The Phoenix Prophecy
an excerpt

I gathered my strength and moved forward again. The ground was burning. My hands and knees blistered where they touched the earth. With every centimetre I moved forward, I felt myself being consumed. My clothes smouldered and flaked off around me. My hair singed away before my eyes, my skin dried and cracked, and with every breath I felt my lungs inside me screaming. Still I went on.
I reached my hand toward Hiro and in an instant, I was alight. Somehow, though the fire was hot, now that I was inside it, I wasn't actually burning. Still I felt the pain in my parched throat, the sharp spasms of my cracked and blistered burnt skin, but it didn't get worse. I didn't die, as I had expected. I was in the phoenix's fire. I stood, then, and reached up my hands to close his mouth, but he pushed my hands away. I reached for his throat, but again, he pushed me away. How could I stop him? The only thought that came to me disturbed me a little, for I knew that he was my brother, though we had only just met. I embraced him. Then, using the only method I knew to silence a man, I kissed him, fully on the mouth, my lips surrounding his and my tongue reaching in to strangle him. He sang into me and I burned. Still I continued my passionate kiss. My body burned from the inside, my lungs ignited and my flesh cooked. Single-mindedly, I continued to kiss the Phoenix. My brother.
After a time, I couldn't feel anything anymore. My eyes had burned away with my skin and hair and I knew this was my end. I saw a great flash of terrible light, my body's last flames, and then I was gone and saw no more.

*

I awoke, shivering, in the darkness. How can this be? I wondered. I looked down at my body, the new skin glowing. Was I truly alive? I reached up to my head and rubbed my bald scalp. Not a hair to be found.
I looked around me. I was still on the hillside, lying on the scorched earth. Rays of moonlight filtered down through the water to light the dome with streaky blue twilight, eerily reflected in the white stone city buildings. Tiny lights flickered from fires in the city. I hoped that they were fires tended by people, and not the last remnants of a city aflame. I sat up. Where was Hiro? He was nowhere to be seen. Had he gone into the city, or had he been consumed by the fire?
A voice answered from my own mind. “I am here.” it said. “I am within you. We are one. We are the Phoenix,” the voice said. I shook my head. I was hearing voices? That was always a good sign, I thought sarcastically. But I thought about what the voice had said and somehow it seemed to make sense. We are the Phoenix. He said he was my brother. I wonder....
I remembered something I had heard in my youth; a story about a soul split in two, shared between two bodies. Could Hiro have been my twin?! I wondered. Was that the reason for my parents' disappearance? Had we shared the same soul?