the end of the story.

It was only proof that they are not the first children to find the machinery under the world.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0GVDXGV81
• ISBN13: 9798254191582
• Release Date: March 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 242 Pages
• Weight: 0.72 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.0" x 9.0"