Why You'll Love This
A guy from Earth bonds with a mythical creature and has to become a legend just to get his sister back — the stakes are personal before they're ever epic.
- Great if you want: portal fantasy with creature-bonding, elemental magic, and tribal conflict
- The experience: fast-moving and adventurous — built for readers who hate slow starts
- The writing: Siddoway keeps the world-building lean and the momentum relentless
- Skip if: you prefer grounded, literary fantasy over action-driven progression stories
About This Book
When Kellen Lars's little sister disappears in front of him, he doesn't just lose her — he loses his entire world, literally. He wakes in Oras, a realm alive with elemental magic, mythical creatures, and Beastcallers who bond with powerful animal companions to shape the forces of nature. Kellen is completely out of his depth, an ordinary person dropped into an extraordinary place, and the only way back home runs straight through it. Derek Alan Siddoway builds real stakes around that search — survival, belonging, and the terrifying possibility that even success comes with a cost.
What makes Beast Mage click as a reading experience is the pacing. Siddoway keeps the world-building moving rather than letting it pile up, feeding readers the rules of Oras through action and consequence instead of exposition. The bond between Kellen and his Mana Beast gives the story an emotional throughline that grounds all the elemental chaos around it. For readers who love progression fantasy — watching a character grow from nothing into something through hard-won effort — this opening volume delivers that arc with enough texture and invention to feel fresh.