Pain was all she felt for minutes. Hours. Time was lost to her, something beyond her reach and comprehension. A constant reliving of her bones breaking and shifting nearly drove her mad while muscles splitting and tearing in her body's struggle to drag her back from the brink of death. She'd forgotten everything during those moments. She'd forgotten who she was. What she was. Why she was.
Then, with a resounding BOOM that reverberated even in her formless mind, her eyes snapped open with a gasp from the depths of her soul. The world swam around her in a myriad of colors and sounds that collided and clashed, beating against her mind’s effort to find purchase once more in reality.
The air around her grew thick with the sporadic charge of electricity just as the first rays of dawn pierced the radiant, shattered windows of Sealrite’s luxurious banquet hall. Only the chirping of a bird broke through the silence and melancholy of the garden of corpses that surrounded her still limp body, all scattered and dead on the cold, unforgiving marble floor.
As she struggled, a small otherworldly power pulsed a bright blue within her stomach. Weakly at first, but the more she struggled against the pull of death, the more powerful the pulse became. Her body suddenly convulsed like the ripple of a still pond, the only indication of life among the death around her.
From her chest—no, from her very heart—a radiant burst of blue light exploded outward, wrapping around her as it spread through her veins with the red fury of molten lava. Her cold, pale skin turned rapidly black under the heat, charring and hardening. After a moment, the burnt skin started to crack.
A second, slightly louder BOOM erupted from her body, splitting the obsidian marble floor as the black remnants of her old skin peeled away, turning to fine ash quickly swept up in a rising vortex of wind. The wind shifted smoothly to a tempest of fire, and the ash and burnt half-corpse of the Red Cardinal disappeared into the flames without even a whisper.
In an explosion of light and energy that rocked the entire banquet hall with a force that towered over any previous sound she’d made, the vortex dissipated with the same caress of existence that had summoned it. The flames lessened and Mirabelle stood in the center of the scorched earth, her flesh anew and her mind reformed. Remaining flames and electricity danced across her smooth pale skin in remembrance and mourning of who she had just been, flickering and flaring before settling into a gentle, iridescent glow. She was, at last, reborn.
Then she blinked, her red eyes peering into the figure leaning against the far wall, hiding from the early dawn light under a fallen arch. No longer were her eyes grey and dull, robbed of all life and joy. They shone once more with the fierce intensity of a thousand suns as she swallowed a deep, shuddering breath and enjoyed the rise and fall of her chest. Of the constant, familiar rhythm of life restored.
But something was different.
“About time,” Idola muttered, stepping out of the shadows. Mirabelle narrowed her still flaming eyes at the Blue Cardinal, a pink fog spilling out around her feet. “I’ve been waiting for you for ages.”
“Who are you?” Mirabelle asked, flexing her hands as she worked to remember. She remembered his name. Knew that he was Idola, the Blue Cardinal of the Church of Light. And she was… who was she? She was Mirabelle. Mirabelle who? “Why can’t I remember anything?” Her voice came out almost panicked and her head split with pain as she pushed for memories just beyond her grasp, as if a thick smog clouded what belonged to her.
Idola quirked an eyebrow. “You don’t remember me?”
“You are Idola, the Blue Cardinal,” the reborn woman stated, still struggling for purchase on her reality. “I… I am Mirabelle.”
Idola gave a grim laugh, shaking his head in confusion. “What in the Hells is going on? You’ve never lost your memory before.” He looked thoughtful for a moment as he squinted at her. “Why don’t you ask the System to fill in the blanks?”
Mirabelle tilted her head. “The System?”
“By the Hells, what do you remember?”
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“I… I remember I am Mirabelle.”
Idola swore. “That’s it?” She nodded and he swore again. “You are not just Mirabelle. You are the Red Cardinal. An Administrator of the System. Try calling upon it. It should at least answer your call.”
“How do I do that?”
Idola muttered something with enough vehemence she could tell he was cursing despite not understanding the foreign sounds. “Try saying ‘Main System, heed my call.’”
Mirabelle repeated Idola’s recommended phrase. Nothing happened. She tried a second time.
Still nothing.
When she went to repeat his words for a third time, some nagging feeling in her stomach urged her to drop the first word. “System, heed my call.”
