From Flame and Ash

by Carrie Ann Ryan

  I had left those who needed me.

  And I knew I needed to go back.

  No matter the cost.

  Chapter Two

  I had already packed my go-bag weeks earlier, knowing this time would come. I repacked it every night, ensuring that I had what I would need, unpacking and changing things out when I thought better of it. Items made in the human world didn’t last long in the other realm. So, I had most of the things I’d taken with me when I left the Maisons, as well as some stuff Alura, a friend of Rhodes and Rosamond who also lived on my block and happened to go to school with me, had given me over the past year.

  I was ready to go back. And my new friend—my only friend these days—wasn’t of this realm either, so it seemed I wasn’t really alone.

  I paused at that thought, wondering why that seemed to be the first thing that popped into my mind.

  Maybe it was because the idea swept over me with each passing day and every passing dream, all the memories of what I had left behind.

  I’d abandoned it all because I was scared. Because I’d needed time to regroup. But so much time had passed at this point, I wasn’t sure what would happen next.

  I wanted to go back. I didn’t know if it was about facing my destiny because, honestly, I didn’t know if there was a true destiny there for me. But I had to go back because people were counting on me, even if I wasn’t sure I could rely on myself.

  I couldn’t just walk away again and pretend that nothing had happened.

  The very evidence of what had happened currently sat in my bag, purring and licking her toes.

  My little polydactyl cat, the one with bat wings.

  Yes, a cat with extra toes was extraordinary on its own. A cat with extra toes on each foot and wings? That wasn’t of this world, or of this realm.

  But Braelynn, my best friend in the entire world, had once been from this realm.

  “Please stop getting your cat hair all over my clothes,” I said, reaching out to pick her up out of the bag. “I swear, you’re mostly black, but your little white hairs on the tuxedo part of your front stick to my clothing, showing themselves to the world.”

  She just snorted.

  Damn cat.

  I tended to wear black these days. I didn’t know if it was because the color happened to look good on me, or if it was because I was in mourning.

  Grieving the fact that my best friend had died, only to come back as a cat that was now in my arms. Or maybe it was me mourning what I once had.

  I had once thought my life was normal. Normal heading into boring. I hadn’t been able to pick my major, I was almost about to watch my friend and my ex-girlfriend—the only two people I truly talked to often—walk away from me as they went off to undergo their own college careers.

  Braelynn was never going to college now. She had lost that opportunity when she came with me into the Maison realm to see what my dreams were about.

  I had known she was following her own path, figuring out why she felt as if she didn’t belong either. But in the end…in the end, it was my fault that she was dead. Or at least changed. And my ex?

  She was never coming back either.

  She couldn’t.

  Brae bumped my chin with the top of her head, and I looked down to see her glaring at me as if she knew where my thoughts had gone.

  “You can’t really read my thoughts, can you?” I asked.

  She just gave me a look that said she could do whatever she wanted and to bow before her regalness. Okay, maybe that was just the look of a cat in general. I liked felines, though the idea that this cat happened to be my best friend was still a little weird.

  I mean, once you clean your bestie’s litter box, there’s no going back. And let’s not get started on the hairballs and the self-cleaning, and everything else that comes with being a cat.

  I didn’t think Braelynn as a cat could actually read my thoughts, but sometimes it sure seemed like it. I forgot, when I wasn’t thinking too closely about it, that she wasn’t actually a cat. Nor was she human anymore. It was this weird dichotomy where I felt like I was still speaking to my friend even though she couldn’t talk back.

  I slipped my go-bag into the closet, wondering when I would finally come back for it. It wasn’t like I could just venture into the Maison realm and know that I would be safe. When Easton had dropped me off here, he hadn’t told me how I could get in contact with him again, only that he would be here for me when I was ready.

  That was so not helpful, but I had been a little shaken about the fact that not only was my best friend dead, at least as I had known her, I had died. Though the Spirit Wielders had somehow helped me out of that.

  Oh, and the boy that I had thought was my soulmate, Rhodes? As it turned out, he wasn’t my soulmate at all, and that meant he couldn’t actually be with me. Or maybe he could be with me, but we weren’t actually talking to each other beyond the letters that he wrote to me that Alura brought. I wrote him too, and Alura passed the messages on, as well as the ones I wrote to Rosamond, though I had no idea how she did it.

  It was all so confusing, and I hadn’t asked Easton more about the rules. I only knew that I could go back. I just didn’t know how or when.

  When Alura had come to the house a week after I came home, devastated, broken, and having to act like everything was normal, I had taken it as par for the course. Of course, a Wielder would be watching over me, making sure I didn’t end up in harm’s way like I tended to do these days.

  She had been the one I’d seen the day before everything changed. She’d been talking to Rhodes and Rosamond about something—me, most likely—and hadn’t gone hiking with us when the Neg had tried to kill me, thus starting everything. She’d stayed behind, saying that it wasn’t her time yet. She was the most mystical girl I’d ever met, with long hair that seemed to flow in the wind just like Rosamond’s did. I didn’t know what kind of Wielder Alura was, only that she was one, and have been living in the human realm for some time. I didn’t know why she was here. And, honestly, I didn’t know if I should or would ask.

