The silence that settled over the old house on Willow Creek Lane was not the peaceful quiet of a sleeping household that this house had known for a long time… this time the silence was complete, like the final note in a long symphony.
For seventy-three years, Fury Kuranes had been Elias. It was not a name he had chosen for himself, but it was given to him by the boy who was on the verge of death, and so Fury had taken the burden of his life and granted the boy the chance to resurrect himself in the future as a phoenix, a more than worthy enough exchange.
Fury had worn this body from that day henceforth with a diligence that bordered on sacred devotion, and decades had passed, and he was now an old man.
He sat in his worn, green armchair by the bay window, the morning sun painting lines of radiance across his rug. In his hands, he held a simple terracotta pot, the soil within it dry and cracked. It was all that remained of the orchid Althea, his wife had nurtured for a decade.
