Convict Fenix

by Alan Brickett

  It had taken Gods and Goddesses, more than one, to stop Page and sentence it.

  This entity was not a pushover, angry, unenlightened, the cunning and intelligence of your average talented badger.

  But not a pushover.

  Power welled inside itself, changed, transformed, and adjusted Page into a new form. It remained humanoid but returned to three-quarters of the height it had been when in its young Page form.

  Then it got fat, bloating grotesquely out of the sash that held up the silk pants.

  Flab flopped down its arms, spread the thighs of its legs and sagged down its calves. The head sunk into a double, then triple chin and continued going. Rolls and rolls of fat fell down over its knees until they were hidden from view.

  A growing blob of blue flesh spread out from the spot where Page had stopped moving, flesh that kept on spreading outward.

  Fenix observed this, careful to take the measure of this new state Page had transformed in to. Because of that, he was able to react in the smallest instant he had when the thin tentacle shot out with a crack of parted air from the blob.

  The small tentacle parted the emerald wall behind where Fenix had been standing with the ease of a knife through a cloud. It then whipped after Fenix in the next heartbeat, digging a line through the wall, the intervening emerald columns and over into anything else.

  Fenix put out both hands and stopped the tentacle of flesh, it slapped into his palms with a thunder crack that broke the foundations of the courtyard. He slewed backward on his feet, dredging up emerald dust and wincing at the already healing blisters on his hands.

  His fire burned the tentacle, keeping Page from sucking out his life, but the burns healed as quickly as he caused them.

  A second tentacle whipped out from the other side, angling in at Fenix’s back it slammed into him only because the first tentacle brought its end in and tried to wrap itself around his wrists to immobilize him.

  He avoided being tied up, took the blow to his back and allowed it to throw him across the courtyard where he went through one of the few pillars that remained intact.

  He did not pause, to hesitate was to die.

  Up and off at a sprint, Fenix covered the ground between him and the Page blob in three heartbeats. Unfortunately, Page was getting faster, without losing any of the strength it had thus far displayed.

  A dozen tentacles shot straight out of the flaccid tissue of the blob right into Fenix’s path, the pointed ends aiming for his eyes, mouth, throat and every other conceived soft spot Page could think of.

  Fenix dodged to one side and then ducked back under even as the limbs of solid muscle spun around themselves to get to him. Thunder exploded behind him, the speed of the tips broke the sound barrier individually, rending the air of the courtyard with great claps.

  No, Page was no easy target, if the entity had only known that it could have taken the Prison over from any other convict from the past few years.

  It had surpassed them all some time ago.

  Emerald dust blew in miniature tornadoes drawn up by the tentacles speedy maneuvers. Fenix at their end spliced his speed and reflexes down to bare milliseconds to narrowly avoid the tips and whip crack lengths.

  Underneath, over, summersaults were avoided because they left him exposed. Instead, every available surface was used with hands and feet to push him out of danger. Where he touched it, the Emerald melted, shattering and breaking from the force of just his evasions.

  Where the emerald was between Page and Fenix it became an expanding cloud of debris, none of which bothered either Fenix or Page.

  The only chance of injury was from each other.

  Page was stronger and faster than Fenix.

  The evidence piled up against him, in the form of welts stitched in crisscross patterns on his limbs where he blocked instead of dodging. Blows that shattered mountains began to tell against him, especially when so many could come in at once.

  He could keep up with a score of tentacles.

  When they became twice that number, he was hard pressed. Once Page had twice that number again, he was in trouble. At five score tentacles, all controlled independently by an insane mind able to track Fenix anywhere in the Emerald Palace he had a hundred problems to contend with in any given second.

  A hundred tentacles, each able to slice clean through a mountain without pausing, each one faster than sound and all working together for the express purpose of bringing him down.

  **

  The Emerald Palace collapsed down on the side where the two were locked in combat.

  The sapphire fire of Fenix wove around buildings or melted straight through walls where it was faster to escape through a hole than go around. Page sliced through or outright demolished everything between it and Fenix.

  Thunderclaps brought down buildings, towers shattered and spewed melting shards over Page where Fenix brought his own might and magic to bear. Every attack he made rained down destructive elements, the flesh of Page darkening first brown and then going black as it was exposed to intense heat the likes of which suns grew jealous.

  The entire Prison was not excluded from the effects of this battle.

  Air shoved aside in giant wavefronts changed the normalized pressure of the atmosphere in the Prison. Heated air, higher than any furnace and in more volume than a village of baker’s ovens, rose from the Emerald Palace.

  Situated in the middle of the Prison as it was, although off center, the plateau of the Emerald Palace was at a height to allow this change in the air to spread down and out in all directions.

  The ordinarily tranquil weather over the plateau began to jerk and spasm like a body exposed to electric current.

  The other plateaus were currently protected by the air flows which existed between the floating land masses. But the residents could still see the weather system forming over the Emerald Palace, localized cloud and winds buffeting across the miles of open mesa swept back around from the air pushed up around the edges.

