She is heir to a Sultanate that once ruled the world. He is an unwanted prince with the power to destroy. They must find a way to save their people from annihilation—but first, they will have to balance their own forbidden passion.
REIGN & RUIN
(Mages of the Wheel series, Book 1)
by J. D. Evans
Self-published, 2019
(via Ethan Ellenberg Literary)
“All magic is beautiful…and terrible. Do you not see the beauty in yours, or the terror in mine? You can stop a heart, and I can stop your breath.”
She is heir to a Sultanate that once ruled the world. He is an unwanted prince with the power to destroy.
She is order and intellect, a woman fit to rule in a man’s place. He is chaos and violence and will stop at nothing to protect his people.
His magic answers hers with shadow for light. They need each other, but the cost of balance may be too high a price. Magic is dying and the only way to save it is to enlist mages who wield the forbidden power of death, mages cast out centuries ago in a brutal and bloody war.
Now, a new war is coming. Science and machines to replace magic and old religion.
They must find a way to save their people from annihilation and balance the sacred Wheel—but first, they will have to balance their own forbidden passion. His peace for her tempest, his restlessness for her calm…
Night and day, dusk and dawn, the end, and the beginning.
J. D. Evans writes fantasy and science fiction romance. After earning her degree in linguistics, J. D. served a decade as an army officer. She once spent her hours putting together briefings for helicopter pilots and generals. Now she writes stories, tends to two unreasonable tiny humans, knits, sews badly, gardens, and cultivates Pinterest Fails. After a stint in Beirut, J. D. fell in love with the Levant, which inspired the setting for her debut series, Mages of the Wheel. Originally hailing from Montana, J. D. now resides in North Carolina with her husband, two attempts at mini-clones gone rogue, and too many stories in her head.
On his twelfth birthday, Jackson « Jax » Freeman arrives at Chicago’s Union Station alone, carrying nothing but the baggage of a scandal back in his hometown. He’s been sent away from home to live with relatives he barely knows. But even worse are the strangers who accost him at the train station, including a food vendor who throws dust in his face and a conductor who tries to steal his skin.
Luna rides a battered old broom that keeps crashing itself into the school pond. She has a witch’s hat and wand and sometimes she’s quite good at magic, but she isn’t completely sure that she’s a real witch. She doesn’t have a familiar for one thing, and she doesn’t know where she came from-only that she was found by three witches who she now calls her aunts. When she swaps her moonstone ring for an Australian boobook owl in the Lost Forest, the mysterious bird seller makes her promise to keep the bird hidden for as long as she can. This is not easy when you live with very inquisitive aunts. And it’s not easy when you find out that the fearsome Madame Valadon, the Best Witch in Paris, is missing her boobook owl and she’s sure that Luna knows something about it.
