Burn of the Everflame — Chapter 26

26

DIEM

he acrid smell of burning wool stung the inside of my nose, the thickT smoke causing me to squint. A snap of my wrist brought a Meros breeze

to carry it away.

“Get another,” I barked.

“We’re running out of chairs,” someone whispered behind me.

I looked back at the two snickering guards watching my progress—or lack thereof. Their faces immediately went slack, backs snapping straight.

“Then grab a table instead,” I snapped. “Or drapes, or pillows, or gowns. Grab anything that burns.”

Their dark blue eyes slid to each other, then to Alixe, who was standing nearby with a stern frown.

“You heard the Queen,” she said. “Get more supplies.”

“Yes, High General,” they said before scurrying away. It bothered me that they looked to her, not me, for their commands. It played on all my worst insecurities that I was too young, too ignorant, too inexperienced to lead. Too mortal for the Descended, too Descended for the mortals. Too rash, too fiery, too angry—or, when it came to Ophiucae, not angry enough.

My existence in a nutshell: forever too much yet never enough.

“Try again. You’ll get it.” Luther’s voice was strong but warm, meant to comfort as well as command.

Alixe grabbed the last chair from a pile of palace furnishings and set it in front of me. I thrust out my palms and closed my eyes.

“Burn,” I whispered to my godhood.

Burn, it answered back.

Magic flowed through my palms, sinking and spreading like an autumn morning fog.

“Try not to call on your Ignios flame or Lumnos light,” Luther said, coming so close behind me I could feel his breath catch in the tendrils of hair along my neck. “Use your magic in its rawest form.”

“Like crafting a shield,” Alixe suggested, “but to destroy, not to protect.”

Magic engulfed the chair in a shimmering dome. I envisioned wrapping the reins of my godhood around my wrists and yanking back to assert my

control.

“Destroy,” I commanded.

Destroy, it purred.

My eyelids flashed with a brief red glow. When I opened them, the chair had become a pile of blackened debris. Alixe knelt beside it, poking through

the ash, then shook her head.

My shoulders drooped.

Since returning from Ignios, I’d spent my days trying to craft the rarest substance in Emarion: raw, unforged godstone. After creating a pile of it when I’d burned my family home to the ground, Alixe had come up with a clever plan to use it for armor, the only thing that might protect our soldiers from Ophiucae and his army of turncoat Guardians. To do that, however, we needed more of it—a lot more. Since I seemed to be the only person with the power to make it, that burden fell to me.

There was just one problem: I had no clue how.

On the first day, I’d tried crafting it from magic alone. When that didn’t work, I gave it some fuel: chopped wood from the forest and broken pieces of Fortosian steel. After that spectacular failure, Alixe had gingerly suggested we recreate the circumstances a little more closely by using furnishings from inside my home—which, in theory, was now the royal suite. But, after a morning of setting fine furnishings ablaze, not a scrap of godstone had formed.

“Perhaps you need to burn something with sentimental value,” she said.

“That could be a problem,” Luther said dryly. He stared at me. “Is there any physical object you truly care about?”

As if my own body was trying to betray me, my hand flew to my neck, where the necklace he’d gifted me lay hidden under my tunic.

“That’s not the problem,” I insisted. “I didn’t care about the objects in my home, either. The clothes, the books—they were just things. It wasn’t the house, it was . . .”

“What that house represented,” Luther finished. I confirmed with a silent nod.

Alixe thought for a moment. “Maybe we should try doing this there.”

“No,” Luther and I said in unison.

Odd, I thought. I knew why I was avoiding the remains of our family home, but I didn’t know why Luther was so opposed. Did he think I couldn’t handle it—that it would put me right back into the dark, angry place I’d been after my father’s murder?

Did he not see that I was already there?

“If only we knew how the Kindred made it,” Alixe said. “There must be something about it in the Sophos archives. Perhaps Doriel can look.”

My stomach churned at the mention of Doriel’s name. Another thing I was dreading.

“The Kindred didn’t create godstone,” I said. “It came from the remains of the Everflame.”

“The Everflame was real?” Alixe asked. “I thought that was just a mortal folktale.”

