Abigail Owen’s The Things Gods Break (2025) is the second installment in The Crucible romantasy trilogy, picking up immediately after the events of The Games Gods Play (2024). The novel follows Lyra Keres, the newly crowned Queen of the Underworld, who is violently separated from her lover, Hades, when she is dragged into the prison of Tartarus. Trapped in a mythological labyrinth of psychological trials, Lyra must unravel a web of ancient deception to find her way back to the world above. The narrative explores themes including Unveiling Truth in a World Built on Lies, The Malleability of Fate and Prophecy, and Sacrifice as the Ultimate Act of Love and Redemption. Abigail Owen is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author. The Things Gods Break engages in revisionist mythology, reimagining figures from the Greek pantheon and challenging traditional narratives.

This guide refers to the 2025 Red Tower Books first edition hardcover.

Content Warning: The source text and this guide contain depictions of graphic violence, sexual content, cursing, confinement, child abuse, substance use, sexism, emotional abuse, illness, and death.

Plot Summary

After winning the Crucible Games, Lyra Keres is named the new Queen of the Underworld, and her friend, Boone, becomes the new god of thieves. However, their elation is cut short when Hades’s father, Cronos, the king of the Titans, drags them down into Tartarus (the Underworld’s dungeon). Lyra’s lover, Hades, the King of the Gods, is left behind, pounding on the gates. When a mysterious bell chimes, Cronos panics and throws Lyra from a bridge into a dark abyss.

As Lyra plummets, she is pulled through red, crystalline cracks in time that transport her to past moments with Hades. When she tries to teleport back to Boone, she lands in a recreation of her old bedroom in the Order of Thieves’ den. A projection of the goddess Hestia appears, explaining that the Lock of Hestia is the first trial in the Labyrinth of Tartarus. Hestia strips Lyra of her goddess powers and presents the test: Lyra must willingly reject a life in which her deepest desires are fulfilled. Lyra’s estranged parents then appear in a glamour (magical illusion), offering to take her home. This was Lyra’s greatest wish before meeting Hades.

Lyra steps through the doorway into the illusion, and her memories are altered. However, she also experiences sharp pains and flashes of her real memories of Hades, along with disturbing glimpses of her parents’ true monstrous nature. A vivid memory of waking in bed with the real Hades shatters the glamour, and Lyra realizes her true desire is a future with him. She rejects the alternate life, and the illusion of her parents melts away, revealing them to be creatures called Nightmares. Boone is also trapped in the Lock with Lyra. After being briefly pulled through another time crack to Hades’s penthouse, where she retrieves one of her axes, Lyra returns to fight alongside Boone. They defeat the Nightmares, who then bow and pledge their loyalty to Lyra. With Hestia’s Lock unsealed, their powers return, and an archway opens to reveal the assembled Titans.

The Titans, including Hades’s mother Rhea, reveal that a prophecy names Lyra as their savior. Another time crack pulls Lyra to the past, where she witnesses the moment Hades cruelly broke her heart during the Crucible Games. She confronts this past version of Hades, who claims a future version of her told him to do it. They share a passionate kiss before she is pulled back to Tartarus. Meanwhile, an enraged Hades tries to destroy the gates of Tartarus, nearly fulfilling a prophecy that he will burn down the world.

Back in Tartarus, the bell chimes again, and the Titans flee from an unseen threat called the Pandemonium. Lyra and Boone witness the Titaness Theia transform into a feral monster after being touched by the invisible entities. They escape into a vast cavern containing the four Pillars of the Cosmos. Rhea hides them inside the Pillar of Earth, explaining that the Pandemonium temporarily drives Titans mad. Boone pulls Lyra into another time crack, where she witnesses a happy family moment between Cronos, Rhea, and their young children, including a teenage Hades. Hades confronts Lyra, recognizing her from a childhood memory where she saved him from his grandfather, Uranus. He is intrigued that he can touch her without his deadly powers causing harm.

