Dmoonfire, thank you as well! Much appreciated.

Yes! That's exactly the series well done and thank you. I've been looking for years and you solved it on such scant information in less than a day. Thanks so very much. Sorry for the late reply too, I had a few personal matters which kept me offline.

definitely not a high fantasy novel, magic system was quite basic and a lot of it had to do with weather related stuff I.e floods and droughts. I think in that world mages were very uncommon so his appearance was unexpected.