I might have scolded her, if I hadn’t wondered the same. The Descended were proof that the Kindred had once walked the earth, but the mortals could only cling to blind faith through stories passed down over generations.

“Very real,” I said. “And the Kindred are as clueless as we are why it turned into godstone when they cut it down.”

Luther gave me a strange look. “How do you know that?”

I immediately bit down on my lip, grimacing at my slipup. His shrewd

gaze noted the gesture.

“Diem . . . who told you?”

The lie rose so easily—Oh, I read it somewhere, perhaps in Sophos. A safe, easy excuse. Plausible enough that even if he didn’t believe me, he wouldn’t dare admit it.

But lying to Luther this way felt too much like a betrayal. He’d allowed me my secrets and my space. He’d even swallowed his complaints when my trip to Ignios stretched weeks later than planned (though I’d known the second he received the news by the anger vibrating through the bond). I

didn’t want to repay his patience with lies. I wasn’t ready to face what the truth would bring, either.

“Let’s stay focused,” I hedged, pointing to the burnt remains of the chair. “Any other ideas what I’m missing?”

Luther’s stare lingered with the threat that his question would not be forgotten. As tension thickened the silence, Alixe seized her usual peacemaker role and jumped in.

“After the Challenging, I noticed there were black rocks mixed in the sand on the floor. I assumed it had come from something destroyed during the fight, but now I wonder . . . what if you made godstone then, too? Was there anything similar to how you used your magic that day and the day your father was—” She stopped abruptly.

“Murdered,” I finished. “You can say it.”

“I’m sorry. I know you don’t like to think on it.”

“I think on it every day, whether I wish to or not.”

“Indeed,” Luther murmured, his eyes on the palace.

It was easy to forget that he also knew the pain of losing a parent in a violent way. While I’d had the luxury—if one could ever call grief a luxury —of openly mourning my father’s loss alongside my brother while others offered their sympathies, young Luther had nothing and no one. He hadn’t even been allowed to admit she’d existed.

I wondered if he’d ever truly grieved her, or if that fuse was still buried inside him, waiting for its chance to burn.

I shifted close enough for our hands to brush. It was the first time we’d touched since the day I returned from Ignios. If he hadn’t appeared the second I landed, his palms gliding beneath my cropped linen top and up my bare ribs as he helped me dismount Sorae, I wasn’t sure what I would have done to ease the bond’s desires, but it would have bordered on obscene.

Reluctantly, I began to pull back, but Luther’s fingers hooked in mine and held fast, pleading without words for me to stay.

“Our magic is fueled by emotion,” he said. “Perhaps that plays a role.

Both of those days tested you emotionally.” He paused. “The night you returned from the island . . .” He trailed off, sensitive to Alixe’s presence.

I’d lost control then, too. Hidden in the clouds, I’d let my godhood burn with all the rage my heart couldn’t hold. But unless the people of Lumnos City had missed a hailstorm of black rock raining down on their heads, no godstone had formed that night.

I shook my head. Luther frowned. “Are you sure?”

Alixe backed away from the not-quite-conversation we were not-so- subtly trying to hide. “I should go check on the Ignios Descended.”

I tensed at the prospect of being left alone with Luther. “No, that’s not—”

“Good idea,” he interrupted. “We’ll keep working here.”

She gave me a brief salute, then set off for the royal hunting grounds where the Ignios refugees had set up camp, not far from the training field the Guardians had made their temporary home. Seeing mortals and Descended living so closely together, and in such similar conditions, left me equally hopeful and afraid.

“The Ignosians have been busy,” Luther said, eyeing me like he could see my nerves. “They made pens for livestock, and they’ve already started planting some crops.”

“They said they want to be self-sufficient, with no outsiders’ help. They refused when I offered supplies to build houses. I worry they think this is all temporary and they’ll be going home soon.”

“Who knows, maybe Ignios City can be saved.”

“What if it can’t? They can’t live in tents forever. Neither can the Guardians. I need to find all of them homes. They need trades so they can provide for their families. Schools for the children. And the people of Lumnos City, I need to help them rebuild. And the other realms . . .” I rubbed my eyes as my chest tightened and my breathing sped up. “They all need Regents and councils. They need soldiers, but the army is a mess. I need to fix that, too. And the half-mortals—”

“Diem.” Luther took my other hand, squeezing them both. “You got the people of Ignios to safety. That’s what matters most. The rest will come in time, after the war.”

