Yuletide: Night Ten
The room where the evening gathering was held was hot,
almost too hot for comfort, and as the kitsune watched the dragon stoked the
fire. The fire blazed behind the black
dragon its flames reaching for his scales hungrily. “The Ice Basilisk had fled to the Plane of
Desert and Flame determined to end the plight of his curse upon the worlds. Had he been thinking logically he might have
sought out one of the soggier Planes in which to elude the phoenix. Instead he sought a wretched place in which a
creature born to ice might die at last.
He fled, tears of fear, of heartbreak, of rage, blinding him. Desperate the phoenix flew in hot
pursuit. A Plane is a vast place to
search, and this particular Plane was a seething expanse of deceit.”
The Plane of Desert and Flame
Endless sands glittering
Eternal fires burning
Smoke barely besmirches the air
Heat rises shimmering,
At the edge of your sight
Just out of reach
Surrounding you on all sides
Elusive, taunting, mirages.
The Ice Basilisk runs
Stumbling on shifting ground
Fleeing headlong towards a fiery death
Always another step ahead,
Ice statues shimmer on the horizon
Impossible, a whisper in his mind
Drowned by an infernal scream
The fault, the blame, it all is mine!
I will not, cannot, hurt again
Not them, not me, by ice and flame
Not her, I shall not this I swear
This word more precious than my name.
Flinging himself down scorching dunes
Tumbling blindly, polished by sand
Blazing white in a world of red and gold
Unwitting he stands out, an unintended shout.
Lyra flies in desperation
Flies in fear and flies in hope
Flies in fury at curses
At a caster so unwise and cruel,
A phoenix in a world of flame
A world of shimmering heat
She casts about for a spot of cold
In a world where none should be,
Faraway she senses it
A chill that weakens, dying here
A frozen heart, she thinks in fury
Would never know such guilt and fear,
A howling storm builds around her
Carrying her with wings of flame
Across the shimmering deceitful desert
Howling its mistress’s name,
Lyra, calls the
howling wind
That scours the desert
In tandem with sand
Unmerciful it batters ice,
Lyra, her name
echoes in his mind
Screamed by the wind
But he dare not live for her
He dared not risk his curse so grim,
The heat he finds is real now
Beating on his scales hot and bright
This flame before him will be his end
An end in blinding, blazing, light,
The phoenix flies in love and rage
She smites the flame while still on wing
Before him lies naught by scattered sand
Cleansed of the executer of suffering,
Gathering the sand within her storm
She flings it up into the sky
And casts upon the Ice Basilisk
The umbra of her fury’s might,
“You shall not leave me!”
The phoenix cried
“You shall not leave the worlds!
Atone if you must, but not by death!”
“How then,” the Ice Basilisk whispers
Defeat within his ice slick voice
“How then shall I atone
For all the ends, those frigid ends, that I have sown?”
“Come with me,” the phoenix spoke
Her voice as honey and as steel
“Let us give back to the worlds
Sparks of joy for all to feel.”
A weary spark of wonder
Of intrigue and of hope
Kindled in the Ice Basilisk’s heart
As he stood upon the shifting sands,
And as he gazed at darkness
At shadow freely given
He thought he knew the sound of love
As he turned and followed Lyra’s storm.
“So the phoenix revealed her power, and wondered later that
its extent left the Ice Basilisk unfazed.
So Lyra kept the Ice Basilisk from the fires of death with the offer of
a way to give back to the world: to create and not destroy.” The black dragon smiled toothily at his
audience and the kitsune wondered at his haunted eyes.
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