Burn of the Everflame

Burn of the Everflame — Chapter 11

DIEM

’m sorry—who did you just say you are?”“I “The Kindred,” the woman repeated. She touched her chest. “Your people gave me the name Lumnos.”

I gawked around the Temple as my brain tried to accept what I was seeing. Nine pairs of grey eyes stared back from faces that were distinct yet

unquestionably related.

“Impossible,” I gasped.

“Nothing is impossible,” the man under the Sophos arch corrected, “for

those willing to search for an answer.”

“How is this happening?” I asked him.

“You took the God’s Horn, did you not?”

“It seems you are capable of doing what you’re told,” Umbros said dryly. He swept a loose braid of his long, silky hair over his shoulder. “We were beginning to wonder.”

I shook my head. “God’s Horn . . . that’s just a myth. A story. It can’t— you’re not—”

“It can, and we are,” Fortos said. He was brawny and broad, built like a brick, exactly how I would have pictured him.

“Great power lies in stories,” Montios said softly. She was the most petite of the group, mild and unassuming, but her features carried the heaviness of quiet wisdom.

“Indeed,” said the woman under the Ignios arch. She reminded me of Alixe—fierce, hardy, clearly a warrior, yet with an approachable warmth.

“There’s one story in particular we’ve come to share with you.”

I stared down at my palms, then pressed them to my cheeks. My skin felt flushed, but my hands were clammy—the effects of rosebane toxin, most likely, along with these wild hallucinations.

“You’re not hallucinating,” Umbros said.

Umbros—the god of thought magic.

My eyes snapped up. “Did you just read my mind?”

“I didn’t need to. You, Daughter of the Forgotten, are painfully easy to read.”

I walked around the Temple, taking them in one at a time. They were so much like the Descended of the realms that bore their names. Umbros wore the smirk of a man with many secrets. Sophos looked . . . well, like he lived in a library. Faunos was preternaturally still, staring like he might pounce at any moment. All of them were beautiful in their own way, their skin illuminated with unearthly light.

When I reached Lumnos, I paused. Something in me felt drawn to her, even more so than the other Kindred whose Crowns I wore.

I took a step closer, and so did she. Her hand rose to my face, her fingertips lightly lifting my chin.

The moment her shimmering flesh touched mine, my skin blazed with the same starshine glow. Though her touch was neither warm nor solid, it felt like being enrobed in the calming embrace of a loving, protective light.

It felt, somehow, like him.

My hand rose to my mating mark. Lumnos noted the gesture and smiled. “I hoped you might open your heart to my Prince. He does love you

so.” . . . Her Prince?

My awe shifted, sharpened, hardened to steel. How dare she claim Luther, after all she’d put him through? He’d sworn himself to her service and received only pain in return.

“If you really are the Kindred . . .” My eyes narrowed. “Then fuck you.”

Her smile dropped.

I recoiled from her touch and pointed at each of them. “Emarion belonged to the mortals. This island belonged to the Old Gods. You stole it all to feed your own egos.”

“We stole nothing,” Fortos argued. “We used our magic to help the mortals, and they welcomed us.”

“Not all of them,” I snapped. “That’s the lie you wanted us to believe, but I read the books you banned. I know the history you tried to burn.”

“That was done after we passed,” Ignios said. “We wished to live alongside the mortals, not eliminate them.”

“That’s not entirely true, sister, is it?” Umbros said. “We bid our children to intermarry with the mortals and repopulate our kind in this

world.”

I balked. “You wanted to replace us?”

“Not a replacement—a union,” Arboros said. “Our people and the

mortals, becoming one.”

“By breeding us out of existence?”

Faunos shrugged. “It will happen eventually. The stronger blood will always prevail. Such is nature’s way.”

“Now you sound like our youngest,” Meros muttered.

At that comment, they all went quiet.

“You’re all a bunch of monsters,” I said. “Selfish, arrogant monsters.

You came to our world and you thought you knew better than the people who lived here. You thought your magic, your Crowns, your blood, even your names were better. The mortals thrived before you came. We had communities full of art and learning, too. We had our own gods, our own history, and the most beautiful stories. You didn’t take any of the bad parts from our world—the wars or the disease, the distrust of anything different.

You just erased the parts that made it ours.” Emotion choked me. “Maybe compared to whatever world you came from, ours was no special thing, but it was special to us. You took away our home, and we’ve filled the Sacred Sea with blood trying to get it back.”

