Ashian

Phoenix mage,
of ash and ember and fire

Obsidian

Minerals & Ores

The glassy surface of this igneous rock shines like a mirror.

15

It hurt, each time.
Even if he knew that he wouldl regain his health and his magic, he still slept at night, dreading the day when he would combust and burn. When his feathers caught fire and he could smell the acrid, burning scent of his own skin, his own bones, his own flesh. Even if he crawled from the ash of his former self, pelt once again restored to its blazing self, he would never get used to the sheer agony of reincarnation.
Ashian gained his immortality ninety-nine cycles ago.
The thrill of staving off death dissipated after the twentieth cycle.
The dreading began the fortieth cycle, when he started greying in much the same way that a flower wilts.
He stopped caring about the immortality after the eightieth.
There was a certain irony in the cycle. Ashian had once been a vibrant coatl-with feathers as bright and firey as the lava of Blacksand Annex-and then, with each rebirth, he lost more and more of that color. Oh, his pelt was as firey as the day he was born, certainly, but he had grown weary, and the spell that he had traveled here to research had no known reversal. But that fact had not bothered a younger him, had it? The younger him only thought of titles and magic and gold, of fire and status and others. Had not thought to put a failsafe in.
He was trapped by himself, from ninety-eight cycles ago. And by the ninety-nineth cycle, his feathers, once the brightest orange, barely even had a tint of their former splendor.