Ruling in flames reborn.., p.1
Ruling in Flames (Reborn Book 5), page 1
RULING IN FLAMES
REBORN
M. SINCLAIR
LOST & BOUND PUBLISHING
Ruling In Flames: Reborn (#5)
Copyright © 2022 by M. Sinclair in USA
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced/transmitted/distributed in any form. No part of this publication shall be shared by any means including photocopying, recording, or any electronic/mechanical method, or the Internet, without prior written consent of the author. Cases of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law are the exception. The unauthorized reproduction/transmitting of this work is illegal. This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locales is purely coincidental. The characters are products of the author’s imagination and used fictitiously.
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The Union of Love & Madness
CONTENTS
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Epilogue 1
Epilogue 2
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M. Sinclair
Published Works
1
ANANI
I’d never given much thought to how I would die.
There had been plenty of times where I had wanted to die, but I think I’d always assumed it would be either at my father’s hand or during a mission with my flight. Preferably the latter—at least then it would be with a band of brothers who cared about me. Who would mourn my loss if any of us survived the dangerous tasks we’d been assigned.
This, though? I would’ve never expected to die like this.
My vision began to flicker around the edges as I stared into the anguish and pain-filled gaze of my mate. This was pure hell.
I wanted to be strong for my peanut. I wanted to remove the fear from her eyes.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t—I couldn’t do anything but reach for her as a horrible tar-like burning sensation ran through every nerve ending of my body, causing me to want to roar out in pain. But I couldn’t even do that because my dragon and I were paralyzed by the assault on us, the magic swarming our senses in an onslaught as the chaos of the room became a distant buzzing. Easily ignorable—the entirety of my world narrowed on Maya.
Nothing else mattered. Only her.
I thought I heard someone roar out my name—maybe my twin—but it didn’t matter because the flicker at the center of my chest, the one that kept me alive, blew out. Every single ounce of my life force extinguished at once.
I didn’t know how else to describe what happened next other than transcendence.
One moment I was in my body, and the next I was being blasted through space and time, a cold energy—nearly invigorating—washing over me. I felt stunned, a prisoner to the vacuum-like pull, both my dragon and I watching in horror as we left our mate and our flight completely unprotected and at the mercy of the vicious shifter called a ‘dragon god’ by some of the prisoners.
A monster who was possibly killing the people I loved.
I bellowed out in pain, my dragon rattling the cage inside of my head as the noise echoed there—but nothing came out of my mouth. The vacuum that we were traveling in was completely silent.
Then realization slammed into me, panic seizing up my chest as I recognized that the space around me was like a warped tunnel, pushing me towards a pinpoint of light at the very end. Holy fuck—I was dying. This was the ‘light at the end of the tunnel’ bullshit.
Almost as if summoned at the thought itself, a wall of blue flames appeared in front of me, bringing everything to a complete and utter halt.
I hung suspended in the air as the tunnel reacted aggressively against the magic trying to block the path, growing constrictive around me, a wheezing sound leaving my throat from the pressure on my ribs. It felt like my eardrums themselves were going to burst, and I closed my eyes, expecting the worst.
Then I was dropped.
I groaned in pain as my body fell through space, my back hitting against a solid surface. That was going to leave a fucking bruise.
Unless I was dead.
I refused to believe I was dead, though. I couldn’t be dead—I wasn’t ready to leave Maya. We had immortality to live out together, and I didn’t want to leave my flight, the only true safe haven my brother and I had ever found.
My head spun in a toxic twist, my brow furrowing at the idea of Ledger thinking he’d lost me. I couldn’t imagine losing my twin. The moment would gut him, and I fucking hated that.
No, I absolutely refused to accept that I was dead. Something had stopped me from truly dying. I wasn’t dead. I would hang onto that thought as long as necessary.
“Good, because you’re not.”
My eyes snapped open. I found myself looking skyward, except it wasn’t a normal sky—no, this was painted in a watercolor palette of red, orange, and pink. It wasn’t a sunset, but it almost felt like one outside of the blazing midday ball of fire I could see out of the corner of my eye. My skin wasn’t overly hot, though, and as I sat up, feeling more than just a twinge of pain from the hard fall, I looked around, realizing that I was in a large grassy plain surrounded by hills. There was nothing else as far as the eye could see.
Where the hell was I?
“Anani.”
The woman’s voice had me turning my head, everything coming to a full stop. Well, obviously I was dead and she had no idea what she was talking about.
“You’re not dead,” she repeated, staring back at me from where she sat a few feet away.
Seeing her nearly fucking broke me, as a pain-filled sound came from my throat. “Mom?”
