MyrddraalFade
A girl from another world wakes on cold stone with someone else's heartbeat in her chest and a crown of cold metal on her brow. Her name-what she chooses now-is Lyra, and the impossible city of Archestryx already knows her as its new Vampire Lord.
The Crimson Crown binds her to every vein of the city: she can feel its fear, its hunger... and her own. Archestryx has always been ruled by spectacle terror-random "examples" dragged to public slaughter, Blood Choirs turning executions into theatre, patrol captains selling prisoners to satisfy distant tithes.
Lyra refuses.
Instead of feeding, she claims a doomed courier as her witness, confronts an Elder at the Crimson Amphitheatre, and carves a new Edict into the city: no more random killings. With the cynical Steward Marcion, streetwise witness Jevar, assassin-turned-ally Kairn, and smuggler queen Sere, she builds donor clinics and the Ledger of Red Debts to aim vampire hunger at proven monsters rather than the helpless.
But the outer Covenant will not tolerate experiments in mercy. Assassins, star-iron, and politics close in, and Lyra must decide how far she'll bend the Crown-before it breaks her, or the city she's trying to save.