  It began to turn, cloud twisted around in a corkscrew, the open mouth of a hurricane forming inside the Prison.

  A small misstep, the tiniest of changes in direction from a brittle piece of emerald, exposed to heat and wind, spelled the first of Fenix’s problems.

  While dodging the most recent attack of thirty flailing tentacles, Fenix knew of the other ten coming up from below like an egg slicer of epic proportions. So he pushed against an outcropping of emerald that was all which remained of the floor of a cathedral-like building.

  That was the piece which broke before he expected it to, just as he twisted aside from seven whips of blue that scoured through the supporting foundation of the same building to slew sideways into him.

  Caught midair with nothing to leverage against the only thing holding him up suddenly became the tentacle strikes.

  Page had him.

  In pairs or groups of five, the tentacles caught Fenix in cracks of strikes from every direction. In a bloated sphere of open air, the hundred limbs of an enraged Page slapped him around like a cat would bat a mouse.

  The squash ball inside a court consisting of only racquets Fenix was pummeled at every turn. Spun around and slammed back at an every waiting set of new tentacles which slammed him as hard as they could into their waiting neighbors.

  Bam, Bam Bam.

  Many times a second Fenix took blows that should have reduced him to flesh and bone kindling. Shattered and broken he should have been reduced to dust under such an onslaught.

  Seen from afar an insane squid played ball with a glowing firefly, the hurricane mouth forming over the lurid landscape of shattered Emerald and the Prison convicts who could see that far prepared themselves to bear witness to the death of a supreme being.

  **

  Aurelian had been wrong, and being able to think that without flinching was a testament to how far Fenix had come.

  Oh, she had betrayed him, for sure.

  Aurelian had angered him greatly, pushed him over
the edge into the extreme emotions, focused and filtered down into a rock hard core of drive. With that anger and desire for revenge, he had escaped, planned, and acted out a successful means to get his revenge.

  In the only way he would have been satisfied, as taught by her, by defeating her and ensuring she would never be a threat again.

  And therein was the root of her mistake.

  He had not loved her, he had loved an idea, and the idea wasn’t necessarily her at all even though she was involved in it. The idea had carried the weight to capitalize his thoughts of her, but now she was just another being, albeit a powerful one.

  What she had offered, what he could get, and the way he was getting it, that was the feeling. That was where he had put his emotion.

  And that was what she had betrayed, not an open and honest connection between two beings dedicated to each other.

  She had never truly been dedicated to him despite the profession of love from her red lips. He had not been someone to her. That was the most profound realization from his memories.

  She had been taking the devotion in stride.

  Part and parcel of the way toward her goals, always moving forward and in some kind of alliance, but no, not love.

  Fenix needed to experience intensity to focus and transform his innate power and the blue flame.

  Aurelian had given him honest anger and outrage, betrayal and revenge against harm done to him. But she had not given him pain and hurt, he had not experienced a sincere connection with her, so it didn’t work as she had intended.

  But then a being like her would likely never understand, Fenix was quite sure she would never have been able to have a complete relationship on any level.

  For Aurelian, those final words she had said to him would have been equally effective as whole truth or bald lie. They were supposed to cause him to think, to wonder about and lose sleep over. To cause him Chaos.

  She had shaped him along the same lines, his entire life, his core being, and the way he lived did not allow for relationships at that level. He was meant to be an instrument, a tool to create chaos, to enact change and let the pieces fall where they may.

  And yet, here he was between two lives, and the most powerful thing he was feeling now was, in fact, loss.

  And anger at that loss.

  Anger and sheer unadulterated vehemence with the being that had caused that loss too.

  With not a little anger at himself for having manipulated everything toward events also resulting in that loss. And surprisingly, not because of the effect on him, but because the cosmos itself may also now be at a loss.

  Because Convenient was dead.

  Fenix could feel the absence inside him, a void he could not fill because it had hosted the presence of Convenient. That the old knight had honestly been a friend was now clear, that he, Fenix, had accepted that with all due surprise to his nature, was also evident.

  And the absence haunted him.

  It hurt.

  **

  Fenix’s magic was, by its nature, fueled by emotion.

  Aurelian had nurtured that and drawn out that talent, creating in Fenix emotion to support his abilities.

  Never had Fenix felt the undiluted anger he now felt, not even the drive for revenge and emotion which had pushed him to defeat Aurelian had been this intense.

  The first time you feel righteous anger has that effect on you, anger at injustice, at the wrongs caused to someone you see as innocent. Anger that is not part of the dark side of people, the kind of anger that is justified, that pushed you to survive despite the evils of the universe.

  Fenix’s entire form of attack and defense changed at a fundamental level when he realized these things.

  His talent, his magic, his core being altered itself and made him stronger.

  The fire of Fenix burned into the nearly impossible to reach limits of the cosmos and turned white.

  His hair lashed out from a body converted now into a new form of immolating flame. Gray skin complemented the lashing torrent of argent fire wrapping around him in an embrace that would char the core of suns.