Umbros folded his arms and leaned against his arch, a troubled look in his eyes. “Ironic, isn’t it?” he murmured. “We became the very same evil that we fled.”

“You carry our blood, too, girl,” Fortos told me crossly.

I scowled. “Don’t remind me. You think I’d be related to you by choice?”

Faunos chuckled. “I’m starting to like her. She doesn’t kneel like the rest.”

“There were others like her.” Meros flashed a wide grin. “I married one of them. He put two blades through my gut and one in my thigh before we—”

The other Kindred collectively groaned.

“We know, sister,” Arboros said. “You retell the story of how you conceived your firstborn at least twenty times a century.”

“We had such delicious fights, he and I.” Meros’s laughter faded, and her features turned pained. “Oh, how I miss him.”

“We all miss our mates,” Lumnos said softly.

The shadow of loss darkened their moods. Even the prickly Fortos and flippant Faunos seemed taken by sorrow that blunted my temper’s edge.

“I thought you gave up your immortality to be with them,” I said.

Anger rippled across their faces. Scattered eyes shifted to Sophos, then around to one another.

Montios offered her hand. “This is the story we’ve come to tell you, Daughter of the Forgotten. Will you hear it?”

A sudden gust of wind fluttered my hair across my cheeks, and a memory rose of the joyride Sorae and I had taken through the clouds over the lavender mountains of Montios’s realm. I thought of Rymari—the gryvern whose grave we’d paused at to pay respects.

I met the stony stare of Umbros, whose gryvern’s corpse lay rotting and alone, another victim in the long saga of the Kindred’s curse. Once again, he seemed to see right through my thoughts. His eyes closed in grief- stricken understanding.

My jaw tightened. “No. I don’t want to hear a word any of you have to say.”

Fortos grunted. “I knew it was a mistake to give her our Crowns. We never should have chosen her over our own.”

“You think I want this?” I jabbed a finger at the four-peaked Crown floating over my head. “All these have done is cause me pain. They’re the reason my father is dead and I’m stuck here.” I let out a disgusted noise.

“Freeze in hell, the lot of you.”

I stormed past Umbros on a warpath toward the stairs. I was halfway

down when I heard his voice.

“Would you like to get unstuck?”

I stilled mid-step. “Are you saying you can get me off this island?”

A long silence passed.

“There is a way,” Sophos said.

I trudged back up and stopped, arms crossed. “Let me guess, you want something in return?”

The Kindred exchanged a solemn look.

“Hear our story,” Lumnos said. “That’s all we ask. Let us tell you of our greatest mistakes and all they cost us.”

I looked around at the others. I sensed a current of words unspoken, the hum of a deeper truth they kept concealed. Angry as I was at them, my instincts told me this was a story I needed to hear.

And yet a sinking feeling told me it was a story I might soon wish I never knew.

“WE KNOW you’ve heard the history of our arrival to your world,” Sophos said as we strolled the path to the northern shore. The others were gathered behind us, Arboros grazing her fingers through the tall grass while Meros turned her face to the sky, smiling at the kiss of the breeze.

“Only what the Descended deemed mortals worthy to know,” I said tartly. “Was it a lie, like everything else?”

“Not entirely. In the world we first called home, our people were the caretakers of a very powerful force. It made us immortal and made our bodies strong, and it blessed our bloodlines with magic. Our people kept it a closely guarded secret, because we feared outsiders might try to steal it and use it to do terrible things.”

“It wasn’t the outsiders we should have feared,” Lumnos said.

Sophos nodded. “Among our own kind, there were those who wished to use the force for more. They claimed they were acting in our people’s interests, but others believed they wanted the power for themselves. The disagreements turned violent, and war broke out. Our leaders threatened to use the force against those who opposed them. They were warned it would

destroy us, but they did not listen.”

I frowned. “You weren’t the leaders?”

“Not at all. In our world, we were merely clerics.”

Lumnos came up beside me. “What you must know is that we tried everything we could to save our world, and we failed. We did not come here to conquer your people, Diem. We had only one goal: to survive. We are the last of our kind.”

I saw the pain in her expression and the shared grief that turned her siblings quiet. Much as I wanted to hate them—much as I did hate them— my foolish heart hurt for the sorrow they must have felt leaving everything they knew behind.

