Below is the complete list of The Valtain Preludes books in reading order, presented in publication order for the series by Carissa Broadbent. This is the recommended reading sequence for the series.
The Valtain Preludes Series
- A Palace Fractured (2017)
- A Crown in Shadows (2017)
About The Valtain Preludes Series
The Valtain Preludes sits in an unusual place within Carissa Broadbent’s body of work. It is one of her earliest fantasy projects, and it is best understood not as a separate flagship series on the level of Crowns of Nyaxia or The War of Lost Hearts, but as an early connected work that belongs to the same larger world as The War of Lost Hearts. That connection is the key piece of context once the reading order is already in front of you. These books matter less because they launch Broadbent’s most familiar modern readership and more because they show the foundations of a world she would later develop more fully.
The series begins with A Palace Fractured and continues with A Crown in Shadows. Together, those books form a compact arc set many centuries before the events of The War of Lost Hearts. Broadbent has described this sequence as following events tied to the eventual creation of the Orders, which makes the series function almost like deep historical background for readers already interested in the later world. That historical distance shapes the reading experience. These are not side adventures occurring parallel to her better-known trilogy; they belong to an earlier era and carry more of the feel of a foundational legend or antecedent conflict.
That placement is why publication order still makes sense here. Even in a shorter subseries, Broadbent builds progression through revelation, political movement, and the gradual widening of context. The second book gains its force from the first book’s setup, and the pair is better treated as one connected sequence rather than as loosely related standalones. Because this is early Broadbent, readers may also notice the beginnings of patterns that become more confident in her later work: emotionally charged fantasy, characters pressed between private loyalties and public conflict, and a world in which magic and power are inseparable from systems of control.
At the same time, The Valtain Preludes should be approached with the right expectations. These books come from an earlier stage of Broadbent’s career, and they are not usually the first place readers enter her bibliography now. Most people come to her through The Serpent and the Wings of Night or Daughter of No Worlds, then look backward. Read that way, The Valtain Preludes becomes especially interesting as a glimpse of development: the scale is smaller than her later breakout work, but the instincts are already there. You can see her attraction to emotionally burdened characters, fractured power structures, and fantasy stories where relationships matter because the world around them is unstable and costly.
The series can also be slightly confusing because of how it sits beside The War of Lost Hearts. It is connected to that world, but it is not the main trilogy itself, and it should not be mistaken for required first reading before Daughter of No Worlds. Readers looking for the clearest path through Broadbent’s major work are still usually better served by starting with the principal trilogy and then returning to The Valtain Preludes as expanded historical context. But for readers specifically exploring the full reading order of her connected fantasy world, these books have a real place.
What makes The Valtain Preludes worthwhile is less polish than perspective. It adds depth to Broadbent’s worldbuilding and shows an early version of the darker, emotionally serious fantasy mode she would later refine so effectively. Read in order, the two books work best as a compact prehistory: not the center of her bibliography, but a meaningful part of how that larger fictional world took shape.