The Heart of the Phoenix

by Brian Knight

  Penny searched the remaining yearbooks until she found the newest, and went straight to the senior page. Her mom and aunt were there, along with Katie’s aunt, but she didn’t find Janet until she’d turned to the junior’s page.

  Janet Beale resembled the girl in her mother’s old photo album, long black hair, pale skin, and thick round glasses. Not Penny’s image of a punk rocker, but people change, inside and out.

  The only punk she’d ever listened to was the Ramones, she wasn’t familiar with Janet Beale, but a quick internet search before Susan came home would remedy that.

  Penny stashed the liberated books under her bed and hurried downstairs to the computer station, typed in a search, and found more than she’d expected. Janet’s stage name was Manic Jan, and Penny had heard of her. Her hair was still black, though with blood red streaks and highlights, and instead of glasses Manic Jan wore a pair of black steampunk goggles. Her band, the Blowhards, had five records, and was currently on tour.

  Penny printed her biography page and was folding it when she heard Susan’s car pull up to the house. She tucked the printed page into her pocket, exited the webpage on Manic Jan and the Blowhards, and ran out to help Susan bring in the empty boxes from her deliveries.

  * * *

  Penny met her doppelganger again that night in her dreams, not in the cave or the hollow, but in her room.

  “Tell me more,” the girl said, and sat down next to Penny on her bed.

  Penny had already told her so much, she couldn’t remember where she had left off or where to begin again.

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Everything.” The girl looked beyond hungry for information, she looked starved for it. “I need to know everything.”

  Penny was stuck for a place to begin, and after a few moments of silence her double, her other half, seemed to guess as much.

  “Lean closer,” she said, and took Penny’s face between her hands.

  They leaned together, forehead to forehead, and closed their eyes.

  “Two bodies, one mind,” Penny’s other half said, and for a while, they were.

  * * *

  Penny awoke at midnight to the sound of her own name called quietly in the room where she slept alone, and realized she was late for her meeting at the hollow. She fumbled her mirror out from under her pillow and found Zoe’s face looking back at her.

  “Come on, slacker. We’re waiting.”

  Chapter 6

  Summer School

  “Okay, I’m here,” Penny said as she closed the door behind her. She tried to ignore the narrowed eyes and impatient tapping of Erasmus’s cane in the dirt. “Sorry.”

  “No trouble,” Bowen said. “I was filling Zoe in on my story.”

  Penny turned to Zoe, eyebrows raised.

  Zoe shook her head in silent bewilderment.

  Katie sat with her eyes closed, not sleeping but clearly wishing she were.

  Ellen yawned loudly.

  “Let’s get on with it,” Erasmus said. “The short one needs her sleep.”

  “Sit and spin,” Penny advised.

  “That was quite rude,” Erasmus said, but gave her a nod and a smile, as if he approved.

  Bowen coughed.

  “Well, you are the Phoenix Girls.” Bowen spread his arms to encompass them all. “But you don’t even know who the Phoenix was... do you?”

  “No,” Penny, Zoe, and Ellen said.

  Katie forced her eyes open and gave her head an apathetic shake.

  “Then your first history lesson will be the legend of the Death of the Phoenix.”

  “Sounds exciting,” Zoe said.

  Penny liked a good story as much as anyone, but at a quarter past midnight she was going to withhold judgment.

  Bowen produced an old cloth-bound book from an inner pocket, thumbed through to a place he’d marked. He told the story, and the girls awoke fully to hear it. They listened with the attention of children hearing a new favorite story for the first time, and Penny at least couldn’t shake the feeling that the story as Bowen told it was not the whole story... that it was still happening, and that she was now a part of it.

  * * *

  The Death of the Phoenix

  A long time ago when the worlds were much younger and still close together, like the rooms of a great castle, the Phoenix walked among the many races of people. She carried with her a living rod from the tree of life, and wherever she went she brought light, magic, justice, and the knowledge mankind and his brother races required to rule themselves wisely. She did not rule, but taught the worthy among others to do it.

