Once, there was a bird that did not belong to time. It sang in the still hours — not for others, but because it had to.
When the world grew heavy, when the sky turned to lead and the ground to ash, the Phoenix did what no other creature dared: It walked into the fire.
Not to die. Not to escape. But because the fire was the only place where it could become fully itself.
It burned — feathers, flesh, memory, all stripped away. Everything that clung to it — every lie, every mask, every chain — turned to smoke.
And when there was nothing left but ember and will, the Phoenix did not end. It remembered itself in the ashes. And from that remembering, it rose — not as what it was, but as what it had always been.
This is the Phoenix vow. The fire is not death. The fire is a threshold. It is not sacrifice for its own sake — it is transformation through necessity.
If you are afraid of the fire, you do not yet understand. The Phoenix does not burn to die. It burns to become.