Convict Fenix

by Alan Brickett

  “Why not face me, crone?” He called out, nocking another arrow to the bow and prepared to fire.

  The little girls hissed at him, circling around and looking for their next opening. An apparition of the crone coalesced off to one side, and he diligently sent his arrow through the phantom’s neck.

  “You’ll need to do better than that sonny!”

  Oh, he planned to; in the meantime, her feeling of confidence served his best interests. The little imps charged in at him, tiny claws slashing, mouths gnashing with their sharp teeth. He swatted and beat them back, suffering only a few cuts, the ones from earlier had already healed over, nothing serious so far. Too much of this would wear anyone down eventually, and the seer could be patient enough to just let it go on and on.

  But he wasn’t going to, it should happen reasonably soon now.

  Fenix charged at a cluster of the girl imps, and they scattered, hissing and snarling at him. Then, suddenly, one of the girls stopped, she looked confused for just an instant before her body took on an iridescent glow. The light built up from within her, another bright source the marks on her forehead and within two seconds she collapsed down to the floor, melting in a haze of burning energy to form a ball of light as big as Fenix’s fist.

  The crone’s cackle sounded from out of the darkness.

  “Do you think that will surprise me?”

  He just smiled, swinging his bow at another of the girls, pushing her back so he could fend off the attack of another.

  “Watch,” he called out and kicked the ball of glowing energy.

  It shot away from his foot and hit the nearest stone wall of the cavern, ricocheting wildly in a new direction. It met another wall and rebounded from that as well, each bounce sending it spinning off on a new vector through the inside of the cave.

  “What?” It was barely a whisper, but he heard the concern in her voice.

  The imp girls seemed to stall for a moment, confused by the change in circumstances, which proved the undoing of one of them. The shooting ball of light passed right through the chest of that one, leaving a simmering hole of burned edges in a perfect circle. And then she too collapsed to the floor and was reduced to a glowing ball of energy.

  The spells he put on the girls stored up their energy and when it was enough turned them into the glowing balls. Consuming their own makeup and the magic of their creation in the process. Being touched by the ball sped up the process significantly.

  Fenix leaped over and kicked that ball too, a vague outline of the seer narrowly managing to duck under the rebound of the first, still flying around the cavern. The concentration of energy was quite dangerous, except to him of course since it was his fire in them. The second went hurtling about with the first while the five remaining girls blinked around in confusion and tried to keep out of the way.

  “Why so quiet? Is it suddenly uncomfortable in here?” He mocked.

  A third girl transformed while dodging, the impetus of her actions transformed the energy within her, and he got there in time to kick the newly formed ball through another of the imps who also transformed. Another swift kick and four balls were spinning about, each one bouncing around with such randomness that even the seer would not be able to predict them.

  “I can still see you, foolish man! I will keep this up long after you are reduced to ashes! Fool, I know the hour of my own death, I have seen my own end, and it is not by your hand! I am killed by a sneak, a thief who kills me from behind; you are not to be my doom. Oh!”

  The last sound escaped almost like a sigh.

  While she had been talking, the crone hadn’t noticed one of the imps trip over a ball of energy that had been one of the other girls a moment before. She sent that globe of energy flying off to rebound from the far wall.

  It burned its way through the back of the crones head and came bulging out between her eyes, burning through the cloth that covered them in a shower of sparks.

  She must have seen it coming in that very last instant, matching up her vision of what she thought was the far-flung future with the possibility of the present. A golden light burning its way through the back of your own skull, how did one interpret that accurately?

  The prison’s white and black mists, both somehow visible even within the darkening cave, wafted from the gorge-inducing nude body of the crone and reduced her to an even more withered husk than she had been.

  **

  Travel down to the back of the creature which carried the Prison required a climb.

  The climb itself was down one of the creature’s hairs, the thick and mile around strands which anchored the lands of the prison to the creature. Like animal hair the fibrous length was layered, and with those layers there came flakes and damage from time spent exposed to air.

  That damage, on such a large surface area, created hand holds and foot holds enough for an experienced climber like Fenix to traverse the height down with relative ease.

  There were some moments of concern when the flakes broke off in strips hundreds of feet long. Fenix would have plummeted down with them if not for his superior strength, augmented supernaturally when needed.

  Breaking into the outside layer of the hair and gripping the corded fibers kept him hanging on when his footing was lost.

  Some of the hair was so fragile it came away in clumps, damage from being frozen and repeatedly thawing where the hair was more exposed between the land above and the back of the creature below.

  Somehow Fenix had thought that the creature would be pristine, magically preserved or perhaps have some sort of maintenance mechanism in the Prison. An equivalent of a wash and condition application every few hundred years or so maybe?

  That the creature seemed mortal, or at least not infinitely durable, highlighted for Fenix the strange feeling he had been building on.

