Diary - Saturday, March 3rd, 2001

Tattoos, dreams, phoenix-fire and death.

I'm getting a tattoo soon...

Given the philosophical nature of a few of my friends, especially after a couple of shots of Glayva, I was asked why phoenix wings. For they are, burning, glowing, and in my mind they are definitely those of a phoenix.

So here's the story (and you thought I'd only post something sarcastic and silly tonight - heh!). The strange thing is that it's completely true, unlike so many other things I draw or write about.

I dreamed I was a sparrow, the tiniest creature, with hands on the edges of my wings and a reduced, human face surrounded by a tuft of grey brown feathers. Little claws, tiny little wings, fragile as a leaf. I dreamed I sat on the ledge of a window in a cathedral so tall that it was impossible, the bottom descending into mist, dark inside, but all dimly multicoloured through the stained glass. I took wing, and I was so quickly nothing more than a puff of feathers and blood that it didn't even hurt when the harpies tore me apart.

I had the sense that they ate me, even though I was of course dead and could not know.

And the next night I dreamed I was a sparrow, the tiniest creature...they ate me again.

And the next night I dreamed I was a sparrow, the tiniest creature, but I lived long enough to peel back from the air when the gigantic creature swept through, dodge, and become crippled by the blow and die smashed against the stone. That death hurt the most, because it lasted a while and I could *feel* broken ribs and blood leaking out.

And the next night, and the next...torn apart by claws or fangs, or broken against pillars or speared on glass. But each night I lasted longer, and each night I grew, a little. Just a little. I was never afraid, even when it hurt, because the creature I was couldn't *be*
afraid.

And one night I crossed the first great room, too fast for the harpies, before winging up to the darkness and hiding in the roof. The harpies were clearly seen now, and they were massive, black, and awful. They crawled up into the beams to tear off my head.

The next night, and the next...

One night they didn't catch me. I'd gotten bigger, and faster, and my feathers were red-brown instead of grey-brown. I was too fast to catch in the open, and I was more agile then them. Still, I had nothing to do but watch them in the air, circling and shrieking, ugly things, while I could only hide because if I went out I would die.

The next night, and the next, sometimes dying, but more often not. More and more often not.

One night *I* turned on *them*. My feathers were red and gold by this point. They killed me, but I wounded them, because my claws had grown in hard as steel. I knew I had to fight them, you see.

The next night, and the next...I wasn't dying any more unless I attacked, and even then I began to survive the battles, sometimes crippled. And then, gradually, not. It was harder for them to hurt me. Sometimes it seemed my wings were metal now.

Until the night came when I was as big as they, and when I opened my wings they caught multicoloured fire. They gleamed like razors, and they hummed. I had eyes like purple holes, and talons like a dragon, and a tail of curving feathered light.

I chased the black harpies through the Cathedral, tearing at them and setting them aflame, until I cornered one and killed it with my wings, and until I had torn the other apart with my talons. Even though I had to slash through stone to get at them I did it. I could cut anything with these wings.

They were dead. I hung in the center of the great building and sang a strange sort of song with a weird phoenix voice and violin-music made by my vibrating metal wings. And everything burned full of light.

And the dreams stopped. That's all there was. Ever. I've dreamed of the Cathedral itself since, but there's nothing left inside it but humming light now.

All and all there were some twenty to forty dreams in this sequence, one a night for weeks. God only knows where they came from, but the image of the phoenix meant a lot to me even before this, so thus the tattoo. And given the way I was born into the body of the phoenix, in the death and in the blood, I'm even going to welcome the pain of the etching.