Mother of Death and Dawn is the final installment in Carissa Broadbent’s The War of Lost Hearts trilogy, preceded by Daughter of No Worlds and Children of Fallen Gods. The novel brings to a head the primary conflicts established in the first two books, resolving the intricate personal and political arcs of its main characters.

The trilogy begins by introducing Tisaanah Vyzetic, an enslaved woman who escapes bondage to seek magical training with the goal of liberating her people from the brutal Threllian empire. Her journey leads her to Maxantarius “Max” Farlione, a disgraced and reclusive former soldier of the Aran Orders, who is haunted by a past in which his body was inhabited by a powerful magical entity that took control of his actions and forced him to commit terrible violence. Throughout the series, their individual quests become deeply intertwined. In the first installment, Daughter of No Worlds, Tisaanah is sold into enslavement in Threll at age 13. She eventually escapes by using her magic to kill her enslaver—an act of self-defense as he is about to kill her—and becomes a fugitive. She joins the magical Orders as an apprentice and is assigned Max as a mentor. Her struggle for freedom evolves from a personal mission into a large-scale rebellion, while Max grapples with traumatic memory loss and the devastating consequences of his past actions.

In Children of Fallen Gods, Tisaanah is inhabited by Reshaye, the same violent, disembodied entity that inhabited Max before he and Tisaanah met. She and Max meet the Fey rebel Ishqa, who reveals Reshaye’s history as the Fey named Aefe and admits his own role in condemning Aefe to centuries of torment as Reshaye, whose name means “no one.” Ishqa warns of a coming conflict between humans and Fey. They confront Nura, second-in-command of the Orders, who reveals that she has been preparing for this conflict by performing cruel experiments on both humans and Fey. The entity known as Reshaye is the result of one such experiment. An enraged Max challenges Nura to a duel for leadership of the Orders, but during this fight, his magic inadvertently allows the Fey king, Caduan, to possess his body. Tisaanah is able to use her own powerful magic to sever the connection between Max and Caduan, but she inadvertently damages Max’s mind in the process, leading to amnesia. In the aftermath, Nura takes control of the Orders and sentences Max to life in the prison of Ilyzath.

 This final volume picks up after the catastrophic events at the end of Children of Fallen Gods, with Max imprisoned in the magical fortress of Ilyzath and Tisaanah desperate to free him. The narrative culminates in a sweeping conflict where their personal struggles for identity and redemption are magnified onto a global stage, directly impacting the fate of both human and Fey civilizations and bringing the central themes of freedom, sacrifice, and the weight of history to their ultimate conclusion.