I flinched. “I can’t afford to wait that long. I don’t have time.”

“Once Ophiucae is dealt with, then you—”

“I don’t have time!” The words burst out, shrill and choking, the cries of a dying animal desperate to escape its demise.

“You do,” Luther said calmly. “And you will not do it alone. Eleanor is managing Lumnos City. Nidara is doing a fine job looking after her people.

Let Alixe handle the army, and let your mother lead the mortals. You have worked hard to earn the trust of so many. Let them help you.” His eyes danced between mine. “Let me help you.”

I didn’t answer—but I didn’t pull away.

I needed Luther. Even before the mating bond had tied my sanity to his touch, he had been the guardrails that held me in place every time the world sent me tumbling. But letting him get close now felt selfish. Isn’t that what I’d done to Henri, allowing his feelings to grow deeper because I refused to accept that our future was doomed? Only a monster would take what I needed from Luther and leave his shattered heart behind.

Then again, Ophiucae’s blood ran in my veins, and his vengeful darkness felt like it had taken root in my soul. Maybe monster was exactly what I was.

“What do I do?” I whispered, the question loaded with so much more weight than Luther could possibly know.

“Focus on what you need to stop Ophiucae—creating the godstone, building your army. Let your advisors worry about everything else.”

It wasn’t the answer I wanted to hear, not when stopping Ophiucae might be the last thing I ever did, but it did give me much-needed focus. I looked at the smoking ashes of the chair. “You think emotion will help create the godstone?”

“Unless you can think of any other similarity between the Challenging and the day your father was killed.”

I let out a resigned exhale and unclasped Sorrow’s Edge from my belt, then unbuckled the Ignios fist I’d taken to wearing every day. I handed the harness over and started to back away, then stopped. I reached to my neck and pulled the golden pendant he’d gifted me from under my top, slipping

the necklace over my head.

“You still wear it,” he noted quietly.

I pressed it into his palm. “Every day.”

His fingers curled around mine as I slowly, reluctantly, pulled them away.

With nothing left on me but my clothes, I put some distance between us.

I shook out my hands, trying to ignore the lingering feeling of him on my skin. I blocked out the sounds of the nearby camps, the warmth of the spring sun, the breeze that tangled in my hair.

In my head, I edged toward the memory of the Challenging, the safer of my options. The voices of the arena crowd came back first: Jeering and judging when I was losing, shouting for Rhon Ghislaine’s blood when I was

winning. How their loyalties shifted as easily as the sand on the arena floor.

How angry that had made me.

Those emotions were easy to find—the outrage, the disgust at how far from their humanity the Descended had strayed. But every time I’d fractured, it was not my temper that struck the shattering blow. At least, not

just my temper.

It was despair. Hopelessness. Defeat.

The feeling that, even if I won my war, it would not be worth everything the victory had cost. And the closer I crept to those emotions, the more I felt like that was a fire even a phoenix couldn’t survive.

I recoiled with a jerk, shaking my head. “I can’t.”

Luther set down my things, then unstrapped the Sword of Corbois from his back. He pulled the Meros compass from his pocket, tossed them both on the pile, and walked toward me. I stumbled back with a visceral urge to escape—not him, but everything he represented, the feelings I couldn’t let myself embrace.

He continued, undeterred. “Run, Diem, if that’s what you need.

Wherever you go, I will follow. At a distance, if I must, but I will not let you walk this road alone. Do you understand?”

“Luther,” I begged, unsure what I was begging for.

He caught up to me and snagged me by the waist, his grip rough in a way that sent heat through my blood. “Do you understand?”

“Yes,” I breathed.

“Good. Now try again.”

I glanced around. With the Ignios Descended to our left, Guardians to our right, and the palace and its many windows behind us, we were surrounded by curious eyes.

“They can’t see us,” he said. “Whatever happens, it’s between you and

me.”

“Luther, everyone can see us.”

