I was in the Land of Éire during a cold winter's night. I was still myself back then... There was a soul that was needed to be collected there, and it was special one.
The soul that needed to be collected belonged to none other than a lass by the name of Katrina C'Aelrith.
She was being chased by a mob when I managed to pinpoint her in the slumbering forest, and my heart nearly stopped.
The moonlight caressed her nearly celestial bronze hair, her emerald eyes filled with fear as they glinted in the echoes of the far away mob. Despite it all, even in those days I felt like my words did her no justice whatsoever.
She would soon get away no doubt, but wouldn't survive the night.
I found out later from the animals the reason why she was being chased. A sad misunderstanding no less.
Apparently, her clan was not use to seeing a young girl taming a pack of dire wolves so easily, especially after that same pack just killed three of their strongest men right in the center of the village…
I continued to follow her throughout the night, feeling her grasp on this world slowly dwindle to near nothing. As she slumped against a silent Silver Birch Tree, her will to live disappeared…
That was my cue to arrive…
I slowly appeared from the shadows, the skins and furs of a grey wolf covering my body, insulating me from the sub zero winter night. The head of the wolf cloaked the top half, leaving only my nose down exposed to her failing eyes.
Through the eyes of a raven upon the Blackthorn tree, I slowly maneuvered myself to her dying vessel.
She did not shake, nor did she have the look of fear. She instead smiled upon me as she exhaled her last breath, letting the elements of ice and snow keep her vessel in stasis.
As my hand slowly raised itself, calling to the soul to its eternal rest, something happened…
I couldn't quite place it, but she felt… different. Her vessel was willing to let her go, but her soul bared its fangs, resisting my tempestuous call.
"You are a different breed of your own." I said aloud, my voice brisk with the tones of her language flowing forth. " You will get to live again, Matron of Éire, so live it to your fullest."
I slowly reach to my side, my fingers wrapping around the Wych Elm hilt of the dagger that was sheathed within black leather. As I knelt down in front of her frozen vessel, I pulled the fated blade out of the sheath and placed the sharp edge against my palm, slicing it open.
Midnight blood- the purest entity of this cosmos- dripped upon the virgin white snow, creating flora that soon disappeared from the temporarily sleeping forest. I dropped the blood-tinged blade upon the ground, reaching forth and opening her mouth, tilting her head to the sky.
My hand slowly hovered over, the essence dripping slowly past her voided lips while her soulless eyes took in beauty from above. As the flow of my blood began to stem, and something began to change within the winds...
Instead of the frozen, tasteless bite of winter within each inhaled breath, a warm, aromatic scent of something unknown filled it in, as if something was to come…
Slowly, my hand moved away from the lifeless vessel, slowly picking back up the blade and replacing it back into its familiar sheath. I looked upon the beauty that sat against the sleeping tree, a smile coming across my face as the color of her lips slowly began to change to its natural pink, her life force realigning with the vessel.
"Do not let me regret this, Matron of Éire." I said once more in her beautiful language before I walked away into the shadows. The crunching sound of snow underneath disappearing into the brisk call of the winter wind.
I should never have done it…
She was the soul that should have never gotten a second chance. She was the one that I should have sent to Limbo. She should have not gotten a second chance to live… to breathe…
To survive…
Two days later, just two days after I revived her, a discrepancy happened within the timeline. I went back to the very same woods where her vessel gave in, to find the worst case scenario…
Her village use to be within the sleeping forest…
Yet it was now a barren landscape of ash and cinders…
I slowly went to what use to be its center, and stood in silence, shaking in the ethereal remains of her power…
She was no longer a mortal…
She became the Fifth
Pheonix...