Seeing the Fire Elemental, really seeing what it had become for the first time, all thoughts of Hilda's fate were forgotten.
The sun had finally set in Northam.
The Fire was vaguely humanoid and had grown to skyscraper proportions. It had completely consumed its pyre and the bodies around it, and was expanding itself outward, throwing off walls of fire to incinerate priests as they attempted to flee. It spread further and further out, burning the very earth itself, gouging a crater as it took root. With each moment, the screams diminished and the roar of the Fire grew.
"Sweet Gaia," Damon murmured as the heat and the roar intensified, as two white hot pits in the centre of its being turned to regard him. "What have I done?"
Flames exploded all around him, and as the full force of the unleashed Elemental cascaded toward him, his thoughts fumbled for the cornerstones of his life. His family. His desire to protect them. His failures.
As the flame surged and engulfed him, slammed him against the car, and he threw his arms up in a futile gesture, his totem animal filled his mind. The spirit that sealed the protection runes cut into his flesh and gouged into his very soul. A spirit born of fire.
The Phoenix.
#
IV - The Phoenix
The world blazed scarlet in that moment between sleep and wakefulness. Damon cracked his eyes open to be blinded by the light of the dawn sun. This morning's sun was an angry red, blood red, as it separated itself from the eastern horizon. The light eased its way between the dragon's teeth but brought no warmth, despite its murderous shade.
The campsite was criss-crossed by shadow. As the light gained hold, the shadows of the teeth thinned. The process was incrementally slow, but Damon had become attuned to the play of light and darkness since his hunt for the phoenix began. The shadows of dawn and dusk were his guides, his timekeepers, and his bane.
He arched to catch sight of Bill. Pain flared in his neck muscles as he did so, but he stifled a groan between gritted teeth. Bill was an unmoving lump on the far side of the campfire. He'd curled into a ball during the night, cradling his rifle with his back to the fire.
Damon eased himself upright. The muscles in his lower back flared with the movement. To compensate, he moved his weight onto his hands. His sliced fingers, still heavy with cold from his family's jaws, screamed with pain in protest.
He was all too aware of the dawn silence, so much deeper and more ominous since the Fire. He spared a glance at his backpack as he regained his feet as quietly as possible. He flexed his injured hand to shake off the pain and regain some feeling. Since his family's last attack, the tips of his fingers had been numb.
Without Bill's campfire, the morning chill was especially mean-spirited. He skulked between the dragon's teeth, passing from shadow to sunshine and back again. The sun was yet to offer any warmth. He gave the remains of the fire a wistful glance as lazy wisps of smoke trailed into the air. The coals would yet have some heat and he longed to hold his hands over that heat. With a sigh, he slipped between a gap in the teeth and sought a place to empty his bladder and scrounge for kindling to stoke the fire.
He had to be sure of Bill's word. He had to check whether the phoenix was still heading west, still following the Fire and on a collision course with the Indian Ocean.
He had to perform his morning ritual away from Bill's prying eyes to avoid any suspicions.
#
Damon held his tongue when he returned with two handfuls of kindling, mostly scorched grasses and charcoal—his usual finds in this area.
"Don't you think it's funny?" Bill was cross-legged and halfway through one of his smokes. "That this whole country could burn so easily, and for so long, but it's now so bloody hard to keep a fire going?"
"The thought had crossed my mind." Damon offloaded his kindling next to the fire and tried to keep his expression neutral.
"We'll move out shortly. Catch that bird of yours." Bill rummaged through his pack. "But first, we eat." He tossed Damon a can of baked beans.
"Thanks."
"You got a can opener on that pig-sticker?"
Damon pulled out his pocket knife. "No, but I'll make do."
"Well, if you change your mind?" Bill produced a can opener from his pack and waved it around. "This cockroach food is better once you get it out of the tin."
"Thanks." Damon smiled as the caught the can opener. "But why is it cockroach food?"