  With the way the Maison realm was breaking, each territory slowly fighting each other before they fought against the kingdom itself, I knew there had to be people fleeing. It wasn’t safe for everybody back there anymore. So, retreating to a realm where there wasn’t any magic or Wielding might be the safest place for them.

  But when Alura had shown up on my doorstep with a note from Rosamond in her hands, saying that, yes, she was a Wielder and that she was here to answer my questions, I figured I should listen. Not that Alura had answered any of my inquiries. Not really. She was good at mumbling and going on and on about history and random things, but she didn’t really answer any specific queries I made.

  It was like one of those mystical orbs that told you things in riddles and fortunes and then left you to try and figure them out on your own.

  I’d never been good with riddles, but I had a feeling if I were going to continue down this path, I should figure out exactly how to learn that talent.

  I hadn’t been sitting on my hands the entire year, though.

  Easton had spelled my parents to make them think that I hadn’t been gone for as long as I had. I didn’t know how he’d done it, but he’d explained that he had extra gifts that came with his bloodline. The same with Rosamond and the others since they were of the Lumiére Kingdom. Easton had made it seem to my mom and dad like I had been gone for a weekend with the girls, and that everything was just fine. He’d also spelled Emory’s and Braelynn’s parents so they wouldn’t miss their daughters because Braelynn wasn’t the same as she had been before, and I knew there was no going back to the girl with the soft smiles. The one that had started to fall in love with a Lumiére warrior named Luken.

  And Emory…I tried not to think about Emory.

  She had been my ex-girlfriend, and then my friend, but had slowly turned into my enemy. That process had begun long before we learned that there were such things as Wielders and
realms and the fact that I was the prophesied Spirit Priestess.

  She had begun to hate me and tried to control me way before we stepped into the Maison realm.

  When she tried to go off on her own, attempted to come back home because she hadn’t liked what I was becoming—or so she’d said—she had been kidnapped. Taken.

  I sucked in a breath and tried not to think about that. Except it was all I thought about sometimes. I hadn’t known what had happened to her, and I didn’t know where she was now. I only knew that once we entered the Fire territory and met with the lord and lady of that estate, Emory had shown up, chained and screaming profanities and evil things. At me.

  She’d seemed to truly hate me, and clearly wanted me dead. I just didn’t know why.

  Someone had thrust Wielding magic into her, and it had twisted her. She might’ve started warping on her own, but the magic had secured that final lock, turned that last key. Now, she was some sort of being that could suck out Wielding and hurt others.

  The last time I saw her, I had thought she died. Instead, she’d just been poofed into the dungeon of the Fire Estate.

  I had been fighting my own war at the time, my own battles, and I hadn’t been able to go back for her—not that I thought she would have accepted my help.

  Though getting a sword thrust through your gut so you could feel every single slice of the blade, every bit of heat and tiny fraction of change and movement sort of made it so that you didn’t think about much of anything except for the pain.

  After, I had run away because I didn’t know how to save her. And, honestly, I hadn’t known how to save myself either.

  But in the year that I’d been back, I had studied the large tome that Rhodes’ older sister—by at least a couple of centuries—had given me. Rosamond had told me to learn my history, and so I had.

  I shook my head. “Sometimes, it kind of blows my mind that everybody is so much older than us,” I said quietly. “Don’t you think, Braelynn?”

  Braelynn gave me sort of a nod. I had to think it was a nod and not just like a cat sneeze or something. Yes, I was talking to my cat, like people with normal cats did every day. And those cats answered back with meows and gestures. My cat just happened to be a former human.

  Rosamond had been the whole reason that we had gone into the Maison realm a year ago in the first place. And once we found her, I woke after healing to find her sitting on my bed petting Braelynn.

  I still remembered my shock at seeing a cat with wings, one that I would learn was actually my best friend. Rosamond had given me a book and basically told me that knowledge was power. Or something like that. My mind had been a little full and bleary at that point after coming back from the dead. And so, I had read up on the history of the Maisons.

  At least, the one the Lumiére wrote. I didn’t know where Rosamond had gotten such a book since we had been in the Obscurité Kingdom when I saw her last.

  The Lumiére and the Obscurité were two halves of a whole. Once, they had been one realm of five territories, five elements. As time passed, those territories had turned into two large kingdoms with the Spirit territory slicing between them. Those kingdoms had warred, and during the Great Fall, a war to end all wars, the kings of each kingdom had died, leaving their power to their children.

  I had met one of those children, Cameo, the former queen of the Obscurité.

  She had died to protect me. I could still remember the look in her eyes at the sacrifice I knew she had made. Because she hadn’t been a bad person. She had just been trying to save her people in the only way she knew how, even if she hadn’t seen the betrayal right in front of her that undermined every move she made. And when she died, she did so because her knight had thrust power into her, a blow meant to kill me. She had sacrificed herself for me, and I would never forget that.

  Sometimes, I woke up screaming, thinking that the power was inside me. Watching as Cameo stood over my corpse. I lay blinking, wondering why I was there at all.

