Page 151 of Spark of the Everflame

I couldn’t take it anymore.

The pain, the heat, the weight, thevoice.

I was going to die from it. I wanted to die, if only to make it all stop.

I lifted my hands to the gods as a great beam of light shot from my palms into the heavens.

Take me, I whispered to thevoice.I surrender.

All my senses narrowed in on the warmth that had gathered atop my head, and for a moment, all of existence went preternaturally still.

The light subsided.

Thevoicehushed.

The tingling melted away.

I looked up at my brother, his form watery and blurred. Crying—I was crying, I realized. I blinked until the tears spilled down my cheeks and my vision cleared.

With wild eyes and a horrified stare, Teller whispered the words that would change my life forever.

“Diem—you’re wearing the Crown. You’ve been selected. You are the new Queen of Lumnos.”

Epilogue

ELSEWHERE IN EMARION...

Six months, two weeks, and four days.

She twirled the chalky white rock in her hand as she counted up the rows of jagged lines scratched onto the godstone wall.

She’d learned the last time how quickly the days could get away from her. A week could feel like a year, or a month could feel like a day. When the soldiers had arrived to take her home from this place two decades ago, if it weren’t for the newborn in her arms, they could have easily convinced her she’d been gone for years.

This time, she’d been more careful. She’d tracked each sunset with a single white line, grouped in batches of seven, counting as the days ticked by.

Six months, two weeks, and four days.

When she’d left, the King’s condition was already so weak, his mind murky and his power faded to embers. She had prepared, both mentally and in a more practical sense, to wait out the final throes of his death in solitude for a few weeks, perhaps a month or two at most.

She hadn’t counted on the King holding out for the better part of a year.

As it often did these days, uncertainty nipped at her heels. What if the King made a full recovery? What if she had misread the signs and he had only been struck by some temporary illness?

With a task this dangerous, she had only been able to trust three people with her plan, and only two with her location. Even if one of them was willing to risk their life to rescue her, it had taken her twenty years to find a way back into this place. When would the next opportunity arise for them?

She could be stuck here for years. Decades. Centuries. Her body could be dust in the wind before another mortal soul touched this soil.

She tucked the hunk of chalk into her bag and rolled the covering of leaves back over her makeshift calendar. There was no point in wallowing over what-ifs. She’d known the risks when she came here. If this was her final resting place, so be it.

She whistled a tune to ease her mind as she started her daily routine—or rather, her nightly routine. It was too dangerous to wander among the sunlight and risk being spotted, so she’d learned to survive only in the darkness. It hadn’t been so bad during those warm summer evenings when she could lie under the stars, but winter was fast approaching. The nights were getting colder and food was getting scarce. Soon she would have to make some difficult decisions between staying hidden and staying alive.

But not yet, she chided herself.Soon—but not yet.

She circled the trails crisscrossing the land and checked each one of the locations she had mapped out for the culmination of her plan. She cleared debris from the walking paths and verified each of her stockpiles—fresh water, food stores, weapons, and the precioussurprisesshe’d miraculously managed to sneak in. She edged as close as she dared to each of the ports of entry, making slight adjustments wherever nature’s forces had dislodged her preparations.

She even managed to do a bit of hunting, winning herself a rare warm dinner from a warren of rabbits, whose unexpected presence here she could only attribute to a gift from the Old Gods. The large meal had her in such good spirits that she even talked herself into approaching the glittering black stone door.

It had been the first place she visited when she’d returned to this awful place. During the agonizing journey, it had been all her mind could think of. What would she find here?Whowould she find here?

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