Heat of the Everflame
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Penn Cole on Heat of the Everflame
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
The bookshelf she never foundThe Kindred’s Curse series began as a correction. Growing up, Cole searched for fantasy heroines who resembled her own experience and kept coming up empty.
As a younger reader, I didn’t see myself in the fantasy books that I found on bookstore shelves or in popular media like movies and graphic novels. At the time, those stories were always written by men, featuring men, and targeting a male audience, often relegating female characters to no more than a shallow, poorly developed love interest.
One novel changed what Cole thought fantasy could hold. Jacqueline Carey’s Kushiel’s Dart, a 2001 epic set in an alternate medieval Europe, was the first time she encountered a female protagonist with full moral weight and political consequence.
I was absolutely entranced by the amazing female characters and the way the story highlighted issues important to women such as consent, bodily autonomy, and gender equality. For the first time, I could imagine myself in the hero’s shoes, instead of being the damsel in distress.
The slow-burn romance at the center of the series was not a concession to commercial taste but a deliberate emotional architecture. Cole named her specific cultural inheritance when explaining where that instinct came from.
As part of a generation of women raised on Matthew Macfadyen’s hand flex in Pride & Prejudice, I really wanted to write a slow (slowww!) burn, enemies-to-lovers romance focused on that amazing period when the love interests are inexplicably drawn together but refuse to give into it. I adore a longing glance across a room, the not-so-accidental brush of a hand, all those moments that have us giggling and kicking our feet.
The political conflict that escalates across the series and reaches full combustion in Heat was drawn from Cole’s engagement with events in the real world, not invented to decorate the fantasy setting.
I was also very moved by real-world issues such as censorship of literature, the generational effects of colonialism and systemic injustice, the role that violence plays in a fight for equality, and what obligation those of us born with a lot of privilege have to dismantle the systems that unfairly benefit us.
That twin ambition, pleasurable and uncomfortable at once, is what distinguishes Heat from a straightforward adventure: the romance and the politics are not separate tracks but pressure on the same question.
How she wrote it
Sixty thousand words and a resetThe architecture of the series required a drastic mid-draft intervention. Cole had already built what she imagined as her opening book when she recognized a structural blind spot: readers would be asked to care about a world they had never been allowed to inhabit.
So, nearly 60,000 words in, I decided to reset. What I had written became book two, and I added a new book one exploring Diem’s life in her village and all the reasons she and her people are ready for war.
The nine realms of Emarion, the world Cole built for the series, were shaped by something she encountered every time she drove across a European border. She moved to Paris with her husband during the pandemic and the texture of that daily life became directly usable.
As an American living in Europe, I was really inspired by how different each country here is, and how a short drive over a border can expose you to entirely new languages, architecture, forms of government, cultural values, and uses of wealth. I wanted to replicate that in the nine realms of Emarion, with each one having its own very distinct culture shaped by its history and values.
Before any reader had seen the first page of Spark, the complete trilogy already existed. Cole finished all three books, then released them in rapid succession: Spark in June 2023, Glow roughly six weeks later, Heat about two months after that. The timeline from first draft to bookstore shelf was compressed further by a pivot from self-publishing to a partnership with Atria Books.
I began writing the series toward the end of 2021, and I self-published the first book in June of 2023. About a year later, I partnered with Atria Books on the print edition of the series, which is rolling out over the next few months. Altogether, it has been about three years from deciding to write the books to seeing them on bookstore shelves.
Writing the third book in the sequence was a different experience from writing the first. The opening book had arrived fully formed; Heat demanded something closer to endurance.
Book three was a slog, as middle books so often are for readers and authors alike.
That admission matters for how to read Heat: the density and difficulty of the book’s emotional terrain is not incidental. Cole built it under pressure, and the pressure shows in the best sense.
What she wants us to sit with
Compassion as the only answerCole framed the moral design of the series around its protagonist Diem, a young woman caught between a group of the magically marginalized Luminae, who have turned to violence after generations of oppression, and the Descended, the ruling class who deny any complicity in that oppression. The setup is recognizable, but Cole refused to let it resolve cleanly.
My main character, Diem, is trapped in the middle of a war between a marginalized group of people, many of whom have been radicalized and have turned to violence, and a privileged class of elites who hoard money, influence, and power, yet refuse to acknowledge their role in any kind of oppression. It would be easy to look at that and declare who are the heroes and villains, but as Diem learns, life is never that simple, and ‘doing the right thing’ is often a lot more complicated than it looks.
Cole described the emotional journey she wants readers to share with Diem. The discomfort built into the narrative is not a side effect but a feature: she designed it so that readers catch themselves making the same rationalizations Diem makes.
I hope that readers go on this journey with her. I hope they jump to the same snap judgments as Diem, make excuses right alongside her for the people she loves who do the indefensible, and share her discomfort when both those biases are challenged. I hope they wrestle with the same question that plagues Diem: What does it mean to do good in a world that operates on such a fundamental wrong?
At its core, the series is a love story that Cole described in terms that reach beyond the romantic plot. Both Diem and her counterpart Luther carry damage that predates the war, and Cole saw their arc as inseparable from the book’s political argument.
For both Luther and Diem, this is a story about prejudice, healing, and the scars we carry with us, both on our skin and on our soul. It’s a journey of choosing love in a world that wants us to hate, and defying expectations in order to write our own story.
When asked to name the single thing she most hopes readers carry away from the series, Cole offered one word: compassion. She then explained why she believes fantasy, not political journalism or polemic, is the right form for that transmission.
I believe strongly that reading, especially fiction, is innately political, but it doesn’t have to be the divisive, polarizing politics we’re used to. Instead, it can be something that encourages us to find love in unexpected places, to nurture compassion, and to keep our minds and hearts open to people of all kinds.