A novel of vampires, werewolves and sorcerers, Lightfall is the stunning debut epic fantasy by Ed Crocker, for fans of Jay Kristoff’s Empire of the Vampire and Richard Swan’s The Justice of Kings.
Intrigued? Read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Ed Crocker’s Lightfall, which is out now!
For centuries, vampires freely roamed the land until the Grays came out of nowhere, wiping out half the population in a night. The survivors fled to the last vampire city of First Light, where the rules are simple. If you’re poor, you drink weak blood. If you’re nobility, you get the good stuff. And you can never, ever leave.
Palace maid Sam has had enough of these rules, and she’s definitely had enough of cleaning the bedpans of the lords who enforce them. When the son of the city’s ruler is murdered and she finds the only clue to his death, she seizes the chance to blackmail her way into a better class and better blood. She falls in with the Leeches, a group of rebel maids who rein in the worst of the Lords. Soon she’s in league with a sorcerer whose deductive skills make up for his lack of magic, a deadly werewolf assassin and a countess who knows a city’s worth of secrets.
There’s just one problem. What began as a murder investigation has uncovered a vast conspiracy by the ruling elite, and now Sam must find the truth before she becomes another victim. If she can avoid getting murdered, she might just live forever.
Prologue
THE WHY COMES LATER
Neuras Sinassion
First, imagine a continent. Let’s call it the Everlands. A continent full of immortals. Vampires. Werewolves. Sorcerers. No humans here. These immortals live forever if they are careful (or, in the case of the vampires, if they drink the right blood), but they can be killed. They are immortal, not invincible, as future wars will firmly and bloodily attest to.
Next, imagine they are mindless beasts, roaming the land. One day, in an act many future scholars will smugly call the Great Intelligence, these beasts develop self-awareness. Become civilized. The first tribes are formed, then villages, then towns. A few centuries later, the first cities go up. Vampire cities. Wolfkind cities. Sorcerer cities. Civilization thrives.
The pinnacle of this civilization is Lightfall, the great city of the Centerlands, the first city where all three immortals mix. It has a vampire name, but then that’s vampires for you. Always hogging the nomenclature.
Life is good for a period. Then the Twin War comes. The kind of existential war that all civilizations face after a while. Miraculously, these immortals do not wipe themselves out. Their weapons are not yet advanced enough. Life is even better, with the lessons learned from the shadows of war. Another century passes.
Then, almost a hundred years ago to the day our story begins, the Grays appear. Imaginatively named for the gray cloaks that hide their features, they decimate the immortals with impossibly powerful weapons. The cities of the Centerlands are no more—even mighty Lightfall.
The surviving immortals flee to their homelands in the corners of the continent, leaving the Centerlands to the Grays. The sorcerers stay in the Desertlands, the wolves in the eastern forests, and the vampires remain north in the first—now the only—vampire city.
A century passes. Our tale . . . or my tale, as you will eventually see, begins.
I have told you the what. The why will take a little longer.
Part I
The Gray Race
1
Ashes to Ashes
To die in normal circumstances is traumatic enough for the family
of a deceased immortal, given the loss of so many potential
centuries. For a wolf or a sorcerer, it is galling. But for vampires,
there is not even a corpse to mourn over. It is a vivid representation
of the permanence of death: one minute they are there, the
next . . . Or to put it another way, there is grief, and then there
is the grief of ash.
Cardinale Ciani, Reflections on Eternitie
First Lord Azzuri
My son is dying, and there is nothing I or anyone else can do about it. There are five bullet wounds in his slender frame, but the bullets themselves have long since dissolved into his blood and sealed his fate. Bright purple veins stand out on his face and arms. His skin softly glows; I put my hand to his forehead and find it boiling to the touch. Soon the poison inside him will do its work, the same as if he had stood before the sun.
They found him not far beyond the city just after nightfall, not long after the day watch handed over to the night. A watchman spotted him in the flickering light of the torches that stretch out a hundred meters from the city walls, and the Scout Guard went out to inspect—a dangerous mission at any time, but they hoped he might have been a corpse of one of the Grays, the reason we have the sundamn walls in the first place. That would have been a first. Instead they found an Azzuri, slowly dying beneath a tree. Now all I can do is stand here and think about what I am going to say to his mother and his sister and his older brother. And how many of them will care.
Suddenly his skin seems to glow even stronger, a bright, searing pulse. Then noiselessly he explodes, leaving nothing but a pile of ash-gray dust.
I stand there a few more moments. Then I turn to my first man, Redgrave. “I am going to speak with my family now. Then I want to know why my son died.”
“Yes, First Lord,” he says, avoiding my gaze.
“Oh, and don’t ring the alarms yet. Not until we know if this is a prelude to an attack on the wall.” I go to leave.
“First Lord?”
I turn back to my counselor, my friend. “Yes, Redgrave?”
“You . . . ah, you have some . . .” His words trail off and he points to my shoulder.
I look. I have some of my son on me. I brush the dust off and walk out.
It is going to be a long night.
Sam
Finally I have it. Standing in front of the bookcase, I hold the vial of blood between my thumb and forefinger and inspect it. It’s red. Same as all the other blood. A little darker than you’d expect, maybe. A little tingle on my nose, my senses dulled from a life of blood poorer than this. But you still wouldn’t know it was different from any others. Different from the cowblood me and the rest of the servants have to live on.
Still holding the vial, I steal a quick glance behind me at the palace library. I’m fairly sure I’m still alone—there’s an hour until nightfall, and vampires like their sleep, or at least they’re not that fond of the day—but it can’t hurt to check, given I’m about to do something that would have me tied to a stake and burnt to cinders before the morning sun if I was caught. My floor, which circles around the entire library, is lit well, so I can see all before me, even with the eyesight of someone on the worst blood for decades. The glow of the desertmold in glass sconces that adorns the walls—show me torches or oil lamps in a library, I’ll show you a moron—gives me a good view of the lower levels. Bookshelves line the perimeter, stretching to the tall oak doors of the entrance and, in the center, a vast expanse of reading desks. Fixed ladders connect the lower floor to the uppers. These are for the servants, as Midways or Lords can clear the levels with a quick bound on their blood.
Above it all is the great dome of the library, on which are painted grand frescoes of vampires building First Light, my city. In Lightfall—the old vampire capital, dead for a century—the palace library was glass roofed, giving a perfect view of the night sky. Mechanical wooden shutters covered it during the day. I never saw this myself, being born thirty years ago, or seventy years after the mysterious Grays made their feelings clearly felt about the cities of the Centerlands. This is the only place I know. But like a lot of things I read about Lightfall, it sounds nice.
From Lightfall by Ed Crocker. Copyright © 2025 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.
