The Tempering

The Foundry #3

by J. Fitzpatrick Mauldin

Humanity perches on the edge of a knife. The Foundry has turned their backs. For tens of thousands of years, humanity has committed sins, but not protecting life has been its worst.

After fleeing the scene of a mass murder with new terraforming equipment aboard, and seeing only a single, dangerous path remaining back to Earth, Milo and his crew must face challenges both strange and terrible to reach the planet they were born of. What they find back in SOL, however, is not what they had hoped for. Time has passed, and that place is long gone. Conflict and strife and war have taken its place, bringing wonders and nightmares in equal measures.

Will they be able to save what the entire species could not? Will the Foundry change its mind and help, or will all that humanity has ever known become a mere footnote for those who uncover its remains a million years from now?
In the end, it is Milo who must decide humanity’s fate—and if that fate costs more than he is willing to give up.

809 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 18, 2025

About the author

J. Fitzpatrick Mauldin is a science fiction and fantasy writer based in Atlanta, Georgia, where he lives with his bibliophilic wife and two daughters. Destined to be a nerd by birth, the product of a science, history, and engineering obsessed father and grandfather, he had no other option than to let his creative juices flow onto paper. Not a single genre writer, he explores many facets and sub genres of SFF such as cheesy horror, sci-fi satire, flintlock fantasy, and speculative fiction. Like many authors, genre niches are not what tend to arouse inspiration in him, but rather, what a character can do within a compelling setting. He seeks to explore grand events and extraordinary times while plumbing the depths of the human condition from life unto death—and beyond.