The first book, The Iron Trial, was published on September 9, 2014, and hit third on the New York Times Middle Grade Bestseller List.

[2] The series is set in an underground school where mages train apprentices to control the elements.

Alastair rejected the world of magic after the death of his wife Sarah at the Cold Massacre during the Third Mage War.

In the prologue The Enemy of Death places his soul into the infant Callum Hunts body.

With her dying breath she warns her husband with her knife by carving a message on the walls and cripples her son by shattering the bones in his leg in hopes of killing him.

At the Magisterium apprentices are trained to be mages using the four elements of fire, air, water, and earth.

During the book, after doing countless seemingly pointless and boring exercises such as sorting sand by shade, the three apprentices become friends after a frigid start and Call starts to decide to stay on at the Magisterium after his Iron year to receive more tutelage and go against his father's wishes.

After an exercise in the caverns Call, Tamara, and Aaron are confronted by a fire Devoured who tells them their fates.

After finding him Call, Aaron, Tamara, a bronze year student Alex Strike, and Drew are confronted by a pack of chaos-ridden wolves.

When confronted Aaron ends up saving their lives by sending the wolves to the void using chaos magic and in doing so reveals himself to be a Makar, astonishing everyone.

Later afterward, an incident where Call foolishly decides to participate in an activity that he could not accomplish because of his bad leg that was smashed when he was a baby, Aaron is kidnapped by the Enemy's minions when taking Havoc for a walk.

Walking in the forest outside the mission gate and the magisterium they come to a bowling alley where they find Aaron tied up and being dangled on top of a chaos elemental by their classmate Drew who works for the Enemy.

In the book two, 'The Copper Gauntlet', Call finds that his father may be trying to destroy both him and Havoc and runs away from home to go back to the magical world.

Tamara misunderstands Call's concerns and thinks that Alastair wants to use the Alkahest to kill Aaron.

They quickly escape, and bring along Constantine's head as proof they killed the "Enemy", but his soul was still living inside Call.

After multiple faulty attempts, Call comes to a realization and enunciates the word that opens the safe: Jericho.

Master Rufus surprises them by announcing that Alma, the leader of the Order of Disorder, will be teaching Aaron and Call.

Later, Callum and Aaron help free the Chaos-ridden, assisted by Anastasia Tarquin and Alex Strike.

They head back to their rooms when Alex rushes through the gates and alerts them that Tamara was kidnapped by the spy, and Havoc ran off into the woods surrounding the Magisterium.

Alex drags the pair to his hideout in the woods and extracts the Chaos from Aaron's body using the Alkahest, killing him in the process.

The masters arrive, and in Call's desperation rant about how he didn't do it, he mentions that he is the Enemy of Death, and the Masters "clap him in chains" He is taken to the Panopticon, the prison, and as the book ends, Anastasia Tarquin is at Call's cell door, telling him she shall free him, and that he is her "son" as she was Constantine's mother.

Jasper and Tamara escape the clutches of Master Joseph and alert the Magisterium as to the whereabouts of Call.

[5] Though Kirkus noted that the similarities to Harry Potter can be distracting, a reviewer at The Daily Telegraph wrote that the book "moves deftly into the gap" left by the JK Rowling series.