Glow of the Everflame （Kindred's Curse, #2）
Penn Cole
For every spark that has lost its light
and needs a little help
remembering how to glow.
Chapter
One
A hallucination.
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?”