Page 39 of Burn of the Everflame

“He was never like the rest of us. Even his magic worked differently than ours. He could not create magic, only absorb it from others and reuse it. He learned to provoke others into using their magic against him so he could steal it.”

“He was a brat,” Fortos muttered.

“And a bully,” Meros added.

“He was a scared boy with no magic in a world at war,” Lumnos cut in, shooting her siblings a reproachful look. “He protected himself the only way he knew how.” She turned to me. “He resented us for leaving. He believed we should have fought harder to save our world. When we arrived, he withdrew into the northern forests. We thought he needed time, so we let him be.”

She smiled. “Then we met our mates. We fell in love, and the nine of us decided to bind our lives to theirs. We knew our youngest would never agree to join us, but we thought he’d be no danger to the people of this world.” Her smile faded. “And so we made our first mistake.”

“The great power we spoke of,” Sophos cut in, “when we came to this world, we brought a piece of it with us. You know it as the heartstone. We used it to cast the Forging spell. It bound our lives to our mates, and it bound our magic to Emarion. We crafted the realms—ten, including one for our youngest. We hoped that giving him a Crown and some land to call his own might bring him peace.”

“What it brought him,” Umbros said, “was an unlimited source of power. He no longer needed to be attacked to take our magic—he could pull it directly from the soil. He went from our weakest to more powerful than all of us combined.”

“At first, we didn’t realize what we’d done,” Sophos continued. “He went back to his forests, and we had our children, the first Descended. We grew old alongside our mates. The end of our lives was nearing. Then we made our second mistake.”

“That wretched tree,” Faunos grumbled.

My spine straightened. “The Everflame?”

Lumnos winced. “I doubt you will believe us, but we did not cut down the tree to replace the mortals’ faith. We intended to celebrate the Forging with a monument using the wood from the Everflame’s trunk. The cauldrons were meant to be lit by its flames. It was to be a site that would represent both Emarion’s past and its future.”

My mouth hung open in an incredulous stare. Umbros raised a hand. “Save your barbs, little one. We’ve had millennia to think on our faults. Your disgust with us could not exceed our own.”

“We were blinded by pride,” Montios said. “The mortals called us gods, and we allowed ourselves to believe it.”

“It was a disaster,” Sophos said. “When the tree fell, the wood turned into sparkling black rock.”

“Godstone?” I asked. “It came from the Everflame? The history books say you created it.”

“In a way, we did, though we knew nothing of what it was or what it could do. Not until . . .”

Near the brush, Arboros burst into tears. She pressed a palm to her mouth to cover her sobs as Meros pulled her close to comfort her.

Sophos’s voice softened. “Her firstborn cut his hand on a piece of the stone. That’s how we learned what its poison could do to our children.”

“We built the Temple out of godstone, hoping the mortals would see it as our way of honoring their faith,” Umbros said. “But many saw it as an insult instead. A group rose against us, demanding we be punished for cutting down the tree. They called themselves the Guardians of the Everflame.”

“The Guardians existed even then?” I asked.

“And they despised us as much then as they do now. We called a meeting with our youngest brother. It was the first we’d seen of him in years. We wanted to reverse the Forging spell as an offering of goodwill to the mortals, but he refused. He believed we should kill any mortals who threatened us harm . . . and that’s what he began to do.”

I recoiled a step. “And you let him?”

“We didn’t know how to stop him,” Arboros protested, her eyes still wet with tears. “When we realized how powerful he had become, we were terrified. He said it was our destiny to rule this world so it could never be taken from us like our home world was.”

“Not our destiny,” Faunos corrected. “His. He believed that when we died, all of Emarion would be his to inherit.”

“The more he fought the mortals, the more they turned against us,” Sophos said. “We had to do something before it was too late.”

“It was the hardest decision we ever made,” Lumnos said quietly. “We were supposed to guide him. It was our responsibility to teach him love instead of hate.” Her gaze lowered. “We failed.”

No one disagreed.

“So you decided to imprison him on the island?” I asked.

“No,” Fortos said. “We decided to kill him.”

The Kindred gathered in an arc around me, their faces somber. “The magic you think of as ours,” Sophos said, “the light and shadow, the wind and tides . . . for us, these are small tricks, limited by the world as it currently exists. Faunos can speak to animals, but he cannot create them. Fortos can kill the living, but he cannot raise the dead. The real magic lies in the force inside the heartstone. It is the power of gods—it can rewrite existence itself. Few of our kind understood how to use it. Even the nine of us were only novices. We were brought here by . . .” He hesitated. “ . . . someone else.”