"I always used to joke with the missus that cockroaches and tinned food would be the only things to survive the apocalypse. Mind you, I was thinking about the bomb back then. So naturally, the only thing the cockroaches would have to eat would be tinned food. Cockroach food."
"And each other."
"There's always that." Bill nodded, took the final drag on his smoke, and then started in on his food.
Damon pried the tin open and dove in with his fingers. After so long surviving on barely cooked meat, baked beans were a delicacy. The rich saltiness of the sauce danced over his tongue but he barely paused to savour them. With the phoenix tantalisingly close, he shovelled the food down.
"Hungry?" Bill asked. He was finishing off the dregs of his tin.
"No time. You said it went west?"
Bill nodded. A sudden graveness descended between them.
"Why don't you stretch the legs for a sec?" Damon suggested. "Take care of business. It's going to be a long, hard sprint. You sure you're up to it?"
Bill laughed. It was derisive and terse, like a bark. "I've survived this long, haven't I?"
Damon gave him a single nod, but kept his gaze on the coals. "I'll clean up here while you take care of things."
Bill shot him a sidelong glance, but nonetheless, picked up his rifle, stood, and made for one of the gaps in the dragon's teeth. He paused on the threshold of the camp. "I'll be back in a minute."
Damon nodded. His fingers were already twitching to get to work on the camp fire.
As soon as Bill disappeared from view, he tossed kindling on the near-dead fire and began to focus his will on the phoenix. He threw the fuel on in haphazard bursts, hoping a flame would catch rather than taking the time to nurture the fire. In a few short moments, the kindling smouldered, then threw off a rising cloud of smoke. A couple of heartbeats later, maybe more, the first yellow spark flared. The fire soon flickered into life.
He drove the knife across the wedge of his thumb and forefinger, immediately beneath the bite wounds. Ignoring the sudden sharp pain and the spreading coldness, he squeezed his wound inside a fist. The dripping blood immediately darkened the flames, as it had done so many times before. He visualized the phoenix in its lazy flight, ethereal wings propelling it forward, trailing flame in its wake, and his grimace curved into a smile. This would be his last campfire. The endgame was about to be played out.
The little fire spat and hissed. More blood dribbled into the flames, intensifying the hiss. Damon tuned into that sound, filling the lulls with his chant. Whispered and feverish, he chanted, competing with the cobra-hiss of the flame, his words running together, his mind burning brighter with the phoenix as the fire darkened to the shade of the angry dawn sun.
"What the hell are you up to?"
Damon blinked at the voice, Bill's voice, although the chant still held him.
The coals popped free. Kindling and sputtering cinders spilled out of the fire in neat a line.
Damon sucked in a deep breath. The cool air chilled the heat rising inside him and the sweat forming on his face. Despite this, a hot flush rose in his cheeks and settled at the top of his forehead.
"Get the hell out of here!" Bill moved forward and shoved Damon hard. He stumbled, almost losing his feet, but the sudden motion brought him back to his senses.
Damon spun around but was met by the barrel of a rifle pointed at his chest.
"I told you last night, I don't take to magic and the like. Not after what's happened." Bill gritted his teeth.
"I had to be sure," Damon stammered.
"No." Damon's gaze dropped for an instant, remembering Hilda, the sacrifices, and his failure.
"Thought as much. Start running, magician." Bill waved his rifle.
Damon hesitated.
"Now!"
Damon went to retrieve his pack.
"Leave that."
He wavered between grabbing for his pack and wrestling for the rifle. Indecision played across his face.
"Don't even think about it." Bill raised the gun sight to his eye and took aim at Damon's chest. "If I ever see you again, I'll shoot you on sight. Now piss off!"
Damon risked a moment more as he stared the other man down. "Believe me, Bill. I tried to stop them. I really did."
Bill's narrowed eyes showed not an inch of leeway.
Damon sighed, looked longingly at his pack and canteens in the dirt just beyond his reach, and then pushed past the row of dragon teeth. He paused outside the skull and saw Bill glaring at him from the gloom within.
