The Woman Who Decided to Kill Gods

Ten years of war between humans and vampires have left the world under a night that does not end. Kyrene makes her living hunting bounties, carrying a sword blessed by the goddess of justice and taking jobs that goddess would probably not approve of. Then a loss arrives that she cannot absorb quietly, she does something that puts both mortals and gods on her trail, and the only exit available comes from the worst possible direction.

Septimus is a vampire prince, he talks too well, and he has one job left to offer her. Kill the gods.

She takes it. Not because she trusts him, but because the goddess she most wants dead is his.

What It's About

This is the fifth Crowns of Nyaxia book and the first half of a new duet, built around a new couple rather than continuing the previous one. The shape of it is a hunt: two people who have every reason to betray each other moving through a wrecked world toward targets that are not supposed to be killable, untangling prophecies and curses on the way, while Septimus carries secrets that would end the alliance if she knew them.

The romance is slow, adversarial, and in no hurry. The war is the background and the foreground at once.

We are not detailing what Septimus is hiding, which gods they reach, or how the book ends.

What Works

Kyrene is written as genuinely compromised rather than fashionably so. Reviewers repeatedly describe her as morally grey in a way that has teeth: she is not a good person having a hard time, she is someone whose choices cost other people, and the book does not flinch from that or rush to redeem her.

The sword steals the book. Zefiah, the blessed blade, is an ancient sarcastic presence rather than an object, and multiple reviewers single it out as carrying both the humour and a surprising amount of the emotional weight. In a book this bleak, that voice is what keeps it readable.

The world is built through economics, not exposition. What medicine costs, what a bounty pays, what ten years of war does to the price of staying alive. Critics specifically praise this over the usual lore dumps, and it makes the setting feel inhabited rather than described.

Septimus converts the skeptics. Readers who disliked him in earlier books report changing their minds here, which is a harder trick than introducing a new love interest from scratch.

And the gods are unsettling rather than majestic. They read as something recognisably awful rather than grandly mythic, which is what makes the premise of hunting them land.

Where It Struggles

The middle sags, and it is a long way across. A training stretch and an extended overland journey slow the book down well past where the pace needed them, and at 560 pages that dip is felt rather than skimmed.

The set pieces start to rhyme. Several confrontations follow similar beats, so by the back half a reader can often predict the shape of a scene before it resolves.

Kyrene's guilt circles the same ground. Her remorse is well written the first several times. In the final third it repeats rather than develops.

The ending does not resolve anything. This is the first half of a duet and it closes on a hard cliffhanger, which readers split on sharply. Some find it devastating in the intended way, others find it withholding. Either way, go in knowing the story does not finish here.

And Kyrene is deliberately unlikable. That is a feature, not a flaw, but it is a real filter. Readers who need to root for a sympathetic lead will struggle with her, and the book is not interested in making that easier.

The Velvet Coven Verdict

Crowns of Nyaxia had been losing altitude. The Serpent and the Wings of Night sits at 4.25 on Goodreads, and each book since came in lower, down to 3.91 for The Fallen and the Kiss of Dusk. This one landed at 4.47, the highest in the series.

Worth a caveat: that figure rests on around 15,000 ratings against 825,000 for the first book, and early numbers always come from the most devoted readers first. Expect it to settle somewhat. But the gap is wide enough that it is telling you something real, and what it is telling you is that Broadbent took the series somewhere harder and darker and it worked.

It is not flawless. The middle is too long, the confrontations repeat, and the ending deliberately leaves you stranded. What it gets right is a heroine who is actually difficult, a talking sword that has no business being this good, and a world built out of what things cost rather than what things are called.

Four and a half out of five. The best entry in this series so far, and the one most likely to annoy you on the way to proving it.

Content note: Murder, graphic violence, grief and loss, blood, explicit sexual content, and a protagonist whose choices harm others. The book ends on an unresolved cliffhanger.

Quick Reference

  • Author: Carissa Broadbent
  • Published: August 2026, Bramble
  • Series: Crowns of Nyaxia, Book 5. First book of the Bloodborn Duet.
  • Pages: 560
  • Setting: A world under permanent night, ten years into a war between humans and vampires
  • Tropes: Enemies to lovers, slow burn, morally grey heroine, vampire prince, god-killing quest, forced alliance
  • Spice level: 4/5. Explicit, but infrequent and late.
  • Status: 4.47 on Goodreads, the highest rated book in the series. Available on Kindle Unlimited.