Chapter Text

The Search was something that happened to all of them at least once in an millennium, but rarely did it ever drag as long as his was. He had been on Searches before, be they because of fate or because of the random chaos that the universe sometimes liked to throw into the mix. Either way, he had never been on one this long, and he wasn’t sure if he would ever get rest, he was tired of this form. He was tired of this life, and he just wanted to sleep for a while.

He looked at the charred bones, well some of them were charred. They were from the battle that was waged seven centuries before, one that took the life of his dragon, of his other half. Others were ornate, some had crude carvings of wards in them, but he was still missing some. They were not ground into dust, he would be able to have been reincarnated already if that was the case. Instead he had to keep searching, scouring the world for the missing pieces the scavengers stole in the aftermath that Gilbert hadn’t been able to find since.

With a deep sigh, Gilbert left his hiding place, flying off into another city. Perhaps here, he would find what he was looking for.

The charm didn’t work, not that he was expecting it to. The sorcerer that sold it to him was just as confused as the others had been. Curses had been around just as long as spells to cure them, but Ivan hadn’t found the spell or charm to break it yet. No information was left by the madman that cursed him, he had taken the hit for his younger sister and now, she was long dead while he continued to live on.

“I’m sorry,” the sorcerer said, shaking his head. “I cannot help you. I do not have the power.”

No one had the power.

“That is okay,” Ivan said with a sad smile. “You tried your best. Do not fret. You are not the first who have failed.”

He left the building and back into the bazar. That particular sorcerer said that he could cure any curse, but Ivan held little hope that it was true. After all, so many had failed, it wasn’t surprising to him anymore.

The second sun was just rising over the horizon, the first already starting its slow climb in the sky. Soon it would be unbearably hot, and Ivan didn’t want to be stuck outside once the air started to heat up. It was already hard to breathe, with the humid air that never went away, only sometimes lessoned by the rains that would come each evening that finally gave the world a peace that it needed. It just made Ivan remember the land where he came from, and how different it was from where he found himself now.

Long bridges tied all the little houses and shops together, the trees still growing higher than Ivan had seen anywhere else in the world. In his time spent in this city, he couldn’t remember the last time that he looked upon the ground, and there was good reason for that. Here, beasts roamed the underbrush that Ivan never wanted to see, not from the folklore that he listened to or the horror stories of those that brought back food.

Sometimes during the night, Ivan could swear he could hear the grumblings below, and decided that curiosity was not worth the trouble.

There was screaming down below where he was, peering over the edge of the rope bridge, he looked a few levels down and he couldn’t tell exactly what was the cause of the commotion, at least a bridge hadn’t broken. Those accidents were often deadly and took a long time to get the bridges back up, and the alternative routes were often twice as long to take as the main walkways.

“Let it breathe,” he heard someone shout, and the throng of people moved a bit, still peering in the middle of awed spectators.

Let it breathe?

Ivan looked at where he was in proximity to the level the commotion was on, thinking to get a better look. Just anything to take his mind off the oppressive heat and the fact that his curse was going to stay with him instead of being cured. He as quickly as he could made his way closer, peering with a few others where everyone had gathered, an interesting sight to see in the middle of the crowd, head propped up.

A phoenix in such a place was an omen, a white one, Ivan had never heard of such a thing, but the murmurs around him were dark and full of foreboding.

“Get rid if it,” someone hissed. “it’ll call its dragon and tear down this city and burn the forest!”

“A dragon, this far south,” someone else asked. “There hasn’t been one here since this place was founded! There’s no way a dragon would come here. Everyone knows that they like mountains!”

“But times are changing,” warned an older woman that was on a bridge above Ivan. He looked up at her, as her dark eyes stared down at the figure below them all. “I have heard that they can even take on human form, and are looking for new homes. A phoenix here is a bad omen. Get rid of it.”

“This one is harmless,” the woman who was holding it shot back. “A phoenix with a dragon is not in this shape and you know it.”

With a snort, the old woman started walking away, shaking her head and muttering about the ending times and dying gods. Such talk Ivan had heard before, and it was always from the older generation. Why this was, he wasn’t able to pinpoint it, but he was sure that it was due to the fact that every generation differed so much from the pervious one that it was hard to look forward to the future. If he hadn’t lived so long himself, he was sure that he would agreed with her.

Dragons stayed in the mountains and surrounding forests. These kinds, the humid lands where the twin suns breathed in their fire as much as they wanted was not the place for them. A place where air and fire danced, where earth was forgotten below and magic, therefore, was harder to bring up and dragons preferred to be a place with magic. There was no way a dragon was coming to this place without good reason.

“It’s moving.”

Ivan’s attention snapped back to the large bird, that seemed to jump up, making the bridge wobble and screams come from everyone on the same thing. It spread its wings, and with one downbeat it was airborne, tearing through the treetops. Ivan watched it go as he clung onto his own wavering bridge, there was commotion all around as people told each other the same story, even though everyone there had just witnessed it.

It had an idea come to Ivan, and as soon as the bridge settled, he made his way down to the library. It wasn’t a big one, books were hard to keep in such temperatures, especially as they got older and scribes fewer and fewer. Not many thought that keeping books were important, as there were many charms coming out that could keep the knowledge, but tha was only for the wealthy or those that knew how to tap into them. Or rather had the magical ability to tap into them.

Besides the curse, Ivan was not one of those people, and relied on books. He thought of becoming a scribe, but that required learning the seven languages and he didn’t have time for that, well, at least not learning how to write them properly. Learning how to speak and read them was a whole different matter. He had the time for that kind of learning, that was taking him towards his goal after all.

The library was in the trunk of the largest tree of the city, the one that was said to give shelter to the first inhabitants and everything branched off from there. Entering, old magic made the inside larger than what looked like could remotely be possible, but such ways were often used back when the city was in its infancy. To make most of the limited space and those that needed shelter from the beasts below.

He quietly went to the ladder, whispering to it what he wanted to find. If his haunch was right, he was in the wrong area to be searching. There were legends that he had forgotten about, things that everyone took for granted as true that Ivan never thought to look into. After all, what good was a legend to him, that had a real life problem? He felt dumb for not considering it before.

“Take me to the stories of Phoenixes,” he told the ladder, and it begun to move them both swiftly and quietly through the selves. This was one of the smaller libraries that he had been to, most of the shelves were empty, awaiting the time when books and documents would become as popular as they were in the beginning, but may be waiting for a very long time.

The ladder finally stopped, a scarce selection stood before him, that made Ivan sigh. At least this library had something to offer him instead of nothing. He often had that problem in the smaller places that he had come to and asked to use their resources.

Taking the book, he flipped through them. Most of this he knew, he didn’t need to know how they came to be, or the fact that they were tied to dragons. That was knowledge that children grew up knowing, and to watch for them. A phoenix was never far from their dragon, that was just common knowledge as the color of the sky or the feel of the suns on the skin.

Finding what he was looking for, Ivan slammed the book shut, returning it to its space. He was in the wrong place, or perhaps the right one? It all depended really. No one had actually sought out a phoenix before, knowing the wrath of the dragon was close, but then again, he had tried everything else.

Why not something completely insane?