The legend of the phoenix is as ancient as the sky.

Part of our culture, it seeps into every tale until its symbolism is so strong that it outweighs all else. The phoenix is our hopes, which rise brighter and hotter from the ashes. It is our dreams which come from nowhere, which are less than cobwebs and whispers, and it is always ourselves who live and die and live on as memory.

We long for that final, glowing splendour before we crumble into cinders. We long to take wing, for there to be no difference between us and the distant stars except that we must fall.

But most of all, we long to be reborn from the ashes.

We have pinned our aspirations to it. We have made it something noble when it is only a creature like any other, existing no further than the air in its lungs and under its wings. It’s easy to think that the phoenix is all about hope. Easy, but wrong. So stark and astonishing is its rebirth that we forget what lies before it.

The phoenix burns, and in its moment of self-immolation it dies not in glory but in wretched, cruel pain.

In all the world, only it has known the space and the silence and the loneliness beyond life. That we imagine it can find the courage to rise again, knowing what lies before it is perhaps our cruellest delusion. It has no choice. It has no will.

And there, we and it differ.

This is a tale about choice. It is a tale about courage, about glory, hopes, dreams, all that we burn for.

And most of all, it is a story about sacrifice. This is the story of the Phoenix.

~*~

Her face in the mirror was pale and resolute.

It didn't show a trace of the maelstrom that writhed under her skin, but nor would she have allowed it to. Phillippa ha Minch touched her fingers to her lips briefly, feeling the imprint of a kiss that still burned there.

You're not mine, she thought to the boy who had left the heat and pressure of his mouth on hers like a phantom kiss. I wish you were, but I'm not a court lady. I'm not there to be wooed and wed like the rest of them. And even if I were, you and I are worlds apart.

She scraped back her newly cut, newly dyed black hair, lashing it tight with a band. It revealed the faint scars on her left temple, and the darkening bruises around her neck, but she lifted the mask that sat on the table beside her, an artful thing of white fabric and wood that left only her mouth bare.

A moment's hesitation, a lifetime’s brief regret as she stared into the murky green pools of her own eyes and saw only her fear and doubt reflected back.

I can do this. I must. I will not come so far and turn back.

And then she went outside, disguised and determined to fight. She would not speak, in case her voice gave away her birth.

For Phillippa ha Minch was a noble, and she was about to begin the Ordeal of Shang.