---

Born in Flame and Song

by Jameyanne Fuller

They will tell me, later, I was born singing. I wasn’t. I was born like all children are born, in one bloody, wailing, messy push. But I was born on fire.

I am the fourth child born in Watersong after the Great Lurch, when an orchestra in the south crashed their performance and the Phoenix nearly dropped our world.

The choir leaders are present at my birth. They crowd around the bed—the conductor, the cantors, and the wandering priest who has come to town proclaiming the future deeds of the unborn fourth Phoenix-child. My future deeds.

For I am born with sparks tangled in my hair and leaping from my fingers. My skin is hot and patterned with feathers, as if painted onto my arms and chest with a fine brush.

The choir leaders and the wandering priest rejoice. But my parents sob. When their tears strike my face, they sizzle away to nothing.

They name me Lyrica, and they mourn me, for even though the sparks and feather patterns will fade in the coming weeks, they will return on my seventh birthday. And one day, before I turn fourteen, I will die and become the fourth Phoenix to carry our world.

They believe I have no choice.

The truth is worse.

I will have a choice, an impossible choice.

---

I am seven years old, and I’m playing with the candle flame at the dinner table.

“How are you doing that?” Bell asks.

“Easy,” I say. I twine my fingers around and through the flames, then pinch off the flame at the base of the wick and lift it clear of the candle. I reach for another candle with a grin for my little sister. This skill is a new discovery. “I can juggle them.”

“Not at the table.” Mama catches my wrist. I tip the flame back onto the candlestick.

“I want to try!” Bell reaches for the candle.

Papa grabs Bell’s hand. Fire does not belong to her like it belongs to me. “Careful, Bells,” Papa says. “It will burn you.”

Bell thrusts out her lower lip. “How come Lyrica can do it and I can’t?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “Wish you could.”

Mama and Papa wince. I don’t know why. That happens sometimes: I do something or say something, and it hurts them.

“Try this, Bells,” Papa says. He shows Bell how to make it look like her fingers are passing through the fire without actually touching it.

After dinner, we go outside. Mama and Papa chat with the neighbors, and Bell and I play rhythm ball with the other kids. Everything is soft and golden, our laughter and tapping footsteps and clapping hands a light descant to the peaceful melody of twilight.

Then Mama raises her voice. “I don’t see why she ever has to know.” I freeze.

“She’s seven,” Papa says. “She’s playing with fire. We can’t hide it from her anymore. We can’t ask the whole world to keep this secret.”

“I don’t see why not. She’s giving them so much. The least they can give her is a childhood.”

“Lyrica!” Bell yells. I snap my attention back to the game. Vic is running toward me, aiming to toss the wooden egg over my head to a teammate.

I steal the egg and race up the road.

“Go, Lyrica!” Bell shouts. My team cheers and takes up the clapping rhythm.

An older girl comes out of nowhere. We collide. The egg flies from my hands, and I crash to the ground.

Pain slices across my knee. Tears spill from my eyes. Bell hurls herself at the older girl, shrieking and punching her, even though she’s barely five and half the girl’s size. The girl pushes Bell away. The other kids gather around, eyes huge.

“She really is the Phoenix,” Vic murmurs.

What? The Phoenix carries our world around the sun. We sing for her, and the magic in our music becomes her strength. I’m not the Phoenix. But fire is welling in the cut on my knee, sparks dribbling down my leg.

It’s not the first time I’ve skinned my knee, and I know fire is in my blood—I’ve felt it singing there since my birthday—but it has never been like this. There has never been so much. It scares me. The fire flashes brighter.

Mama and Papa arrive. Papa presses a wet cloth to my knee, and Mama rubs my back, murmuring something I can’t hear, because my head is filled with buzzing, like a choir humming the opening note of a requiem. The other kids scurry away.

“Mama, what’s wrong with her?” Bell asks. She stands at my side, scared but defiant.

I lift my head. “They said I’m the Phoenix.”

Mama draws me into her arms, heedless of the sparks singeing her skirt.

This is how I find out, sitting in the dirt, liquid fire oozing down my shin. I am the Phoenix. I am going to die. I believe, like my parents, I have no choice.

---

I am eight years old, approaching the other kids in the schoolyard. When I ask to play with them, they edge away, whispering behind their hands and throwing frightened looks at me.

No one partners with me for duets in school. Our teacher has to pick someone. Vic says it’s because my voice is still rough and off-key, but he’s just being nice.

My teacher says not to worry about my singing. I will be the Phoenix. It will be their job to sing for me, to give me the strength I need to carry the world. It doesn’t matter if I can’t carry a tune. Still, no one wants to sing with me.

