Hallowed Games Books in Order

C.N. Crawford’s Hallowed Games is a fantasy-romance duology about forbidden magic, dangerous attraction and people marked for persecution. Its first book places a woman with a lethal touch inside trials where only one entrant is meant to survive. The second widens the conflict toward witch hunters and a vampire king fighting the Order. Across the pair, the powers that make a person feared can also become essential to resisting the people who claim the right to judge or destroy them.

In Hallowed Games, the heroine cannot touch another living person without killing them. That curse makes ordinary closeness dangerous before the annual trials add a more immediate threat. A hundred cursed people are forced to enter, and a god’s mercy is promised to only one. Survival therefore seems to depend on an arrangement designed to turn people with forbidden abilities into victims and rivals. The setting gives the story a constant pressure: escaping one danger does not necessarily mean escaping the authority that created the contest.

Then she meets someone her touch cannot kill.

Maelor appears to be a hunter of the cursed, making him an unlikely person to trust. His immunity has an explanation that introduces another hidden part of the world: he is a vampire. Attraction grows alongside the heroine’s need to understand what he wants and whether he can help her survive. The romance makes her power especially consequential, since contact that would usually mean death becomes possible with him. That exception does not remove the danger around them, but it changes what she can imagine for herself within it.

Vanquished Gods develops the wider struggle against the Order in the kingdom of Merthyn. A woman hoping to remain hidden in a forest cottage becomes entangled with Sion, a vampire king who wants her death powers for his campaign. Their alliance involves a secret about someone she has killed, as well as his promise to help her control her touch. Witch finders and the threatened destruction of sanctuaries make withdrawal increasingly difficult. The fantasy conflict moves beyond an isolated contest toward the survival of communities, while desire remains complicated by withheld information and the potential violence of a powerful partner.

Read Hallowed Games before Vanquished Gods to follow the duology’s movement from deadly trials toward the larger confrontation. Readers can expect dark romantasy with vampires, curses and strong romantic attraction alongside physical danger. The continuing appeal comes from the tension between power as something condemned and power as a possible means of survival. The books put trust under pressure by making allies dangerous in their own right, asking how a person can pursue freedom when the help being offered also brings new obligations and risks.