"Mind of the Phoenix"

[Archie Phoenix 0]

Archie was a bird. The landscape thousands of kilometers beneath his soaring body was of no land he’d ever seen. It was a dead world, an ash grey mass pocked by hundreds of massive craters and countless smaller ones. Perhaps this land had been vibrant once. Indeed, Archie got the sense, a sense he could not explain, that this world had once, long ago, contained life. But no world could survive such a meteoric onslaught. What force had wrecked its atmosphere and allowed stellar bodies to strike its surface?

 

Archie’s wings were fire. Each elegant stroke of his wings revealed a fluttering coat of bright feathers, blending from deep red at their bases to orange at their tips. He was as magnificent a beast as had ever taken to the skies of this or any world. But he was also deadly. Waves of terrible heat distorted the landscape around his beating wings. He knew that any creature that touched his feathers of flame would perish instantly, becoming one with the ashen landscape below.

 

Archie’s eyes were a predator‘s eyes. And they sighted something unusual the moment it turned the curvature of the horizon. There was the greatest crater on this world’s surface -- the mark, perhaps, of the calamity which had incinerated the atmosphere. It was thousands of kilometers wide; its depth Archie could not sight from this angle, but it was certain to be great. A stellar monstrosity had left this legacy of its arrival. But it was not the crater, which Archie had begun to sight minutes before, that grabbed his attention. Just beneath the far lip of the crater, imbedded in the charred rock, was a structure of glass and metal. It was a facility built by the hands of sentients. Not a ruin -- even from this distance, Archie’s eyes could discern that the materials were clean and fresh enough that they’d been placed recently and were still being maintained.

 

To his right he heard a vague squawking, warning of danger which it brought. His long neck swung around to point his hawkish head toward the source of the noise. It was as if he gazed into a mirror. Another head emerged from his body and stared back at him. It was nearly identical to his own -- the same hawkish countenance, the same fiery plumage, the same neck curved around the back … but the eyes. The eyes. Deep. Molten. Blood red. Terror. This head was repulsive and alien to him. But he knew that it was his own. Archie’s mind was an enantiomorph.

 

Archie woke with a start. His left hand immediately reached up to grasp his right shoulder, though he did not know why. His Samantha Kent construct had wounded his abdomen, not his shoulder.

 

With his other hand, he pushed himself up to a sitting position. He was still in his cell. It was an unremarkable cube of steel walls. Kent had created it before his eyes, carving it out of the walls of the Aether’s Caress facility and then sealing him inside of it. From in here, Archie had no idea what was going on. He knew only that something had gone horribly wrong when the Samantha Kent was produced from his mind.

 

He had been taken outside the cell once. Tendrils of energy had snaked from the walls, lifted him up, and carried him out to a great hall he did not recognize. There was Samantha, dressed like royalty, and the other two members of his group, Torre and Daena. He knew that he was being displayed to them, that Samantha could have killed him with a thought if she desired. Clearly, she had some sort of control of the energy of Aether. How she achieved that control, and what she’d been doing with it since, Archie could not tell. All of his equipment had been taken.

 

Archie was not claustrophobic. He did not particularly enjoy enclosed spaces, mostly because he grew up on a world of enclosed spaces which he’d always desired to escape, but he did not fear them. Now, though, he felt great unease. It was not the enclosed space itself which caused his unease, but rather the great sense of hopelessness, the knowledge that something terrible, something for which he was partly responsible, was going on outside this cell, but not knowing exactly what was happening nor being able to do anything about it. His thoughts kept turning to Torre and Daena, beyond these cold steel walls, and his concern for their safety was great. Even during his most tedious days on Renazia, six surfaces had never been this stifling.

 

Archie backed into a corner and wrapped his arms around his knees. All he could do now was wait … for something … anything to happen.