He looked at the Guardians, where his cousin was walking through the tents carrying two wooden casks of ale on his shoulder. He cupped a hand around his mouth. “Taran!”

Taran’s head whipped toward us. “Who was that?” His narrowed eyes roamed over us, never stopping, until they stopped on the Ignios camp.

“Zal, was that you?”

Across the field, Zalaric paused his conversation with a group of women wearing the leather fist of the Ignios Royal Guard. “You’re hearing things, old man,” he shouted back.

“Hey, you think you could talk them into selling me one of those strappy leather things?” Taran puffed out his chest. “I think I could pull it off.”

“Sorry, handsome. I don’t think it’ll fit over that giant boulder you call a head.”

From the stars in his eyes, I wasn’t sure Taran had heard any word after handsome. He handed off the casks to some of the Guardians, who—to my surprise—smiled and clasped his wrist, then jogged across the field toward Zalaric. Luther pulled me against him just in time to keep Taran from walking right into me.

“See?” Luther said, squeezing my hip. “They can’t see us. No one can.”

His fingers twitched against my side, and I felt the caress of his magic brush my skin. “We’re hidden behind an illusion. I’ve been working on them while you were away. So you and I can have . . . privacy.” His gaze dropped to my lips, and my pulse picked up speed. “Close your eyes.”

My stomach fluttered as I obeyed.

“Good. Put your hands on me. Anywhere—just so you know I’m here.”

My hands rose to the thick muscles of his torso. One roamed higher to rest atop his heart. Its steady thump resonated through my blood, matching the ghostly beat that had joined mine.

“Good,” he said again, slower—huskier. “Now go back to that day.”

“The Challenging?”

“No. The day your father died.”

Panic flared. Luther’s hand shifted to the small of my back and spread wide, pressing me close.

“Don’t think,” he said, “just feel. Let yourself go back to the moment your magic took over.”

Everything in me resisted. The loss of my father had become more like a bruise than a wound: unpleasant to look at, but tolerable. Survivable.

Painful only when touched. Reliving that moment would mean slicing it open, and hadn’t I bled enough?

I opened my eyes. “I can’t go back there.”

Luther frowned. “Is this why you haven’t questioned the Sophosians who were at your ball? They arrived days ago.” I looked down in shame,

and he studied me for a moment. “Let’s try the night you returned from the

island.”

“I didn’t create godstone that night.”

“But you did lose control. It’s that, or your father’s death. Your choice.”

My deepest cut or my freshest. Luther’s ability to root out everything I hid from was merciless in its precision.

Grudgingly, I let my mind drag me back to the night I returned, standing naked in my chambers with Luther at my back, his arms wrapped around me. Despite everything, there had been joy in that moment, anticipation of the forever I was sure we would get.

Instead of the crushing sorrow that came next, my thoughts wandered to what could be. What if I told him about the bond? What if I didn’t have to die? What if I could wake up every morning to his hands on my skin and his quiet, brilliant smile?

My fingers curled into the fabric of his shirt, my body pressing closer.

Beneath my palm, I felt his heart begin to pound. I breathed him in, my senses savoring his woodsy musk. Gods, I’d forgotten how he smelled of the forest. That was where we belonged, not pampered in a palace or shivering in a tent.

The hand on his chest drifted higher until I found skin. My fingers grazed his throat as it rumbled with a dark, hungry noise.

“This is what you really wanted that night, isn’t it?” he murmured. “You didn’t want me to leave. You wanted this.”

His hand curved around the nape of my neck, fingers threading through my hair and forcing my lips closer. I arched into him with a quiet whimper

that was both plea and protest.

“Tell me,” he growled.

Still too much of a coward to say it aloud, I managed a nod.

He placed a kiss at the corner of my lips. “You wanted this.” His mouth roamed, pressing to the soft spot beneath my ear, then again to the column of my throat. “And this.” His hips rolled into mine, his hard arousal

impossible to miss. “Say it, Diem.”

“Yes,” I rasped. “All of it.”

Bone-shuddering relief flooded over the one-sided bond. “Then why

send me away? Was it something I did?”

I shook my head.

