Burn of the Everflame — Chapter 52

52

DIEM

or two days, Ophiucae walked by my cell to and from the library, theF book on the heartstone always in his hands, and not once did he so much as glance my way. If he was hoping to unsettle me, it was pathetically effective. I recited my mother’s story of her time on the island to remind myself what he was capable of doing, even to those he loved. He was far too dangerous to trust—not with the heartstone, not with Emarion, and not with me.

It did not stop my chest from squeezing each time he passed me by without a word.

I was not the only person in Sophos wrestling with conflicting feelings.

Ophiucae had healed the mortals from the poisoned ale, leaving them begrudgingly grateful. When he ordered them to gather their weapons and prepare to leave for Umbros, even Vance gave a deferential nod.

“Are you coming with us?” Vance asked him.

“No. I’ll do my part from here.”

He nodded toward the Descended they’d captured in Meros. “What about them?”

“Until you prove to me that you can do something other than run away

or get them killed, they stay with me.”

Vance’s lips formed a thin, hard line.

“Is there something you’d like to say?” Ophiucae’s smile spread wide at his silence. “Very well. Take your men and go.”

“One last question,” Vance gritted out. “Where’d you send our messenger hawk?”

Ophiucae arched a brow. “If I want to send a message, I don’t need a bird to do it.”

Vance frowned. “It left when we got back from Meros. None of my men know where it went.”

“Perhaps it was sent by whoever warned Fortos you were coming, or whoever told the Merosians to poison their ale.”

“Can’t you use that mind magic of yours to figure it out?” Vance grumbled.

“I’ve grown tired of giving help without getting something in return.”

Ophiucae’s eyes slid to me for a brief moment, sending my heart pounding, then returned to Vance. “You’re dismissed.”

Vance stalked toward the Ring Road, muttering colorful words beneath his breath and clenching his good hand around the handle of his blade.

Ophiucae watched, stone-faced and still, until the men were gone, then he set off toward the grasslands.

“Why are you really staying here?” I yelled out.

“Don’t provoke him,” Doriel hissed.

I waved them off, raising my voice even louder. “Is it because you’re afraid to fight?”

Ophiucae ignored me, silently walking away.

I walked to the bars. “You’re too powerful to be such a coward.”

Ophiucae stopped.

My pulse raced. It was a calculated risk. If he was distracted, the shield he’d draped over Vance and his men might falter, which could give whoever they came across a fighting chance to get away.

“Why are we in Sophos at all?” I demanded.

“The people here were weak,” he called out. “I barely had to lift a finger to conquer the realm.” He looked over his shoulder, throwing a cruel smile at Doriel. “It was so easy.”

“I didn’t take you for a man who prefers easy,” I said tartly. “Is that the real reason you came here, or did you know how much the library means to me, so you took it to hurt me?”

“Hurt you?” He whipped around and stormed toward me, looking more enraged than when I’d called him a coward. He slammed against the other side of the bars and jabbed a finger at Doriel, snarling. “Did they not conspire with the Meros King to trap you on the island? Was the Ignios

King not the one who put a blade in your chest? I punished all three of them for their crimes.”

I gripped the bars to steady myself on weakening knees. My advisors had spent many late nights trying to guess where Ophiucae might attack next, debating which realms might offer him the most strategic position or the most useful resources to plunder. We’d even considered whether his targets might be motivated by revenge against whichever of his siblings had wronged him most.

We had not considered his vengeance might not be for himself.

“You did it for me,” I breathed in grisly understanding. Generations lost, realms decimated to cinders, all in a twisted gesture of loyalty. “Call your men back from Umbros. I don’t want this.”

“I have my reasons for taking Umbros, even if you do not.” He held up the book on the heartstone. “And what better place than Sophos to put my research to the test?”

He walked away again, and my panic soared. He was already powerful enough to shield from miles away and take the minds of a realm. What more could he use the heartstone to do?

“Let me come with you,” I called out. “I want to see how it’s done.”

He rumbled a laugh. “So you can use it against me?”

“Not the heartstone,” I added quickly. “I want to see your—our magic.

Show me how it works. You’re the only one who can.”

He turned his head halfway to me, seeming to consider my request.

“Diem, what are you planning?” Doriel murmured.

In truth, I hadn’t thought past getting him to say yes. I only knew that if I didn’t do something, I might not be able to live with myself for what he did next.

“If you want me to join you, it requires trust from us both,” I called out.

