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Flame in spirit, flame in sight The desert holds their fiery might
For anyone who has ever been told their spark shouldn’t burn so bright and for all the people who loved them precisely because it did.
Only one thing is certain: my mother’s disappearance on that hot, cursed afternoon set off a chain of reactions so unexpected, so far-reaching, that even the gods themselves could not predict the consequences that would later come to pass.
And so it’s there that my story begins.
Though I gave their roaming hands a wide berth, I couldn’t avoid the hooded, red-rimmed eyes that followed me with too much interest.
A patient had died on my watch.
It had lit a spark deep within me, a need for justice, that I was struggling to ignore.
“Strange to have a blood sun on Forging Day,”
white...
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In the old mortal religions, a blood sun was said to be a warning from the gods, a harbinger of great upheaval.
“That blood sun was the day of my birth.”
Though Forging Day was our most raucous holiday, it wasn’t one that most mortals looked on with fondness.
On this day many millennia ago, nine immortal siblings known as the Kindred crafted a magical pact—the Forging—after seeking refuge in our world following the violent destruction of their own.
Through the Forging spell, Emarion was broken up into nine realms, each named for one of the Kindred and infused with its patron god’s or goddess’s respective magic.
Forging Day was meant to remind us, mortal and Descended alike, of that lofty goal.
The day that control of our world passed to them by way of inheritance, one of many gifts bequeathed by their divine ancestors. Our mortal ancestors hadn’t been quite so generous to us.
Lumnos City,
ruling class, I might as well live a world
Mortal City felt like a tinderbox, one spark away from exploding.
It’s never the enemy who attacks outright who will strike your killing blow, he’d taught me. It’s the one who hides in the shadows and waits. The one who strikes when you’ve finally looked away. Those are the true predators to fear.
Mortals could only bear brown eyes, another consequence of the Forging spell.
Descended hoarded the more fanciful shades of the rainbow for themselves, just as they had with so many other beautiful things in Emarion. Each realm’s Descended had their own distinct eye color, with Lumnos Descended all sporting various shades of blue—although,
When the brown eyes and auburn hair I was born with unexpectedly turned colorless
Survive, my father’s words echoed in my ears. At whatever cost, to whatever end. Survive first, mind the consequences later.
Say what you want about the women of Paradise Row, but they certainly were loyal.
Cold, emotionless eyes. Blue-grey eyes. Descended eyes.
Some could barely summon a spark. Others could drown the entire realm in darkness.
“Those eyes—a gift from your father, aren’t they? Your real father.”
“That mother of yours thought she could hide it from the world. Thought she could hide it from you with that little powder of hers. But secrets like that can’t stay kept forever.”
There was no way she could know about the powder and the reason I took it. No one outside my family knew—and no one inside my family would dare share it. Unless...
My body was no longer mine to control. Not so brave now, are you? Her voice echoed in my head—only it was different somehow, more refined. Smooth like molten platinum, radiating with power.
When we meet again, remember this moment, child. How I could have made you kneel. How I could have made you beg.
“When forgotten blood on heartstone falls, then shall the chains be broke,” she crooned. “Life for life, old debt requires, or eternal be his yoke.”
More days passed with no answers. Then weeks. Then months. And still... she did not come home.
“Dead girl walking,”
He would say those were necessary side effects, that the hallucinations the flameroot prevented—symptoms of a disease I’d inherited from my birth father, the same illness that turned my eyes grey and my hair white at age ten—would be far more severe than a clouded mind.
Fight.
Fight.
My thoughts flickered to a black-eyed woman in a darkened alley.
“You know Descended can’t use their magic while they’re outside of their home realm,”
“Try not to plot any more royal assassinations in public, please.”
Lumnos, Realm of Light and Shadow, was one of the more mortal-friendly of the nine realms of Emarion,
Fortos, Realm of Force and Valor,
Blue eyes. A Descended.
Ethereal beauty and wicked to the core.
“You may call her Princess Lilian,”
“Silverworm. It’s made from a lovely white flower that grows near the shore.”
Olive skin. Blue-grey eyes. A long, uneven scar. Him. It was him.
An inferno kindled deep in my chest.
Fight.
