Mark of the Phoenix

Prologue: The Doors of Destiny

"Kenna."

I flinch as my name is called. I look around, shifting from foot to foot, looking for some sort of support, but no one looks my way. All of those who wait in the large, plain white room sit on marble benches or lean against the stone walls staring at the floor or their hands. No one makes eye contact with me or anyone else. They are caught up in their own fears right now.

"Kenna, come forward. "

The voice booms and is enough to jar me out of my daze and I start shuffling forward.

"Come along girl, don't dawdle. Destiny waits for no one," says the Spirit Guide behind the tall white marble podium calling off the names of the Gifted who are Choosing today.

"Too bad," I mutter under my breath, careful not to let to let the Spirit Guide hear me. I would be very happy to let my Destiny pass me up so that I could stay in the only home I've ever known.

Over the past couple of weeks, as Choosing Day got closer I had heard many of the other Gifted talking about their home realms and hoping that that is where their destinies led them, back home. Even if I had any friends in the newly graduated Gifted, I still would not have been able to join in those conversations. They all have memories of their homes and families, I do not.

As a rule, Gifted are brought to the Spirit Realm around their ninth or tenth year, depending on when Gifted Testing was done in their Realm. Gifted are humans who have the ability to use magic, or magical beings such as shapeshifters, faeries, or merfolk. There are hundreds of species of magical beings.

Spirit Guides, the inhabitants of the Spirit Realm, teach the Gifted how to use magic until they reach their majority and choose the Destiny Path they will take out into the Realms to use their magic, hopefully, for the good of others.

I have lived my entire life in the Spirit Realm. I know I was not born here, no mortals are, but I was brought here long before I was old enough to develop memories like the other children. I don't even have an impression of my mother holding me when I was a baby. Once, when I was about thirteen years I was able to get Etraya, the Spirit Guide who had taken care of me as a child, to tell me that my mother had a Gifted test done before I had been born and that I'd been brought to the Spirit Realm only two days after my birth. When I pressed more information, asking what Realm I was from, what happened to my parents, I had been forbidden to speak of the subject again.

I shuffle past the Spirit Guide's podium as slowly as I can without getting a reprimand. My stomach lurches as I reach the huge gilded doors and they begin to swing open. My feet feel heavy, but I force them to move and they carry me through the wide doors into the Destiny Room.

This is the room every Gifted pupil wants to see, but are never allowed to enter. It is rumored that the room only existed one day a year, Choosing Day. I don't believe the rumors and stories. No amount of magic can make something stop existing, not even in the Spirit Realm. I suspect there is strong magic attached to the room that hides it from curious pupils. I gape, open-mouthed, as I enter the room.

It is cavernous, at least five times the size of the outer chamber I had been waiting in with the other Gifted graduates. The walls and floor are made of pure white marble so flawless and seamless I can't really tell where the walls end and the floor begins. I look up but can't really see a ceiling, just a bright light that illuminates the room with an ethereal glow. I pull my mouth closed, trying not to look as awestruck as I feel. Though stories flow through the pupils, none of us really know what to expect before we go in. No one, other than the Spirit Guides, that has seen the room has ever come back to tell about it. Once a graduated Gifted enters the Destiny Room they leave the Spirit Realm without reentering the school, though none of the students know exactly how.