Lament of the Phoenix

By P. J. Benjamin

Easing my pale arched wings through the insistent wind, I watch the Last-Spoken far beneath me. Soft-skinned bodies frolic on the warm sands. They drift and splash in the teal waves that crest around them. On a day this clear, little separates the blue of the sky from the reflection coloring the watery expanse that falls away behind me.

I watch, and I remember the Speaking.

How many lives have I lived? Less, at least, than my rotations around the sun. Yet they cannot be counted, not using every grain of sand below to mark their place. Have I forgotten any? Would I know it if I have? I am not like the Speaker; I have a beginning.

But lives spent without eyes were but memories of thoughts. They held little sensation beyond movement and nutrition. I lived many such lives in the first moments of the Fifth Day. With each death, I added something to myself as the Speaker had taught, but who could say how many lives passed until the subtle shifts in my form granted sight?

I angle my wings south to match the humid air rising from the industries of the Last-Spoken. I am over their harbor town now and can hear the beasts of my current form wail among distant rocks. How long will we cry? The grief, the example we set by it—how can the Last-Spoken prance and play in ignorance?

The beasts know me. I have always been their shepherd. Charged by the Speaker as the firstborn of the Fifth Day, I guided them from the morning of deep water into the noon of shallow reefs. As evening came, I was the first to bring them onto land, to teach the breathing of air. In the twilight hours, I heard the Speaker bring the Fifth Day to a close. I listened from a mountain peak, learning I would never return to the water.

I stretch my webbed feet at the memory—how it itched when I finally hardened my scales for land!

Yet, my time as a Hard-Scale is one I remember fondly! Those lives spent before the noon of the Sixth Day were filled with radiance and warmth. The world smelled different, sweet and expectant. The air perfumed with a hint of the Days to come, for the Speaking had not yet finished.

As lives passed, my flock of beasts became titans in the empty land. They reached for the heavens until their necks burst above the forest’s canopy. In honor of such holy desire, I sought to lead them into the sky itself, and so induced my first feathers. Today mine are pale and subdued, but those first were iridescent! I was a Hard-Scaled, yet fledged in shimmering hues of crimson over my hide’s muddy green.

I had barely learned to use them when the Meteor fell.

Oh, the roaring it made as it fell from the sky above. A star plucked from the firmament! It struck the land with a force that shook the earth like a bell, a toll marking noon for the Sixth Day. Endless clouds of ash masked the sun while the fiery blood that veins the deep earth destroyed the verdant land. When the eruption stilled and rock cooled, what remained of life whimpered against the cold of endless shade.

So many beasts died in those first hours of ashy cloud and bitter cold. I called out, asking the Speaker to grant me the heat of the deep earth to warm them while hair replaced scale. In his kind allowance, he spoke a word of my very own, one I cherished in my heart. With that utterance, the ground burst beneath me and I flew into the air at last!

I became the fire-fledged bird, and until the twilight of the Sixth Day, the warmth gusting from my wings protected the development of those devastated beasts. In time, the ash clouds settled from the sky and the sun returned to radiate its glory. Only a few Hard-Scaled beasts remained. Hairy-Eggless filled the earth now. At midnight of the Sixth Day, the Speaker spoke his final word, and with his exhalation, the Last-Spoken rose from the dust of the ground.

Never had I seen a creature like him. Noble and valiant, he gave titles to each within my precious flock. I, too, was entitled. Phoenix, he named me, a name I bore until the time when forty days of rain claimed all but a few of the Last-Spoken. Only my legend remained, embedded in their imaginations as they filled the earth. Did they know the cycle of my rebirth foretold their own? Foretold how all things would be restored to true life?

Today, as my wings take me farther inland, I still cry at the memory of that life. How had things gone so wrong? The Day of Rest had only just begun! Even now, the recollection chars my heart black, though I had left my fire behind long ago. I had watched, knowing it was my place to see, but not speak, as the Last-Spoken failed to listen to the Speaker’s words. And how, in scandalous humility, the Speaker arose from his Day of Rest to give them new words, words for those who failed to listen.

But that was long ago.

Miles inland now, the heat from a hill of hot trash keeps me aloft. Will I ever take another form? I do not know. I can only hope to mimic the humility of the Speaker; to show the Last-Spoken what they have made of the beasts I guide.

I tense with revulsion and dive from the sky. Alighting on the plastic mountain with the beasts of my form, I shriek my gull cry into the sunny sky. Eating the dregs of the Last-Spoken’s waste, I weep, and I wait.

Wait for the Day of Rest to dusk and for the Eighth Day to dawn.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

P. J. Benjamin writes a blog called the Firmament which explores the intersection between good fiction, and better theology. While his creative passion is for weaving sound biblical doctrine into his work, his greatest joy is in helping other speculative fiction writers do the same. He lives with his wife in the scenic Pacific Northwest, spending his free time cooking, bladesmithing, and accumulating more board games than he has time to play.

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