  The Prison was not just a holding cell for convicts.

  If the creature had a limited lifespan, even if that life could be measured in millennia or longer, then it meant the Prison could end. Or at least the current form of the prison could cease.

  Just like the convicts could die instead of being kept alive perpetually to suffer for their crimes.

  Whoever or whatever had designed the Prison and convinced the most high Entities of the cosmos to send inmates here had an ulterior motive.

  Idle thoughts for another time, perhaps, or perhaps it was relevant.

  Either way, Fenix completed his climb down in two days, the single rest accomplished by peeling back a thick layer of outer hair eight feet wide and wedging himself in for a while to sleep.

  A lot of sleep was not needed, but being on the top form could well be.

  Once down, Fenix examined the hair root and saw it still held a healthy white epidermis where it met and sunk into the skin of the creature. That skin provided a mildly spongy but even surface to walk upon.

  Moisture created from sweat during the day, sweat that seeped upwards in pores dozens of feet in diameter, evaporated during the day and condensed at night. This created mist or fog or both depending on the complex interaction with the Prison weather system and hugged the surface of the creature’s back.

  This was what created the impermeable effect seen on the lands above when looking down.

  It also smelled sour and left a tangy aftertaste in Fenix’s mouth.

  From where he had come down, Fenix aligned himself with the map in his head. The swamplands and green land masses of the northern area of the prison were above him. The edge of the furthest south and west point of those plateaus came close to the far eastern edge of the central plateau where the Warden had its Emerald Palace.

  It was in this gap that Fenix had climbed down one of the hairs connecting the green covered plateau. If he desired to, which he did not currently, he could move east into the shadow of the central plateau and find another hair to climb up to get to the Emerald Palace.

  This would have been the way that other prisoners would have come to challenge the Warden in its o
wn home.

  Fenix instead turned to face east and south, looking up through the mists at the dim shapes of the plateaus floating above. Looking farthest south to align his sense of direction with the tree of life visible as the tallest point where he then looked left, north of the tree.

  There he found the extreme end of the plateau and between them could see the open gap which was above the Prison creature’s head.

  That was where he needed to go.

  It took weeks of travel among the skyscraper hairs and rancid mist to make his way down and along the spine of the creature. The going was faster than traversing the land masses above him because he could go in a relatively direct line.

  He did not need to find bridges and clamber over rough terrain.

  The worst that could happen was to find a hill-sized pimple to go around or the mountain-sized lumps of muscle which built up steadily to form over the bones of the spine of the creature. In this second instance, the spine served as a useful marker for the direction he needed to take.

  As to dangers of the wild, the skin lice grew to the size of wolves, and other parasites one would find that thrived on skin and hair grew as large as houses.

  One or two seemed to take an interest in him, but for the most part, they were docile and subsumed in their own lives where their simple existence was the same as any other mite on any other Beings skin.

  So there were not many burnt, and scorched corpses blasted into the skin of the creature.

  Fenix had wondered if such close proximity to destructive power would affect the thing, if perhaps a continent-sized spasm or rippled of scratching would create havoc on the Prison lands above.

  As far as he could tell, the creature paid no attention to him or what he did whatsoever.

  Closer to the head and the dense mist and fog around the ends of the plateaus were contributed to by the waterfalls around the tree of life and the currents of airflow in the Prison.

  The amount of it between the sun and the skin of the creature was so dense that it left Fenix in a perpetual twilight during the day and a darkness so complete at night that without his magically enhanced senses he would have been blind.

  Fenix was not so sure of himself in this place to create light during the night, something told him that it might be visible far enough away, or even from above, that it could lure various terrible things to him.

  He did not need the complication nor the distraction.

  Working with scarce resources like the Vitae proved an exercise in prudence, something to keep the convicts in check. Any of them could well be Gods or Goddesses, which was part of what the Prison was for.

  But without their memory to tell them that, and sufficient power by gathering Vitae, all were rendered equal.

  So he plodded on at a steady pace, spent his days in a routine of travel, exercise and stretching, and some soul searching. The drudgery and mostly unchanging scenery blurred time and made his steps merge together in a haze of thought that matched the misty landscape of the forest of hairs.

  Inevitably he started by searching the memories he had begun to recall, then he went into his training, relearning his magic, and kept himself busy with practice tasks.

  Inevitably he came around to days of thinking on the one subject that confounded him.

  Convenient.

  For all of his intelligence and practicality, Fenix could only assume that missing memories might help him reconcile his feelings. Real feelings about someone other than Aurelian, the one Being or Entity that he had ever cared about.

  Fenix was not even sure that he could rightly say that he cared for Convenient at all, but there was something there. Somehow the man had found a way into that core of Fenix that established a connection.

  As far as Fenix could surmise from the days of in-depth analysis into his own inner workings, he did not establish connections.

