A Mind in Motion

     A torrent of rain fell from the broken clouds above, screaming into the night as each drop sizzled against his raging skin. He knelt, pleading into the rapidly warming mud caking his body and clothes for some kind of mercy, but each cell in him continued to burst into flickering wisps of flames.      The pain was maddening, his joints seizing and flexing under the strain like he was a marionette strung tight to a demonic marionettist. Spittle foamed out of his mouth and waves upon waves of colors like churning cinder washed across his vision.      Death had been far more peaceful than this furious rebirth.      His robes, spun from the finest material, burned like wicks, surrounding him in a glowing pulsing light as the individual flames bursting from his skin began to merge and grow together. The air surrounding him was suffocating--billows of colored smoke rising up, tangling themselves with the rain drops that contin...

I grew up around the fire stacks, hidden away in the hills surrounded by a thick forest. We were a small community but one held fast to the traditions of hard work and strong family ties. I was there the day the stacks blew and the storm clouds came in. It had never happened before, the two colliding in the sky. We had been preparing for the coming rain, covering our homes and bundling down under pillows and blankets to keep warm. The storms help the stacks cool down, allowing us to work and live around them without the ground getting hot beneath our feet. The clouds arrived like always on the backs of phoenixes. Graceful, vibrant birds with long necks and tails; the Northern phoenix with rich blue feathers like the ocean carried her grey clouds behind her as the Southern phoenix, white like snow, carried her own. It's beautiful to watch them dance in a mating ritual, soaring and circling one another, blending the clouds together in a thunderous release of passion and ...