Phoenix Rising

In the gloom of my subconscious, I could just make out the dirty yellow sphere of the Sun through the opaque air made thick from the smoke of generations burning. I thought it had all been a dream, but I woke within this nightmare. I struggled to focus, uncertain if I was dead or if I had ever been alive. Even my memories were dulled and out of focus in the darkness of the lingering cloud. I began to move about conveyed by spirit, ethereal and without notice of my physical body. As if time turned back on itself, smoke and flame coalesced returning nature to its state of order before the chaos.

For a moment, I felt like a living body, naked and prostrate on the cool grass, basking in the warmth of the Sun burdened by only whisps of thin clouds. I rise to lean upon my elbows looking down the gently sloping hill between my bare feet to see a peaceful village anchored in a depression surrounded by rolling grasslands.

Beyond the village and the adjacent hill, a point of darkness appears on the horizon and rapidly expands to envelope the firmament. There, just before the sky bends to meet the earth they leaped from the heavens from boiling clouds of smoke and fire. Demons upon dragons coalesce out of the bubbling torment. They form their ranks and deploy their legions, the minions of darkness.

They march headlong, down the slope and through the fields, laying fire to the land in their wake. Before me, in the path of the approaching army, this village of people, foolish in their complacency, move about their business unaware.

“Run away!” I screamed to them from my vantage point on the hill. “Something is happing. An evil is coming.” Yet, the people played.

“Can’t you see the demons and the dragons approaching,” I implored. “Can’t you see their army?” And yet, the people played.

They became ants, unaware of danger, until they were laid waste by the advancing horde. Now I stand in their path with no obstacle before me to impede their approach, nowhere to run and no refuge for me to escape their wrath. But I do not fear for myself because only now I am aware that I am not alone. At my feet, my beautiful child plays innocently in the grass, oblivious to the pending doom. He will save his people and deliver them to order out of the chaos. He will live because I will shield him from the fire. Though my flesh will be consumed in the conflagration, he will persist, unharmed, unknown and unsought by the horde.

Ignoring the advancing death, I kneel before my child and pull from around my naked neck, the last of my possessions, a gold and platinum pendant suspended from a platinum chain. With the chain draped over my fingers, I hold the heart-shaped locket in the palm of my hand and read the words etched into the white metal. “From the ashes springs new life.” How appropriate those words seem to me now.

I hang the chain around my innocent child’s neck and surround him, wrapping my arms and legs around his tiny body as the fire engulfs us.

I float above the destruction again in ethereal form, like ash on a hot breeze. Once again, my memories are obscured in shadows, but I look down from where I rose onto the breeze and see an innocent child, blackened from ash, but otherwise unharmed. Around his neck dangling to his bare navel is a white metal chain and pendent. He raises a chubby little arm and reaches for me, but I float away.

All around me, I see the result of generations scoured away in a scope of time I could not fathom. Soon the dim light fades, and I search for the Sun, but blackness surrounds me until all goes dark.

***

I’ve never seen the Sun like it appears for a moment in this recurring dream. My waking eyes have only seen our life-giving star through the filtered filth of smoke and dust given flight by decades of war. I’ve never known peace. I’ve never seen a yellow Sun in a crisp, clear blue sky, not outside this dream. Sometimes I wonder if it isn’t better that the Sun explode and consume us all.

I’m a living legend. A miracle baby found alive and unharmed at the epicenter of the Great Conflagration, naked but for this single pendant containing the picture of a young woman and a baby. The Unburned tell me the story of the mythical phoenix that was said to periodically consume itself in fire and return to life after days in the ashes. They say that is the origin of the pendant’s words, “from the ashes springs new life.” Now I’m The Phoenix, the unwilling hero or the reluctant idiot of a desperate people looking to me to bring new life from the ashes.

I don’t know why I’m here. I don’t know why I survived. I don’t know why all of this happened. I have no idea where we are going and I certainly don’t know how to get us there, but the task has been charged to me... to spring new life from the ashes.