We reached the edge of the path. Montios and Meros walked together to the shore, the latter kneeling to smile at the lapping waves while the former stared pensively toward the distant mountains. Arboros had wandered into a patch of wildflowers, cupping her hands around their blooms. Even Lumnos seemed to lose herself gazing at the sun.

These millennia-old beings had crossed worlds and crafted godlike spells, but today they looked like curious children stumbling on old, beloved toys.

“Forgive us,” Sophos said. “Where we are now, there is nothing to smell or touch or read. There is only time.” He heaved a tired-sounding sigh.

“Endless, mind-numbing time.”

“And fates,” Umbros added. “So many possible fates.”

“You can see the future?” I asked.

“We see what might be the future,” Sophos said. “Paths this world might take, depending on the choices of those living in it.”

“Is that why you’ve come—you want me to put this world on a specific

path?”

Umbros and Sophos exchanged a glance.

“It is . . . forbidden for us to . . . intervene,” Sophos said, choosing each word with deliberate care.

I shot him a dull look. “You haven’t done that already? There’s hardly a part of my life you haven’t manipulated with all your ‘endless, mind- numbing time.’”

“We gave you our Crowns,” Lumnos said. “Beyond that, every choice has been yours to make.”

I bit down on a snappy response. I certainly did not feel like I’d had much of a choice in anything lately—not when every alternative would have meant losing someone I loved.

“My heir Doriel revealed to you that we had a tenth, our youngest brother,” Sophos went on.

“Omnos,” I said. “The one whose line I descend from.”

“He was never like the rest of us. Even his magic worked differently than ours. He could not create magic, only absorb it from others and reuse

it. He learned to provoke others into using their magic against him so he

could steal it.”

“He was a brat,” Fortos muttered.

“And a bully,” Meros added.

“He was a scared boy with no magic in a world at war,” Lumnos cut in, shooting her siblings a reproachful look. “He protected himself the only way he knew how.” She turned to me. “He resented us for leaving. He believed we should have fought harder to save our world. When we arrived, he withdrew into the northern forests. We thought he needed time, so we let him be.”

She smiled. “Then we met our mates. We fell in love, and the nine of us decided to bind our lives to theirs. We knew our youngest would never agree to join us, but we thought he’d be no danger to the people of this world.” Her smile faded. “And so we made our first mistake.”

“The great power we spoke of,” Sophos cut in, “when we came to this world, we brought a piece of it with us. You know it as the heartstone. We used it to cast the Forging spell. It bound our lives to our mates, and it bound our magic to Emarion. We crafted the realms—ten, including one for our youngest. We hoped that giving him a Crown and some land to call his own might bring him peace.”

“What it brought him,” Umbros said, “was an unlimited source of power. He no longer needed to be attacked to take our magic—he could pull it directly from the soil. He went from our weakest to more powerful than all of us combined.”

“At first, we didn’t realize what we’d done,” Sophos continued. “He went back to his forests, and we had our children, the first Descended. We grew old alongside our mates. The end of our lives was nearing. Then we

made our second mistake.”

“That wretched tree,” Faunos grumbled.

My spine straightened. “The Everflame?”

Lumnos winced. “I doubt you will believe us, but we did not cut down the tree to replace the mortals’ faith. We intended to celebrate the Forging with a monument using the wood from the Everflame’s trunk. The cauldrons were meant to be lit by its flames. It was to be a site that would represent both Emarion’s past and its future.”

My mouth hung open in an incredulous stare. Umbros raised a hand.

“Save your barbs, little one. We’ve had millennia to think on our faults.

Your disgust with us could not exceed our own.”

“We were blinded by pride,” Montios said. “The mortals called us gods, and we allowed ourselves to believe it.”

“It was a disaster,” Sophos said. “When the tree fell, the wood turned into sparkling black rock.”

“Godstone?” I asked. “It came from the Everflame? The history books say you created it.”

“In a way, we did, though we knew nothing of what it was or what it could do. Not until . . .”

Near the brush, Arboros burst into tears. She pressed a palm to her mouth to cover her sobs as Meros pulled her close to comfort her.

Sophos’s voice softened. “Her firstborn cut his hand on a piece of the stone. That’s how we learned what its poison could do to our children.”

“We built the Temple out of godstone, hoping the mortals would see it as our way of honoring their faith,” Umbros said. “But many saw it as an insult instead. A group rose against us, demanding we be punished for cutting down the tree. They called themselves the Guardians of the Everflame.”

“The Guardians existed even then?” I asked.