In the reddish light, darkness congealed in the giant skull's sockets. The shadows pulled in nightmarish angles across its surface, highlighting every protrusion. Incomplete vertebrae armed with mast-sized spikes stretched out behind it. Some spikes had shattered, presumably from the creature's violent demise. The shards littered the bare earth. Still more bones were spread across the once green paddock and served to collect heaps of ash pushed there by the wind.
The entire area was a boneyard shaded in red and smeared with ash that darkened the bones. Bill stood in the creature's maw, caged by teeth, yet exuded more menace than the monstrosity around him.
"Trust me, Bill. I'm a friend," Damon pleaded.
Bill raised the rifle to his eye again, a motion barely visible in the shadows.
With the fight drained from him, and nothing further to say, Damon took off at a slow jog. His first few steps were tense, his back muscles knotted, anticipating danger. He expected the rifle's boom and pain to tear through him, to be shot in the back as he ran away, to be put down like a dog given a whiff of freedom.
The bullet never came, and he relaxed a little as he settled into the tempo of jogging. He soon joined the flow of the highway and headed west once more, leaving the monstrous skeleton with Bill in its jaws, to follow the direction of his campfire arrow, to follow the trail of his phoenix.
#
The barrens of the Avon valley were out of view by mid-morning. As he had ascended the Great Eastern and penetrated deeper and higher into the Perth foothills, Damon couldn't help but look back on his journey.
The view had been painfully clear. The dawn sun had mellowed but only slightly. It boiled a malcontent orange as it burned its way through the haze that permeated the sky since the Fire. Where once the Avon valley had been verdant paddocks, it was now one colossal scab. Brown and black, but glittering with vitrified trails cutting across its surface. The view would have been startling, even beautiful in a stark fashion, had Damon not known the life that had once been there.
Black trees were a constant reminder of the area's plight. So too was the burnt-out carcass of Northam. Once a city filled with life, it shared the fate of Australia as a whole. Its only distinction, apart from the complete levelling of every building, was that Northam was the very first place to burn, the epicentre of a continental conflagration. Gone in a few hellish minutes were the thousands of people living in the city.
The scorched crater not far from town brought back too many painful memories. Damon still heard the screams from the Fire's birthing, still remembered the rage with which it fell on nearby Northam.
Damon still remembered his own death and his subsequent rebirth. To wake to the sound of a town screaming was almost too much to bear.
The view had become mercifully obscured by the trees. The crater, the husk of Northam, the endless blackened fields beyond, the skeletons of monsters dotting the landscape as odd-shaped lumps, and Bill's campsite, his dragon's jaws, they all disappeared as he jogged further into the hills. Roadside trees reached their naked branches to the sky, replacing the horizon's view by slivers the further west he travelled.
The forest of dead trees was the stuff of nightmares. The trees reeked of a fresh burn, still vivid months after the event. While he tried to keep his attention on the asphalt, snippets of colour kept snagging his attention.
For the first time since the Fire, he encountered green buds and the occasional leaf sprouting from some of the trees. His heart sang at the first sight of regrowth. Still, most trees were too far gone, burnt to their very core, but he took it as a blessing from Gaia that life could return to the scorched continent. Buoyed by the discovery, and not having to haul his pack, he found an extra spring in his step as he dared to hope once more.
He continued in that mood even through his thirst and the midday heat. Skeletal trees provided next to no shade, but the sun didn't batter his spirits the way it usually did. The end was within his grasp and that kept him from flagging.
The ruins of hamlets passed as he took every dip and rise the hills had to offer. Most were too small for him to remember—places blasted by the Fire, each little more than a gutted service station and a sign blackened by the heat but always thick with trees.
The trees were larger the deeper he penetrated into the hills. Most were jarrah, which sprouted in towers from the ash and had long stretches of bare trunk before the first major branches spread from there. Each was like a clawed hand or an inverted broom of monstrous proportions but leafless and stripped of life. Occasionally, a different tree punctured the monotony, most often what looked like a redwood, but with the fire damage, it was impossible to tell.
