Page 101 of Burn of the Everflame

26

DIEM

The acrid smell of burning wool stung the inside of my nose, the thick 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.