I swear I surprise myself every day! I haven’t been so inspired to write any stories since my last one in March, but I was literally scrolling through Pinterest and I found this and I had something within me and I just decided to roll with it. I’m treating this like a free write, so don’t shocked if you see any mistakes on here, okay?
The prompt banner says, “Write the story of a magical creature missing their species’ key feature (a siren without a voice, a unicorn without a horn, a dragon without fire, etc). At first I was inspired by the “a siren without a voice” but then I thought about looking into other mythical creatures and remembered Phoenixes and thought this would be kind of cool to explore a dying phoenix. So I hope you all enjoy this little story!
I am dying.
We are all dying in our nests, awaiting to be reborn, and discover new worlds among men. It’s a lifetime achievement to be present in every birth, genius invention, and war. You are there as a sign that the circle continues and never ends, you give the humans hope for their future, but what happens when you are the one, who is constantly dying and on the urge of never awakening? There’s no direct answer to that, but yet I am living it.
My name is Sonnet. Yup, that is my name. It was given to me by my master, Edmund Groose (Gross). He was given a phoenix for his 44th birthday, after being ill for some time. He thought of me as a good sign, as phoenixes are generally always dying and coming back to life, but I was never a good luck bird to him or anyone else for that matter.
He told me while I was perched inside the bar in my bronze cage, that he gave me that name for his love of poetry, as he was infatuated with my brightly colored feathers, of purple and green. I looked like a peacock more than a phoenix honestly. I was to be his companion for 14 years, which is the exact lines of a written sonnet. After his untimely death, I was sent away to another master, and another, and another after him.
In all I had a total of 14 masters in my lifetime.
Now you might think this is unusual, but I never once died and was reborn with any of them. I was a young bird at the start and lived out the lives of the people around me, but was never the spectacle of the other phoenixes of the world. While I aged throughout the decades, my colors started to fade but never exploded into a ball of fire at the end of the day like some many others, I stayed and suffered through the fiery pain inside.
I was never unhappy with my situation though. I was going through what some many others were, I was slowly dying and I actually relished in that feeling. I was always afraid that once I made my first rebirth, if I’d still have my memories of my previous owner? Would I still want to look outside the window into the morning sunrise and be given freshly caught fish from the sea? I often wondered if I’d still feel the same as I always had after I came back and lived again.
The world had not changed too drastically from the time I was given to Edmund Groose in the 1800’s, as I wasn’t exposed to too much, as it was illegal to have such an exotic bird of my kind but I was basically a family heirloom to the Groose family. I never left the house or roughly my cage in the corner of the spare bedroom. It was a dark and gloomy room to let such a magnificent bird sleep, but when I was let out for some excercise, the room itself was big enough to fly around the columns on the walls and even sit on the windowsill to absorb as much sunlight as I could to hopefully bring back my beautiful hue on my body and even my spirit, but over time I realized that it wasn’t working and that I was officially dying for good.
The pain is beginning to be too much for me. I can hardly stand up on the bar at the top of my cage. The cage I was originally in, is breaking apart at the seams right along with me. I no longer have the strength to stand up, as the heat of the fire within me is burning the muscles and bones in my body. My feathers are slowly decaying, one by one falling and drifting down to the floor. Once there, the green shade had turned into a black and fragile texture to the touch.
I hope I die and never come back, for I’d like to be the one phoenix that never rises from the ashes. The enigma to other birds of my species to be afraid of what could happen to them, but the question remains, would they accept death or divert altogether?
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