1. Phoenix
1
PHOENIX
I felt as though I were asleep—a restless sleep, though, full of tumult and disconnected but vaguely familiar thoughts and images. I exited a tall brick building, passing by men in long, formal coats and women in large, poofy dresses, a dark-skinned man in a top hat walking toward me. I stood in a wide open field, watching the same man drive a team of horses pulling a plow. And then I was wearing a toga, watching this same man defend his life in the center of an arena, blood staining the ground around him.
I was trapped on the edges of a whirlwind, spinning around and around, the embers at my core blown into a raging flame, consuming me entirely in a hot white flash.
Cold. Voices. Awakening was a slow, fractured event, noticing first this thing and then another. I opened my eyes to a canopy of soft, dappled green. My hands clenched at my sides, gripping the detritus of the forest floor.
There was a shout nearby and I sat straight up.
I sat in a circle of ash. My hands were blackened with it, and wiping it off on my thighs simply smeared it on a different part of my body. Why was I n***d?
The image of a dragon flashed across my memory, and the last moments before his attack came to me in a sudden wave. The Master had been captured, and I with him. The strange warriors who had been assisting the shifters had been escorting us through the woods, and then the dragon came, seizing the Master and setting fire to everything, and everyone. I had run, my clothes and skin on fire, which I did my best to control, to consume with my own internal fire. I must have succeeded. I wasn't dead.
The voices came closer. I had to move. Either the warriors had escaped the dragon's wrath or the shifters had come to see what had happened to their friends, and either way, they would not treat me well.
I sprang to my feet and ran. I had no destination other than away. The shifters had driven us from our home, had captured my protector, my family. Without them, I had no way to tell who was friend and who was foe.
I was alone.
As I ran, my dreams pushed their way to the surface of my mind, distracting me, slowing me down. They plagued me, and the longer I was awake, the less they felt like dreams and more like memories. My foot landed on a sharp rock and a yell of pain escaped me, but I kept pushing forward. The pain was good. The pain helped me focus.
When would I stop? What would I do when I could run no more? I had been nothing, I had been no one before Master. An unwanted child, passed from family to family before finally phasing out of the system at eighteen, I'd taken whatever jobs I could to survive. I had been working at a gas station when Master had found me, told me I was special, that I could be so much more. I walked out of that gas station and never looked back. He and the others taught me how to find my fire, a dim ember that had barely any life in it, and they taught me to feed it and to use it.
For the last year, they had been my everything.
What now?
My feet pounded to the beat of that question. What now? What now? What now?
Master had always said that one day, we would approach his father the Dragon King and be welcomed with open arms. Well, the Dragon King had come and gone, and I was alone, my friends captive.
I had to free them. I had to free them just like he had freed me.
With that realization, I stopped running. What was I afraid of? The shifters would never have dared come against me on their own, and their warrior friends were dead.
I would rescue my friends, my family, and together we would find the Master and rejoin him.
The fire in my soul flamed brightly. What power could those animals have over me?
I was the Phoenix.
