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Penn Cole on Spark of the Everflame
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
The books she couldn’t find as a girlCole read fantasy for years before she found a book that put her at the center of the story rather than the margins of someone else’s. That book was Jacqueline Carey’s ‘Kushiel’s Dart,’ and the experience of finally being seen as the intended reader reset her sense of what the genre could be.
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.
That moment of recognition became a mandate. Cole has a wide readership across genders, but the creative engine behind the series is specifically the younger version of herself who came up empty.
Though I have many male and nonbinary readers and I value them deeply, I get a lot of joy in writing the books that, as a young woman, I wanted but couldn’t find.
Alongside that gap in representation, Cole brought a very particular romantic architecture she had been waiting to build. The reference point she names is telling: not a grand speech or a climactic kiss, but a single wordless gesture from the 2005 film adaptation of ‘Pride and Prejudice.’
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 series was not conceived as escapism from current events. Cole was writing during a period when she was tracking specific political and social questions, and those questions built the architecture of Emarion’s conflict from the ground up.
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.
Fantasy, for Cole, is not a vehicle for avoiding those questions. It is a way of approaching them before readers have time to raise their defenses.
How she wrote it
Sixty thousand words thrown awayCole pre-wrote all three original books before releasing any of them, then published them in rapid succession beginning in June 2023. The path from first sentence to bookstore shelf took roughly three years, but the timeline obscures a major structural rupture early in the process.
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.
The book Cole originally planned to publish first was not ‘Spark of the Everflame.’ Her initial version opened after the inciting event that drives protagonist Diem out of her village, skipping the life that made that departure matter. She tried to make it work for nearly sixty thousand words before conceding it couldn’t.
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 reset cost her months of work but solved a problem she had not been able to name: readers needed to love what Diem was fighting for before they could feel the weight of the fight.
Once the structural decision was made and the right starting point locked in, the writing of ‘Spark’ itself moved at a speed that surprised even Cole. That ease did not carry forward into subsequent books.
The first book was so easy—the story poured out as if it had been sitting in my head fully formed for years.
The nine realms of Emarion, the book’s sprawling world divided into distinct territories each with its own government, language, and values, were not invented at a desk. Cole was living in Europe when she was building the world, and the texture of daily cross-border life gave her the model.
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.
The book’s most charged setting is the divide between Lumnos City, the Descended elite’s seat of power, and Mortal City, the adjacent settlement where Diem grows up in poverty. Cole drew that geography from memory rather than imagination.
Though quite close to each other, Lumnos City and Mortal City might as well be different worlds. One is filled with wealth and privilege, and the other is struggling to survive amid poverty, crime, and lack of opportunity. For me, especially growing up in the southern US, this is like so many places I knew where being born on the ‘other side of the tracks’ completely shapes the course of your life, and where so many unjust systems are designed to keep money, political power, and education hoarded on one half of that divide.
On what the book is wrestling with
Power without accountability, faith without mercyThe Descended, the book’s ruling magical class, could have been written as straightforward villains. Cole made a different choice, one that reflects her argument about how unjust systems actually sustain themselves: not through pure malevolence, but through spectacle, charisma, and the seduction of watching excess.
The Descended are so much fun to write, because they are extreme in every way. They take everything they do to excess, whether that’s how they rule, how they dress, or how they get their entertainment. They are eccentric, charismatic, beautiful, and supremely hateable. It’s like following a jet-setting socialite on Instagram—you might resent them for their bottomless trust fund and their lack of responsibility, but you also can’t resist watching what crazy thing they do next. But they’re also a cautionary tale about what happens to power when it goes unchecked, especially when faith gets involved.
Cole designed Diem’s position in the plot to place readers inside a specific kind of moral discomfort. Diem is not a neutral observer of the conflict between mortals and Descended; she has loyalties on both sides, and those loyalties pull against each other in ways that have no clean resolution.
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.
The question Cole built the entire series around is not resolved in ‘Spark.’ It sits at the center of every choice Diem makes and is meant to follow readers out of the book.
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?
What she wants us to sit with
Clearer eyes, more inclusive heartCole is making a claim about fiction’s political capacity that runs against the usual objection, which is that genre fantasy distracts readers from real-world problems. She argues the opposite: that the distance fantasy provides is precisely what lets readers engage with ideas they would reject if presented head-on.
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.
When Cole names the single quality she wants readers to take away from the series, she chooses a word that applies to how readers treat characters in the book and, she implies, how they treat people outside it. The image she has for readers finishing the final page carries that weight.
I hope that when they turn the final page, they look up at their world and see it with clearer eyes and a more inclusive heart.