Where Steel
Failed

Is Where Steel Failed a standalone?

No. It’s Book One of The Old Hunger, and the saga continues in What Wrath Requires, out January 7, 2027. Book Two assumes you’ve read Book One, so this is the place to start.

That said, Where Steel Failed is a full journey of its own: a monastery, the hidden Sanctuary, the hunt for a killer, and a war between kingdoms that dwarfs one young man’s grief. Part of the pleasure is watching the world outgrow Seraph. Riding through the jungle of the East, he asks Miriam where the city is. She doesn’t even look up. “Over your head. We’ve been riding under it for a good while.” Seraph raises his eyes. Without realizing it, he draws rein, and his horse stops in the middle of the road.

What should readers know before starting Where Steel Failed?

Three things.

First, don’t skip Kerald’s Notes. It’s a single page, signed “Brother Kerald, the Betrayed,” and it makes a promise: “I will tell you what the dark hides, but also what hides in the light.” We grow wary in the dark and trusting in the light. Keep that line close. The light deserves questions, too.

Second, this is adult epic fantasy, and it doesn’t look away. The content note covers graphic violence, including torture.

Third, Seraph will frustrate you. He gets things wrong, sometimes the same thing twice, even after he has paid for it once. That isn’t a flaw in the telling; it’s the road he’s on. Here, trust has to be earned, and the truth can take from you the person you believed you were.

Is there romance?

Not at the center, and I’d rather be honest about that. The engine of Where Steel Failed is vengeance, and what Seraph learns about trust along the way. But desire is there, and so is the risk of caring for someone. Mostly it lives in what goes unsaid.

Crossing to the East on the old man’s boat, Seraph tells Sididi that he owes his new life to the people who gave it to him, and the next one too. Sididi smiles at him in a way he can’t read, and for a heartbeat he doesn’t know where to look. It’s the old sailor who brings him back on board, snapping his fingers and pointing him to a rope.

In this story, desire is a risk you carry quietly.

How brutal does it get?

At times, very, and not only in battle. On his first morning of training at the Sanctuary, Seraph coughs blood, with a few broken ribs, while Miriam, whom he can’t even see, tells him the only thing that matters is how long it takes him to stop dying under her blows. So far, of everything exceptional about the training, he has grasped only the pain.

I don’t write brutality to shock. Pain explains many choices; it doesn’t necessarily make them right.

But wonder is never far. Deep beneath the waves, a stone tunnel turns to something like glass, and suddenly the whole sea hangs overhead: pale corals, big gray fish, the shadows of enormous creatures moving in the depths. Seraph, who wants to become capable of anything, manages only this: “You can see the sea!”

Who is Seraph?

A young Guardian of the Realm, one of King Sivion’s elite soldiers, and the one most likely to question an order. On the road to the monastery he asks his captain why they didn’t just send messengers. He never gets to finish the sentence.

Curious, stubborn, impatient. Later, high in icy mountains, he stops before a crevasse too wide for anyone to jump. He measures it for the hundredth time and keeps telling himself, “Too few…” and then, “Too far…” He takes four long strides of run-up and leaps anyway. That’s Seraph: thrilling to watch, and exhausting to travel with.

He wants to become more than he is, and to be worthy of the people who walk beside him.

Who is Neh’eh?

She opens Where Steel Failed: she is the first person Seraph sees, on the very first pages, before the story ever takes you to the monastery. He wakes at a vast black table, pale and vacant, held by a cold he can’t shake. A woman circles the table slowly and asks whether Seraph is really his name. Then she sits at the far end and orders him to look at her. Her eyes are glacial and deep as the ocean, and he cannot tear his own away. She admires him, she says. And yet he has not always been wise. “In fact, once too often, you were not wise at all.”

Who she is, and why he is sitting at her table, is something the book makes you earn.

How long is Where Steel Failed?

376 pages in paperback and hardcover, about 123,000 words. On Amazon, the Kindle edition lists a print length of 378 pages.

What is the reading order of The Old Hunger?

1. Where Steel Failed (November 1, 2026). 2. What Wrath Requires (January 7, 2027).

Is Where Steel Failed in Kindle Unlimited?

Yes. Kindle Unlimited is now called Kindle+, and you can read the Kindle edition free with it.