It is unconventional – everything about it – but contrary to the oft impertinent curiosities whispered by those around him that spoke of such treachery as perpetrated by the Deathless, he knows he is no prisoner here. It would take nothing to fly away; to shed the fineries of luxurious silks for nothing but plumage of brilliant oranges, deep reds, and glittering gold to put miles and miles between him and Koschei and his kingdom; and by some accounts, those shadowed doubts kept quiet lest they incur the wrath of the Immortal, he should, but the Firebird does not budge. He does not try to return to what had been. He does not try to be anything more than what he is known to be: The chosen consort of Koschei, kept, but not caged; cherished, however caught; provided for and in ways perhaps even Koschei may not have recognized; and in turn, he knows the Deathless can be calmed.

It is symbiotic though the Firebird leaves no impression that those moments – the quiet moments, those peaceful moments when the weight of immortality doesn’t hang so readily on Koschei’s bones as if draped over rigid bone and atrophied muscle – are his doing; that a gentle tune hummed through the air could carry with it relief or a few shed tears, perhaps undeserved by some, could quell his pain. They were simply harmonious and, for some time, it remained that way as those who, in their misinformation or ill-intentions, found themselves foiled; but there were always exceptions and cages far less gilded with keys of sharp blades of magical steel, and in the end, it would be Ivan lauded a hero for capturing that which once could not be.

He doesn’t beg, he doesn’t cry, he doesn’t sound the alarms. Koschei will know well enough of such intrusion – if not by the Firebird’s mouth than the signs of struggle found in hastily disturbed ground and scorched Earth, in discarded fabrics and lost feathers, dimming against the cold ground as if embers, and however spared, he knows what light rests at the end of the path in front of him and it doesn’t take prophecy to see the eruption of roaring flame and an egg, mistaken and stolen, nary to be seen again by the Deathless, just the waking panic of a heat-singed face of former slumber as Ash’s body springs up to kick off winter bedding for a subpar cold.

Seattle, after all, was no Novgorod and it wasn't Buyan.

But these were dreams – all of them, from the coastal sea breezes of a life in Japan to the war torn remains of a Europe at war and the blistering heat of iron forges, and it takes nothing more than the high scream of a tea kettle and a shaky hand with an ever-smoothing pour to settle a troubled mind – and not lives lived, Ash twisting his fingers around the handle of the kettle with a particular affinity for the elaborate gold accents and brightly painted porcelain inlays, vintage, stamped with letters suggesting, but nothing more, the origin of such a gift found in the depths of an oddities store.

Not the first and hardly the last relic taken to, the shelves of his apartment containing just as many trinkets and they did texts, “eclectic” might have been an apt description as jars of loose leaf teas sat next to copies of Nihon Shoki, all nestled among post-war recounts of historical events, books of some to no significant, and small hints, clue, as to what it all meant; what he was and who he had been; and what it might have meant in the future.