“Something with the sword?” I tensed, and he took it for the admission it was. “You put your blood on the blade. You said something was inside it.”

Not something, I thought with a shudder. Someone.

My eyes opened to find him watching me. His grip on me tightened, like he could tell I was an inch from fleeing and a breath from giving in.

“You spoke with the Kindred, didn’t you?” he asked. “They told you about the Everflame—about how the godstone was made.”

My lips parted, the truth on my tongue. Maybe it was selfish to drag him into my misery, but I was sick of bearing this secret alone.

“Yes,” I whispered.

“They told you how to stop Ophiucae.”

“Yes.” With each confession, the burden I’d been carrying began falling from my shoulders. “He’s not the son of Omnos—he is Omnos. He’s a Kindred. He’s been trapped in that cell for thousands of years. He never gave up his immortality like the others.”

Luther’s furrowed stare drifted as he worked through the consequences of my revelation. “So he can’t die.”

My heart wrenched. “He can . . . just not by normal means.”

“The sword. You need that to kill him. That’s why they gave it to you.”

I swallowed. “Yes. It’s the only way.”

For a moment that seemed to stretch on forever, he didn’t move, and he didn’t speak. My own emotions were so conflicted, I couldn’t begin to make sense of his. I wondered if he’d figured out the awful truth—if he was warring with the same rage and grief consuming me.

And then he looked back at me . . . and his face brightened into a broad, triumphant smile.

“I knew it.” He held out a palm, where a spark of light flickered to life.

His eyes lifted to the sky. “Thank you, Blessed Mother. Forgive me for

allowing my faith to waver.”

He was thanking her?

I was too stunned to resist as he wrapped his arms around me with a deep, joyful laugh. “I prayed for years that Lumnos would come back and save this world from what it has become, but she did something so much better.” He cupped his hands around my face, his smile heartbreakingly wide. “She sent us you. You’re going to stop him, and you’re going to save us all.”

I’d never seen him this happy. Not when I won the Challenging, not when we’d reunited, not even when I’d told him I loved him. The pure elation surging through the bond crashed into my despair, oil and water tumbling together in a futile attempt to unite.

“Luther,” I choked, “you don’t understand.”

He smoothed his thumbs over the lines of my anguished expression, trying to erase it away. “I know you doubt yourself, Diem, but I do not.

Blessed Lumnos will guide your hand and help you see it through, just as she has guided me. Whatever she has commanded you to do, I beg you, my heart, have faith. You are our savior, and she will not let you fail.”

A chasm opened inside of me at the knowledge of the excruciating pain I was about to cause. I’d wanted so badly to give him the elusive happiness he deserved, only to become the one tearing it to unmendable shreds. The cruel irony was more than I could take.

So I spread my arms, and I leapt into the darkness.

“Yes,” I said. “You’re right.”

His smile faded at the flatness of my tone. “Is this because he’s your sire? You’re upset because you don’t want to kill him?” He quickly wiped his face clean of its joy. Somehow, that made it worse. “Fuck. I was thoughtless. I’m so sorry, Diem, I know this is difficult for you.”

“I’ll do what I have to do.”

Over the bond, I felt the guilt creep into him, scolding him that he was

to blame for my sudden coldness.

“I’m fine,” I insisted.

He didn’t believe me.

I didn’t believe me.

He reached to stroke my hair, and I flinched away. “I should eat. I need more energy for this to work.” It was the one excuse I knew he wouldn’t question. He’d been offering to fetch me a hot meal no less than five times per day, shoving a piece of fruit or bread into my hands every time I showed a trace of exhaustion—which, these days, was often. “Could you get me something from the kitchens? Maybe those spiced figs I like?”

He eyed me skeptically, perhaps knowing, as I did, that the figs required an hour to roast. “You’ll be here when I return?”

“Yes,” I lied. “I’ll keep working on the godstone.”

He held my gaze for a moment before turning for the palace. With every step he took, another crack opened in my spirit.

Maybe Marthe Hanoverre had been right about me. After all the times I’d promised to fight, I was still the same pathetic girl who only seemed to run.

I was not the only one to blame. Luther had placed his faith in Lumnos.

