I entered this world much like I left the last one – through pain, through blood, through sacrifice.  I couldn’t tell you why I chose this world, or even if I consciously did, but now that I’m here, I have no choice but to stay and make the best of it.  At least for the next forty to fifty years, anyway.  

One of the perks of being a phoenix is the resurrection.  One of the benefits of being a demon is the ability to cross through the barriers that separate different planes of existence.  But what happens when you’re neither, but their blood (along with copious others) runs through your veins anyway?  You get me – a mutt of no discernable skill, no great power and no higher calling, but unable to stay dead in the classical sense.

This is not to say that I have no power whatsoever – I’m sure you’d love to be fireproof, immune to freezing cold temperatures, or to be able to see in the pitch-black of a moonless night, but that doesn’t make up for the need to drink a Gods-awful mix of blood and chemicals every week just to get the nutrients my body needs to not explode into flames and take out a city block. Where normal humans get to eat filet mignon “so rare a good vet could bring it back to life”, I have to worry about whether the fork’s made of copper, silver, or iron.  Luckily gold has fallen far out of fashion (other than that one moron with the golden toilet), so that’s one less worry – but carrying around a set of plastic utensils to a date doesn’t exactly embody a class act.

All’s to say that having myth blood isn’t all you’d think it’s cracked up to be.  People love to hear stories about how unicorn blood cured their kid’s cancer or how gorgon eyes helped build the foundation for stratospheric high-rises, but there’s a lot of hidden problems that you never read about on the net, and you definitely don’t hear about them when you’re on the table and they’re telling you either take the blood or die.

Why are people so scared of death anyway?  It’s not like we don’t already know that Gods exist.  It’s a pretty safe bet that if you’re not a total dick, one of the Gods will probably accept you and you’ll be set forevermore.  Barring that, make a few million dollars, put it into a blind trust with your consciousness as the beneficiary, and live forever in UtopiaAfter.Death or any of its dozen clones.  Either way, eternity’s taken care of.

For me, death is different.  For starters, no one’s at my deathbed unless they want to be incinerated.  It’s not like those cute stories where the bird just flames out into a pile of ash, it requires months of planning and an underground bunker to contain the damage.