At last he relented, striding back to the cell with a hard, inscrutable look. I hurried out the door the moment he unlocked it and kept distance between us, hands clasped at my waist, eyes cast demurely low—the picture of submission.

He eyed me as we walked toward the grasslands. “Do you fear me,

daughter?”

“Yes,” I admitted.

He let out a hum, and I wondered if that pleased or upset him. “Yet you wish to come with me. Alone. Unarmed.”

Extremely unarmed. No weapon, no magic. I couldn’t even lie without his detection.

“My fear isn’t for myself,” I said. “If you wanted me dead, I would be.”

That earned another quiet hum.

“Do you fear me?” I asked.

“You’re brave, indeed,” he said dryly. “A perilous trait. Nothing is more deadly than courage.”

I pretended not to notice the warning underlying his words. “You claimed I was almost as powerful as you. Does that mean you can teach me

to do the things you’ve done?”

“Difficult, without your magic.”

“You can bring it back. Fortos magic can heal flameroot.”

His head snapped to me with a suspicious glare. He took my hand, and I sucked in a breath at the sudden surge of his magic through my blood. It felt just like him: icy, determined, ruthless. And gods, its strength . . . I felt pitifully frail inside its grip, a glass bird in an iron fist.

And yet it wasn’t strong enough. Despite the pummeling of his magic, the flameroot’s muffling barrier didn’t budge.

He knelt and pressed his hand to the soil, and his well of power went from vast to infinite. It felt like all the energy in all the world, every force of nature and every living thing, flowed through his body and into mine. It focused into a sizzling beam to burn the flameroot from my blood—but the flameroot was stronger. Not even a whisper of my godhood escaped its grasp.

His magic built inside me with nowhere to go. My vision blurred, my blood turning molten. My skin felt seconds away from splitting open.

Ophiucae released me with deep, heaving breaths, sweat beading at his temples. “If that was a ploy to drain me . . .”

I collapsed and pressed my scalding-hot cheek to the cool grass. “It wasn’t. In Fortos, I thought . . .”

I held my tongue. I didn’t think I’d healed the flameroot from the Descended I’d freed from the Fortos prison—I knew. Perhaps there was some other force at work that day. It wouldn’t be the first time the gods interfered in my life without explanation.

Or perhaps there was at least one thing my magic could do that his could not.

Ophiucae walked on, and by the time I managed to recover, he lay on his back atop a hill, skin aglow with light. When I approached, his gryvern swung close and snapped its jaws. Even without Faunos magic, I understood: Ophiucae might trust me, but Xipherus did not.

I crouched beside my sire. Though his eyes were closed, his face was furrowed with effort. Sorrow’s Edge lay against his hip, and with his palms pressed to the soil, the book on the heartstone sat on its own beside him—

both objects free for the taking.

His gryvern let out a snarl.

“Xipherus seems to think you’re up to something,” Ophiucae said, eyes still closed.

I glanced at the beast as it circled overhead. “He’d kill me if I tried anything. I’d really prefer to live.”

It was the truest answer I could afford to give—heartbreakingly true. So true that Ophiucae did not stir, and his gryvern angled away.

“You’re pulling from the Forging magic, aren’t you?” I asked.

He nodded. “I can’t believe I almost refused when my siblings asked to bind our magic to the land. I was afraid it would make us weaker.”

“Why did you agree?”

“My siblings never let me absorb their magic, and they ordered their brat spawn to do the same. I hadn’t felt my godhood for years. They offered to replenish it if I went along with the Forging.” His expression turned wistful. “I would have agreed to anything, just to feel magic in my veins again.”

The chasm in my chest opened wider, yearning for something to fill it.

Despite how much I had wanted to be rid of my magic after the slaughter at Mort-Feu Pass, I’d started to miss its presence—not just for the strength it gave me, but for how complete it made me feel. Wielding a sword in one hand and magic in the other, I felt like the truest version of myself: the mortal warrior my father raised me to be, and the Descended Queen I had become.

Maybe that was why I’d lost myself on the island. Without magic, I’d been stripped of half my soul. Without Luther, I was missing half my heart.

I wouldn’t feel whole until I got them both back.

“My realm was not always barren,” he said suddenly, interrupting my thoughts. “Those forests used to be green year-round. The most beautiful

trees you ever laid eyes on.” His features pinched. “It was the only place on this miserable continent I ever liked.”

“When you showed me the children, I saw a tree in the forest regaining its color.”

