The Box Survives Phoenix
Kerrick searches the Violet Archives after three towns Phoenix was said to have visited give him nothing but ash.
Kerrick finds a box that withstood Phoenix and calculations that may have failed its makers.
searches the after three towns Phoenix was said to have visited give him nothing but ash. Whole cities lie in ashpiles, wooden beams and crumbling granite alike, and among the building-sized heaps he finds many smaller piles in the streets and guesses where the people went. Nothing rises from the ashes to interview, so he goes academic.
Nineteen floors down he finds the dossier a scavenger crew told him about, bound papers with Phoenix etched on the cover, sealed in a thick-walled, unliftable box of smoky diamond-like stone scorched along every side. The dossier opens with hypotheses about minimum safe distances and which exotic minerals from which realms might contain the flaming bird, then dissolves into scrawled symbols beside phrases like combustion rate on burned pages. The box came out of the middle of a glass crater in a field of hardened molten rock, miraculously intact.
Kerrick guesses the researchers misjudged their minimum safe distance. He admires the box anyway.
Kerrick guesses at the researchers' fate from a crater and a scorched box; the dossier gives them no names and never places Phoenix at their experiment.