I hadn’t seen many photos of my mother. In fact, I had only seen one singular picture from a trip she and my father had taken to the Earth realm. The rest of the photographs and paintings had been destroyed following her death…and I was starting to understand why. The photo I’d found had featured this exact woman—what it hadn’t featured was just how fucking similar we looked in person, so much so that I kind of understood why my father hated looking at us, especially me. Kind of.
A pair of icy blue eyes exactly like mine held my gaze as the breeze ruffled her dark curly hair that was pulled back away from her face, bringing to my attention how young she looked. Far too young to be our mother.
Because she was dead.
“I’m dead,” she confirmed softly, making my fists clench. “But you’re not, and I was sent here to tell you to not be afraid. I promise this will be over soon. Your mate and you share a bond that has intertwined her magic with yours—you will live, Anani.”
My mate. Maya. Where the fuck was Maya?
I immediately looked around, fear instantaneously permeating every part of my being at her possible loss. It was easier to focus on solving the problem of closing the distance between Maya and me than to deal with this—meeting the woman that our father had punished us for losing, time and time again.
“Close but unreachable,” my mom said quietly. “The fire she was hit with would’ve killed any other phoenix—Ry’s fire not only burns, but drains—but because of who your mate is, she will live. She has to be the one to figure out how to pull on that strength of hers though.”
“I need to see her,” I insisted, standing up as she did the same, watching me with interest and concern. I could barely meet her gaze, feeling a sudden misplaced wave of hurt—she had left us. Obviously she hadn’t meant to die, but she’d left us.
It was irrational to think that way, and even more so to put that on her, which was why my brain was still searching for anything to focus on other than how much I wished things could have been different. That the woman in front of me wasn’t a stranger but someone who had been with me my entire life—a parent who’d loved me and showed me that every day. Someone who would have protected us from our father.
Yeah, I wasn’t doing a good job at distracting myself.
“You will soon,” she promised and offered a watery smile. “You and your brother found your mate.” She said it as a statement, but her eyes were filled with soft curiosity.
I considered not answering, running a hand through my hair and looking around in frustration, hoping to somehow spot Maya. But when I once again found nothing but rolling hills in the distance, I exhaled, closing my eyes.
“Yeah. Yeah we have,” I whispered.
“I’ve tried to watch you when I could.” Her voice was filled with a note of sadness, and when I opened my eyes, there were tears welling against her lashes. “I even tried to reach out to your father, to tell him to stop—”
Her voice was choked on the end, and she crossed her arms over her small frame as if trying to hug herself. “But he was so clouded by grief and hatred, so much anger, that no matter what I did, I couldn’t reach him.”
“You shouldn’t have had to,” I said, feelin g angry that she was blaming herself for this. But more than anything, I was furious at my father.
“I should’ve been there to protect you two. I should’ve found a way to come back—”
“From the dead?”
Her chin tilted up as tears trekked down her face. “We have a phoenix in our line, a few generations back…I should’ve found a way. I should’ve tried to tap into that before—”
In a second flat, I was across the space and pulling my mom into a hug. Emotion clogged my throat as she hugged me back, making me realize how far I’d come since meeting Maya. I wasn’t positive how I would’ve handled it before, but I knew it wouldn’t have been like this. For sure not like this.
While it was hard to see her, to imagine the mother she could’ve been, the relief that this was giving me—the closure—was something I would’ve never expected. It was so damn clear that she had never wanted to leave us, and while I had never assumed that had been her intention, there had always been a part of me that had felt abandoned.
“This is not your fault. He’s fucking crazy,” I said as I finally pulled back.
She looked up at me with so much warmth it hurt. “I love you, Anani. I loved you and your brother so much, from the time I found out I was carrying you to when I looked down at both of you, holding you in my arms before I…” Her voice teetered off, and she inhaled sharply. “I have always loved you, and I’ll continue to do my best to watch out for both of you from here.”
“I love you too,” I whispered, wishing that Ledger and Maya could’ve been here. There was no damn way to adequately describe this experience.
“Your mate.” My mom stepped back and reached for the ring on her finger, pulling it off and placing it in my hand. I immediately recognized the piece of jewelry because my father had a matching pin with the family sigil on it—one that he’d always worn proudly but never allowed us to. “Give this to her. I want your brother and you to have a part of me to pass on…if you’re okay with that.”
“I’ll give it to her,” I promised, not bothering to bring up how much it was going to piss off my father if I could bring this into the real world—or maybe it would fucking scare him. I think I would take either one, and it sure as hell would prove to Ledger that I’d spoken to her. Not that he wouldn’t believe me, but shit—this was insane.
“She’s good to both of you?” she asked, her eyes shading with concern.
