Chapter Text
Silvery stone ruins, left to decay in the golden sun; long abandoned.
If there was phoenix here once, then they’ve long since gone. Left this place to rot. Just like every other damn island he’s tried.
Sunburn bites back a frustrated screech, and kicks a rock hard, hard enough to send it off the grassy island, and down, down, to whatever lay below skylands. With how high up these specific Islands are, probably just to another sun-soaked island.
But maybe it’ll keep falling down. Never to return, never to land. Like his egg, left in a volcano far from any other phoenix, never to find them, but never to stop searching. He shakes his head. Great now he’s comparing himself to rocks. He’s truly lost it.
The hybrid stretches his wings, feathered, unlike his friends, and they gleam in the setting sunlight. He glides out, circling around the islands once more. Maybe he missed something the first time.
The ruins take up the entirety of each, relatively tiny, floating island. He looks down at the closest islands. One has a large in-ground pool, either for drinking or swimming, the other is some sort of storage building, he would guess from how small it was, and the gardening tools left behind.
He thinks each island must have been part of a larger whole, like buildings in a town. Each serving their own purpose for residents to travel between as needed. Not a problem if everyone can fly or teleport. Or maybe they once had walkways that have fallen? The thought makes him pause, and he stops to land on the storage island.
He searches the storage for… something as he continues his train of thought. Could every phoenix teleport or fly? Maybe they lose the abilities in old age? Maybe they had to wait for their feathers to come in as fledglings? Sunburn is half dragon, and he was able to do both from hatching. Is that a dragon thing; to be able to fly from hatching? He knows many dragons, but not a single phoenix, full-blooded or otherwise.
The records the Skylanders have on them are few and far between, and never from the Phoenix themselves.
Oh sure, there’s records of what they looked like. They were bird-like but bigger than the claw sized birds of Skylands, and smaller than sunburn. They had two scaled legs, three toes on each foot, two wings, and a tail. Their wings and tails were lined with long feathers that nearly dragged the ground as they walked. They were “the colors of fire”, whatever that meant, and glowed as if lit by the fire in their chest. All of this is recorded time and time again.
But there is nothing about how they lived, who they were as a people. He doesn’t notice as he crushes whatever he’s holding between his front talons.
No information for him, the one left behind; the egg hatched long after their disappearance. Not even a clue as to what parts of him are phoenix and what is specific to him.
Sunburn thinks he knows what parts of him are dragon; the large eyes, that glance around the storage, unseeing, the four legs, and the tendency to hoard anything shiny. But the line between what is a Phoenix and what is uniquely Sunburn is not one he can draw.
Some time ago, before he was hatched, they just… vanished.... and any information went with them.
Some think they were hunted to extinction by those who wanted their powers, but that would have been slow. Someone would have noticed, surely. Surely an entire race didn't just slowly die off for no one to notice. Right? Somewhere in the distance he hears a griffin's screech.
But the alternative was that they just… disappeared. He’s not sure if that’s better, or worse.
It’s possible, far too possible. Skylands pulses with magic, it flows through every living thing, himself included. Stranger things have happened than a group disappearing into nowhere without a trace. But still someone should have noticed them beforehand. They have records on the Arkeyan who lived in Skylands for a much shorter time! So why not the phoenix who were known as protectors?
Overwhelmed with emotion, and tired from his long flight here, he lays down in the remains of a nest underneath what appears to be a shelf. When did he find this? He wasn’t paying attention. He doesn’t care that much either. It isn’t very comfortable, but it will do; the sun is setting, he just needs somewhere to crash.
This is the third set, not individual but set, of islands that’s turned out to be a dead-end. Of course he checked the Phoenix Psanctuary first. All that was there was the “Phoenix chicken”, and he would bet several coins from his hoard that they were, at best, a very distant relative of the Phoenix; and that was at best.
His friends offered to help on this journey, but Camo can’t fly, and he couldn't have carried him the whole way here, and Drobot had been called by Master Eon for something else before he left. and Drobot wasn’t a great flyer by its own admission, so he doubts it would have made it all the way here.
But Skies Above, he could use one of them now though. Someone to tell him if it is even worth it to keep searching, because he isn’t sure anymore.
He has been searching since he became a Skylander, and all he has to show for the years of effort, of struggle, is a distantly related species who couldn’t tell him anything, scattered sun-damned ruins, and a handful of stories that sounded more like myth than fact.
Wonderful. So nothing of worth then. Nothing to show for all his work.
Well not nothing. He’s got a rough idea of what they could have been. Things most stories seem to agree on. That they could teleport. They were protectors, sometimes depicted as protectors of Skylands, and sometimes depicted as protectors of all dimensions. They were as fiery as their feathers. And he knows around what they looked like, kinda.
He's got the shape, the outline, of who they were and that counts for something, right?
He rolls over in the nest, and cracks open one eye to look through the crumbling window-hole up to the stars.
Sunburn is a being of fire; he draws his power from either the sun, or an outside source of fire like the volcano, the moment neither are available he becomes lethargic. His own fire isn’t strong enough to sustain him without help.
Despite this, he’s always found the Moon and stars to be great companions. And tonight is no different. There's something comforting about them that the sun does not provide. A sense that they could lead him wherever he could want, if only he’d follow.
He can’t, but he appreciates the thought anyway.
He really should sleep. He has a long day tomorrow. Either he’ll start the long journey back home, where his friends will comfort him, or he’ll fly around the ruins one more time looking for something, anything, he might have missed.
But for now, the half-Phoenix sleeps in the ruins left behind to decay by a species long gone, and does not think of how similar they are. Abandoned, in pieces, and with no answers.
A single star, a single functioning eye, looks down upon the small one they left, and regrets; regrets leaving behind their hatchling; regrets they cannot hold and comfort him; regrets they cannot sit down and explain the universe to him.
They hope that one day he’ll find the answers they cannot give. They hope he takes as long as he needs to find them.