by O. J. Lowe
I said nothing. Words felt distant and blurry, fuzzy inside my head; I couldn’t have made sense of them even if I’d wanted to. I just wanted the pain of death, to feel it take me. It had to be better than living like this.
“Condemned men make the best confessors,” Moulton said. “You can tell them absolutely anything, knowing the sands of time are trickling out of their hourglass and they’ll never be able to repeat it to another soul. How does it feel to know this is where it ends for you, Armitage, to know that you’ve come so far, you’re going to die in ignominy? This is your last stop, the final destination, you don’t get a do-over. How many people have you killed like this?”
Just shut the fuck up and kill me, you dick! Even amidst my mental malaise, it still hurt hearing him go on and on, I didn’t give a fuck about his problems. Boo-bloody-hoo, everyone has them.
“Goodbye Armitage.”
Finally!
I didn’t feel the blade, just the icy cold biting into my skin, spreading down my gullet as more blood erupted from me, that chill rushing down me deep into the pit of my belly, horrific frostbite pushing through me as Moulton stepped away, my knife covered in blood. My blood. That coldness spread into the centre of my being; I’d never felt anything like it.
All until it met the fire.
Anyone who ever met me always assumes I’m just a regular human, nothing special about me at all. I like to keep them thinking that. Some supernatural beings choose to flaunt their power, they like to make sure people know what they are. Vampire or shifter pride, that sort of thing. Unfortunately, as I’ve already said, once someone knows what you are, they know how to kill you. Personally, I’ve never set out to make it easier for someone to know how to kill me.
Not that they could anyway. Eternity feels like a curse sometimes. There’s been points in my life when it’s been pretty damn handy, I know that much. Even now, the cold hit the fire deep within me, the flames always there even when I try to ignore them, a simple chill not enough to quell them.
Everything felt clearer now, Moulton coming into razor-sharp focus, the fire spreading from inside me, my blood alight, catching across my clothes and my skin, bitter orange kisses spreading across me. It should have hurt. It truly didn’t. Like I said, I was born of the flames. I know what you’re probably thinking right now. People think born of the flames and automatically think ‘dragon’. Not quite. Not quite at all. All I was, all this body was ever meant to be went up in fire in a heartbeat, my bones contorting into new shapes under the incredible heat, my flesh burning away in fiery gibbets. Some of the flames hardened, lost their temperature, covering my skin in brilliant red, orange and yellow feathers, my mutilated arms losing their injuries, shrinking and altering until they could no longer be used for anything other than flight. My legs shrunk, my toes fusing together into three hooked talons, a magnificent rainbow plume erupting from the area above my ass. My mouth and nose jumped out in front of me like someone had viciously slapped me on the back of the head, taking on a pointed shape, hard and durable.
By the time the heat died down around me, I was no longer Cassius Armitage, or at least not a version of him any living being would recognise. Moulton did at least have an idea what I was, he took another step back, brandished my knife in front of him, not that it would do him any good. I stared at the blade the way a giant studied an ant, not particularly impressed by it. A single focused stare and the blood on the blade, my blood, erupted into flames. Not just any flames though, the fires of life that flooded through me. People go on about dragon fire, but these particular flames hadn’t been seen in the Novisarium for decades, if not centuries.
I was the last phoenix. And as Moulton dropped the knife, started to gather black shadow energy around him, he was going to come to realise exactly what that meant for him.
Twelve.
Let’s talk about the phoenix, shall we? There’s been a lot of shit said about us over the years, I don’t like to talk about being one. The fact I’m the last one, it should say a lot about what happened to the species. We were hunted almost to extinction, which sounds strange when you consider we’re capable of renewing ourselves. Well, let me tell you this, humanity always finds a way. When they know what you are, they seek to do just that. Centuries ago, most of my people ran afoul of the Roman empire, they thought we’d represent the promise of rebirth for our empire. When they found us, they tried to kill us as an offering to their gods, all for glory. A lot of the time they succeeded, we’re not easy to kill but with time and effort, it can be done.
