The Butterfly Effect

“Come on, they’re here!” Lydia had hardly realized it herself, honestly. She’d woken up and simply assumed it was cloudy; that is, until she noticed the cries of the phoenixes and the occasional feather that flew through the air.

“You couldn’t have said something sooner..?” Tim muttered as he begrudgingly got up.

Henry didn’t need a second warning, though, the most ready out of all of them. “You’re the one that’s still not up!”

“We’re not going to miss them,” Tavin pointed out with a yawn. “Looks like they just got here.”

“It’s still better than being right behind them.” She made sure she had everything then went to leave, gesturing for the boys to follow her. “This is the part where things start getting interesting.”

…

There was no time to try to look at their surroundings or think about anything else; they all shared the same single-minded determination to keep up with the phoenixes. They got ahead when they could so that they could afford to rest when they needed to. Even with the chilly breeze brought in from further north, the presence of so many little fires kept them from getting cold.

It wasn’t until it was dark that the phoenixes started to land and collect in another area. The four set up their little camp and Lydia passed out their dinner.

“So we’re following the phoenixes,” Tim began as he watched the fiery birds, “but do we know anything more about the song?”

“I don’t really remember that part except that I wasn’t doing it,” Lydia said. “All I know is that it’s got to be something weird.”

“Maybe it’s something in the way they’re crying—their birdsong.” Henry suggested. “Or something about the legend of Ekambar.”

“Or something else we need to be looking out for…” Tavin ate what little bit he had left, then wandered over to where the phoenixes were. He carefully shooed one of them away to reveal what was underneath it.

Realizing that there was something there, Lydia got up and circled around the entire flock of phoenixes. She saw the few uncovered spots of the large area that must have all been a part of the same thing he discovered. “They’re all on top of it.”

Tim shooed away a few more. “It’s got to be some kind of magic, too—there’s warmth coming off of it.”

“Could it be something they’re doing to keep themselves from burning out too early?” Henry suggested as he went to look too.

“I didn’t see these last time I was here…” she mumbled. “It’s clearly not just grass, so why did I not already know this was here..?” She shook her head. “If it keeps the phoenixes from burning out, then there should be a lot more of them throughout their whole migration route. And who would’ve put them there to begin with?”

“No one can be certain about why the phoenixes migrate or where their final destination is supposed to be,” Tavin muttered. He was still trying to shoo several other phoenixes away. “For one, they leave in Aclither. It might be the beginning of summer but they burn out quicker in cold weather. It’s the one time we see a large amount of them together, but they experience rebirth, not breed. We don’t even know if where they all eventually burn out is really supposed to be their final destination.”

“Hey, there’s text here!” Henry made a few more phoenixes move so that the writing could be seen. His enthusiasm quickly dwindled when he could actually look at it completely, though. “Aaand I have no idea what any of it says…”

“Let me see.” Tavin motioned him out of the way. “I can read it… kind of. It’s just the really old predecessor of our modern language—what Seothians used until they interacted with the Fleyw Bresh.”

“I’m not going to question how you figured that out, because honestly I can’t read it either,” Lydia decided. She was the ruin expert and, with it, the ancient language expert (begrudgingly second to Diana, though, as a historian whose whole job revolved around reading and deciphering those old texts). At least as far as self-proclamation went.

“A combination of interest in the matter a few years ago and schoolwork,” Tavin replied casually. He glanced at his brothers. “Can you try to get the phoenixes off of the rest of the text?”

Strangely, the phoenixes did it on their own. Some went to pile on top of their brethren while a few seemed to give a sound of defiance and fly to the grass or nearby bush instead. Either way, this was obviously what they wanted them to do… even if they shouldn’t be able to understand what the four of them were looking for.

Tavin walked along the entire edge a couple times, studying each of the runes written until he was certain of the entire piece’s meaning. Then, one last time, he circled around it as he read it. “‘Here I have built a place for the phoenix, a proud collection that will never see the dim glow of the underworld. May this be a safe haven for them to rest, recovering their strength on their way to eternal life. If one should follow, let him hear their song; think of himself as one of them, a bird of fire, and he will understand their call. They are overflowing with stories, if only one would open up their ears to hear them.’”

“So is it about their birdsong..?” Henry looked it over himself until Tavin stepped out of the way and all the phoenixes quickly came back to its warmth. “Or..?”

“I’ve done a lot of things in my forty years of living,” Lydia remarked. “I’ve figured out literal things were actually a lot more cryptic than I thought they were, and I’ve realized cryptic things were the most straightforward things once they were put into practice. I have a feeling this is definitely the latter.”

“Think of himself as one of them,” Henry repeated thoughtfully. “Tavin, if you had to guess, how old would you say this was?”

“One of the first instances of written language. This stuff hasn’t been used since we made up our calendar system, which we’ve had since the end of what Qizar’s legends tell us about our history,” Tavin said as he wandered back to where the rest of them were.

“So it’s probably not talking about Ekambar. It means the phoenixes themselves. But… are they really anything more than just fragments of his soul?” Henry sighed and walked back over to the rest of their things. “Why does even the simple stuff have to be so complicated?”

“It wasn’t meant to be—or at least, I don’t think it was.” Lydia sat back down too. She decided to take advantage of the light the phoenixes provided and dig through her satchel for her journal; now that they weren’t constantly moving, it was the perfect time to write down what happened, even if she hadn’t started yet. “Kiah mentioned once that phoenixes were just meant to be more or less regular birds. Whoever wrote this probably didn’t even know of Ekambar and how phoenixes would become associated with him.”

Tim fell to the ground with a sigh. “We haven’t even died once, how are we supposed to know what it’s like to get engulfed in our own flames for eternity?”

“It isn’t death we focus on,” Tavin said. “Instead, we think about their rebirth. The meaning of eternal life and the evasion of death, not someone’s punishment for foolishness. In a way, they’ve done the one thing that several have tried but always failed to do; they rose back up from the ashes to live anew.”

“Even if it’s an honor, do they really go on willingly forever..?” Lydia decided to look at the phoenixes before actually opening her journal. By now they were getting ready to sleep too, only once squawking when, what she imagined to be, the entire group yelled at a single one for moving and disrupting the rest of them. “I mean, it’s not just their death that Qizar believes is part of their atonement…”

They all gave it some thought before Henry finally decided, “Maybe it’s better to think of yourself as a symbol of eternity—easier to get through the endless pains of life and death with the hope that you can stand for something. That you’ll be remembered as something beyond the soul that makes up all that you are…”

Lydia sighed. “I guess there’s always more time to think about it tomorrow. I’m going to stay up for a little while longer, but you should all try to get some rest. We’re right back at it in the morning, and this time we’ve got to be quicker since they’re all in one place now.”

They all nodded and laid down. She turned back to her journal and flipped through the pages to find a blank one, though something else caught her attention before she found it.

She’d written in journals daily since she was young; at first she just filled them with daily events until they could no longer hold any more, then go on to another. But by the time Tim and Henry were born, she’d changed it to smaller notebooks that were easier to travel with, then wrote a year’s worth of entries in it.

This was full of entries from twelve years ago. She assumed she must’ve just grabbed the wrong one when they left, except they stopped a day before Tavin’s birthday and she knew she’d written in it earlier in their trip. She looked in her satchel for another but found no other.

Slowly, Lydia simply put the journal back in and told herself she just wouldn’t write in it today. She’d have a better look in her satchel later, when there was natural sunlight and she had time to spread it all out. The right one had to be in there somewhere.

Right?