He nodded again. “With no one of my line to walk its soil, the land withered. It’s healing, now that you and I have returned.” His fingers curled, clawing into the ground. “Another blight on this world we must put to an end.”

I pulled my knees to my chest and looked out over the grasslands. “Will the same thing happen here if Doriel dies?”

“Do not fret. I will not let what happened to my realm happen to any other.”

“But if Vance kills all the Descended, how—”

I stopped.

The children.

Was that the real reason Ophiucae had saved them—to keep the Forging magic strong so he could draw from it forever?

And if the children grew into adults that refused to bow to the man who’d killed their families . . . what would he do with them then?

My eyes shot to Sorrow’s Edge. In the sky, Xipherus gave a low, rumbling growl. Ophiucae’s hand parted from the soil and curled around the golden handle.

“How quick you are to think the worst of me,” he murmured. My heart stirred at the softness of his voice—wounded, perhaps even sad.

He slowly sat up. His other palm left the soil, and the glow of his skin began to fade. For a moment, he looked at me but did not speak, searching my face for an answer I dearly wanted to give, if I only knew the question.

Then his thoughts drifted with his gaze—perhaps to everything and everyone that had left him with scars even centuries couldn’t heal.

It was strange to see someone so fearsome still so visibly haunted by his past. It made him seem more man than god—more father than foe. It made him vulnerable. Relatable. It made his evil deeds easier to forget.

It made him harder to kill.

I pressed my lips tight and sat with him in the silence. I kept him company, as my Prince had done for me, vowing to not let this broken person I cared for endure their troubles alone.

His stare fell to the island. “Will you ever go back?” he asked.

I imagined stepping on those shores again and shuddered. Ophiucae made a curt noise of agreement.

Forging Day was one week away. If I didn’t return to the island to shed my blood on the heartstone, the Forging spell’s magic would decay. Would it truly be a loss if the borders finally crumbled? If everyone, mortal and Descended, could travel freely through the realms and settle in a place that made them happy, instead of being chained to a homeland they never chose?

Ophiucae reached into his pocket and pulled out a golden disc, flicking it open with his thumb. I stilled in recognition of the Meros compass—and its quivering red arrow, pointed right at me. I shifted ever so slightly, and my heart began to pound as the arrow followed my movement.

You cannot trust him, wiser voices warned inside my head. That compass was made with Kindred magic. What if he’s manipulating it to trick

you?

But what if he wasn’t?

Then it’s pointing to the Crowns you wear or some power you have that he desires for himself. If you’re what his heart wants, it’s not out of love. . . . But what if it was?

I could no longer pretend that my hope to change Ophiucae was only about preventing my death. I didn’t just want to live, I wanted a life with him in it. I wanted us both to be cured of the shadows that plagued us, and I wanted us to be more than the enemies that fate had forced us to be.

“Tell me about Andrei,” he said abruptly.

I blinked a few times, surprised to find tears at the corners of my eyes.

“What?”

“Tell me about him.” I flinched at the clash of metal as he snapped the compass shut. “I want to know more about the man who took my place.”

The descriptions of Andrei that came most easily were the labels bestowed on him by others: Legendary war hero. First mortal Commander in Emarion Army history. Advisor to three different Crowns.

Then there were the less flattering labels: Traitor to his kind. Descended puppet.

But none of those things described who he was to me.

“He taught me how to fight,” I said. “How to defend myself, but also how to protect others. How to turn my weaknesses into strengths. How to survive.”

I lay back, stretching out on the grass, and pressed my palms to the soil the way I’d seen Ophiucae do. Though the power running through it was as inaccessible to me as my magic, there was a different connection I sought.

“He didn’t know about you,” I said. “Mother never told him. To him, it didn’t matter. He said we were family, blood ties or not.”

The air felt loaded, as if we both had more to say that we didn’t yet trust the other to hear.

“My father and I were never close,” Ophiucae said. “I was different from my siblings. People whispered that my mother must have grown bored with my father and had an affair. When our parents began the spell to leave our home world, I didn’t want to go, so I waited until my mother and my siblings laid their hands on the heartstone, and when my turn came, I ran. I knew they couldn’t chase me without breaking the spell. The only person who could was my father, and I was sure he’d let me go. He would never risk his real family for me.”

I rolled my head to the side to look at him. “Yet here you are.”

Ophiucae’s features were drawn, caught somewhere between the cold rage that never fully left him and a budding warmth that I still wasn’t sure I

could believe.