Watching him beg her forgiveness for his doubt, unaware that she’d engineered his heart’s destruction, left me quaking with rage.

The two women he’d devoted himself to would be his ruin.

Neither of us deserved him.

My godhood churned within me, feeding on the vicious emotions that turned my thoughts black, and my skin began to glimmer. I felt, ironically, like all those moments before, when I’d lost control.

I needed an outlet.

I needed revenge.

I stormed into the palace and to my suite, past the guards dragging out the last of the furniture from the parlor. I dismissed them and grabbed an object I’d hidden in a drawer of my desk, then set off on a warpath for the one place I knew I’d find my target. When I arrived, I threw open the double oak doors of the palace library with a menacing crack.

My eyes scanned the startled inhabitants, cataloging each of their terrified faces before stopping on a familiar one staring outside. I walked toward the latter and slammed the doors behind me with a gust of Meros air.

Despite my dramatic entrance, my brother barely acknowledged my approach. He pointed at a nearby stack of dusty books without looking away from the window. “What do you think of these?”

I grabbed two and held them up. “A Compendium of Curative Ointments? A Study in Sutures? Teller, do not tell me you want to be a healer. You turn green at the sight of blood.”

“They’re not for me.”

I followed his line of sight outside to the palace gardens, where Lily was filling a basket with cuttings of the medicinal herbs I’d planted months ago.

“I asked Mother what books might help with Lily’s training,” he murmured. “She suggested these.”

That alone was a testament to Teller’s desperation to win Lily back. I hadn’t seen my mother and brother in the same room since returning home, let alone seen them speak.

I tossed the books down, and Teller’s gaze finally broke away. He took one look at my faintly glowing skin and frowned. “What happened?”

“Come with me. You deserve to see this.” I marched across the room to a cluster of pink-eyed Descended surrounded by tall stacks of books. I lifted the object I’d retrieved from my room and stabbed it into their table. They jumped back and stared up at me in terror.

“Which one of you can tell me why I found this knife in my father’s chest?” I demanded.

“What?” Teller breathed. He reached for the blade, then abruptly shrank back. “That’s what killed him?”

“No, it isn’t,” Doriel insisted. They rose and stood behind the other Descended’s chairs, laying a hand on each of their shoulders. “I’ve

explained to Diem—”

“Her Majesty,” I snapped.

“—to Her Majesty that she is mistaken. No one from my realm had any part in that horrible crime.”

I glowered. “Unlike all your other horrible crimes?”

Teller grabbed my arm. “They’re the ones who murdered Father— you’re sure?”

I could see my brother’s hope begin to surface, mixing with anger and grief. Having blamed himself for Father’s death, he needed the closure of bringing the killers to justice. We both did.

I set my blistering glare on the seated Descended. “You two were at my ball. You insisted on staying in Lumnos for another night.”

“We were at House Benette all day,” one of them said, too scared to even look at me. “Ask them, they’ll tell you!”

“House Benette’s word means even less than yours,” I hissed, though the silence of my Umbros magic had a knot forming in my stomach. “You knew about my family. You threatened my brother.”

Doriel looked offended. “Inviting him to study alongside the smartest minds in Emarion is hardly a thr—”

Books and bodies went flying as an irate pulse of my aura shot through the room. Doriel slammed into a bookshelf that gave a precarious wobble.

“Apparently not smart enough to know when to shut their mouths,” I

sniped.

“Doriel, move!”

Obaneryn sailed past me, gold and turquoise beads clinking in his locs.

He shoved Doriel to safety as the bookshelf toppled on its side—but not in time to escape it himself. Obaneryn disappeared under an avalanche of heavy tomes and the ominous thud of the heavy wooden shelf.

“Obie!” Doriel screamed.

“The books!” their kinsmen cried, sounding equally aghast.

Together they ran to the rubble, Doriel hurling books over their shoulder, the other Sophos Descended tenderly picking them up. Doriel wedged their shoulder beneath the massive shelf and strained to lift it, but their delicate frame was no match for its weight.

“Help me,” they pleaded.

I crossed my arms and glared.

Tears sprang to Doriel’s eyes. “Obaneryn never wanted to leave you on the island. He only did it for me. Punish me, not him.”

