The Serpent and the Wings of Night — Crowns of Nyaxia, Book One

The Self-Published Book That Conquered the Genre

Few recent fantasy titles have a publishing story as striking as The Serpent and the Wings of Night. Carissa Broadbent released it independently in 2022, and word of mouth — particularly on BookTok — turned it into a phenomenon large enough that a major publisher eventually brought the whole Crowns of Nyaxia series to a wider market. That trajectory matters because it tells you something about the book itself: it spread because readers could not stop pressing it into one another’s hands.

The premise is irresistible. Oraya is the only human in the vampire kingdom of Sivrinaj, the adopted daughter of the Nightborn King Vincent, who has shielded her in a court that would otherwise treat her as prey. To win true safety — and a chance to remake her place in a world that despises her kind — she enters the Kejari, a brutal once-a-century tournament held in honour of the goddess Nyaxia, in which competitors fight through deadly trials for a single granted wish.

A Heroine Built Around Vulnerability

What separates Oraya from the genre’s parade of effortlessly lethal heroines is that she is, by the standards of her world, weak. Surrounded by immortals with supernatural speed and strength, she survives on preparation, poison, blades, and a hard-won understanding of how predators think. Broadbent makes that disadvantage the engine of the character: every fight is a problem to be solved rather than a foregone display of dominance, and Oraya’s intelligence under pressure is consistently the most exciting thing on the page.

Her relationship to Vincent — protective, controlling, loving, and suspect all at once — gives the book an emotional spine beyond the tournament. The question of who Oraya is allowed to be, and who has the right to decide it, runs underneath everything.

The Slow Burn With Raihn

The romance arrives through Raihn, a charismatic rival competitor whose easy warmth masks his own agenda. Broadbent plays the enemies-to-lovers arc with patience that some readers will adore and others will find demanding: this is a genuine slow burn, built on banter, grudging trust, and shared survival rather than instant heat. When the relationship does deepen, it has weight precisely because the book made you wait. Readers arriving expecting wall-to-wall spice should recalibrate; the payoff here is emotional before it is physical.

A Pantheon Worth the Price of Admission

The mythology is one of the novel’s quiet triumphs. Nyaxia, the goddess of the night who created the vampire bloodlines after being cast out by the other gods, gives the world a theology with genuine texture. The competing Houses, the politics of the Nightborn court, and the cosmology behind the Kejari all feel like the surface of something larger — and the book is smart about revealing only enough to make the sequel feel essential.

The Trials and the Pacing

If the book has a structural weakness, it is the episodic quality of the middle, where the tournament’s individual trials can read as a sequence of set pieces. Broadbent largely compensates with momentum and with the steadily tightening Oraya–Raihn dynamic, but some readers will feel the stretch between the gripping opening and the explosive final act. It is a minor complaint against a book this propulsive, and the ending — which reframes much of what came before — more than restores the tension.

The Prose and the Atmosphere

Broadbent writes with more lyricism than the genre often bothers with. The arenas, the blood-soaked rituals, and the night-drenched city are rendered with real atmosphere, and Oraya’s first-person voice is sardonic without tipping into the quippy register that flattens so many romantasy narrators. It is a book that takes its own darkness seriously, which makes the romance and the rare moments of tenderness land harder.

Where It Sits in the Romantasy Wave

The Serpent and the Wings of Night belongs on the short shelf of titles that defined romantasy’s commercial surge alongside A Court of Thorns and Roses and Fourth Wing, but it earns its place on craft rather than hype. It is darker than Yarros, more disciplined in its slow burn than much of the category, and more interested in mythology than most of its peers. For readers who want a vampire fantasy with genuine stakes and a romance that is made to be earned, it is close to essential — and it sets up a duet conclusion, The Ashes and the Star-Cursed King, that fans consider one of the strongest in the genre.

What the Final Act Changes

It is worth flagging, without spoilers, that The Serpent and the Wings of Night saves much of its power for the end. The closing chapters deliver a reversal that recolours everything that came before — Oraya’s understanding of her place in the Nightborn court, the nature of the people she has trusted, and the true shape of the bargain she has been chasing. It is the kind of turn that rewards a reread, because Broadbent has been quietly laying its groundwork throughout. The revelation also clarifies the book’s title and its central metaphor, and it transforms what could have read as a self-contained tournament novel into the first half of a deliberate two-book arc. Crucially, the twist does not feel like a cheat: the clues are present for an attentive reader, and the emotional fallout is devastating precisely because the romance and the trust were built so patiently. This is why fans so often insist that the duet must be read as a single story — the first book ends not with resolution but with a wound, and The Ashes and the Star-Cursed King exists to answer it. Go in with the sequel within reach.

Our rating: 4.4/5 — A darkly atmospheric, expertly paced vampire romantasy whose vulnerable heroine and disciplined slow burn justify the phenomenon it became.

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