  Growing up among his people, they were inclined and encouraged to interact, but never to develop an attachment. To be attached to anything, whether it was an individual, a purpose, or even a weapon of choice was discouraged.

  Attachment went against survival because to be attached meant you had something else that took up your time and effort in some way. Whether only in a small desire to hold onto a favorite toy or weapon, or to protect something that could not be moved.

  This brought down the given options you had in a situation if you could not give up everything and move on as an extreme option then everything between what you wanted to keep and that option became severely limited.

  Which was why Fenix was unique in that Aurelian had allowed him to become connected to Her.

  So for Convenient to have been a connection meant that Fenix could have become attached to the man in some way. He had enjoyed his company at times, but he could enjoy the company for the moth, allow it to be in his presence, and not be attached.

  Somehow Fenix felt that he had lost something with Convenient.

  The simple fact that he spent this much time wondering about his relationship with the man showed some sort of attachment had started.

  He could not afford to be distracted by the, feeling, if that was what it was. So Fenix meticulously examined and set aside the exotic, to him, arrangement of feelings about Convenient.

  Something that he would have done in an hour or hours at most took him days of struggle. At last, though he felt that he had compartmentalized Convenient away in his psyche and could focus on escaping the Prison.

  **

  The brightest time of the day lasted only a few hours with a strange false dawn and false dusk effect by the time Fenix was making his way along the neck of the Prison creature.

  The dawn and dusk took place out of time with the plateaus above the creature’s head because it was only when the sun shone through under those plateaus in that small gap where they floated above the creature’s head.

  After dawn, the sunlight would only filter into the fog covering just before it was at the highest point overhead and disappear soon after behind the tree of life.

  Fenix then had little choice but to approach the last stages of his journey in a perpetual twilight bordering on full night or only travel during the brightest parts of the day. Fenix did not have the patience, considering his drive to escape, to wait out most of the darker times.

  This did make it challenging to find out exactly which way around the head he should go once he got to the base of the neck where it joined with the upper spine.

  To understand the scale, the creature’s spine and neck joined much like a hedgehog or porcupine would, where the bones of the shoulders came together with the spin and supported the neck bones straight ahead to the skull.

  On a creature with a neck the size of a large inland lake and the hump of the skin and bone of the join higher than an average mountain this did give Fenix pause.

  He could have built his sanctuary on either side of the head, after all, there would be ample space among the large hair strands or even in any bony protrusions. A home, even a mansion, could be carved into that kind of area and be unnoticed by a being of this size.

  Fenix then set about searching for any hidden signs he would have left for himself, something to point the way. That such a sign would need to last for decades, or longer, and should only be recognizable by him and not easy to interpret by another Convict would make it more unique.

  It did not help that his memories of making such markings were incomplete.

  His past self must have thought of that, however, as his previous self-had thought of many things it seemed.

  No sooner had Fenix begun to search for etchings on the hairs, higher up because of growth, than there was a flash of amber light in the mist to one side. It was there and gone again in a second, but with his reflexes, Fenix instantly had the direction pinned down.

  He moved off, keeping his nose pointed the way he wanted to go and his eyes unfocused to catch any new signal.

  Then the flash went off again, closer now and st
ill in front of him.

  In a matter of minutes, Fenix came across a tattoo marked into the ski of the creature equidistant between two of the hair follicles.

  When inert, the design was simple and could have been mistaken for a child’s painting or blotch. In fact, it was a mark used by hunters among his people who left a trail for others to find campsites and stores of firewood and supplies.

  Hunters also served as scouts for his people, Aurelian’s people.

  Her creations for Her purpose.

  Fenix shook himself and looked again at the smudge barely visible in the upper layer of skin. It could take someone a lot of searching to even notice something like this, and quickly dismiss it as close to any other discoloration seen elsewhere on the back of the creature.

  When it flared again, Fenix felt the spell form and let his arcane senses travel over it.

  It was a tattoo, using blood, probably his own blood if he thought about how it worked. Using synergy, the blood would react when more of itself came close by, in this case, within Fenix when he walked around.

  The reaction called on the latent magical properties and caused a flare of light, which was powered by the same energy used to keep the spell going for decades. It read the energy from crushed Vitae imprinted under the skin along with the tattoo, blood and Vitae made into ink.

  Since the spell would be mostly dormant while waiting for a resonance from the blood link it used very little energy except when flashing. This one could have been viable for another century until activated.

  As it was if he stayed here and let it keep flashing, it would burn out within a week.

  More than enough time to find his way.

  The diagram looked like splotches of spilled food, but variations in the design used by the hunter scouts provided direction. Fenix could recall enough of that basic training, something his past self must have counted on.

  Or, if he could not recall enough, then he would not have been ready to follow the signs anyway.