“Maya?”
My mom nodded, and I smiled authentically for the first time. “Maya is amazing, and I wish you could meet her.”
“I do too.” Her eyes watered again before she seemed to shake herself and took a step back. “I can already feel the magic of these planes shifting. Your mate won’t stay caged for long.”
I completely believed that.
“I love you,” I whispered as she blinked out of existence with another soft smile.
I dropped to my knees, and a breath whooshed out of me. I lifted the ring up, the small gold sigil delicate in nature, and I put it in my pocket, hoping like hell it would stay there. I felt a tear stream down my cheek, my breathing a bit uneven as I tried to rationalize what had just happened—Had I really just spoken to my mom? That was impossible, right?
The ground underneath me shook. I looked around in confusion, noticing a barrier in the distance. It was gold and seemed to shoot all the way up into the sky—far past anything I could see. When the hell had that gotten there? I made my way towards it, the soft winds brushing against me. My eyes widened as the land dipped into a valley—but not one I could go into, as I was completely warded from it.
In the center of it all? Maya.
Her delicate form was curled up in a bed of grass, and she appeared to be sleeping peacefully. I raised my hand to the barrier, wanting to touch it or try to pass through it, to go to her—
“Don’t.”
This time it was a familiar voice—the man from the prison, the one who had unsuccessfully, if I was to believe my mom on not being dead, sacrificed his life for us to escape from. I turned to look at him, finding that he looked vastly different than he had in the prison. The bands on his wrists were gone, and his wings, instead of being smoky in nature, were now full angel wings with silver and black feathers.
Holy shit—was he an angel? Like an actual angel? During the last Cosmos War, the angels had fallen, their realm destroyed by the gods…so to see one in person was a bit disorienting.
“Don’t what?” I demanded, my jaw clenching as I tried to not show how surprised I was to see him.
“If you value your luck in surviving so far, don’t touch the barrier. It’s not a magic I recognize, which means it’s either hers or it’s something different. I tried to touch it and it nearly caused me to black out.”
“Fuck,” I muttered, looking back at Maya.
“She has to overcome his fucking magic herself before we can go to her,” he hissed in frustration, obviously upset over the concept.
“The Master? Or is it Ry?” I asked, remembering what my mom had called him.
“You know his name?” the man asked with a curious tilt of his head, looking alarmed.
“My mother called him that. She appeared to me.”
He nodded in understanding, as if unsurprised. “Yes, Ry is his modern name.”
Something occurred to me then. “Why are you here? Aren’t you immortal?” At least I had assumed he was, considering how damn long he had been alive for. If Maya was being reborn, it made sense why I was here with her, but what the hell did he have to do with this?
A shadow passed his gaze. “I don’t know. I’m immortal, but not with those bands on. They negate my magic, and if I used them to go against Ry, it would cause my true death.”
“Which is why you were hesitant to destroy the stone,” I noted, remembering that he hadn’t originally brought up the option. “You knew you would die.”
“Something that didn’t bother me if it wasn’t for the fact that I feared Maya still wouldn’t escape, which was unfortunately true,” he bit out. “I thought I would be able to find a different way, even after he arrived.”
“So you should be actually dead.” I didn’t comment on the way he spoke about Maya, feeling defensive over the way he was looking at her before his gaze moved back to me. I knew now wasn’t the time for violence, but I didn’t like the idea of him being close to her—I didn’t fully trust him, even if he had sacrificed his life for us to escape.
His eyes darkened. “I should be, but instead I’m here… I don’t understand why.” The last was an admission I could tell he didn’t like to make.
Letting my magic out, I realized I couldn’t feel my full connection with Maya—not that it had been severed, but almost as if there was a wall separating us. I started to understand why he was here as I appraised him curiously, nearly letting out a defensive rumble.
Apparently it didn’t matter if I trusted him or not. I had a feeling he would be around from now on…if we ever left this weird fucking limbo.
“The two of you have a bond.” I had no idea how he didn’t realize it, but I couldn’t leave it unstated.
His brow dipped. “What the hell are you talking about?”
Yeah, he didn’t know. Wonderful.
“Focus on her. You’ll see,” I said, unsure how to feel about that. My initial reaction was distaste and possessiveness, only to remember that he hadn’t predicted this. Not only had he wanted Maya to escape, but he had assumed he was going to actually die.
My brow furrowed, not fully sure how to handle this situation. Honestly, it was the least of my worries considering everything else.
“Fuck.”
The man sat down in the grass, looking dazed. I offered him a cautious look but decided to leave him to his thoughts as my gaze moved back to Maya. My chest squeezed as she began to move, her eyes slowly blinking open.
