Page 27 of Empire of Flame and Thorns

The moment I see his reaction, I shove my magic straight at him. It slams into the brass-colored spark of shock inside him. Latching on to it, I pour everything I have into it.

Draven gasps and stumbles back several steps as he blurts out, “What the hell are you doing? You can’t take off your shirt in the middle of a room full of people!”

I grin at him.

That wicked little smirk reminds him that he wasn’t supposed to react and show any emotions. Which in turn triggers a flare of panic. He tries to block it out a fraction of a second later, but I’ve already latched on to that small yellow spark.

Smug victory pulses through my chest as I pour a torrent of magic at it, blowing his panic far out of proportion.

Draven gasps again and staggers back once more. His eyes are wide and his mouth slightly open.

“Oh fuck,” he blurts out. “I shouldn’t have done that. Shit. I wasn’t supposed to—” He snaps his mouth shut, cutting off his own words, before ending with another, “Fuck.”

All around me, the whole room is staring at the usually so powerful and imposing Commander of the Dread Legion who is now panicking like an untrained adolescent.

After quickly putting my shirt back on, I let a wide grin spread across my mouth as I watch Draven.

It took me almost seventy years to learn how to successfullystackemotions like this.

Contrary to what most people think, I cannot actually create emotions. Everyone thinks that I can change the way they feel. That I can twist their heart and soul into something unrecognizable.

They’re wrong.

I cannot create new emotions from nothing. I cannot make someone angry if they’re bursting with joy. I can’t make someone hate a person that they love. And I can’t make a person love someone that they hate. Or even someone that they’ve just met. I can only manipulate emotions that are already there. I can increase and decrease what they feel, but I can’t make them feel something else. The spark of the emotion needs to be there first.

There are loopholes, or rathertechniques, that I can use to get around that problem. One such technique is what I did toTommen at the gate and to Kevlin at breakfast. I say and do something in order to make them feel a specific emotion that I can then increase. It was the same method I used in order to make Draven feel shock now.

Then I used a technique that I callstacking. I use one emotion to jumpstart another emotion.

I can’t make a person hate someone else out of the blue. But what I can do is to create a situation where the first person feels angry or hurt or betrayed by the second person. Then I can increase those emotions to such an awful degree that it eventually makes the first person hate the second person. Even if just for a second during a moment of weakness or hurt. And then, I can latch on to that brief spark of hatred and flame it into a raging wildfire.

Naturally, it’s very difficult to accomplish. It only works under very specific circumstances and only with certain emotions. Love, for example, is entirely impossible to create. I can increase someone’s lust to the point where they want to fuck someone even more than they want air in their lungs. But lust cannot create love. Love is too complicated an emotion.

But I can most certainly randomly yank my shirt off in front of the most powerful dragon shifter in the army in order to shock him, which I had calculated would then lead to panic, which I can, in turn, fan into an embarrassingly large flame.

All around me, people are staring at the scene before them. Everyone knows that Draven Ryat would never willingly panic in front of an entire room full of other clan leaders and monarchs and lowly fae alike. It can only happen with the help of strong magic.

I sweep my gaze around the room.

It’s displays like this that make people think that I can create emotions from nothing. And I never contradict them. The less they know about my magic, the better.

Up on the dais, a few of the other clan leaders smirk at Draven.

Jessina raises a hand.

I cut off the flow to my magic immediately.

Within seconds, the overwhelming panic that I created in Draven’s chest disappears and returns to its original minor spark. He stops stumbling away and instead freezes on the floor. His chest heaves as he stares at me.

If I pushed with my magic right now, I’m pretty sure that I would now find a spark of humiliation in his chest instead.

He stares at me.

The whole room is dead silent. It’s so deafening that I can almost feel it hum against my eardrums.

From a few strides away, Draven looks at me like he can’t decide whether to torture me into revealing all the secrets of my magic or to simply ram a sword through my heart.

Before he can decide, Emperor Bane shatters the thrumming silence.

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