Ten years ago the sun cracked apart in the sky and fell. Nobody has seen a dawn since. Crops rotted, vampires came ashore, and humans learned to eat each other and call it practical. Into that permanent midnight walks Kyrene, a bounty hunter carrying a blade gifted by the goddess of justice, who has never once believed she earned it. The gap between what people call her and what she knows she is powers every page of “The Lion and the Deathless Dark”, and it runs hot.
The Sunless World Is the Sharpest Setting in the Series
Five books into Crowns of Nyaxia, the vampire kingdoms of Obitraes are familiar territory. The human side of this war has not been. Here we finally get it: bounty shepherds trading severed heads for silver, cannibal cults squatting in rotted manor houses, medicine so scarce that a sick teenager rations it by the hour, and gods who appear in the sky like bad weather, petty and hungry and easily bored.
What makes it work is scale. Kyrene notices the absence of color before she notices the politics. No flowers. No leaves. Nothing on a plate that is not brown or grey. That one observation does more worldbuilding than a chapter of lore ever could, and Broadbent trusts it to. She has always written violence well. In this book she writes scarcity well, which is harder and rarer.
Kyrene and Zefiah Are the Real Love Story
The finest invention here is not a person. It is a sword.
Zefiah, the Blade of Retribution, is sentient, five thousand years old, thoroughly judgmental, and funnier than she has any right to be. She lives inside Kyrene’s skull, sniffs at her drinking, despairs of her taste in men, and craves vampire hearts like a starving animal. Their bickering carries whole chapters. Their bond carries the novel.
Why the pairing lands so cleanly:
- Zefiah is physically incapable of lying, which turns every exchange into a lie detector aimed at Kyrene’s self-deceptions
- Her dialogue sits in curly braces, visually separate from the prose, so the reader feels the intrusion exactly as Kyrene does
- The blade wants justice. Kyrene wants revenge. The friction between those two words is the book’s genuine argument
- An early instruction from the sword, “Leave the tears. Bring the anger,” gets repaid late in ways I did not anticipate
If you have read Broadbent’s War of Lost Hearts trilogy, you already know she can write a prickly mentor voice. Zefiah is that skill at full stretch.
Septimus, and a Romance Built on Recognition Instead of Fate
Septimus, the seventh prince of the House of Blood, first appeared as a schemer in the margins of earlier books. Given a lead role, he becomes something considerably more interesting: a man in permanently white clothing who claims he never gets his hands dirty, reads romance novels in secret, chain-smokes drugged cigarillos to hold back a curse eating him alive, and calls Kyrene lyri, an old Bloodborn word for lioness.
The romance in The Lion and the Deathless Dark by Carissa Broadbent works because neither character is redeemed by it. They recognize each other. That is the whole mechanism. He engineered atrocities and does not repent; she has done unforgivable things and does not apologize. The heat comes from two people who have stopped auditioning for anyone’s approval finally meeting someone who does not require it. A bathing scene roughly a third of the way in does more erotic work with a washcloth and a wounded shoulder than most books manage with a full bed.
For readers tracking spice: it builds slowly, arrives late, and is explicit when it does. Consent is handled with unusual care given the vampiric circumstances.
A Structure Shaped Like a Weapon
The Lion and the Deathless Dark by Carissa Broadbent splits into five named parts, each with an interlude written in cool third person about someone in Kyrene’s orbit. These short chapters are the most technically impressive writing in the book. They tell you how a person joined her crew, then tell you plainly how that person will die, then return you to the present where the character is still cheerfully alive. Dramatic irony administered like poison, one dose at a time.
The five-part spine:
- Justice sets up Kyrene’s crew and the cost of her divine contract
- Machinery introduces the alliance and the first impossible target
- Pleasure delivers the book’s best set piece, in a temple that doubles as a bordello
- Blood turns the screws on the curse and on the romance simultaneously
- Vengeance detonates everything, including reader expectations
Where the Book Bleeds
An honest review needs to name the seams, and there are a few.
- The middle sags around the travel sequences. Two long stretches of horseback conversation exist mainly to deepen the romance. They succeed at that and stall the plot doing it.
- The god fights follow a repeating template. Locate a divine weapon, taunt the deity, improvise a kill. Broadbent varies the execution cleverly, but the shape is visible by the third one.
- Secondary characters are thin by design and still feel thin. Marko in particular exists to be a lesson rather than a person, and the interlude that redeems him arrives after he can no longer use it.
- The ending is a cliffhanger with no cushioning whatsoever. The author’s note cheerfully admits as much. Readers who need resolution should wait for the finale.
- Newcomers will feel the fog. Cameos from earlier books land as pleasant surprises for veterans and as unexplained furniture for everyone else.
None of this sinks the book. It does mean The Lion and the Deathless Dark by Carissa Broadbent reads as the first half of something rather than a complete arc, and your patience for that will decide a lot.
Where to Start, and Whether You Can Start Here
Marketed as the opening half of the Bloodborn Duet, The Lion and the Deathless Dark by Carissa Broadbent functions as a soft entry point. It is far richer with full context. The reading order:
- The Serpent and the Wings of Night (Book 1)
- Six Scorched Roses (Book 1.5)
- The Ashes & the Star-Cursed King (Book 2)
- Slaying the Vampire Conqueror (Book 2.5)
- The Songbird & the Heart of Stone (Book 3)
- The Fallen & the Kiss of Dusk (Book 4)
- The Lion and the Deathless Dark (Book 5)
My advice after finishing all seven: read Book 1 and Book 3 at minimum. Book 3 in particular sets up characters who walk directly into this story and matter enormously to how its final act feels.
If This Book Worked on You, Try These Next
- Godkiller by Hannah Kaner, for a weary professional deity-slayer and a similarly bruised moral compass
- The Poppy War by R.F. Kuang, for a protagonist who becomes the monster the plot required
- A Dowry of Blood by S.T. Gibson, for lush, mournful vampire romance with teeth
- The Jasad Heir by Sara Hashem, for hidden identity, sharp banter, and a heroine lying to everyone including herself
- Blood Over Bright Haven by M.L. Wang, for a complicity reckoning that will leave marks
- From Blood and Ash by Jennifer L. Armentrout, for readers who want the romantasy comfort beats alongside the carnage
How This Copy Reached Me
A bounty hunter delivers the head and collects the fee, and the shepherd checks the tattoo before paying out. The publisher handed me this book in advance and asked for exactly one thing in return: an honest accounting. So here is the head on the desk, unwrapped, blood and all. Nothing was paid for a favorable verdict, and nothing here has been softened to earn one.
The Verdict
This is a book about a woman who has been mistaken for a hero for a decade and finally decides to find out whether the costume fits. It is grim, wickedly funny in places, occasionally repetitive, and emotionally devastating in the final quarter. The prose runs lean and fast. The kills land wet. The romance earns its slowness.
The Lion and the Deathless Dark by Carissa Broadbent is not a flawless novel, and it is not trying to be a comfortable one. What it is, unmistakably, is a writer at the height of her confidence taking an enormous swing at her own series mythology and connecting. Bring patience for the middle stretch and a high tolerance for endings that refuse to be kind.
Content notes: graphic violence including against children, gore and body horror, discussion of slavery and cannibalism, substance use, grief, suicidal ideation, and pregnancy loss.