Ache (Jack)
The door to the building swung behind him ungently. The crack of thunder in its frame - and the uncomfortable shuffling of the door man beside it - called to Ilyien to stop and center himself. After a moment's forced and careful calm, he turned back to the door man and nodded once in apology before heading down the street.
His anger ran deep, nearly as deep as the pain. He walked briskly, pressing his feet hard against the pavement with each step, forcing his mind through a series of elementary focus routines. Throughout it, he kept his mind carefully separated from his fellow phoenix. Sabev would know his presence; he couldn't close her out so completely, even now. But he could allow no true communion with her now. The anger was breaking his composure, dredging up the past, stabbing into the wound his lifemate left behind when she burned through her final flame.
The audacity, the sheer, blind stupidity of that human! How his Sabev found friendship with such a treacherous creature, he couldn't fathom. The woman was so certain of her words, certain when she knew nothing of the phoenix, nothing of the suffering their race had endured at the hands of her kind. Because of the greed of humans, of all other races, his people had been hunted nearly to non-existence. Creating new phoenix was a rare and dangerous process. When his people first retreated to the deserts of Caeleste, there had been so few of them that there was a true concern that they would yet fall into history.
It took centuries, centuries on centuries, to return the phoenix to a stronger population. One city became two became three, as their remembrance in the Outer Realms turned to legend and then myth. It was how it must be. The wealth the phoenix carried in their blood and in their tears was enough to begin wars and blood feuds. The wealth of the phoenix was enough to turn good men into brutal butchers. Kyla Trinian, his beautiful lifemate, had fallen to a group of those men. No, that human had no concept of what she so arrogantly suggested was "what must be."
His skin was dangerously hot. He realized it when he stopped beside a bench and put his hand on the metal. The paint bubbled under his palm. Gritting his teeth, he wiped his palms together and drew his skin back to its human-like temperature. It was a wonder his clothing hadn't begun to steam. He took a hard breath and demanded that his calm return to him. This was no way for a Knight of the Obsidian Circle to comport himself. This was no way for a follower of Tyr to behave. He shut his eyes.