The Face of Death
She is a Phoenix. She has glimpsed the face of death time and again and risen anew from ash. But oh, the rebirth isn't easy. Every time the weight feels heavier, the ascent more difficult. She finds herself dizzy, short of breath. Death ripples along her nerves, agony and numbness warring in its wake, each dragging her under. It is unstoppable, insatiable, but she is a Phoenix. She will rise.
The face is different every time. Sometimes cold, empty, devoid of any telling wrinkle of emotion. Sometimes it is fallen, crumpled, barely able to sustain its own weight. Sometimes it is so achingly familiar that she longs to plummet instead of spiraling upward, strong as a Phoenix ought to be. Even, sometimes, the face is gleeful, full of malice. Then the bird within her rages, would tear the world asunder with its fury if only given means.
The voice of death is ever-changing, too. Now and then it is flat, unflinching as its master. Or triumphant, making her ears burn and blood boil. Sometimes it carries no sound at all, only ceaseless silence. Most often it is soft, mournful. It's hard to hear over the roaring of her own mind, but that doesn't matter. The words are superfluous, for their meaning is always the same.
There is one thing uniting the varied visages, and that is what lies beneath the mask. It is something raw, primal, too basic to be articulated by simple human expression. It is finality, dreadful irrevocable certainty. Perhaps it is a flicker in the eyes, a twist of the lips, a particular note in the voice, but there is always some disturbing cue that twines its way into her brain past all desperate objection. There is no bargaining with death, not in any form.
It creeps to her house with the first light of dawn, standing hesitant and solemn on her doorstep. She knows before it speaks, before it can even take a breath, that another Phoenix has fallen, never to arise again as something of this world. She invites the face of death in for tea, but it goes cold before either of them drink.
It ambushes her in the aftermath of the fight, when wounds still bleed and the air still burns with curses. It is clipped, tightly bound, but nonetheless it undulates within her like an earthquake. A moment of heavy silence, and then it is gone, slipping away as those who remain plan the next counter-assault.
Sometimes it lashes her in the heat of battle, a manic, crisp taunt slicing away at her defenses. It points a wand at her chest and laughs, and it takes everything in her not to simply burst. She lets the rage take over then, but her fruitless assault against death brings her no serenity.
It stands soberly before her, suspended in the cadence and magic of ritual. It drones, buzzes, spits and sparks with the flames of a funeral pyre. It nestles into the countenance of the child whose hand she clasps, stares out at her from the empty eyes of every neighbor.
It surrounds her, these days. Around every corner, across every street, even in her bathroom mirror, she finds the face of death. Her only solace rests in the thought that one day it will vanish for her. Her own death lies waiting, an ugly curse coiled in the tip of a stranger's wand, and when at last she meets it she will do so with a steady hand and straight shoulders. She will return to dust, and from that dust she will take flight beyond the reach of death's haunting face, a Phoenix singing of eternal joy.