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At the beginning of the world there is a garden with an apple tree. They aren't golden though, and there's a snake with red eyes looped around the nook so he leaves them be.
A wise choice, he thinks later, when humans populate the earth like mites.
In New York, New York, 1947, he tells his story to a street pigeon with whom he shares a statue. There's a man selling pretzels in the cool open air and about a hundred birds nearby, waiting for a crumb.
"Every five hundred years I fly to the same mountain, and build the same nest, and get reborn. And the kicker is - I just end up doing it all over again."
His pigeon friend gives a lowly coo which is possibly a cuss, he isn't sure, he doesn't speak pigeon all that fluently.
"You see, the thing is, we used to have a thing once, me and him, me and Ra - the sun, whatever you want to call him. A dialogue. Maybe even a friendship. He said, "You'll live forever and sing songs for me," and I did, I have, but we're verging on forever and he hasn't even spoken in... centuries."
The pretzel man is a little too ambitious swinging some dough into shape and the collective avian mass lurches forward, several loosing their footing and flapping dramatically.
The Firebird's friend doesn't move, just stretches his left wing out slowly as though he disapproves of the whole situation.
The Firebird preens himself, though he doesn't know why he bothers. New York is not his favorite place, though it is at least considerably less dusty than Egypt. "You ever seen the sun, really seen him?"
The clouds part in New York, New York, and reveal more clouds, darker and heavier, and it quickly begins to rain.
The birds disperse, like a splatter of paint shooting every which way.
***
In the twenty-first century, they don't worship the sun anymore. They don't even name him, barbarians, just send probes out to take photographs of him and talk about how solar flares are a legitimate problem now.
The Firebird finds it terribly offensive, but he is just a bird and the earth is larger still than he can travel.
When it's time to begin his journey East again he gets a head start, flies out there with nothing but a belly full of apples and several thin twigs clutched in his beak.
He builds his nest, substandard this year but he admits he's getting old and perhaps a little lazy, and sits back to wait for Ra's inevitable ignorance. He braces one black eye against the glaring ultraviolet and tries to convince himself he doesn't care. He has watched Egypt rise up and fall down, follow a slave to freedom, go from a whole rainbow of gods to only one; he no longer needs validation from a bubbling ball of hydrogen that the human race now knows is rotating at a rate of 220 kilometres per second.
The Firebird fluffs his feathers and is not impressed. "Are you going to acknowledge me this millenia?"
Ra says nothing.
"Look. I know you're laying low because humanity doesn't do direct interaction with their deities anymore, but there are more creatures than them on this rock you know."
Ra says nothing, but the Firebird's eye hurts from looking at him too long so he glances away. "
I'm just saying. I want closure. Will this ever end?"
Ra says nothing.
The Firebird says nothing for two thousand years. He doesn't build his nest either.
***
Three thousand years later he's a forgotten oddity, a talking bird in an era where the human race has restless feet and the technology level to address that need to explore. He is old now, painfully so, and occasionally when his feathers fall out they do not grow back.
He sits on a nest of disregarded hot copper in old Heliopolis and wonders when he will get to die.
He lays his head upon an old exhaust pipe, not bothering to keep his eyes open. "Hey Ra? Why didn't the sun go to school? Because he already has a million degrees!"
The earth is quiet now, and the Firebird has no complaints; he can preen his rusted feathers in peace.
"Hey Ra, what was the first animal in space? The cow that jumped over the moon."
Ra says nothing.
"Yeah, I don't get that one either."
The clouds roll out and the sky gets darker. The sun moves lower in the sky and the Firebird begins to feel sleep crawling over him, weighing his body down. It doesn't hurt so much any more. He tries to flex his wings but his muscles don't respond, and he thinks, just for a second, that the sun flexes and constricts. He looks out at it, and it hurts, but he cannot bear to look away.
"Hey Ra? See you in another five hundred years."