  The Phoenix was beautiful, powerful, and wise, and though she wasn’t a goddess, she was immortal. She was not infinite, but nearly so.

  Most of the people of the many worlds loved her, but some did not. Some who wished to rule, but were not worthy, wished to destroy her for her interference. Many did try over the long centuries of her life, but all failed.

  The Phoenix’s greatest enemy was Tarvus the Red, exiled prince from the land of Galatania, both despised and feared in his former country. Known as the Blood Prince, Tarvus the Red’s hunger for violence and power led him to betray his father, the rightful king, and ignited a civil war that left the great kingdom on the brink of ruin.

  Only the Phoenix’s intervention saved the people of Galatania from enslavement by the tyrant Tarvus. She drove the Blood Prince and the shattered remains of his army from the land and returned the disposed king to his throne. For many years the Phoenix’s peace endured. Tarvus the Red, Blood Prince of Nowhere, did not return.

  Shortly before the death of the old king and his good son Artaius the Red’s ascension to the throne, news reached Galatania that the Blood Prince was finally dead, and the last of his army killed in the far east by the bird people.

  But Tarvus, Blood Prince of Nowhere was not dead. A clever and patient man, the Blood Prince waited. He watched her from afar, for he was learned in the vilest of the magical arts, and studied the Phoenix. He discovered her deepest secrets, the source of her power, and the secret behind her immortality. At last he laid his plans against her, a trap set up to snare her at her weakest and most vulnerable.

  At the end of one of her long cycles, for life itself was a cycle, always beginning again where it ended, the Phoenix sought her sanctuary grove, a place of power and renewal. Frail and weak with many decades, she found one of the doorways between the worlds and went to where her old body could die in its own flames and be reborn from the ashes. For a time she would remain helpless, an infant with all her millennia of knowledge, but the native creatures of that place were always helpful, rescuing her from solitude and taking her to a place where they lived. The strong, red-skinned natives of that land always expected her, for they were deeply tuned to the cycle of the worlds, and raised her as if she were one of their own until she was grown enough to resume her endless, wandering life.

  The Phoenix found her sanctuary grove, her place of rebirth for time out of mind, and prepared herself for the flames, but Tarvus the Red waited in ambush and struck her down with his own dark magic before she could defend herself. The curse the Blood Prince put on her withered her form and ate the flesh from her bones.

  As the Blood Prince bent over her in gloating triumph, she slashed at him with her ruined and skeletal hand, leaving a gash across his cheek that scarred him forever. With her last breath, she pronounced her own curse upon him.

  “May your house be always divided, your kingdom always besieged. May your face forever wear the mark of my hand, and may my face be the last that you see.”

  Tarvus the Red was afraid, convinced that her dying curse would end his life, but the Phoenix turned away from him and dragged her withering body toward the creek that ran through her sanctuary grove, and with the last of her strength, drove her rod into the ground at the water’s edge.

  The Blood Prince watched as the dying Phoenix turned from flesh to bone, bone to dust, and dust to nothing, until only t
he shriveled, beating muscle of her heart remained on the ground before him. Though he struck the heart with the darkest magic he knew, nothing would still its beat. The Phoenix’s heart was too strong. So he turned it to stone, and when at last it stilled, he bent to claim her rod of power.

  Hard as he drew upon it, the rod would not pull free. She had driven it deeply, and the earth would not relinquish it to him.

  The Blood Prince returned to his old land, with the Phoenix’s stilled heart as a trophy, to regain his lost kingdom.

  The Phoenix did not return, but being immortal, could not truly die. Her spirit lingers on in her sanctuary grove.

  The Blood Prince, now Blood King, was a tyrant, and the Phoenix knew his tyranny would ensure the first half of her curse against him. Only her return would complete it.

  The Phoenix waits endlessly, restlessly for those who might bring her back.

  * * *

  The story ended and the hollow fell into silence for almost a full minute before anyone spoke.

  “That’s almost like a creation legend,” Katie said. “Is it apocryphal?”

  “Apocryphal?” Penny slid from the fog of a good story and back into the present.

  “Made up,” Zoe elaborated.

