The Phoenix's Fall

"I fell down today.

It was swift and it kicked me in the face like a blow from an elephant. I couldn't control myself as my heart convulsed. Desire, raw need, flooded me, and the swift pain of its denial was like a hand clamping around my soul and squeezing. I could barely breathe...

This doesn't happen to me. I'm smarter with my feelings. A voice inside whispered "she doesn't want you," and the echo that came down through my soul was as sharp and practical as any thirteen year old could be. This is why you don't do this. You don't touch those things, don't go near them, don't look at them, do not listen to them.

Don't fall for them.

Some things, you have to work against every day. You know this. You've done it before, you can do it again. Remember who you are. Remember what you are. Strip back that veil until you are nothing. Until that raw and bleeding heart of yours has nothing left in it. Crush it inside you until it is dust. And do it over and over and over until you don't know why you do it. Until you can't feel a single speck of that life, that hope, that love.

Until you die.

Dust and ash are all you are. Dust and ash are all you need to be. Ticking over in the hourglass of time until that person moves on. Until that blazing sun in the sky leaves you alone to your crying madness.

For madness is what it is. Sanity doesn't strike you in the dead of night like this. It doesn't attack you where you're most vulnerable. It doesn't take everything that is best in you and turn it like a knife in your hand.

Sanity isn't what you use against yourself.

Spinning in my mind, the wheels click back and forth. Don't do this. You know what's coming. She's moving and you are static. She is fire and you are earth. She will flit to another star just like the wind, and you don't have the soul to be that friend. Standing by. Watching the emotion fall off your face and into someone else's embrace. You were never that person, not then, not now.

And swiftly, draw that circle around you. Gather those ashes about you. You are nothing, from nothing, to nothing. That means you can be anything, from all to everything.

There's only so many times you can break me.

And break me.

...and break me.

Until I fall down.

But don't be surprised when I get up again. This cloak of flame is my soul, and those ashes are embers of my heart. In them I burn and flicker and hunger for life. Like a coiled serpent those fragments will sweep around me, biting through the skin and into the soul beneath. With every pinprick of pain my stance is firmer, my step surer, my heart lighter.

My soul brighter.

If there is no sun but you in my heart, I will put your blaze to shame. I will take that other life and lay it down gently as a babe and say goodbye. It shouldn't have been, but it was beautiful, and I don't hate it. It shouldn't have snapped me in a moment, it shouldn't. But I can only marvel at a world with such things in it.

Such people as you."

- Serestra Cain; Deserter, Outcast, Saviour.