Another piece I started a while back. I'd had the idea playing around in the back of my head for years, but had just never gotten around to writing it down. I've gotten a chapter or so written past the prologue but I'm currently reworking it. Anyway, here's the opening:
PROLOGUE
It is said that when the first phoenix died, two birds rose from the ashes.
The first was like his father. His fiery wings blazed red and gold, and his eyes were newborn stars. The other, was darkness itself, his flames a roaring smoldering blackness. He gave no light of his own, but his pale cadaver eyes reflected all his brother’s glory back.
They circled for a moment, then sped apart, a streak of flame burning toward the east; a spreading shadow aiming west.
It was a year before they met again.
“You look sick, brother,” said the flame, his voice a roiling fire.
“It is the brightness of your eyes,” came the shadow’s hissing reply.
“Truly, brother? I do not mean to hurt you,” returned the flame, and his roaring voice held sorrow.
The shadow’s words were a bed of ancient embers, soft and distant, “It is not of consequence. We were born for conflict.”
“I know that we must battle, and I do not fear it,” said the flame, “but for how long?”
“Until there is no need of day or night,” said the shadow, and he launched into the sky.
Their chase began above the plain where they were born; a circuit of fire and darkness that grew until they wrapped around the world, one eye staring toward the earth and one outward into space. Day and night were born from their struggle – the bright phoenix and his blazing eye, and the dark brother, his great pale eye waxing and waning and staring ever down.
Light and darkness, day and night, war without end. They fly there still.
-- from The Anaeliad, Book of Greater Legends
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- gymbrall (
gymbrall) wrote,