A wall of pitch black jumped into her vision, overlaying where Idola stood and blocking him from her view. Mirabelle jumped back from it in shock, a small yelp escaping to freedom from between her lips.
“Ah, finally. I thought you’d been purged for a second. Thank the Goddess,” Idola said through a dry laugh. By the sound of his voice though, Mirabelle wasn’t sure how thankful he actually was.
[SYSTEM ANNOUNCEMENT: Welcome, Mirabelle of the Phoenix, to the Desire System.]
“What does it say?” Idola asked, removing the blue hood that had covered his face. Blue eyes stared at her with wide curiosity under a bush of shoulder-length shaggy blue hair.
Mirabelle hesitated before giving him an answer. He looked almost agitated; on guard like a feline prepared to spring. But was that caution directed at her? If it was, why? She hadn’t done anything to him.
Or had she and she couldn’t remember?
She swallowed, deciding to tell him. He seemed to have answers to who she was. If she told him, he might help her out.
“It is welcoming me,” she said.
“What exactly does it say?” Idola pressed. “It shouldn’t be welcoming you. You’ve been a System Admin for nearly a decade.”
“It says ‘Welcome to the Desire System,’” Mirabelle half responded, that same nagging feeling warning her against revealing the title of Phoenix to another who would live to tell the tale.
The black screen and red font blinked into the darkness, leaving her only with Idola’s perplexed face and drawn eyebrows. “The Desire System?”
“Do you know what that is, Idola?”
The blue-robed boy she somehow knew to be in his late twenties flinched as she called his name. He turned on her with a snarl, “Do not call me that. I am the Blue Cardinal. You will respect the title.”
Something blue glinted in his eyes, cutting off his next words and her response. His eyes widened, eyebrows shooting up into the ceiling. His eyes traced something in front of him. The further he read, the more his lips curved down. As he finished, his jaw clenched and he raised an arm to wave the message away.
“You’ve turned traitor, Red Cardinal? Why? After all this time?” He hissed, lip curled into a snarl. “Have you been allied with an enemy System this entire time?”
For some reason, his accusation stung Mirabelle. A sharp pain poked her at the word traitor and she had the sudden urge to argue. To claim her innocence.
But was she innocent? She had no idea.
Massive twin blades suddenly materialized in Idola’s hands as an iridescent power surged around him with what Mirabelle could only describe as excitement. “Now I have to kill you,” he said, seemingly unable to decide between the smiles and frowns that continually contorted his expression.
Mirabelle blanched and took a step back, instinctively and desperately reaching for that source of power she’d been reborn with. The bundle of flames flared at her call and the source near her gut filled her with an irresistable desire to fight. To triumph over this unknown enemy threatening her.
She had just returned and this man whom she barely remembered was attempting to send her back into that pain-filled Nothingness?
Mirabelle returned the snarl with a growl of her own, massive red and blue flames roaring to life around her. “Not if I kill you first.”
[SYSTEM MESSAGE: Desire System Administrator 001 registered. You have been completely purged of the Main System. The Flames of Rebirth ability granted by the Main System has henceforth been revoked with the purge.]
[SYSTEM QUEST: Defeat the Administrator of the Main System.]
[REWARD: Flames of Rebirth.]
Blue and red tempests of power cascaded throughout the banquet hall like a raging waterfall. Their energies collided, and the space around them trembled. The already weakened stone walls of the building broke and splintered under the pressure of their repeated clashing.
But Mirabelle wasn't worried. The more they fought, the more power and knowledge of combat returned to her.
The pink fog continued to leak from her during the fight, reaching ever toward Idola with the promise of pleasure and relaxation. The Blue Cardinal fought against her with the fluidity and strength of a river, burst of water and ice flung at her from a myriad of directions, but they all melted within the vicinity of her burning flames.
"How are you so strong outside the influence of the Main System," Idola grunted, covering a layer of burnt, boiling flesh on his stomach with a blanket of ice.
Mirabelle surged forward like an arrow of pure fire as she shouted an answer to his last question. She didn't know how she knew what to say. She just knew what the right answer was. Idola wouldn't live to tell her tale. "I am the Phoenix."