  But I remembered that queen, and I would always do so. And I would never forget her son, the current king of the Obscurité.

  Easton.

  The boy who had saved my life. The one I knew would probably never forgive me for what had happened to his mother. But he was the one who had made me a promise to come back as soon as I needed him.

  I just didn’t know what any of that meant.

  The Maison realm was fracturing. The crystals that made up each realm and helped to bring in the Wielding powers of the elements and then push them out into the realm’s people had either been ill-used or broken during the Fall. The history had written it one way, but I had seen them another when I watched the knight manifest his magic in an evil and putrid way.

  Again, I didn’t know if what Rosamond’s history book said was the actual truth or just one side of the war.

  Wasn’t there a saying that the truth of history is only with those who wrote it? Because there’s always another side to the story.

  It was said that the King of Obscurité—the old one, Cameo’s father and Easton’s grandfather—had broken many rules. That he had tried to take over the entire realm and forced the King of Lumiére into fighting when he didn’t want to. The resulting war had killed thousands—maybe even millions in the end.

  And since the Maisons were long-lived, a lot of the warriors who had been alive during the Fall over five hundred years ago were still around. That history was always within them.

  It was a lot for me to take in and deal with, yet I was smack in the center of it.

  Because that was another tale, another myth. A story of someone called the Spirit Priestess. One who was supposed to unite the kingdoms and the territories under one banner. The history just didn’t actually lay out how that should happen.

  As the supposedly foretold Spirit Priestess, I would’ve liked some instruction. Maybe even a note. A to-do list of what I was supposed to accomplish in order to save my friends and so many people that I did not know.

  Because with every single day that passed as I sat in my university classes, working towards my history major—one that I didn’t even know I really wanted—I knew I didn’t belong. I had only picked the major because I hadn’t been able to choose anything else. I wasn’t going to be a scientist, I wasn’t going to be a doctor. I wasn’t going to be a lawyer. The only thing I could do was look back. Pore over the histories and wonder how people got through such tragedies, overcame the wars that devastated civilizations. Because maybe there was an answer for me with regards to the Maison realm in what the people of my world had done. Maybe there was something in what was already written that could tell me what was to come.

  Or maybe I was just losing my mind and needed to go back to the place I thought would be the end of me.

  Braelynn tapped my chin again, and I looked down at her.

  “What?”

  In answer, the doorbell rang, and I shook my head.

  “You’re scaring me now.” I swore Braelynn shrugged, not that a cat could actually shrug, but her little tail twitch thing told me something. I ignored her and went to the door, knowing who it would be.

  Because, after all, I only had one friend these days.

  “Alura.”

  “It’s time.”

  I blinked.

  “It’s time?”

  “Do you remember what Rosamond said? She told you to trust me.”

  I nodded, letting Alura in.

  Rhodes had written to me, telling me what he was doing in his realm. After the fight with the knight in the Obscurité Kingdom, he had gone back to his court, called by his father and uncle. His uncle was the king of the Lumiére, his father the Lord of Water. And, apparently, his grandfather, his mother’s father, was the Lord of Air. Rhodes, the boy I had fallen for, the one who was apparently not my soulmate despite what I had thought, despite what he’d thought, had some major connections.

  He was royal blood, through and through.

  And I was just human. A hum
an who had unlocked two of the five elements within herself.

  My hands twitched, and I looked down at my fingertips. I could still Wield in this realm and had been practicing with Alura for the past year.

  It wasn’t the training that I truly needed, though, since she wasn’t an Air or an Earth Wielder. Those were the two elements I had, and that meant that Alura had one of the other three Wielding elements. Not that she told me what they were. She didn’t show me anything, just helped me focus so I didn’t blow anything up while we were in the forest of the foothills on the Rocky Mountains. It was the only place I could safely practice my Wielding without anyone seeing.

  It just wasn’t the same as in the Maison realm.

  Alura tapped my bracelet, the one she had given me. It was a silver chain with tiny little charms on it. Each one represented an element. Alura had told me it was for protection, but I didn’t know exactly what that meant.

  Rosamond had written to me, just like Rhodes had, and told me to trust Alura. So, I did. And I wore the bracelet. And packed and repacked, knowing that I would be going back to the Maison realm any day now.

  When Alura looked me in the eyes, I knew that day was today.

  I had to go back to the Maison realm. Maybe I would be going back to Rhodes. Perhaps I would be going back to Easton’s kingdom.

  Two kingdoms needed me, and I had friends—or at least people I knew—in each.

  The time had come.

  There was no holding back any longer.

  Chapter Three

  I didn’t know exactly where we were going or who we were about to meet, only that this was the start of a new beginning. Or perhaps it was the continuation of the start I had run from when I needed to learn to breathe again.

  It might seem odd for me to so blindly trust Alura after everything that had happened. But then again, when I truly thought about it, it didn’t. I knew Alura was a Wielder and someone that Rosamond trusted. I had almost sacrificed everything to find Rosamond after the Obscurité knight and his Negs had taken her, and I would still do whatever I could to help her.