🐦🔥 Shrine of Five Phoenixes 🐦🔥
⛩️⛩️ SageDay 🪐✨ 04 Janustides 2025 🎆🌉 Waxing Crescent Moon 🥶 🌒 15 Nivôse CCXXXIII ❄️🌨️ Water Rooster · Fire Rat · Wood Dragon 🌊🐓🎆🐁🍁🐉 Day 10,430 ⛩️⛩️
🐦🔥 Shrine of Five Phoenixes 🐦🔥
At the heart of the shrine of the five phoenixes are five feathers, each from a different bird. one of green-gold and white, one is red and white, one is blue and orange, one is
The quills were each used by the heads of five armies to sign a peace treaty. the copies of the treaties were later incorporated into the international law and common law over the next thousand years. some copies ended up in state libraries, monestaries, or were held as heirlooms by the successor state to one of the original signing parties.
an oath signed with a Phoenix quill is particularly potent. phoenixes are reveared as the carriers of souls between heavens and the facilitors of reincarnation, capable of flying through the sky, the ocean, the hell worlds, the ghost worlds, the divine realms, so to violate an oath signed with one's quill is to risk being rejected by that Phoenix upon your death.
Phoenix feathers are potent in fire magic, from the alchemical to the ceremonial to the scriptographic. words written by a quill with the proper ink will not burn, and even if the manuscript is destroyed if the ashes are preserved and reheated the ink will reorganize itself and the text can be reconstructed. a tattoo needle derived from a Phoenix quill or bone can make one impervious to fire, yet if one violates the terms of the spell the tattoo may begin to burn with a cold heat that will torment the wearer while preserving them beyond a point where pain would normally knock out or kill them. even after death they endure as flaming ghosts. stories of a people who went to a Phoenix for help and were given it's bones to perform a ritual and then failed to return all it's bones for it's reincarnation is told in the North. the needle carved of such a bone is a recurring talisman.
the djinn honor the phoenixes above even the deathless gods which infuriated a certain king who had taken up his crown as part of a revolution incited by certain prophets who prrached that any god which could be seen was no true God, and any god that could die, though it resurrected itself, could not be the true God which dwelled in the truth of the world always behind and underneath what more superficial deities played upon like images on the surface of the water, pale reflections of the blinding sun.
the djinni ambassador who objected to the destruction of certain shrines to phoenixes, dragons, fairy gates and folk saints was thrown from the court and barely escaped from the city with his life and less than half of his embassy staff, most of whom were destroyed in the attacks on the local djinn populations, driven out of the cities and villages with iron charms and bigoted violence, or confined to ghettos on top of mesas or cellar tunnel neighborhoods where the oppressive earth and erosive water and cold whistling cave winds made torn paper of their essence.
the paper kites which flew over certain djinn friendly neighborhoods offering them a charmed site to rest and absorb the suns' rays became targets for anyone with a line of sight to the skyline. the silk threads to slide down and take offerings of fairy milk and orange wood incense were cut by the houses residents or cut by invaders, and djinn might fly over an entire burrough buffeted by rain and wind and find nowhere safe to land for days at a time, iron nails affixed to ever square inch of rooftops to discourage pigeons and djinn in the guise of pigeons from landing to rest or reorientate for even a moment.
the djinn ambassador(s) went to the glass palaces of the djinn high families and spoke of the pogrom taking place, led by the cult of the Unseen Gods. the desserts could hold many refugees, but djinn need more than heat and sand to sustain themselves and their culture. the families sent out flyers to the shrines of the phoenixes. these were generally sites where a Phoenix had been known or believed to have been sited. a few were flame bleached nests of stone, long uninhabited but still rich in power and meaning, frequent sites of vision quests for juvinile and elder djinn. there were temples where a Phoenix had been seen once or many times, flying over a river or alighting in a garden or carrying a great stone or dancing with a dragon in the ocean's surf. they sent delegates to the pagoda of the moons where they burned jasmine and mint and goblin sugar and the resin of plants grown in hidden Oases only the djinn know about. they sent delegates to the lighthouse where a thousand years before a djinn had landed and served as warning light for a passing armada of refuges, then turned around and caused a pursuing armada of warships to become caught on a reef and there they donated a lens of djinn blown glass. they went to the white Phoenix bridge shrine where a Phoenix could be seen reliably flying on the evening of the summer solstice and morning of winter solstice where thousands of pilgrims traveled every six months to prayers, offerings, and messages to their ghosts--and where some received replies, written on the same paper with the names emblazoned with fire. they sent delegates to the golden temple of resplendent serenity, where three elderly male phoenixes lived, and to the mountain peaks where a pair of
blue-white female phoenixes were raising two rare white phoenix chicks and an almost unprecedented black phoenix chick, and they waited a year and eight months performing offerings and honoring spells before on a crisp mountain day in early spring, between the pinpoint rise of the first small white sun and the lush golden dawn of the second, they witnessed all five birds flying between the peaks. eventually, they knew, those birds would migrate off of this world across the vast empty black to a planet orbiti g the same great blue star which their own trio of Suns orbited, a world of toxic storms and mercury seas rotating under great searchlight moons. and they went to the base of the rock 24 miles high where the phoenixes traditionally first arrived back from the migration of dry waterless airless space to adopt the forms of unblinking spiders and fish and raptors and statues to stare in shifts for a year of the planet around which their world was moving.
⛩️⛩️ SageDay 🪐✨ 04 Janustides 2025 🎆🌉 Waxing Crescent Moon 🥶 🌒 15 Nivôse CCXXXIII ❄️🌨️ Water Rooster · Fire Rat · Wood Dragon 🌊🐓🎆🐁🍁🐉 Day 10,430 ⛩️⛩️