Deeper into the heart of the hills he travelled, passing the remains of larger towns like Sawyer's Valley. His skin tingled when he entered outposts of civilization, as if the ghosts of the locals brushed him with their hospitalities. The sensation had been most frequent in the biggest cities but also muted. When he stood in the streets of Sydney and Melbourne between scarecrows of skyscrapers, the prickle was a fleeting constant, like pushing through a subway crowd without form. He supposed it was city hospitality. Even the ash swept through in tight gales and gathered in huge drift-piles between buildings as though keeping to the urban way. In contrast, country folk took the time to leave an impression, even in death. The tingle persisted until the town's remains were well out of sight.
Only when the touch of ghostly hospitality passed did he recognize the regular thump in the distance behind him.
By then, the sun was low in front of him, at eye level, close to burning out his retinas. This was the hardest part of his trek, normally the time when the phoenix came into view and the gap between hunter and prey closed to a tantalizing foot race. Today, with the trees and the hills claustrophobic compared to the open spaces of the wheat belt and deserts beyond, and the sun at pains to blind his final steps, the phoenix may have been just over the next rise or a hundred kilometres ahead for all he knew. But his awareness, the twinges of senses lost, told him the phoenix wasn't far away.
The thumping was closer now. A clear pattern—boots on asphalt. Boots. On. Asphalt. Someone closing in behind him.
Damon searched his surrounds for a vantage point or an ambush spot, something with which he could gain the upper hand. While there were abundant stands of trees on either side of the road, they offered little protection. Without undergrowth, the naked eye could penetrate the bush for at least a hundred meters. Too scant a camouflage against a man with a rifle. The jarrahs were too tall and trunk proud to climb, too fire-brittle for a strong handhold. Their lowest branches were twice again beyond his reach.
The town of Mundaring wasn't far, and he'd probably make it there before dusk to hold out against his family for as long as it took, but there was first the matter of Bill. Despite his imagination and quickened heart, deep down he knew it had to be Bill. No other living person, if there were living people, could have approached so stealthily without h
is notice.
So he turned and waited.
When Bill eventually appeared over the previous rise, Damon's heart thumped harder. He tensed, clenched his fists, and waited.
Bill slowed his pace the moment he squinted up and saw Damon in the centre of the road. His rifle was slung over his shoulder. He carried Damon's pack, with the canteens swaying with every step. Bill's own gear sat over the drum of water strapped to his back.
"Bill," Damon said. He kept his arms folded across his chest.
"You're a ..." Bill wheezed. "Hard man ... to catch."
The older man puffed for a long time, doubled over with hands on knees as if he were ready to throw up. Eventually, his breaths, while still laboured and echoed by a wheeze, returned to something close to normal.
"So why'd you follow me?"
"Here." Bill tossed Damon one of his own canteens. He caught it with a satisfying slosh. Bill had filled it from his own reserves.
"Thanks." Damon swallowed a huge gulp. His first moisture for the day, although his mood had staved off the worst of the light-headedness.
Bill followed suit, unhooking Damon's other canteen from the pack he still carried, and downing a good portion of the contents. A trickle worked its way free of his mouth and spilled inside his shirt.
Damon waited for him to swallow before prompting him again. "Why the generosity, especially after this morning?"
Bill wiped his mouth. "You said you weren't involved in this Fire business?"
"I meant what I said. I tried to stop it."
"You knew the people involved?"
"They were druids, although you'd call them priests, I suppose. They intended to raise the elemental to stop the monsters."
"Well, they succeeded there, didn't they?" The bitterness was clear in Bill's voice.
"Like I said, I tried to stop it, but—"
"Save it for another time."
Damon stared at his hand, tracing the self-inflicted network of scars and scabs.
"And this phoenix?" Bill prompted.
Apocrypha Sequence: Inferno Page 9