It’s why while most of my people were being killed, I kept my head down and tried to blend into society, muted down what I was rather than flaunting it. I’ve always been one who enjoyed doing that, it’s probably the reason I became such a successful assassin later in life.
Moulton knew what I was, he hurled blast after blast of magical energy at me, painfully dull black stuff that barely registered from behind my sea-blue eyes. I opened my beak, shrieked powerfully and pure phoenix fire erupted from my belly, punched through the darkness with brilliant light, as if it weren’t there. It didn’t stop, pushed through it and seared Moulton’s armoured arm, bit into it like acid and he let out a howl, even louder than the one I’d made moments earlier. Even now, he was being superheated inside his armour, slowly cooked by the intense heat. I fixed my beady glare on him, bobbed towards him on purple feet. Damn, but I hated walking as a bird, so ungainly. My talons clicked on the warehouse floor, I clacked open my beak once again and hit him with another fireball. The armour of the knights of the Shining Council is supposed to repel magic, I’d once been told, I couldn’t remember by whom. Phoenix fire was beyond magic, it was life itself, superheated and supercharged to devastating effect. It was to wizard fire what a hell hound was to a chihuahua, some sort of relation in name only. The blast hit Moulton in his centre-mass, left a sticky black smear across his breastplate, one that started to smoke in an instant. The faintest smell of cooking meat filled the room, fresh screams filling the room. I wasn’t going to let up on this with him, he’d cut my hands off, I wasn’t going to stand for that. He’d regret it, he’d regret it all. Because hell hath no fury like, well a giant fiery pissed off bird for one thing. Those who assault the noble phoenix might well not live to regret it, for Moulton had been right. We always want revenge on those who wrong us. Might not be big, might not be clever, might leave us all blind but it was satisfying.
Right now, I wanted revenge more than anything else. It hadn’t become about the money or the reward or even the Red Claw’s future. It was just about killing Garrett Moulton. My third blast of fire was more continuous, a wild stream of untamed flammable fury that ripped across his armour, warped it under the heat. Moulton’s screams became even more pronounced, no hint of rhyme or reason to them, just simple sheer animal pain. Every inch of him right now, I hoped, was fiery agony.
Eventually his armour retreated, no longer able to bear up against the blast, simply popped out of existence as the enchantment broke under the wrath of my flames and the string holding the amulet around his neck burned away. A small clink rang out as it hit the ground, Moulton staggered back, his hair and skin aflame suddenly as the protection of the armour vanished, his screams silencing as his lips fused together, twin dull pops hitting my ears as his eyeballs finally relented, sizzled and popped under the immense heat.
If I could speak, I might well have taunted him, given him some final bon mot of wisdom, a word of ultimate judgement. I might even have said something to send him easily into the embrace of death. I couldn’t, so I didn’t. It wasn’t the style of the phoenix. I didn’t change into this form often, the phoenix was wrath and judgement personified, people always forget that the only way to bring about the rebirth of a new world is to burn down the old one. That’s the sort of rebirth my kind brought about, the sort that ultimately scared the shit out of the Romans so bad. They wanted to see their empire gain its past glory, not burn down and be replaced by something u
nfamiliar and new, something they likely didn’t think they’d understand.
It’s always sad when people turn on those that they’ve worshipped. But such is the fickle nature of humanity. A lack of understanding, a simple clarity over what they think they’ve sought, it can lead to fear. Fear leads to destruction.
One final time I opened my beak and coated him in fire, denied the protection of his armour, lobster-pink skin burned, went dark red and ultimately black before he crumpled, twitched a few times and lay still.
Take that, you son of a bitch.
