Legacy of Steel

Legacy of Steel is an epic fantasy novel by Matthew Ward, published in 2020. It begins a year after an unlikely alliance saved the Tressian Republic from fire and darkness, a victory that cost thousands of lives and left the Republic's champion, Viktor Akadra, gone without explanation.

The ruling council is trying to mend old wounds while other factions read the Republic's weakness as an opening. The insidious Parliament of Crows works from the shadows, and to the east the Hadari Emperor is gathering his armies, so internal division and external danger arrive at the same moment and neither can be settled on its own.

The consequences are not confined to the Republic, because the turmoil reaches the realms of the divine and the war that follows is one in which the gods themselves take sides. The survivors of the earlier alliance therefore have to work out which parts of the coming conflict they can still influence, and what is left of the victory they paid so much for. Nobody in the Republic is able to sit the war out, and this time the gods will not either.