Same routine as always. Tom took out a heap of his specially blended nutritious snacks and fed the bird. Fawkes ate happily, stretching his neck to gulp now and then. Tom held back a laugh and slowly smoothed down his feathers.
Honestly... phoenixes in this world weren't much to look at. Only when they called on their power did the blazing light and that sacred, living aura add much to their looks.
But Fawkes was a lot cuter these days than he used to be, because with the exception of people, any creature looks adorable once it rounds into a ball. And Fawkes had swollen to something very close to a ball.
Did that break the rules of the trial?
Of course not. Everything Tom fed him was top-grade nutrition, dense with energy, meant to help Fawkes return to his peak faster after his next rebirth. The energy just hadn't been digested yet, so it sat stored in his body and made him a little round in the meantime.
Even Dumbledore saw nothing wrong with it. He only thought Tom had been rather too good to Fawkes lately. If the bird ever lost this standard of meals, there would be a tantrum for sure.
"Fawkes, let's have another contest tonight."
The phoenix, busy stuffing himself, nodded without looking up. Tom called it a contest, but to Fawkes it was just play, so there was no reason to say no.
...
Late at night.
Tom had Fawkes carry him to the North Pole, so he wouldn't waste a drop of magic or mental strength on the trip. He let Fawkes rest a while, went over the rules until they were perfectly clear, and only then did the contest between man and bird properly begin.
A ball of light shot up into the polar-night sky above the North Pole. The instant it burst, Tom and Fawkes vanished from the spot together.
Their maximum Apparition range was nearly identical. They surfaced together for the first time in Norway's Svalbard archipelago, then in Reykjavik, Iceland, then the Azores, the Brazilian Highlands, the Drake Passage, and on south.
From the moment the contest began, Tom had slipped into a Thought Leap state, pushing every scrap of his magic and mental power to the limit. Even wrung dry, it didn't dent his performance in the slightest. When one portion of his mental power was spent, he unsealed the next at once, and sealed the drained portion behind him so its "lethargy" couldn't spread to the rest.
Seeing his little buddy so serious, Fawkes got serious too and went all out. In no time at all, man and bird had crossed the whole planet and landed at the halfway mark, where they rested side by side, letting their bodies ease off after all those nonstop spatial jumps.
This time, Tom recovered first. His talents, stacked together, had long since pushed his recovery speed to something ridiculous, and he left the South Pole ahead of Fawkes.
"Chirp!"
Fawkes wasn't about to be outdone. He hauled his faintly trembling body into motion to chase after him, and the result was...
"Burp!"
He had been eating too well lately. The jump actually failed, and he had to recover for a while longer before he could set off.
"Hey! James, did you hear that?"
Two people in full cold-weather gear had stuck their heads out of a nearby hut. "I think I just heard a bird!"
"I heard it too... Tony." James nodded blankly, then raised a hand and pointed at the flag planted in the South Pole. "And I saw a flash of fire over there. What the hell..."
The two were researchers from the Antarctic station. They searched the area carefully, found nothing, decided they had been hallucinating, and ducked back into the hut.
When they pulled up the security footage, James and Tony shot to their feet.
Neither their ears nor their eyes had been playing tricks on them. There really had been a bird. And not only a bird. There had been a person too. Appearing out of nowhere, vanishing just as suddenly, like the teleporting mages of legend.
The two men looked at each other.
"Report this up the chain. Now!"
...
The North Pole.
Tom lay sprawled in the ice and snow, dragging in huge, ragged breaths. Like a lunatic, he had run from one pole of the Earth to the other and back again in under three hours.
Tom aside, even a Legend would have a hard time pulling that off. Have one of them race a phoenix over short Apparition jumps and it might work out, but over long distances they would never keep up.
Ten minutes passed before Fawkes reappeared. Tom scraped together enough strength to give him a crooked smile.
"Fawkes, you lost this one."
"Chirp, chirp!"
The phoenix let out a sour, reluctant cry, but he still pressed up against the boy's ear and rubbed against his cheek.
He really hadn't been in good shape today. He had eaten a bit too much in the afternoon. Then again, given how far ahead Tom was, the result wouldn't have changed much even without that slip. He would only have lost by a few minutes less.
At that moment, the ninth palace in Tom's mind flared bright. Its great doors swung open, and a streak of blood-red light shot out like a meteor and sank into the depths of his sea of consciousness.
Tom's body drifted upward on its own and began to merge with that meteor, until flames wrapped him from head to foot.
"Chirp...?!"
Fawkes's eyes went wide. Staring at the ball of fire that had been Tom, he felt a sudden urge to cry out for his mother!