rise from the ashes

The Phoenix was singular in the most literal sense: only ever one alive in all the world at a time. Its plumage burned red and gold like living flame, and it did not measure out its life in a handful of seasons as ordinary birds do but in centuries, ageing slowly across the long span of human history.

Even so, the end came for it as it comes for everything. When the Phoenix felt its great strength beginning at last to fail, it gathered sweet-smelling spices and fragrant wood and built itself a nest high up, where the first light of the rising sun could reach it. Into this nest it settled, and there it waited.

Then the fire. Some say the sun's own rays kindled the wood; some say the bird beat its wings until sparks leapt from them. Either way the flames took hold, and the ancient Phoenix was wholly consumed, burned down until nothing was left of all that splendour but a small heap of grey ash.

And in the ash, the thing itself. From the burnt remains a new Phoenix stirred and lifted — young, whole, blazing with fresh colour, born out of the very ruin of the old. Death and rebirth were folded into a single act, and the cycle set off again, on down the ages, as it always had.

To rise from the ashes is to do what the Phoenix did: to come back renewed and stronger from total destruction, remade out of the wreckage of whatever had looked, only a moment before, like the end of you.