  “Has to be,” Ellen said. “Good story though.”

  “Why does it have to be apocryphal?” Erasmus was quickly distinguishing himself and the resident grump, jabbing his cane in Ellen’s direction as he snapped at her.

  Ellen slid sideways off her perch near the fire pit and stepped away from his pointing cane, knowing all too well what the cane actually was and not wanting him to shoot her on accident.

  “My great grandfather fought the Blood Prince when he tried to invade the South Islands.” He dropped his cane’s tip back to the dirt and began to twirl himself on his stool again. “And my Uncle Bilge said he saw the Phoenix when he was a boy. Said she did a flyover one evening when he was out alone, harvesting jellyfish.”

  Erasmus ceased his spinning and frowned for a moment.

  “He was a sociopath and a liar though, so he might have made the whole thing up.”

  “I’d call it a romantic accounting,” Bowen said. “It’s a historically accurate account of a war between two Fuilrix brothers.”

  “Between Tarvus the Blood Prince and Artaius?” Penny was thinking privately that her family was even more messed up than Zoe’s.

  “Yes,” Bowen said.

  “And the Blood Prince won in the end,” Zoe asked, “dooming the people of Galatania to an eternity of darkness and tyranny?”

  “That’s a bit melodramatic, don’t you think?” Erasmus sounded supremely irritated.

  “Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” Bowen said. “A decade or two at most. He had a son who inherited the kingdom when he died.”

  “Erick the Addled,” Erasmus said with a curt snort of laughter.

  Bowen nodded. “He was quite mad... tried to learn all of his father’s magic and scrambled his brains.”

  “And the Phoenix?” Ellen seemed ready to get back on topic.

  “There is plenty of historical evidence that the Phoenix lived,” Bowen said. “Enough to convince most historians anyway.”

  “I saw a temple to her once,” Erasmus said. “Up in the northern arc.”

  “A temple,” Penny repeated, trying to decide if their legs were being pulled.

  Erasmus gave a sharp nod. “I was traveling with a company of merchants and we camped near it, fled the next morning just ahead of a band of berserkers who decided to let us go and burn the temple to the ground.”

  “Ooookay,” Katie said.

  “And her last reliable sighting was at a border dispute between two towns on the edge of the Dead Lands,” Bowen continued, as if there had been no interruption. “Just before the Blood Prince deposed his brother.”

  “So the Phoenix is... was real,” Penny said, arriving at the point she thought they were trying to make.

  “Yes,” Erasmus and Bowen said together.

  “And Ronan’s theory,” Bowen said, “is that this is the grove from the story I’ve just told you. This is where the Blood Prince killed her.”

  “And that,” Erasmus said, pointing back over his shoulder with his cane at the old, twisted ash tree, “was her rod from the Tree of Life.”

  Penny was about to ask what the Tree of Life was supposed to be, then decided she’d just Google it. Fascinating as it all was, she was an eye blink from passing out.

  “Ronan thinks she’s still here,” Katie said, also apparently more than ready to arrive at the point of the night’s lesson.

  “Don’t you?” Bowen raised his eyebrows in a burlesque display.

  Penny thought about the strange lady she’d met when they made the circle, the woman sheathed in flame, and thought the others were remembering her too.

  Penny believed.

  Ellen, who had been silent for the past few minutes, began to snore gently from her seat near the dying fire.

  They decided to call it a night, or early morning as it was, and meet the next night at midnight. Penny returned, desperate for a few hours of restful, and hopefully dreamless, sleep, but awoke late the next morning feeling as though she hadn’t slept at all.

  * * *

  The Gallic Wars and the Land of the Midnight Sun

  Rome’s war against the Gallic tribes and the consolidation of Gallic lands led to an uprising among the subjugated Gauls under their leader, Ambiorix, and the later rebellion by Vercingetorix, chief of the Arverni tribe. The final battle of the insurrection took place in the besieged city of Alesia, where Vercingetorix chose to stand his ground and fight rather than flee. Though there were a number of lesser uprisings, this marked the end of the Gallic Wars.