I am nine years old. I’m still asking to play. They still say no.

Bell, nearly seven now, watches from across the schoolyard, surrounded by friends choosing teams for a game of altos and sopranos. She waves me over. I shake my head. If I try to play with Bell, her friends will leave. I won’t do that to her.

But Bell comes to me. She takes my hand. “I want to play with you.” Still, she can’t hide the sadness on her face as she watches her friends.
Mama says the other children don’t understand me, and they’re frightened of what they don’t understand.

“But why can’t grownups explain it to them?” I ask. Grownups understand. Our neighbors are always pausing to say hello to me, taking my hand or touching my hair. And people come from all over the world to visit me. They bring gifts of food and cloth. They want to get to know me, to play their instruments for me—a novelty in our choir town of a cappella singers. They tell me I am so brave. But I do not feel brave. I am afraid. And each time an adult clasps my hand and murmurs their thanks, each time a child who used to be my friend backs away, frightened and confused, I’m even more afraid.

---

I am ten when the Phoenix comes to my window.

It’s sundown. I’m reading the diary of the girl who became the third Phoenix. Light blazes behind me, and I look up. A great flaming bird perches on my window ledge. The diary slips from my fingers and thumps to the floor. I scramble up and back away, throat clamping around a scream. My back slams against the bedroom door. I grope for the handle.

“Why do you run, child?” the Phoenix asks. Her voice is the hiss and crackle and pop of flames. It is every voice in a choir and every instrument in a symphony. And yet it is also the voice of a young girl, not much older than me. I glance at the diary on the floor. Before she was the Phoenix, her name was Ylenna.

“How are you here?” It’s not what I meant to ask. “I mean, you’re…” I gesture uselessly with my hands, as if I can encompass the size the Phoenix must be. “You’re huge. You carry our whole world.”

The Phoenix clicks her beak. “This is how I appear to you, child, because this is what you can understand. But I am so much more. I am…vast. Why do you fear me?”

I press back against the door. Here is the truth I never want to speak aloud, never want to think of. “You’re going to kill me,” I whisper. It’s more complicated, but it’s also exactly that simple.

The Phoenix bows her head. “Mother Flame and Father Song have made it so. A new Phoenix will rise and fall with each flame of our world. But it won’t be forced upon you.”

A tentative, pianissimo hope cries out in my chest. Cautiously, I edge closer to the Phoenix. “What do you mean?”

“You have a choice,” she says. “You may spread your wings and carry our world. But you may also stay human.”

“But you need…the world needs…a new Phoenix. Because of the Great Lurch.”

“I am so tired,” the Phoenix says. “And yes, my flame, this world’s third flame, is dying. But I can carry on a while longer, if you choose not to shoulder this burden.”

My heart is thrumming, and my fingers are tingling. My parents, the town leaders, the wandering priest of the Phoenix-child, they all said before I turn fourteen, I will die and become the next Phoenix. I don’t have a choice. But here is the Phoenix herself, insisting I don’t have to die. And I don’t want to die. I want to live. But… “What happens if I don’t become the Phoenix?”

She flutters her wings. “Another child will be asked.”

I want to live. Oh, how I want to live. But I think of this other child, the next girl who will be born with sparks tangled in her hair and leaping from her fingers. She will grow up with this fear and loneliness. What if she doesn’t want to be the Phoenix either? Someone has to carry our world, or we’ll fall, just like we fell two hundred years ago, before Ylenna became our third Phoenix. And if I choose not to do this, everyone will know. I won’t suddenly have friends because I’m not the Phoenix-child anymore.

“There is time yet for you to decide,” the Phoenix says.

“Can you watch people when you’re the Phoenix?” I ask. “People you love?”

She hesitates. “I could. But all the people I loved on this world died long, long ago.”

I stumble back, horrified. She’s been the Phoenix for more than two centuries now, but I never thought what that meant. Yes, I could watch Bell grow up, watch my parents grow old, but they will die. There will only be me, carrying our world for so many long, empty years. It is a horrifying prospect.

“And… Does it hurt? Becoming the Phoenix?”

She cocks her head, regarding me. “I can’t tell you that. I know, when I chose this, the world was in danger because an orchestra played my father’s unfinished composition and it hurt the old Phoenix, but that was so long ago, and my memory has faded. I don’t remember what it was like to live in that time or even to make the choice I did.” Her voice is ancient with its sadness, the pull of a bow across a cello’s strings, one long, aching note.

I pick the diary off the floor. It’s her diary. When I finish it, I’ll know more of her human life than she does. “Your name was Ylenna.”