Going phoenix, my natural form, it always comes with a price. As the smell of charred meat lingered in the air, like sizzling pork, I knew it was coming, that the flames which had swallowed him would eventually swamp me. Already the fires licked across my feathers, and this time it hurt. Not badly, not right now anyway, but more an irritation. Like a flea bite or something like that. I’d have ground my teeth if I had any left, tried to ignore it. No such luck. That sensation only intensified until the flames felt like ants digging beneath my skin, every inch of my body alight with scarlet flames. As they hit my nerve endings, my beak opened, my shriek shook the building, I collapsed, my legs barely able to hold my weight. I was a lot smaller as a phoenix than I was as a human, but still. Burning flesh started to fall from me, flakes of burnt skin dropping into a heap at my feet.
I always hated this part, I knew as my vision went first red as the flames met my eyes, then black as they were scorched away in sizzle, more ashes falling to the ground.
I didn’t know when I stopped being, when I died or when I lingered between worlds, but it was always like this. Not quite physical, not quite mental, just a simple state of existence where things felt fluid. I’d always found it the equivalent of being at the bottom of a very deep hole, having to claw your way out of those depths and back to the light. The only thing I noticed was, I couldn’t find anything to hold onto, like trying to crawl up an empty space capable of collapsing on you at any given moment.
Sometimes, you don’t even know if you’re rising or falling, you could be climbing out of it, could simply be damning yourself even further. Every one of my people did this at some point or another. It gets harder each time to come back from death. And that, folks, is how the eternal phoenix goes extinct. You kill us, we can come back. In theory, there’s no limit to how many times we could do it.
A lot of the time, we do come back. Eventually, I think we all just decide it isn’t worth it. Dying is easy. Living is hard. Rebirth is even fucking harder. It’s a lot of stress, a lot of effort and if your heart isn’t in it, then why would you consider even bothering with it? Far easier to just slip off into death, I think.
That wasn’t going to be this time though. I had too much left to do, my work in the Novisarium wasn’t finished. There were still people left to kill and I was going to be the one who orchestrated it all. I had revenge and retribution to employ against certain parties, both mine own and that belonging to others, I wasn’t going to simply slink away into the knife, I would be heard.
The moment my head broke the flaky white surface, the light threatened to blind my virgin eyes and I moaned, continued to pull myself out of the pile of ashes that were the remains of my previous form. Any sound I made sounded guttural, inhuman even, my tongue yet to realign itself with my voice. The first few moments of life are always the trickiest, the body is new, it hasn’t been tested yet. I finished climbing from the ashes, laid naked amidst the pile, squashed them beneath my torso, grinding them against my bare back. The room stank, vividly so, overcooked meat above the bitter stink of shit. My hands had grown back, the moment Moulton had cut them off, I’d known I’d need to do this to get them back. A small price to pay, to be sure.
By the time I got my bearings, I’d found the amulet, clutched it close to me. It’d lost the heat from it, now cool to the touch. I didn’t even give the charred body another look. After all, it was only meat. The flesh is fragile, it breaks, and it ruins, it eventually fails us all.
Even as I ran a hand across my jaw and through my hair, I knew I was a new man once again, that my aging had been reset. Before all this, I might have looked in my fifties. Now, I wouldn’t be surprised to see I’d had twenty-five years or more knocked off me.
It might be painful, it might be hard, but it does have perks, I’ll give it that. Plus, it always unnerves the hell out of people afterwards. Perhaps the biggest inconvenience? Trying to find clothes in the immediate aftermath.
“Goodbye, Garrett,” I said, trying out my new voice. “It’s been a pleasure.” I liked it. Strong. Real authority. The way someone like me should sound.
I met with Valentine and Nivendis in private, just the two of them, no other witnesses. I’d managed to return to my home, taken a shower to get the filth of that warehouse off me, dressed and made my way to Valentine’s house in Vermillion Heights. Everyone knew Thomas Valentine was one of the richest men in the Novisarium, rumour had it that if he hadn’t been so devoted to the Shining Council, he might well have been considered for the Conclave. Personally, I thought devotion and self-interest were two sides of a coin. Working for the greater good was perhaps the biggest myth involved in public service. We’re all in it for ourselves, we might do some good for others, but anyone who claims to never have acted in their own interest is either a liar or an idiot.
