Chapter
One
hallucination.A It had to be a hallucination.
That was the only explanation. The visions I’d been carefully avoiding for a decade were back, and I only had myself to blame.
For years, I’d taken a regimen of a rare substance known as flameroot to ward off the wild, impossible delusions I’d developed as a young girl—delusions that I could feel things, do things, that mortals like me should not be able to feel and do.
Before disappearing without a trace almost seven months ago, my mother—the best healer in Lumnos, Realm of Light and Shadows, one of the nine realms of Emarion—had been obsessed with ensuring I took my daily dose. She warned me the visions could come back if I missed even a single day.
Well, I’d certainly missed more than a day.
Several weeks had passed since I’d hurled my entire supply of the distinctive red powder into the sea for reasons that, even now, I struggled to explain.
Perhaps because of the way it dulled my emotions and left me feeling hollow and cold, or perhaps because of the mysterious black-eyed woman who cornered me in a dark alley and urged me to give it up after revealing family secrets she never should have known.
At the time, the flameroot had represented everything I hated about my life—every loss, every mystery, every invisible harness that held me back in my sheltered, mundane life. Throwing it away had made me feel free in a way I’d never experienced in all my life.
But now, doubled over on my hands and knees in a circle of smoldering, newly blackened grass outside my family home, with my younger half-brother Teller staring in shock at the space just above my head, I felt anything but free. And the flameroot, my only chance at salvation from this insanity I had so recklessly invited, now lay at the bottom of the Sacred Sea.
Panic gripped me by the throat as Teller’s words haunted my thoughts.
Diem—you’re wearing the Crown. You’ve been selected. You are the new Queen of Lumnos.
“I’m going mad,” I said hoarsely. “I’ve lost my mind, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it.”
“You’re not going mad,” Teller said, though his expression was less than convincing. “I can see the Crown myself—it’s floating right over you.”
I reached up to rip it away, my fingers clawing for purchase, but I felt only cold, empty air.
Teller’s face grew brighter as he approached me, illuminated by an unearthly light. I whipped around to search the shadowy forest for its source before realizing the light had come from me—from the space above my head, and from a silvery glow
emanating from my skin.
Another delusion.
A hopeless whimper escaped my lips.
“I’ll get Father,” Teller said. “If he can see it, too, then—”
“No!” I shouted. Our father, Andrei, was already furious with me. The fight we’d had—oh gods, the horrible things I’d said
to him...
You are not my father!
Where is our mother? Why did you stop looking for her? Why haven’t you grieved her loss?
Perhaps you do not look because you do not care. Perhaps you’re the real reason she’s gone.
I regretted every word.
Though he was not my father by blood, Andrei had claimed the role with fierce dedication. His love for me and my mother was indisputable, and although no part of me truly believed he had played a role in her disappearance, my frustration over our family’s endless secrets had pushed my temper to its limit.
He might never forgive me for being so cruel. If he found out I’d also been lying to him about the flameroot...
“Don’t tell him yet,” I begged. “Please, Teller.”
“We have to tell someone. If that really is the Crown of Lumnos, that means the King is dead, and you’re going to have to...”
He shook his head, unable to get the words out.
No.
This was all part of the hallucination. It had to be.
Maybe Teller wasn’t even here. Maybe I was talking to myself, lost in my own insanity.
My focus shifted to the marshy shoreline that ran in front of our family’s land, the same spot where I’d flung the vials of flameroot into the sea. The current was strong in this area, but maybe...
I climbed to my feet and staggered toward the water’s edge, clumsily kicking off my boots and unlatching my weapons. I was still wearing Prince Luther’s tunic and the plated armor pants of the Royal Guard uniform, after his cousin had dressed me when my own clothes were incinerated by the armory fire. The fabric soaked up the frigid water like a sponge, plastering to my skin and weighing me down to the muddy seafloor.
“By the Flames, Diem, what are you doing?” Teller protested. “Come back, it’s as cold as the glaciers of hell out there.”
I didn’t answer, my mind too focused on my search. I dove under the surface and tried to spot some sign of the distinctive jars, but the water was too murky to see more than a foot through its cloudy depths.
I came up gasping for breath and caught sight of my reflection on the surface. Even through the ripples, I could see it hovering above me, its scattered dots of light twinkling like gemstones.
The Crown of Lumnos.
No, I told myself. Not the Crown—just my imagination. My madness.
A fresh wave of dread sent me wading deeper into the water and thrashing wildly as I rummaged along the seabed.
“Diem, come back to shore,” Teller called out. “We’ll figure this out.”
“I can’t,” I yelled back. “I can’t. I... I have to...”
“Come back, or I’m going to get Father.”
“No!” I whirled around and saw the panic in Teller’s caramel-brown eyes.
“Please, Diem,” he begged. “You’re scaring me.”
“The flameroot—I threw it out here a few weeks ago. I was angry, and I...” I pushed myself deeper into the ink-black sea.
“I need to find it. I can stop all of this if I can just find it.”
