Page 150 of Spark of the Everflame

“Why haven’t you grieved her loss,Father?Why do you speak as if she’ll walk through that door at any moment? What do you know that we don’t?”

The tingling coursed up my arms and scorched through my chest. Something crackled in my ears, and the corners of my vision went dark as the walls of the house faded from sight, leaving only the enraged man in front of me and an endless, angry darkness.

Fight.

Destroy.

Just like those weeks ago when I’d quarreled with Henri in Fortos, I was consumed with the overwhelming urge to hurt him—to crush his body and his spirit, to strike a wound so vicious he might never recover.

And so I did—with words, if not with weapons.

“Perhaps you do not look because you do not care. Perhapsyou’rethe real reason she’s gone.”

“Diem,” Teller gasped.

Father detonated, overturning the table and sending dishes and chairs scattering across the floor. “Get out,” he roared. “Get out of my house!”

“Gladly,” I snarled. I shoved past Teller and across the threshold, slamming the door behind me.

ChapterThirty-Two

Istormed across the patch of land surrounding the house and toward the watery marsh. Though night had fallen and the forest was barely visible under the thin wink of moonlight, the ground seemed to glow with its silvery light at my feet. I was still struggling to think, struggling tobreathe.

Behind me, the distant call of Teller’s voice yelled my name, but I couldn’t stop.

My anger wasn’t subsiding—it was growing. Mutating. I had completely lost control, and I had no clue what I was capable of.

I hurtled through the trees, barely noticing the sting of the wayward branches that whipped at my face. A root caught my foot and sent me crashing to my knees in a clearing near the shore.

I was hot—why was I sohot?

There were too many sounds.

My ragged, panting breaths. Teller’s muffled voice. Something sizzling beneath my palms.

And thevoice. It was no longer just chanting—now it was taunting me, singing to me, pleading with me, screaming at me. I clamped my hands over my ears to block it all out, but it only grew louder until it drowned out all else.

Free me, Daughter of the Forgotten.

“Diem, are you alright?” Teller’s voice cut through the cacophony as he carefully approached.

I couldn’t see him—the light was too blinding. Even in the dark shroud of night, it was as if the sun itself stood over me and shook its disappointed head.

“What’s happening to me?” I whimpered. My fingers clawed into the damp, peaty soil, and I heard the hiss of steam. Beneath my palms, the ground had turned into a blanket of complete darkness, and for a moment I felt lost in a freefall through the evening sky, never again to land.

Far away, a shrill and inhuman cry roared through the night. An ancient sound.

A mourning—and a calling.

Release me.

The top of my head throbbed with undulating waves of pressure and pain. Slowly it began to condense and take solid form as an excruciating heat gathered in its place. And a heaviness—a colossal heft that threatened to crush my bones into stardust.

Teller cried out. “Diem, you’re—you’re—oh gods...oh my gods...”

Suddenly, I was screaming. My throat was scratchy and raw—perhaps I had been screaming the whole time. My connection to reality had become tenuous, my body too overwhelmed with warring sensations to separate the real from the imagined.

Claim me. I am your birthright and your destiny.

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