“What was he like?” I asked.

“Foolish. Virtuous, in the worst kind of way. Always doing the noble thing, even when it tore our world apart.” One side of his mouth slid up.

“He would have liked you.”

I shifted uncomfortably. I was still getting used to the idea of Ophiucae as my father. Seeing the Kindred and their parents as family was unimaginably foreign. They were the gods who watched our misfortune with heartless indifference, not kindly relatives I unknowingly took after.

“My people were immortal,” he went on. “Now I am the last one alive.”

His head turned, and he met my gaze. “Your father taught you to survive.

So did mine.”

The faint taste of a warning spiced his words, but it no longer shook me.

I saw his threats more clearly now: the pain-crafted defenses of a man who’d been abandoned by everyone he’d ever loved.

“Do you ever wonder if they’re watching us?” I asked. “The men who raised us . . . do you think they’d be proud of what we’ve done?”

His gaze unfocused, and for a moment, he was still.

Then . . . he shuttered. His jaw set, the light in his glacial eyes going a stormy dark. He sat upright and jerked the book on the heartstone into his lap. “Storytime is over. Return to your cell.”

“Wait, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”

“Xipherus, take her back.”

His gryvern speared downward and slammed down beside us. Its fiery breath singed the hairs on my arms as it screeched at me to obey.

“I want to know more about you,” I pleaded. I tried to reach for Ophiucae, but a swipe of his gryvern’s talon sent me scrambling back. “You didn’t bring me all this way to sit in a cage. Twenty years together were stolen from us. This is the chance we never had.”

“Return to your cell,” he barked. “If you will not join me, you can’t be trusted.” He wouldn’t even look at me, his voice growing more detached with every word. He was receding into the safety of his rage, where no one could get close enough to hurt him.

“I can’t join you if I don’t know you,” I begged. “And how can you

accept me until you know me?”

“I know enough.”

“Ophiucae, please, it’s not that simple.”

“You would put me right back on that island to waste away.”

I recoiled. “I would never—”

“You’re plotting to use that sword against me.”

“I’m not!”

Silvery light ignited in his eyes—my secret revealed.

“You lie!”

The book tumbled from his lap as he jumped to his feet. He gripped Sorrow’s Edge in his shaking fist and angled its blade at me. Shadows spilled from his open palm, his angry energy crackling in the air.

I scrambled back as he stalked forward, towering over me. “N-no,” I stammered. “I don’t want to hurt you. I don’t want you to die. Listen to your magic, you’ll see I’m being honest.”

His fury wavered, caught between my lie and my truth.

I glanced down at the razor-sharp blade pointed at my throat. “The sword. Yes, I confess—I tried to steal it back.”

His eyes narrowed. “To use it against me.”

Yes.

And no.

I swallowed. “The heartstone in its blade—I’m afraid of what you’ll use it to do. And because . . . I’m afraid of what it will do to you.”

His chest rose and fell in a dance of ragged breath and stirring wrath.

His eyes were wild, his muscles coiled, but pain was etched across his face.

I’d never seen him so conflicted. So ready to kill me, yet so desperate to take me at my word.

Ophiucae lowered the tip of Sorrow’s Edge to my heart.

I closed my eyes. Held my breath. Awaited my end.

And I thought of Luther, and all the time I wished we’d had.

“Go back to your cell.”

I looked up to see Ophiucae walking away. Xipherus snapped his fangs in my face to push me back, then again, then again, forcing me toward the city. My heart sank as I gave up and turned away. I might not have died, but I’d had a chance to open his heart and I’d failed, and that was the greater loss.

With Xipherus snarling at my back, I shuffled to my cell. A glassy-eyed mortal was waiting there with keys in hand. With the stiffness of compulsion, he unlocked the door and held it open.

I wouldn’t have killed you.

The voice in my head stopped me mid-step.

On the island. I needed your blood, not your life, to get my freedom.

And you were innocent. Just a child. My child.

I looked over my shoulder at his glowing form in the distance, his back still to me.

That was your mother’s true betrayal. Not putting a sword through my chest. Believing I would put one through yours.

Xipherus jabbed his muzzle into my shoulder, shoving me into the cell as the mortal slammed it closed behind me.

I ran forward and gripped the bars of the door. “Father,” I screamed, praying he could hear me. “If you love me at all, don’t use the heartstone. If you do . . . it will destroy us both.”

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