“And they despised us as much then as they do now. We called a meeting with our youngest brother. It was the first we’d seen of him in years. We wanted to reverse the Forging spell as an offering of goodwill to the mortals, but he refused. He believed we should kill any mortals who threatened us harm . . . and that’s what he began to do.”

I recoiled a step. “And you let him?”

“We didn’t know how to stop him,” Arboros protested, her eyes still wet with tears. “When we realized how powerful he had become, we were terrified. He said it was our destiny to rule this world so it could never be taken from us like our home world was.”

“Not our destiny,” Faunos corrected. “His. He believed that when we died, all of Emarion would be his to inherit.”

“The more he fought the mortals, the more they turned against us,”

Sophos said. “We had to do something before it was too late.”

“It was the hardest decision we ever made,” Lumnos said quietly. “We were supposed to guide him. It was our responsibility to teach him love instead of hate.” Her gaze lowered. “We failed.”

No one disagreed.

“So you decided to imprison him on the island?” I asked.

“No,” Fortos said. “We decided to kill him.”

The Kindred gathered in an arc around me, their faces somber. “The magic you think of as ours,” Sophos said, “the light and shadow, the wind and tides . . . for us, these are small tricks, limited by the world as it currently exists. Faunos can speak to animals, but he cannot create them.

Fortos can kill the living, but he cannot raise the dead. The real magic lies in the force inside the heartstone. It is the power of gods—it can rewrite existence itself. Few of our kind understood how to use it. Even the nine of us were only novices. We were brought here by . . .” He hesitated. “ . . . someone else.”

“No point hiding it now,” Ignios said. “It was our parents. Our mother came to Emarion, too.”

I frowned. I’d heard countless tales of the Kindred, but never any mention of their mother. Then again, I’d heard no mention of Omnos,

either.

“What about your father?” I asked.

Their faces twisted in matching torture, like the answer was a battle to give. Even Sophos seemed to be struggling to speak. “Heartstone magic requires more than skill. There must always be a balance. Coming here gave us a chance to live. In exchange . . .” He looked down, voice turning quiet.

“The heartstone took our father’s life as payment.”

“A future taken, and a future given,” Lumnos said, holding my gaze with a strange intensity, “and our mother’s future, burdened by guilt for what she’d done. It was love that bound them all.”

“When our brother threatened that future, we asked our mother for help,” Sophos said. “She crafted a sword called Sorrow’s Edge and infused it with a spell to kill him.”

I froze with a horrified stare. A mother plotting to murder her son at the request of his siblings. I’d wondered once if the Descended’s long lifespans had corrupted them so badly, they no longer understood the value of life.

Now I wondered if their Kindred ancestors were the real brutes to blame.

“You think us heartless,” Fortos guessed, and I couldn’t deny it. “You’re wrong. It was an act of mercy.”

“It was an act of love,” Lumnos said, still looking oddly insistent. “You have to remember that, Diem. Our mother cared for him as much as any of us. She loved him too much to let him become a thing of evil.”

“Or so we believed,” Faunos muttered.

Several shot him bitter looks, though others pursed their lips in tacit agreement.

“Before you judge us, hear the rest,” Sophos insisted. “Our mother requested we build a tomb on the island. A way to honor his memory, and a place to keep his body safe so the mortals couldn’t defile it. Lumnos was the only one of us he had any fondness for, so she was tasked with luring him to the island while our mother completed the spell. Mother asked the rest of us to stay away.”

“That,” Meros said drearily, “was our third mistake.”

“At the last moment, our mother changed her mind,” Sophos went on.

“She couldn’t bear to kill him, so she cursed him instead. She placed him in chains that could only be unlocked by the blood of an heir.”

“An heir conceived in love and born of a mortal,” Lumnos corrected.

“She thought that if he could fall in love with a mortal, as the nine of us had, his heart would be redeemed.”

Faunos scowled. “She spared his life, and he killed her for it. Took the blade from her hands and drove it right through her chest.”

Lumnos bristled, her eyes dropping low. Umbros studied her with a curious frown.

“Foolish woman,” Fortos grunted. “Their hearts are too soft. That was the day I decided only a man would bear my Crown.”

“And yet a Fortos Queen stands before us,” Meros said pointedly.

“And her soft heart might save them all, in the end,” Umbros said.

“Wait,” I cut in. “If your mother changed the spell, how did Omnos die?

And how did Ophiucae take his place in the cell?”