My brother’s expression shifted to something like pity as his voice dropped low. “The flameroot isn’t going to stop this, D.
That Crown is real.”
“No,” I rasped, an invisible noose tightening around my neck.
“Remember when we were little,” he said gently, “and you were so scared the flameroot wouldn’t work. You made me promise to tell you if your mind was starting to go, and I swore to you that I would. Do you remember?”
I managed a nod.
“I need you to trust me. I’m telling you, on my life, that you are not imagining this. I don’t know how in the nine realms this happened, but that powder won’t make it go away.”
His tone was so earnest that I might have believed him, had I been listening. But my focus had shifted—to the dark-haired, blue-eyed, finely dressed Descended girl standing behind him holding a bouquet of white roses whose petals seemed to be dipped in glowing moonlight.
The flowers tumbled to the ground. “Blessed Kindred, you... you’re...”
Teller stumbled backward. “Lily! What are you doing here?”
Her gaze locked on me—on the spot above my head. “Diem said I could come for dinner, and I thought...” Her hands flew to her mouth. “Is—is it real? Are you...?”
Lily’s unexpected arrival snapped me out of my stupor. I waded back to the shore, trying to find the words to tell her that no, this couldn’t be real, not for a thousand different reasons, but the words wouldn’t come. At the moment, real was too complicated a concept.
“This means our King is dead,” Lily murmured. She sank to her knees and placed a fist over her heart. “Long live our Queen.”
“Please, don’t,” I protested, attempting to wring the liquid from my waterlogged clothes. “I’m not your Queen.”
Teller’s eyes darted between us. Slowly, he began to drop to his knees. “Long live—”
“Oh stop it,” I hissed and grabbed his arm, hauling him back to his feet. “Not you, too.”
Lily lowered her head. “Blessed Mother Lumnos has chosen you.”
“Then she made a mistake. I can’t be the—will you please stand up?—I can’t be the Queen. I’m only a mortal.”
Growing up in the poor village of Mortal City, I’d spent my life isolated from the luxurious world of the Descended, the offspring of nine sibling gods and goddesses known as the Kindred, who long ago colonized our mortal home. I knew very little of the rules of royalty, but I did know this much: when a monarch died, their throne passed to the most powerful Descended. Only those with the blood of Lumnos flowing in their veins had ever worn her Crown.
Until now.
Lily rose, her face still aglow with reverence. “Perhaps she decided it’s time for a mortal to reign.”
“Has that ever happened before?” I asked.
She shook her head. “None of the nine realms has ever had a mortal Crown. But they say Blessed Mother Lumnos can see what lies in the future. Maybe she believes a change is needed.”
“Or maybe you’re not mortal,” Teller said quietly.
My focus shot to my brother. “How can you say that? Do I look like a Descended to you?”
He ran a hand down the back of his neck and scanned me from head to toe as if seeing me for the very first time. “You’re tall, like they are. You’ve always been strong. I haven’t seen you bleed from a wound since...” He stiffened. “Since your visions started.”
“Of course you have,” I argued, though as my thoughts tumbled through a web of memories, I couldn’t seem to think of one, either.
Only once—weeks ago, at the royal palace, when a Descended guard had nicked my throat with his blade. But that knife had been Fortosian steel, one of the only substances that could pierce Descended flesh. Their nearly impenetrable skin, along with quick healing and the power to wield magic, manifested in Descended children at puberty—the same time my visions began.
My last confrontation with Prince Luther played in my mind, his striking blue-grey eyes watching me through the bloody handprints I’d left across his skin.
I know you feel my power, he’d taunted. Because I can feel yours, too. You’re no more mortal than I am.
No. No, no, no, no.
I had to be a mortal. My mother would know if the man who sired me had been Descended, and she would never keep that
from me.
Would she?
“What about your eyes?” Lily asked, squinting as she looked closer for the telltale blue that would mark me as a Lumnos Descended, as opposed to the brown of the mortals. “I’ve never noticed before. Are they...?”
“Grey,” I answered. “Not like the mortals or the Descended. But I was born with brown eyes, they changed when I—”
Lily’s gasp cut me off. “Grey? Your eyes are grey?”
“Why? Does that mean something?”
“Show me,” she insisted.
My shoulders tensed. I had long ago learned to be wary of the attention my unusual eye color attracted. Children of mixed mortal-Descended heritage were forbidden by law, and any blue-eyed child who couldn’t prove pure-blooded lineage was condemned to execution if they were found.
A strong reason for your mother to lie about what you are, my conscience reminded me.
Lily let out a strangled cry as she took in my smoky irises. She staggered back, then turned as if to flee. “I have to go. I have to tell Luther about this. He’s been—”
“No!” I ran forward and clutched her shoulders. “Lily, you cannot tell your brother. You have to promise me you won’t say a word.”
“You don’t understand, Luther can help you. He saw—”
“I don’t want his help,” I snapped, a little too harshly. I regretted the hurt that flickered across her face, but this was one area where Lily and I would never see eye to eye.
