Chapter 303: She Was Born
During the start of the great Era of Rebirth, the forgotten city of Cinderhold still existed.
Long before its furnaces lit the southern sky, before its mines filled the vaults of kings and its smiths learned to fold Grace into steel, a Mystical God Phoenix descended upon the land during one of Gehenna’s earliest invasions.
The Demons had come through a Gate large enough to drown the valley in Gloom. Entire settlements vanished beneath the red-black fog. Rivers soured. Forests burned without heat.
Men who breathed the corruptive air turned their weapons on their own families before their bodies split open and birthed Beasts from within.
The Phoenix rose upon the city. Its wings covered the valley from ridge to ridge. Gold fire fell from its feathers and burned the Gloom out of the earth.
Demons fled beneath it, but the Phoenix hunted them through the mountains, tearing apart flying horrors with its talons and melting armies beneath the light of its eyes.
The battle lasted three days.
On the fourth, the Gate closed. But after that third day, the Phoenix did not rise again.
It fell into the valley with one wing missing and its chest torn open by the scars of Gloom it had endured. The impact broke the ground for miles. The last of its fire spread through the stone beneath it, warming the land even as the great creature died.
The survivors gathered around the body.
They waited for it to decay but it never did.
Its bones remained warm. Its feathers continued to release Grace. Its blood hardened into a red-gold crystal beneath the soil. Deep inside its broken chest, its heart shrank into a single ember that no rain, wind or spell could extinguish.
The people claimed this Phoenix as their god, and took its endless state of life even without loving as a promise of the Phoenix’s return.
As well known through ancient text, Phoenixes did not die as other creatures did.
They burned, and through that burning they returned. So the survivors rebuilt the creature’s remains into a monument large enough to house the spirit still sleeping within them.
The bones formed the frame and the petrified flesh became the body.
Its unbroken wing was spread above the eastern side of the valley while smiths, Mages and masons restored the other from gold-veined stone.
Its beak remained sharp enough to split armor. Its talons sank into the hill beneath it. Both eyes shone even after death, watching the city grow beneath their light.
Cinderhold was built around the statue.
Its furnaces fed on the warmth beneath the Phoenix’s grave. Its crops grew through winters that froze neighbouring cities. Water drawn from the deep wells came up clean, and Gloom weakened before it reached the walls.
House Ashen became the city’s keepers.
They were not the strongest family when Cinderhold was founded. They were the family that stayed beside the Phoenix while others fought over its remains.
The first Lord Ashen swore before the great ember that no part of the creature would ever be taken, sold or used for anything except its eventual rebirth.
For generations, his descendants kept that oath.
But then came the time when Cinderhold began to fail.
The Demons came more often. Beast herds descended from the mountains in numbers the old walls could no longer stop. Kingdom officials demanded higher taxes while sending fewer Rangers.
Nearby bastion cities watched Cinderhold’s mines and furnaces with the hunger of wolves waiting for an old lion to stumble. They were waiting for the day the Kingdom would send Extinguishers and Cinderhold would officially be an abandoned city.
By the time Solaris Ashen was conceived, her family had already broken the oath.
Her father, Lord Malrec Ashen and her brother, Flamion Ashen, called it necessity.
First, they sheepishly and shamelessly removed a feather.
It took twelve men to carry it down from the Phoenix’s wing. Even separated from the body, the feather burned with clean gold light and filled the sealed chamber with enough heat to blister stone.
Lord Malrec watched it leave beneath a black cloth.
His wife stood beside him, one hand over the child growing inside her.
"This cannot continue," she whispered.
"It saved the eastern settlements," Malrec replied.
"You sold part of a god."
"I bought us cannons, barriers and a hundred Brigadiers."
"You sold part of a god."
Malrec turned to her. "Would you rather bury three hundred citizens?"
She looked toward the empty place on the Phoenix’s wing.
"No," she said. "But I would rather know where this ends."
Malrec did not answer.
The feather was forged into the core of a weapon for a neighbouring city. In return, Cinderhold received soldiers, Awakeners, and siege engines before the next Demon assault.
The city survived.
That made the second theft easier. Then the third.
More feathers vanished beneath the cover of restoration work. A piece of one talon was cut away and sold to a royal armory. A fragment from the beak became the focus of a high-ranking Fire Mage’s staff.
One of the Phoenix’s eyes disappeared inside a government convoy and returned as influence for House Ashen at the higher tables of power.
Each sale bought Cinderhold another season.
But they didn’t know that each sale also weakened it for the next.
The furnaces started to cool. Smiths complained that the metal no longer accepted Grace as easily. Then crops failed near the outer districts. The wells lost their warmth.
Gloom began gathering beneath bridges and in abandoned tunnels where it had once burned away before touching stone.
The people blamed war, the government. They blamed the Demons and the Beasts.
No one blamed their rulers for stealing from the statue. Now one knew enough to look at what was missing.
The Phoenix, meanwhile, knew everything that was happening.
Its spirit had remained inside the great body, waiting for death to complete itself. But a Phoenix could not rise through a corpse being carved apart. Every piece taken from it became another chain. Every bargain made with its remains pushed resurrection farther away.
It watched House Ashen sell the body they had sworn to protect. It watched every piece of itself being taken away, smashed, grinded and frozen to forge powerful equipment all over the world.
For its own survival, the God Phoenix had no choice but to leave.
The spirit entered the nearest vessel carrying its bloodline.
A child not yet born.
Solaris Ashen entered the world in screams. She was louder than any other baby born in the birthing chamber.
The braziers basically exploded when she took her first breath. Fire climbed the curtains and spread across the ceiling, but none of it touched her mother. The flames curled around the infant instead, shaping themselves into wings before sinking into her skin.
The midwives dropped to their knees.
Lady Aveline Ashen held her daughter against her chest and stared at the golden mark forming over the child’s brow.
Malrec entered moments later with guards behind him. He stopped when Solaris opened her eyes.
They were not a newborn’s eyes. Gold burned beneath them, old and furious.
Aveline tightened her hold. "Do not touch her."
Malrec looked from the child to the blackened ceiling. "What happened?"
"She was born."
Another brazier flared.
Solaris turned her head toward the heat and the fire bent toward her.
Malrec stared, realizing what had just happened. His child was going to be an Awakener!
A smile broke on his old, weathered face.
There was hope for Cinderhold.