52 pages • 1 hour read
Penn ColeGlow of the Everflame
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2023A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Quest for Self-Discovery
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of violence.
Diem Bellator’s first-person account traces her agonizing search for the truest version of herself. At the novel’s beginning, Diem discovers that the gods have chosen her to be the new Queen of Lumnos, and she initially resists this calling because she is convinced that she is a mortal and has no right to the throne. Furthermore, Diem initially defines her identity according to her old life in Mortal City, where her days were consumed with her work as a healer and her relationships with her family and her childhood sweetheart, Henri Albanon, who have shaped her understanding of who she is. Now, faced with a million dramatic changes in her life, she fears the necessity of accepting her royal calling because to do so would be to forsake her identity as she has come to understand it. Her foray into palace life thus launches her journey toward self-discovery.
Diem’s first-person perspective illustrates the finer nuances of her struggle to find and claim her true identity. When she first arrives at the palace “wearing ill-fitting clothing that [stinks] of brine,” her “colorless eyes rimmed red with exhaustion” (31), Diem feels out of place and alone among the royals. Her perception of her own lowly status grants access to her interior world and captures her feelings of being unmoored in this realm. She describes herself as a mess because this is how she sees herself, and her narrative tone is questioning, uncertain, and self-critical. Over the course of the chapters that follow, however, Diem’s narrative tone evolves. She gradually stops questioning who she is and learns to accept that she is still discovering who she wants to become.
Once Diem learns to listen to her heart, she is better able to embrace her identity. While her palace life often makes her feel like a “speck of dust floating through a mighty ray of sunshine” (48), over time she comes to realize her true power, standing up for herself and using her voice just as she once did in her home village. She starts to articulate her deepest beliefs and declares her desire to help her people and take charge of her own life. At the novel’s end, Diem has finally figured out how to activate her magical powers by channeling her desires and emotions. With the sheer force of her will, she proves herself to the other Descended and to herself, and this stage of her evolution proves that she is true to herself and others only when she listens to her heart.
Challenges of Balancing Love and Duty
Diem’s integration into palace life challenges her to balance her desires and responsibilities. Before the Crown of Lumnos appears above Diem’s head, Diem regards herself as a mere mortal. She is loyal to her family and friends and wants to help support her people in the face of the Descended’s threats. However, with the beginning of Glow of the Everflame, these desires and duties become less clear to Diem as she is thrust into the world of the Descended. As the presumptive queen, Diem feels caught between others’ expectations and her own desires for her future.
Diem’s conflicted feelings for Luther and Henri further complicate her ability to embrace the most authentic version of herself. Even though she and Henri have grown apart and have never really seen eye-to-eye on many important issues, Diem continues to feel loyal to Henri, and she also believes that she is responsible for his happiness. Her attachment to him stems from the fact that they have been friends since childhood and have had an intimate relationship, and share some overlapping beliefs. However, once Diem leaves Mortal City, she feels herself growing apart from Henri, and this new emotional distance is augmented by her deepening relationship with Luther, who offers her guidance and heightens her senses. Her attraction to Luther feels like love but abrades her sense of duty to Henri, and Diem’s feelings for her old lover are also hindered by the law of the land, which states that “relationships between mortals and Descended […] are forbidden” (71).
As the new Queen of Lumnos, Diem hopes that she will be able to fight for her people and succeed in negotiating peace between the mortals and Descended. She therefore fears that her romantic entanglements might endanger her duty to the realm. She also struggles to claim and act upon her feelings, because she fears that her love for her family, friends, and prospective lovers will compromise her royal reputation.
The author uses Diem’s ongoing internal conflict to show that others’ expectations often limit a person’s ability to pursue their own course in life. Throughout much of the novel, Diem does not feel free to choose who to love, and she is also denied the agency to choose her own battles. After discovering her status as a Descended, she must refrain from the liberated habits that characterized her childhood, and her new adult duties weigh heavily upon her and threaten to stifle her spirit. By the novel’s end, however, Diem learns to follow her heart—a lesson that is exemplified by her passionate kiss with Luther in the arena, as well as her crowd-pleasing display of magic at the Challenging. These moments convey Diem’s newfound ability to balance her desires with the needs and expectations of others.
Burden of Leadership
As Diem spends more time at the palace, her new leadership position becomes a heavy burden that threatens to overwhelm her. Because Diem is a strong-willed person, she has definitive ideas about what she can accomplish as the new queen. However, the other Descended houses and royals complicate her ability to rule the way she wants to rule, and the royal houses of Corbois, Hanoverre, and Byrnum find different ways to challenge her authority and complicate her foray into the political world. For example, the Corbois family invites Diem in, but they also try to control the choices that she makes. By contrast, Houses Hanoverre and Byrnum contest her right to the throne and convince the other houses to work against her. These fraught relationships make Diem feel “completely, eternally alone” (89), and even after she discovers her magic and realizes that being a Descended queen is her destiny, she fears that her future will be defined by “painful, heartbreaking decades” (89). Her trepidation in the novel’s early chapters conveys the confining elements of palace life and suggests that Diem’s new leadership role complicates her sense of identity and her future, alienating her from the world around her.
Leadership also feels burdensome to Diem because she is caught between her long-held loyalty to the mortals and her newfound loyalty to the Descended. She grew up in the mortal world and therefore wants to defend the mortals from the cruel acts of many of the Descended. Because the Descended have historically marginalized and inflicted violence on the mortals, the royal houses have little interest in helping them. Ultimately, Cole uses the ongoing conflict between the mortals and Descended as an allegory for the real-world issue of class warfare.
The Descended are the elite class, while the mortals represent a lower, disempowered class, and Diem’s only desire is to create peace between these classes so that she is not forced to betray one faction or another. However, striking this balance and enacting initiatives that engender peace prove to be far more difficult than Diem expects. Her anguished vacillations between the palace and the village illustrate how burdened she feels by her position of power, for she often feels trapped between the little girl she once was and the authoritative woman that she is becoming. In the end, Diem learns to accept her leadership position when she acknowledges her own strength. This revelation inspires her new surge of confidence and helps her to lead her people with a clear heart and mind.