  During this war a number of Gallic tribes simply vanished, assumed destroyed or assimilated into other tribes. Many of these tribes had taken the opportunity to flee while the main Roman force was engaged in Alesia fighting Vercingetorix. They gathered on the island of Britannia with members of the Druid priesthood to prepare for their escape to a land where the Romans could not follow. While still awaiting the arrival of the final lost tribes, the gathered Gauls fought a final battle against Roman soldiers at a site now called Stonehenge.

  Stonehenge was one of several Worldgates, gateways to a place of magic where the Druids traveled and gathered power and knowledge, the Land of the Midnight Sun, so named for the bright ring of light that decorated its night sky in place of a moon. In the final battle led by the Gallic hero, Fuilrix, the Gallic warriors defended the site while the Druids opened a gateway large enough for the gathered Gauls to escape through. Fuilrix remained behind and fought until all but him had escaped, and when he was the last, fought his way through to the portal before it closed. He arrived on the other side badly injured, covered from head to toes in the blood of his enemies.

  When the doorway closed behind him, Stonehenge fractured and the Worldgate closed forever.

  Fuilrix was made chief of the consolidated Gallic tribe, and later, king of the new land of Galatania on the continent they named Gallia. The descendants of Fuilrix continued to rule through the centuries, and Fuilrix himself attained an almost mythical stature. It was claimed that his fiery red hair was once dark, and turned red by the blood of his enemies as he fought his way through the Roman army, slaughtering them by the hundreds. He was called the Great Red King in legend, and his descendants almost all have the same fiery red hair. Because of Fuilrix and his royal descendants, red hair is considered a sign of nobility, privilege, and all redheads in the new land enjoy an elevated status.

  The House of Fuilrix still exists, and his descendants still rule the Land of the Midnight Sun. Other humans have come to their world over the centuries, assimilated into the mostly peaceful culture, and influenced it in subtle ways. The social structure remains similar to the ancient Gallic and Druidic cultures, but not identical. Technological progress in Galatania is centuries behind the world they abandoned to the Roman
s, electricity is unstable and dangerous, but steam power is now in wide use since its introduction. On the few occasions where modern electronics have been brought to Galatania through one of the still existing gateways, it either does not work properly, or fails catastrophically.

  Galatania is a feudal republic, ruled by a king or queen chosen from the House of Fuilrix, but governed on a larger scale by representatives chosen from the people. For the first 1,500 years, Galatania existed in peace with itself and the natives of the new Earth. After a royal coup by the Prince Tarvus, known as the Blood Prince, against his father, King Lenus, Galatania became ever more aggressive and grasping, warring against once friendly native cultures and tribes. With the assistance of the near mythical figure known as the Phoenix, an immortal woman of great power and wisdom, the deposed King Lenus reclaimed his throne and Tarvus was banished. For many years the reinstated king, and then his son, Artaius, ruled in peace, but Tarvus returned and killed Artaius. With no natural heir to accept the throne, and no one willing to challenge the last direct descendant of Fuilrix, Tarvus became the Blood King. His reign was short but violent, and left Galatania weakened. The trust between Galatania and its neighbors has never been fully restored.

  The original Gaulish language, which was similar to Latin, has evolved through the centuries and is now almost entirely Latinate. Continued contact with the old Earth has required the rulers of Galatania to adapt, and English has become a second language. The House of Fuilrix speaks Galatanian and modern English, and the power structure that supports the House of Fuilrix has adopted English in order to protect state secrets from the masses.

  Its many secrets include a number of portals, and potential portals, back to the old Earth. The House of Fuilrix has spent hundreds of years destroying those that could be destroyed, and possessing the others. The last of them, and the most problematic, connects Galatania’s capital city, ancestral home of the House of Fuilrix, with a small town on Old Earth called Dogwood. For many decades the House of Fuilrix has tried without success to acquire ownership of the land where the portal, Aurora Hollow, exists. Aurora Hollow is the final uncontrolled portal, and the royal family considers it an unacceptable threat to their secrecy from the world they fled 2,000 years before.