“Maybe I’ll punish you both.”

“Diem,” Teller said quietly.

“What?” I snapped at my brother. “They buried me alive on that island.

Why shouldn’t I do the same?” I shrugged. “I’ve earned a little revenge.”

“Since when do you care about revenge?” he asked, jogging forward to help Doriel. “Forget the books,” he yelled at the others. “Come help.”

The Sophos Descended watched me warily as they crept forward to join Teller and Doriel. The four of them grunted with effort, but the bookshelf would not lift an inch. Doriel collapsed to their knees, crying out Obaneryn’s name. Teller’s eyes cut back to me with a plea.

Revenge is not justice.

There was nothing worse than being shamed by one’s own words.

“Move back,” I said irritably. They stilled, staring at me. I raised my hands, palms out. “I said move back.”

All but Doriel obeyed. They hesitated, eyes bulging at the magic swirling at my fingers. Perhaps in reflex, their hands flew up to conjure a shield—an empty effort, with their magic strangled by the Forging spell.

“Please, no—”

“Burn,” I gritted out.

Burn, my godhood sang.

Flames ignited the glossy, lacquered shelves, and the mountain of books became a bonfire. It was hard to tell whose screams were louder, Doriel or

the Sophos Descended. Both lunged to save what they loved, and both slammed into a stone barrier I raised from the marble floor.

“What are you doing?” Teller cried, but I didn’t hear him, too engrossed in the dance of the ruinous flames. As the fire grew hotter, my heart grew colder, and the silvery glow surged across my skin.

Burn.

Destroy.

Teller seized my arm. “Diem, stop.”

Our eyes met, and what I saw turned my stomach: fear. Not of my magic or its consequences, but of me.

My flames abruptly guttered, leaving a thick hill of ash. Doriel climbed over the barrier and frantically dug through the mess. A shimmering veil of light began to emerge. Beneath it lay the books, in pristine condition, and Obaneryn—shaken, but unburnt.

Teller let out a quiet swear and dragged a hand down his face. He glanced around at the library. Books were strewn across the floor, tables overturned and chairs smashed to bits. My makeshift stone walls had pierced holes in the silken carpets, and the black ash swirling in the air left a dusting of soot on every surface.

When he looked back at me, his fear had become something so, so much worse: disappointment.

I pulled Doriel’s knife free from the toppled table, then prowled toward the two Sophos Descended. Their faces turned a ghostly pale as they backed up against another bookshelf, trapped in my path.

I held up the knife. “If you lie to me, I will know,” I snarled, “and I will bury this blade so deep in your flesh they will never find it. Am I

understood?”

They both gave terrified nods.

“Did you have anything to do with my father’s murder?”

“No,” one blurted out as the other shook their head. “We stayed at

House Benette all night.”

I begged my Umbros magic to find a lie.

As usual, my prayers were met with silence.

“Do you know anyone else who did?” I demanded.

Again, they denied it. Again, no sign of deceit.

I gripped the dagger so hard, my hand began to shake. “Then why did the knife that killed him look just like this?”

“We don’t know,” one said.

“We swear,” the other agreed. Their lip trembled. “Please, Your Majesty, don’t kill us.”

The knife clattered to the floor, and the frosty, familiar darkness ripped me wide open and swallowed me up.

I’d done a fine job of proving my power, earning my enemies’ fear, alienating my brother, and leaving the world around me in ruins. The one thing I hadn’t done was find my father’s killer. And now, with my final clue at a dead end and my time running out, I never would.

“Go back to your realms,” I said, “and don’t ever come back.”

I turned, and I did the only thing I seemed to know how to do: I ran.

I ran from the library and through the hallways, out of the palace and toward the melted iron gates of the palace grounds. I ran until the scratchy roar of a gryvern met my arrival. With a snarl, Tybold snatched me in his talons and took to the skies. Behind us, Sorae shrieked her protests—even louder when I ordered her to stay.

I climbed up Tybold’s side and mounted his back, and when we were far enough away that the only thing I could feel was his shackled wrath and my own shattered heart, I finally let go, and I burned.

And when I finished, there was not an ounce of godstone to be found.

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