  Simultaneously the hurricane exploded outwards, and the tentacles around Fenix were slammed down by the hand of air so hot it splashed the emerald underneath it as the precious stone instantly turned liquid just from the downdraft.

  Inside a new white dwarf, the figure of Fenix’s humanoid form unfolded from the fetal position he had been in under the lashing Page was giving him.

  Rays of heat from this sun lasered down into the pooling emerald, setting it bubbling as it reached boiling point. As fast as Page could heal even its skin could not keep up with the continued burning exposure to Fenix caused.

  Without a deific sunscreen to lather over its burning flesh, Page knew that it could not remain exposed to this level of power and not be harmed.

  Even in the midst of its desire to kill Fenix, among the impotent frustration its juvenile mind needed to unleash, Page knew that now it faced death.

  Even as Page tried to escape, into the bubbling pools of emerald, anywhere that was safer than outside, above ground where the Fenix sun burned, it knew it was doomed.

  There was not a gigantic flash of destructive force, even as he existed in this state Fenix knew the destruction he caused to the Prison. The atmosphere itself was catching fire around him and in moments would erupt.

  If it did then the air pressure protecting the other land masses from the battle on the Emerald Palace plateau would be torn aside and go up in flames of their own. The Prison creature would die in a glory of burning hell even as the other plateaus were engulfed.

  The Tree of Life would burn, the Prison would die, something the Warden would never allow.

  In the second after he turned into white fire Fenix knew this, in the split second it took Page to turn around and try to run Fenix knew he had him. The righteous anger he felt did not take away his rational thought, it focused it.

  So Fenix turned that focus into a single line of fire, argent fire burning silver-white that beamed down from him, as wide around as the blob that was Page.

  It struck the molten emerald and evaporated the stone, unhindered by anything material the fire caught up with Page, surrounding it and smothered the existence of the entity. There was such a small fraction of time between when Page existed and when it was wiped from existence that there was no thought for Page to recognize its own end.

  It came and went at the speed of white light, clean and purifying.

  Fenix doused his fire, flying stationary above the charred pit he had bored into the land, he observed the prodigious amount of black and white mist that spread out and then turned to seep into the still protected parts of the Emerald Palace.

  There to add itself to the floating sparks of the Wardens grand experiment.

  Of the entity Page there was no, and never would again, be any sign.

  Fenix felt sad, this was not going to correct his mistakes or bring Convenient back, nor did it change his fundamental nature, he would survive and always push to survive.

  He would survive at any cost.

  What this had done, was give Fenix a new appreciation for the value of what it may cost.

  Leisurely floating down to the hardening emerald, Fenix touched down and took off at a sedate walk back to the Warden, and freedom.

  Epilogue…

  “Three hundred and twenty-eight years sir,” Wisp was saying.

  He floated above the stone outcrop with the glass sides that projected from the tall wall within the chamber that held the Sparks. The Warden’s prominent stone visage protruded from the wall behind him, as smooth and unblemished as always.

  “Good work Wisp, and give my congratulations to everyone else as well,” the face rumbled.

  “I believe that more than makes up for his last time here does it not?”

  “Yes, Sir. Fenix managed to more than double the overall intake, and we expect that the loss of so many convicts will not be of major concern sin
ce we’ll get replacements to fill in all the gaps in the population within three more years. The quota should remain unaffected, and we will maintain our lead on the budget figures.”

  Wisp was quite pleased that he had finished the calculations so quickly.

  If the stone face had any capacity for expression or gesture, it may have nodded. “Good.”

  There was a pause as both entities contemplated the pristine white glow and light sucking black void that was the two Sparks. Small tendrils of white and black seeped in from the runes along the walls, signs that another prisoner had died.

  It would take a while before that was more common, the general upset caused by Fenix was back to a natural cycle of survival, but they did need to increase the general population.

  “Only a few more thousand years to complete cohesion, sir,” Wisp commented.

  “Yes, I have already started the plans for the next pocket dimension, one much larger than this, and preparations have started on finding a complete world to use for the next phase.”

  “Very good sir, shall I analyze the projections and complete a report.”

  “Please do Wisp.”

  It was always satisfying to do a job properly, for Wisp.

  His thoughts rambled about, as they were wont to do after so much effort and workload had been completed. The paperwork alone for so many prisoners’ deaths was staggering, but he always relished that challenge. And of course, there was the concise report on the escape of one particular prisoner.

  “Did they manage to recapture him, sir?”

  “No, apparently he had the means to get away once he was out already prepared for him. Most impressive on his part, but then we knew that about Fenix already.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “An ambitious being, that Fenix, leads an interesting life. I must say I really wasn’t that impressed with the witch hags themselves, young girls reaching further than they should have and too quickly. “

  “But Aurelian did well in crafting Fenix. If her remaining sisters, ahem, and that one male witch hag, managed to do the same, the cosmos would have some potential trouble in the future. Although perhaps I give Aurelian too much due, I think that Fenix is perhaps his own creation as much as hers, despite what even he may think.”