Her brother had been the King’s heir apparent, groomed to take the throne from a young age. His magic was so infamously strong, no one had even been considered a close second. Luther’s name had been all but engraved on the Crown.
And considering that only hours ago, I’d sliced a blade into his throat as we’d threatened each other’s lives—among other deeply unsettling exchanges—I wasn’t in any rush to tell him it now belonged to me.
“He cannot know about this,” I said. “No one can. Not yet, at least. Please Lily, I’m begging you.”
“But you’re our Queen,” she whispered, looking pained.
I gripped her tighter. “If I’m your Queen, then you have to obey me, correct? You must do as I command?”
She bit her lip and nodded.
“Then I command you as your Queen—tell no one about this. Especially Prince Luther.”
She let out a whimper as she realized she was caught.
“Everyone’s going to know the moment they take one look at you,” Teller said, pointing to the Crown.
“There must be a way to conceal it or take it off.” I looked at Lily hopefully. “Right?”
“King Ulther only wore it for special occasions,” she said, then hesitated. “But perhaps it can’t be removed until you complete the Rite.”
“She means the Rite of Coronation. It’s a ritual held on Coeurîle,” he explained, pointing across the Sacred Sea toward the forbidden island at its center. I’d never been more grateful that my brother was the one mortal invited to attend Lumnos’s prestigious Descended school, making him well versed in their arcane traditions.
“When is that?” I asked.
“After the Period of Challenging. In thirty days, any Descended in the realm can Challenge the new Crown, if they believe that person to be...” He shot me a sympathetic look. “...unworthy to wear it.”
“Good.” I gave a short laugh as tightly wound tension eased from my bones. “Perfect, actually. Luther can Challenge me.
Gods, I’ll just give it to him. Let them all find me unworthy, for all I care.”
Teller and Lily shared a somber glance.
“It’s not that simple,” he said slowly. “If someone invokes the Challenging, they must duel until either the Crown or the Challenger is killed.” Teller looked ill. “It’s a fight to the death, D.”
“Surely there’s some other way...” My voice fell silent at the dread on my brother’s face.
My world began to splinter around me. If all this was true, life as I knew it was over. The mortals, with their well-earned distrust of the Descended and their outright hatred of the royals, would run me out of the village. Would I even survive long enough to make peace with my father? To find my missing mother?
And Henri. Oh gods, Henri.
My childhood sweetheart, the man whose marriage proposal still hung unanswered over my head—and the man who had brought me into the bloody fold of the Guardians of the Everflame, the mortal resistance. The Guardians had proven there was no line they wouldn’t cross to destroy the Descended. If they believed I was one of them—and worse, the Crown...
I started to sink under the heaviness of it all. One day ago, I was an inconsequential mortal girl living an unimportant life, and now I was... what even was I?
“Tell me this is a hallucination,” I whispered. “Tell me I’ve lost my mind and this is some awful dream.”
Teller’s arms slid around my shoulders. “Whatever happens, you won’t be alone. We’ll figure this out together.”
The rough tremble in his voice nearly broke me apart. With his elite education, he knew far more than I did about the consequences the Crown would bring. If he was this scared...
Shame swept through me and cooled the molten burn of my panic. I was the elder sibling—I was supposed to be strong for him. Promise him that everything would be fine. With his quiet, steady manner, he had already been a rock for our family since our mother’s disappearance. I couldn’t let him carry this burden, too.
I took a deep breath, crushing the fear down, down, down into a leaden ball that I could roll away into the shadows of my heart. I pulled away from Teller and placed a palm on his cheek. The light from the Crown filled his eyes with a brilliant glow, revealing the anxiety he was trying so valiantly to hide.
“Tomorrow, go to Father and Henri. Tell them I’ve left town to visit a friend, and you’re not certain when I’ll return.”
He shot a look toward our family’s cottage. “Are you sure we shouldn’t tell Father now? What if Mother told him something before she...” He trailed off.
“Not yet. I need to sort this out for myself first.”
Teller frowned, but nodded. I gave a silent prayer of thanks for the gift of a loyal brother—though whether my prayers were meant for the Descended’s Kindred or the Old Gods of the mortals, I was no longer sure.
“Where will we go tonight?” he asked.
“You’re staying here. I need you to go through your books from school for anything about the Crown, this Rite of Coronation, the Challenging—anything you can find that might help me get me out of this.”
“What about you?”
That, I had no answer for. I couldn’t risk being seen by anyone until I learned how to hide this infernal thing floating over my head.
“I can help,” Lily jumped in. “There’s a cabin on the royal hunting grounds, not far from the palace. No one would dare use it without permission from the Crown, so you won’t be disturbed. Besides, you’re the true owner.” She shrugged. “All the royal properties belong to you now.”
My heart skipped a beat at the idea that all the opulence and excess I had once despised the royals for hoarding was now mine to possess. To think of what I could do with all that wealth—the problems I could solve, the people I could help...
I shook my head to clear the thoughts away. I had no intention of keeping the throne, and certainly no desire to fight anyone to the death for it. This was all one massive, unthinkable mistake.
I just needed some time to prove it.
