The Ashes and the Star-Cursed King

The Ashes and the Star-Cursed King is the second Crowns of Nyaxia novel and the close of the duology that began with The Serpent and the Wings of Night. Carissa Broadbent published it in 2023, and it starts with Oraya in the worst position she has held in the series: grieving, a prisoner inside her own kingdom and unable to trust the people who put her there, least of all Raihn.

The Kejari is finished, and the arrangement that carried Oraya and Raihn through it has left them on opposite sides of a settlement neither of them designed. Raihn holds the throne, and his own nobles are in no hurry to accept a Turned king who was once a slave. The House of Blood is pressing in from outside, which means every alliance available to the new court comes with a price attached.

The settlement that ended the tournament has made both of them rulers in a kingdom that does not want either of them, and the terms of that settlement are what the book spends its length renegotiating. Oraya's blood remains the most dangerous fact in the room. Her father's secrets, the power they were tied to and the question of what she is willing to trade for a crown are the material the second volume works with.

Broadbent keeps the narration in Oraya's voice, so the politics arrive as a series of obligations rather than as a view from outside. Crowns of Nyaxia continues beyond this pair in the same world, first with a novella and then with further novels about different characters, and it began as a self-published series before the print editions appeared and the series found a wider audience.