“Armitage,” Valentine said, his eyes narrowing as he fixated on me. I’d been right, previously greying hair had taken on a jet-black lustre, my wrinkles and lines filled in. I did say I had many children, though to my knowledge, none of them have my shared heritage. I’m the last pure-blood phoenix alive. All my children are tainted by their mothers. Usually, most conceptions came at times like this, when I never felt more alive or ready to spread my seed. “You’re looking considerably well.”
“Yes well,” I said. “You’d be amazed at the power of good exercise. Chasing Moulton around the city, it did me the world of good.”
“And is he dead?” Nivendis asked, though he didn’t look at me as he said it. My response was to toss the amulet onto the table in front of him.
“I believe that belongs to you,” I said. “Make sure you give it to someone better next time, yeah? Not a raging psychopath.”
“You say that like it’s a negative,” Valentine said. “It’s one we look for in our knights. I imagine you have considerable use for them in your line of work, hmm?”
I couldn’t argue with that, no matter how much I wanted to. He had me there. “Regardless, there’s a line between psychopath and uncontrollable. You made a bad mistake with Moulton.”
“We all make them,” Nivendis said. “Show me someone who says they’ve never fucked up; I’ll call you a liar. He had talent.” He chuckled to himself. “Bad thing is, he didn’t use it right. That’s the real tragedy in all this.”
“And my payment?” I asked.
“We’ll sort it,” Valentine said. “You’ll have it in the next twenty-four hours. We’re men of our word, Mister Armitage, trust me on that.”
I gave him a shit-eating grin, not because I wanted to antagonise him, but because I truly wanted him to know that I didn’t fear him. “I know you will. Hey, this business is built on trust and reputation. I know you’re going to pay me because you don’t want the Shining Council to get the sort of rep that says they don’t pay when someone provides them a service. Just the same as I don’t want to get a rep that says I’m soft if someone doesn’t pay me. I’ve already killed one wizard in recent hours. Once our business has concluded, I’m unwilling to double down. I don’t talk about past hits or past clients. I’m sure we all just want to forget about it.”
“My, my,” Valentine said. “The bollocks on you. You’ll be paid. You’ll keep your mouth shut. Nobody us ever going to speak of this again.”
“Did Moulton suffer?” Nivendis asked. “When you killed him?”
I opened my mouth, hesitated. He didn’t need to know the full story. “No,” I lied.
“It was quick. Painless. He never saw it coming.” I tried to ignore the phantom stench of burned meat in my nostrils.
“Good,” Nivendis said. “Good. Good to hear. “I wish things could have been different.”
“We all wish that sometimes, Ian,” Valentine offered. “Hardest thing in the world to change things when they’ve already happened. For better or worse, every action has consequences, some of them we can live with them and some of them we can’t.”
I left the two of them to it, turned and headed out the door, head held high. I’d done my job. I’d earned the pay today. I couldn’t ask for more. Maybe it was time to head to the school, get things ready for when they sent their candidate around for me to mould into the next great assassin of the Novisarium.
I’m a simple man. I don’t want much out of life. I’m an inherent contradiction at heart, I’m the last of my kind, someone who simply wants to blend into the crowd. That which makes me unique damns me. I want people to know my name, but not what I look like. I want people to know my story, but not while I’m alive. I want wealth and notoriety, but I’ll never spend it, never revel in it.
Who am I?
I’m Cassius Armitage. The last phoenix. Not that anyone will ever know that last part. That’s the secret beneath the secrets.
Epilogue.
Alexander Pierce had eyes on the assassin the moment he walked into Dead Town, the moment he approached Solaris. As a fixer for the Sunlight King, it’s his duty to make sure threats stay contained before they spiral beyond control. An assassin, particularly one as notorious as Cassius Armitage is trouble. If he comes near Vressiere, Pierce needs to be the one to stop him. Nothing quite as grand or mighty as the mortal knights the queen of the Moonlight Court desires. Pierce knows his place; it isn’t to comment on what that loony bitch does. His concern is his own court.