She opens her beak. Closes it. A single, diamond-bright tear spills into her feathers before sizzling into nothing. “It has been… so long… since someone called me that. I’d nearly forgotten. Thank you.”

I reach out and stroke my hand along her back. Her feathers are pleasantly warm. They do not burn me. I do not know what I will decide. I am a mess of longing and confusion and guilt.

The door bangs open behind me. “Lyrica, they took my book again, but guess what.” Then Bell sees the Phoenix. And she screams.

Bell throws her arms around me. “No! No, you’re not taking her!” she screams at the Phoenix. “It isn’t time! Go away!”

And the Phoenix does, leaping from the ledge into the sunset, leaving scorch marks on the sill where her claws gripped the wood.

Bell buries her face in my shirt and sobs. I hold her tight.

“I hate her!” Bell says. “She’s a monster!”

“No. She’s our Phoenix. She carries our world.” And, I think to myself, Once she was a girl like me.

“She’s a monster. She’s going to kill you.”

And though I have absolutely not decided, I cannot bear Bell’s pain. I kneel down so she’s taller than me and put my hands on either side of her face. “Bells,” I say, “she said I have a choice. I don’t have to be the next Phoenix.” She blinks at me, and I hug her. Who cares what anyone else thinks? I can live. I can have my family. “I’ll never leave you, Bells. I promise.”

We run to tell our parents. They weep with joy and hold us tight. They say they love me, and they’ll love me whatever I decide. They remind me the whole world is depending on me, but there is heartbreak in these words and so much hope and guilt in their faces, and I know they want me to live. I am elated.

Later, I ask Bell about the kids who stole her book, but she just shrugs and grins. “Nothing. I got it back.” But is that a tremble of fear behind her smile?

---

I am eleven years old. The other children talk to me now, but they are distant, too-polite and nervous. They tell me I am brave. They thank me. They don’t ask if I understand the transposing assignment or offer to swap half their goat cheese and tenorberry jam sandwich for half my tomato, basil, and cheese sandwich at lunch. I have stopped asking to play with them. Papa says they understand they shouldn’t be afraid of me now, but they’re afraid of becoming my friend because they will lose me. This hurts me in a way I can’t explain. It would almost have been better if they were still afraid of me.

Bell sits with me in school and plays with me in the evenings, even when her friends call her over. I am grateful and guilty and still so lonely.
I try to get Bell to spend time with her friends. But whenever I see her skipping rope or playing rhythm games, or sitting with a boy in her year with their heads bent close over the same book, she looks unhappy. When she catches me watching, her face twists with guilt and sorrow. I can’t tell the town I might not become the Phoenix, so I remain on the outside.

I long to decide, once and for all, that I will not become the next Phoenix, that I will live. But I can’t deny that I was chosen for this. I must have been chosen for a reason. I must be the best girl to take on the burden of carrying our world through its next flame. I want to live. I want to live so badly. But I also know that this loneliness, this existence on the fringes of everyone else’s life, will only get worse if I turn my back on my destiny.

The months pass. Bell has yet to find her Voice and join our parents in the choir. They start whispering, late at night, that she’s pretending she can’t sing to keep me company. They don’t know what to do about it. I want Bell to join the choir, to become part of the town in a way I never can, but I’m also painfully grateful for her constant presence at my side as we watch the choir practice.

Sometimes, in certain light, I think I see a pattern on Bell’s skin like feathers. But I must be imagining it, because wouldn’t it be nice if I was not alone? When I look again, the feathers are gone.

When I’m twelve, I ask the conductor to let me join the choir like the other children my age. I’ve heard them talking about the magic that thrums through them as they sing, and I want that too. The priest and the choir leaders have told me I don’t have to sing. My parents say there will be time for that later. But maybe if they let me sing, even though I still can’t carry a tune at all, Bell will find her Voice and sing too. And I want to. I imagine singing with the choir at the harvest festival, the magic resonating in my blood, in my bones, watching the Phoenix blazing brightly, brighter still because of my part in the song, as she soars across the western sky. But the conductor says, “You don’t need to, Lyrica. You’re already doing so much for our world.”

“I’m still part of this world. I want to help the Phoenix.” Ylenna.

I know what she’s trying to say. If I join the choir like everyone else, I’ll be part of life here in a way I haven’t been before. I’ll be part of the music that strengthens the Phoenix so she can carry our world for another year. And then I’ll die and become the next Phoenix, and I will leave a hole in the choir where I once sang. Why spread my family’s pain to the rest of Watersong?