After days in hiding, Lyra and Boone meet Persephone, the goddess of spring. She shows them large, golden cracks in the rock near the Pillars, revealing that Tartarus is breaking and causing earthquakes. Persephone then betrays them, pushing Lyra toward the Titan Iapetus. When Iapetus throws Lyra into Hades’s Lock, Boone jumps in after her. They land in a replica of the Circus Maximus whose guardian is a “copy” of Hades. Competing in a seven-lap chariot race against Hades’s hell horses, Lyra and Boone face unleashed zombies. Working together, they use horses created from the powers of various gods to sabotage Hades’s team, allowing Boone to win. The Hades copy reveals there are seven Locks in total and that Lyra has unsuccessfully attempted to complete them all many times before. After each failure, time resets.

Lyra and Boone negotiate with the Titans, agreeing to attempt the remaining Locks in exchange for training. Rhea reveals that Cronos never ate his children, but she cannot explain the full truth without causing time to reset. Lyra is pulled into another time crack, and when she returns, she learns Boone was lost in a separate one. The Titans begin training her, revealing she has always died in Aphrodite’s Lock.

Lyra is again pulled into a time crack, this time to the Titanomachy, the war between the Olympian gods and the Titans. She sees the Olympian gods’ faces are covered by iridescent veils as they attack the Titans, who refuse to fight their own children. The Titaness Phoebe tells Lyra she is gaining her first power: the ability to see glamours. Rhea confirms that an unknown enemy glamoured the Olympian gods to believe the Titans were evil. Lyra later discovers a glamour over Persephone’s eyes.

Lyra and Boone successfully navigate Poseidon’s Lock together. Immediately after, a dying future version of Lyra appears from a time crack, her throat slit, warning of “monsters” in Hera’s Lock. Her death triggers a “hard reset,” moving the timeline’s starting point forward and allowing Lyra and Boone to retain memories from the previous time loop.

Lyra is pulled into more time cracks, where she manipulates her own past, planting her axe for her younger self to find and instructing a past Hades to enter the Crucible and choose her as his champion. She is then pulled to the night she and Hades first made love, where she tells him he must break her heart to protect her from the sirens during the Crucible. They make love again, and Hades initiates an eternal magical bond between them.

Lyra returns to Tartarus to find that Boone was badly injured attempting Zeus’s Lock alone. She discovers that Persephone, Boone, and Phoebe have been newly glamoured by an unknown traitor. Lyra learns to remove the glamours, and Phoebe realizes her prophecy that Lyra and Boone’s destinies are bound together is untrue. A massive earthquake damages their safe room, and they realize the quakes are caused by Hades trying to reach Lyra.

Under a new glamour, Persephone shoves Lyra into a time crack. Lyra and Boone then complete Hera’s Lock together. As they prepare for the final Lock, Cronos pushes Lyra in and quickly follows, replacing Boone. Aphrodite’s Lock requires a sacrifice of love, and Cronos reveals he has always seen Lyra as a daughter. He sacrifices himself by walking into fire. As Cronos dies, his power over time transfers to Lyra, unsealing the final Lock and opening the gates of Tartarus.

As Lyra becomes the goddess of time, the cracks in broken time heal and are absorbed into her. The gods of death, led by Anubis, attack the freed Titans. During the battle, Lyra allows the goddess Hel to stab her to get close enough to remove the glamours from all the gods. Hermes teleports Lyra to Olympus, which Hades has destroyed in his rage. With Aphrodite’s help, Lyra gets past Hades’s defenses. She reaches him, removes his glamour, and he is devastated by the truth. They learn the holes Hades tore through the Underworld are causing the oceans to flood Tartarus.

Lyra travels to the past to learn from Cronos how to control her new powers. She manipulates her own past, ensuring Zeus curses her but with new limitations. She then returns to the present and freezes Tartarus in a time bubble, reversing time to the moment just after she was pulled into Tartarus, undoing Hades’s destruction. The plan works, but the gods of death, who remember the original timeline, judge Hades for his actions. Anubis strips Hades of his powers and immortality, making him mortal. Hades, whose eyes are now blue instead of silver, tells Lyra he has a plan. In the Epilogue, the secret traitor reveals that they now plan to manipulate Lyra.