Page 37 of Glow of the Everflame

Despite the chilly air, the heat building inside me felt as if it might consume me whole. I wiped at the sweat dripping from my face. “I haveso manyreasons to hate you.”

“Do you?” he growled. “Or is it easier to blame your anger on me than look in the mirror and confront the truth?”

Fight.

Kill.

Destroy.

My vision went hazy, my body at once too hot and too cold. Burning and freezing, scalding and crystallizing, incinerating and shattering.

“Stop running away, Diem. Face what you are and what you’re meant to become.”

I groaned and squeezed my trembling palms to my temples. Thevoicewas screeching with its cries to be unleashed, dragging its claws down my throat and smashing its fists against my brittle skull.

I couldn’t take it, couldn’tsurviveit.

“I thought you were fearless.” Luther’s lip curled back over his teeth. “So stop being such a coward.”

FIGHT.

KILL.

DESTROY.

I snapped.

One moment I was shaking, panting, and then—

I was levitating. Hovering in the air, cocooned by a glowing white sphere that crackled and hummed as my hair danced around my shoulders in a churning breeze. Spiked tendrils of pale blue light twirled from the orb’s surface, slinking across the floor and transforming the dungeon into a luminous jungle of gnarled, sharp-tipped vines.

A hazy black liquid dripped from each thorn, as if bleeding from within. It swirled and swelled, the floor awash with it—a lake of shadows, then a sea, its ominous tide cresting in waves and lapping at the walls.

Luther yielded a step as the inky darkness splashed against his legs. He shielded his eyes at my blinding glow, but my own eyes had perfect clarity as they narrowed on him.

And he was grinning.Grinning.

The sight of it undid me.

I was a dying star, exploding and imploding, consuming all I touched.

My piercing screams were echoed by the roar of my distant gryvern as a blast of pure energy ripped from my chest. Luther cast a shield in a dome around me, and my power blazed past it like a fire through parchment. Magic crashed against the dungeon walls, fissures splintering across the rattling stone ceiling.

Luther grunted with effort and crafted another shield around me, then another. The silvery flames that shot from my skin burned through each one with ease, dissolving into a mist that froze as it landed and coated the obsidian waves with a foam of glittering frost.

I lost all sense of self. My body was no longer one soul but thousands of them. They flowed like roots from the soil beneath the palace, snaking through the stone and burrowing under my skin. They pulsed in rhythm in my core, each one lending their power to my own.

One stood out in particular, a spirit brighter than all the others combined. Its face wavered in my vision, too hazy to see clearly except for one feature: two grey eyes, so much like my own, staring back at me. Their corners crinkled as if in a smile.

A smile of promise. A smile of fate.

It might have lasted only a second, or an hour, or a lifetime. When it ended, I was on my knees. A starry glow still shone from within, my veins coal-black under luminescent skin. The floor had cratered beneath me, and between the cracks, sprouts were visible through the rubble.

And then I heard laughing.

I looked up. Luther’s magic armor had vanished. His clothes hung in tattered shreds that smoked from where they’d been singed, the scar across his chest peeking through the ragged fabric. His bloody body was covered in a collage of cuts and burns, one eyebrow half-scorched from his face—but he was radiant. Practically giddy. His smile stretched from ear to ear, his eyes gleaming with delighted shock.

There was no more cold veneer—this was Luther unmasked, and he was boldly, unreservedlyhappy.

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