I finished this book at 2 AM, sitting on my kitchen floor with the lights off. The cat was staring at me. I was staring at the wall. Somewhere between the prophecy and the betrayal and the blood, I had stopped being a reviewer and started being a person with a racing heart.
The Lion & the Deathless Dark is the fifth book in Carissa Broadbent’s Crowns of Nyaxia series, and honestly, it might be the best one yet. The question that drove me through every page was this: what does it actually cost a person to choose vengeance over love, and what happens when those two things become the same choice?
Kyrene and Septimus Are Two Different Kinds of Broken
Kyrene is a bounty hunter with a blessed sword and a bottomless pit of grief where her life used to be. She’s not the polished heroine you expect. She’s reckless. She’s impulsive. She fights first and thinks never, and she’s so busy being angry that she doesn’t notice how much of her humanity she’s already traded away for revenge.
Then there’s Septimus. The silver-tongued vampire prince with a dirty mouth and a tragic backstory. He’s been lurking in the background of this series for books now, and finally getting inside his head is like opening a door you knew was there but were afraid to touch. He’s calculating. He’s manipulative. He’s been playing the long game for centuries, and he’s tired in a way that has nothing to do with sleep.
The plot is simple on paper: Kyrene kills a god, gets in trouble, and makes a deal with her enemy to hunt down the rest of the pantheon. But the execution is anything but simple. Broadbent weaves prophecy, curse, and political intrigue into a story that never sits still. The pacing is relentless. The action is brutal. And the ending? The ending made me throw the book onto my bed and stare at the ceiling for a solid ten minutes.
Here’s what got me, though. These two characters shouldn’t work together. They’re both so damaged that they can barely function as individuals, let alone as a team. But Broadbent doesn’t shy away from their brokenness. She leans into it. Kyrene doesn’t soften. Septimus doesn’t heal. They just find someone who finally understands the shape of their pain.
The Blood That Binds Is Also the Blood That Bleeds
The core theme here is grief and what it does to a person’s soul. Broadbent explores this through some remarkable imagery. There’s a sentient sword named Zefiah who functions as both a weapon and a mother figure, and she’s genuinely one of the best characters in the book. There’s the eternal night that hangs over everything, a literal darkness that mirrors the internal darkness of the protagonists. And there’s blood. So much blood.
The blood is the central metaphor, and Broadbent uses it brilliantly. Some blood tastes like vengeance. Some tastes like grief. Some tastes like nothing at all. That’s from the book’s description, but the text lives up to it. Every time Kyrene draws her sword, every time Septimus feeds, every time a god falls, the blood is doing double duty. It’s violence, yes, but it’s also memory, connection, and the price of survival.
What struck me most was how Broadbent handles the relationship between revenge and intimacy. Kyrene and Septimus don’t fall in love despite their shared desire for vengeance. They fall in love because of it. They recognize something in each other that no one else can see. When Septimus says his chest is wide open and all he wants to do is lick the blood from her fingers, it’s not just a spicy line. It’s a confession. These are two people who have been so thoroughly broken by loss that the only way they know how to love is through the wounds.
There’s a moment where Kyrene thinks about how she’s never been looked at with honest, genuine affection. Not as a divine warrior. Not as a bounty hunter. Just as herself. And that moment broke me, because it’s so specific and so true. Broadbent writes these small, devastating revelations with such precision that you forget you’re reading fantasy at all.
What the Fury Costs
The book is not perfect. Kyrene takes a while to warm up to. She’s frustratingly stubborn, and there were times I wanted to shake her and tell her to just talk to Septimus instead of charging into danger. The romance is slow burn to the point of near-torture. If you’re looking for instant gratification, this isn’t your book.
But the writing is stunning. Broadbent has a gift for making every sentence feel intentional without feeling overwrought. The world-building is intricate and fascinating, especially the reveal about the Bloodborn curse and why Nyaxia created it. That twist genuinely surprised me, which is rare for this genre.
The side characters are excellent, particularly Zefiah and the cameos from previous books that tie the series together. Speaking of which, if you haven’t read the earlier Crowns of Nyaxia books, you’ll still enjoy this one, but you’ll miss a lot of the emotional weight. Septimus’s story has been building for a long time, and this book pays off that groundwork beautifully.
If you love romantasy with high stakes, morally grey characters, and a romance that feels earned rather than convenient, this is for you. If you’re a fan of enemies-to-lovers done right, with actual hatred that slowly transforms into trust and love, this is for you. If you want a book that will make you cry on public transportation, this is absolutely for you.