“You know,” the conductor says, “I think I have the perfect job for you.”

This is how I find myself standing at the edge of the choir with Bell during the Harvest Festival, holding a light wooden pole three times my height, attached to several feet of string, then a glorious paper bird, a phoenix painted red and orange and gold. I twirl the pole, and the paper phoenix swoops over the choir. I feel worse than when I wasn’t part of the choir at all.

The song crescendos, and I swoop the Phoenix low over the singers. They lift their voices and raise their hands to the paper phoenix. Beside me, Bell lifts her hands too. At the tips of her fingers, stretched toward the paper Phoenix… Is that a spark?

The song shifts. I swing the paper phoenix into the next pattern. When I look back at Bell, there’s no sign of sparks at her fingertips. Of course not. It must have been a trick of the light.

I’m thirteen. The world trembles occasionally now. Ylenna is growing weaker. As the Harvest Festival approaches, the shakes grow longer and become more frequent. People shoot me strained, anxious glances, at first when they think I’m not looking, but as the shakes get worse, they stop caring about that. “Our Phoenix is dying,” they say. “What is she waiting for?” Even Bell draws away. She’s quieter. She has nightmares, and she’s gnawed her fingernails to bloody stubs.

I tell my family I will stay with them. I tell myself I haven’t decided. But when I approach Vic at the Harvest Festival and ask him to dance, it’s with a feeling that I want this one sweet memory of the boy who played with me when I was little, who grew up beside me, who has become tall and handsome in a quiet, kind sort of way, who has always found a smile for me even when he’s saying no. I want to dance with him and carry the memory of this dance with me as my fourteenth birthday draws near. But when Vic shakes his head sadly and says, “What’s the point, Lyrica?” I am utterly unsurprised. And again I wonder: What will I have in this world if I decide not to become the next Phoenix?

---

The day before my fourteenth birthday, I wake with fear knotting my stomach and strangling my throat. It is the last day. I am shaking so hard, my whole bed vibrates. Then I realize it isn’t me. The whole world is shuddering.

I have a choice. I can sense, even in their sleep, my parents’ guilty, painful hope, Bell’s utter certainty. I can do nothing, and I can live.

Or I can embrace the burden I was born to shoulder. It’s scary, and it will probably hurt. But if I turn my back on my destiny, I will fail my people and my world. Even if they only look at me now as the girl who is going to die, even if they never appreciated I was a girl who was alive, I will fail them.

Another child will be born with skin patterned like painted feathers and sparks tangled in her hair and leaping from her fingertips. She will take my place. Another childhood will be lost.

The world wobbles.

I don’t think Ylenna can carry us long enough for another child to make this choice.

My family wants me to live. They know the cost to the world, and they want me to live. But if the world falls into another hundred days of darkness, they will suffer.

I get out of bed.

I stare down at my little sister, sound asleep, no fear that I will leave her, because I promised. Tears fill my eyes, and I choke back a sob.

I kiss Bell’s forehead and walk away.

I write a note for my parents. I tell them I love them. I try to write more, to explain, but there’s nothing else to say. I love you. I love you so much.

I leave the house.

I know where to go. What to do.

The sun has not yet risen. The sky is a deep, clear blue. I walk through the village and climb the hill to the promontory overlooking the lake.

A rim of sun appears over the horizon, turning everything to fiery gold. I lift my face to the sky, and I sing.

There are no words, just a melody that pours from my very core, swooping and soaring up and up and up, bittersweet with mourning and hope. Until now, I have never been able to carry a tune, but this song is pure and deep and resonant with power. And yet with each note, my heart breaks a little more. With each note, I’m less certain. I step forward, right to the edge of the rock. The song crescendos. I bend my knees and spread my arms to the sides.

My heart beats furiously against my ribs, out of time with my melody. I feel each beat through my whole body, all the way to the tips of my fingers and toes.

I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to die. Whatever it means for our world. Whatever life I’ll lead. I want to live.

I let my arms fall and step back. I press my hand to my chest, feeling my heart pounding sure and strong and alive against my palm. I can’t catch my breath.

“Lyrica! No!”

I turn away from the lake, step away from the edge. Bell dashes up the hill. I sit on a rock and put my head in my hands. My tears spill over.

Then Bell is there, clinging to me. “What are you doing, Lyrica? You promised.”

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Bell. I have to.”

“You don’t. The Phoenix gave you a choice.”

“But there isn’t time,” I say. “You feel the world shaking, don’t you? Ylenna is too tired. There isn’t time for another girl to grow up. She’s going to drop us. There will be another hundred days of darkness, and it will be my fault. I have to do this, Bell. I’m sorry.”

