The Exiles return

The realms were saved. They were never healed.

Seven years after the Great Mergence bound the worlds together, peace holds-but only just. Beneath treaties, trade routes, and fragile alliances, the joined realms strain at their seams. Old wounds have not closed. Ancient powers have not fallen silent. And in the living roots beneath the world, something is beginning to fail.

Alec has spent those years protecting the balance he fought so hard to win. But when a warning reaches him through the dark from the one voice he never expected to hear again, everything he thought he understood is called into question.

Probetor, exiled and dying, carries a truth that reaches back before Alec's birth.

Jenny was never finished at Lemuri.

Hidden beneath Maredrom, a stolen fragment of the Drasal Tree has been used to weaken the Mergence from within. Jenny believes the realms were never meant to remain one. She believes separation is the only way to prevent a greater collapse.

Worse still, she may be right about the wound.

But if the world is broken, who has the right to decide how it should be healed?

As old griefs awaken and every realm is forced to confront the cost of peace, Alec faces a battle that cannot be won by sword alone. To save the world he helped forge, he must decide whether truth is enough to justify power-and whether healing can ever begin without consent.

The Exile's Return is the fourth and final book in the Magic & Steel series: an epic fantasy adventure of mythic magic, fractured worlds, hard choices, and the difficult work of peace.