AntiPhoenix

Buddha was wrong. The Hindus are wrong. History does repeat itself. But then it stops. It's all going to come to an end one day. The stars will burn out. Time will stop. And god won't slurp it all back up and vomit it out again in a different pattern. That's it.

There is one AntiPhoenix and only one. It's written on this page there is no other. It came alive when you read these words. You can use this Black Phoenix in your game. It's the only one you'll ever get. When it dies, if it dies, tear out the page. Its printed with a perforated side. Take it outside. Burn it. There can never be another AntiPhoenix in your game, or any of your games, ever again.

Things find their meaning in their end. For a thing to live it has to die. For a thing to exist there has to be not-exist. No end, no meaning. The AntiPhoenix is the end. Final and irrevocable. When it dies even the terms used to describe it will fall like old leaves.

A Rainbow of darkness. In normal glows the AntiPhoenix burns, a Hiroshima-storm of A-Bomb-ravenwings. The negative-image pinwheel, a whirling, dancing archive of every imagined colour of black. An oil slick, vast and far a you can see, that holds the light from one bright star in the empty carbonised sky. This is the lesser image if the AntiPhoenix, douse the light and its true form begins to reveal itself.

As total darkness falls upon the eye, the rods revolt and cones rise up. They crackle slightly in the black, reluctant in sleep. Like dreaming dogs they twitch. The random flickering signals make the back-ground-grey, the hunting place of the Eigengrau. Absolute blackness can't be seen by us, except in contrast with light.

Unless the AntiPhoenix is there. Its absence rides the blackness, infiltrates the eye, and inverts the signals in your optic nerve. The back-ground-grey recedes. A deeper darkness seems to grow. A shadow in a shadow, a storm cloud in an eclipsed sky with slowly growing shape and form. The light sensing cells in your eye spasm and freak, instead of sending signals to the brain they start demanding energy to live. The brain responds and amps up your eye-nerves with sustaining volts. The eye stops receiving energy, and starts to gently glow¹. Your pupils lume.

Simply looking at the creature in darkness is slowly draining your mind and life and soul out through your eyes. It's nothing personal, this is just the effect the AntiPhoeinix has. It's not trying to kill you, though it fully accepts you death is inevitable and absolute, like all death. (Lose 1hp per round while looking at the AntiPhoenix in darkness.)

No-one who dies at the claw of the AntiPhoenix or around the AntiPhoenix or even thinking deeply about the AntiPhoenix will ever come back, by any method, fictional, meta-fictional², or divine. Ever.

The AntiPhoenix is a master of words and generally sad. It only speaks and cannot be reached by any other form of communication. An expert in poetic forms, it knows all forgotten tongues and none that live³. To talk to it, you must learn a language, ruined and extinct, only then will it allow you the slightest attention.

It knows everything that has passed (most things) all that will die (most of the rest) and a bit about immortals (doesn't like them, fakers.) It ends things, sometimes things like lives and hopes and loves but also sometimes curses, tyrants and pain.

It sometimes wants things, old poetry is a favourite, lost things, memories, highly secret and deeply lost artefacts, powerless but significant. Decoding it's instructions is the hardest thing about working for it.

Every single part of its body is extremely valuable and extremely dangerous. The kind of people who would want these parts are all uniformly terrified of going anywhere near it.

1- It's quite pretty actually, although only the AntiPhoenix will ever actually see this.

2- You can try and bring them back in another game, but you will know in your heart that this is a lie, just a copy of the character you knew.

3- It probably knows these too but refuses to use them.