Bell takes a shaky breath. “Lyrica, look at me.” I raise my head. Her chin quivers, but her eyes are fierce, determined. “You can live.”

“But—”

“Listen.” She grabs my hands. “I’ve known you’re the next Phoenix for seven years. I’ve lived knowing that, and I’ve watched it tear you apart. And I’ve hated that you haven’t had any of the chances I’ve had. All I’ve ever wanted is for you to live. You have a choice, Lyrica.” Another deep breath. “Because I have a choice too.” She releases me and holds out her hands. Sparks grow at the tips of her fingers.

My breathing catches in my chest, and my stomach swoops. “No,” I whisper. “Bell, no.” It’s my turn to wrap my arms around her and anchor her to the rock. All the times I thought I saw a pattern of feathers on her arms. Those sparks at her fingertips when she sang at the Harvest Festival. How quiet and anxious she’s been in the last months. “You could be the Phoenix too?”

Bell nods. “You’re right. There isn’t time to wait for someone else to grow up.” She takes a deep, shuddering breath. “But I’ll do it, Lyrica. You don’t have to. You can stay with Mama and Papa. You can live.”

I want to live. I want to live so badly it hurts. But not without Bell.

I thought if I chose to live, some other girl far away would be born to take my fate. But it isn’t some stranger I will never know. It’s my little sister. My sister who has so many friends and a place in the choir waiting for her and a whole life, but who has never abandoned me. I haven’t had friends to play or study with. I’ve never sung in the choir or danced with a boy. She’s had these chances. She will have these chances. But over and over again, she has chosen me. She has suffered too, these last seven years. And she will choose me again, if I let her. She will give all that up for me, to give me a chance at that kind of life. I cannot let her do that. She can’t take on this burden for me. Yes, she will suffer if I become the Phoenix, but she will live. Really live.

I won’t have any kind of life if I walk away from this. I will always be the girl who was supposed to become the Phoenix and save the world but who was too scared to take on that destiny and let her little sister do it instead. Even if we move far away, I will always know it. My parents will always know it. But most of all, Bell is the reason I want to live. I cannot take her life away from her.

Right now, I hate Ylenna—the Phoenix—for telling me I had a choice. Because there was never a choice. Not really. Bell was right, all those years ago. She is a monster.

And yet… There is a difference. Maybe I was destined to become the Phoenix no matter what. But now I will do it because it is the right thing to do for my world, for my town, for my family. I don’t face this crying or begging or hoping for some miraculous reprieve. I will walk to the edge willingly with my footsteps sure and my head held high and my voice strong. I will not hesitate. I will leap. Because I choose this.

A moment ago, I was terrified. I was not ready to become the Phoenix, not even to save the world. But to save my sister, I am brave. I am strong. I am burning.

I crush Bell to my chest. “I love you, Bells. So much. Live. For me.”

“Lyrica, no!”

But I’ve already released her. I stride to the edge of the cliff, spread my arms, and leap into the rising sun.

One moment, I am falling through clear, bright morning air. The next, I’m soaring out across the lake on fiery wings.

Behind me, Bell kneels on the cliff and sobs. I feel her grief and awe in my own mind. And I feel them all. My parents racing, frantic, through the village; our conductor staring out at my flight across the lake; Vic, just waking with the heavy knowledge that today is the day before I turn fourteen. And the hundreds, thousands, countless others across the world I now carry. I finally understand what Ylenna meant when she perched on my windowsill and told me she appeared small because that was what I could understand, but really, she was so much more. She was vast. Because I am vast. So much more than I could ever comprehend before this moment. I’m soaring across the lake, but at the same time, I’m wheeling through the sky, the world on my shoulders, swirls and streams and clouds of pastel mists eddying beneath me and the sky arching fiery blue above. And I am also with every person on this glorious world as they wake.

Thank you. The voice of the third Phoenix, the girl Ylenna, is faint in my mind, so weary, and fading quickly. May your flame burn brightly, Lyrica. And she is gone, my name the last word on her tongue.

And I realize I will live. I will live, and I will remember my name, and I will carry the world. And Bell will live. I will watch her as she grows up and finds her Voice in the choir, a stunning soprano. I will watch as she falls in love with a girl from Phoenix City who builds clarinets. I will watch as she grows old and happy with her family, but always cradles that broken piece of her heart that belongs to me.

Across the world, across the years, my people will raise their voices or their instruments in song, and the power of their music will burn in my veins. But I will listen for one rich, clear soprano. And I will sing with her.