It was a plain brown box addressed to her, wrapped in abundant packing tape, and covered on all sides with postage from four different countries. Sarah was used to receiving such packages from her uncle, it usually meant he had found something interesting on one of his jaunts to wherever his fancy had taken him this season. On occasion it meant questions from officials from postal inspectors to Scotland Yard, but those incidents had dwindled since the affair with the gaudily jeweled cross that had arrived by courier. Still, on her dining room table the box of trouble looked oddly small.

In her adventures with her uncle she had quickly learned the value of having a good knife at hand, and so drew a folding inch and a half blade from her pocket to make short work of all the packing tape. Better to know what kind of trouble she would be in before it actually got started. Nestled within a bed of crumpled newsprint was another small box made of delicately carved wood with scrolling brass hardware. It had a hasp latch, but no padlock to secure it. Instead there were two simple strips of paper clinging across its seam with who-knew-what acting as adhesive. These cut much easier than the packing tape had.

The ornate box was filled with ashes. Sarah's eccentric uncle had used this trick before, smuggling a fragment of papyrus scroll between two glass plates in a box of Sahara sand, but filtering her hand through the fine ashes revealed nothing more than her sooted fingers. Scrubbing her hands together produced a small cloud, so instead she wiped her hands on her shop apron before lifting the box from its bed and setting it next to its larger and plainer cousin. Where the carved box had lain amid the newsprint she found an envelope which turned out to contain a letter from her uncle.

Sarah,
I hope your shop is thriving back home! I look forward to perusing your shelves of curios maybe even before this package reaches you. No doubt we'll have ourselves a fine time discussing the details this trip when I get home.
The contents of the box you've just received should prove most interesting. I won them in a card game here, and I don't mind telling you that things got a little rowdy when I revealed my hand. I haven't again seen the fellow who lost since that night, but no matter. When he placed it on the table he claimed it to be a reliquary holding the ashes of the legendary Phoenix! Likely a baldfaced lie, mind you, but with the way my hand had shaped up I didn't much mind what with his money already in the pot. It was a tidy sum, and I had already won! I know you don't enjoy cards as I do, but out here it's the card tables are where most of the governing takes place. My shaman friend who has been traveling with me these past three weeks was rather taken aback when I showed him my prize, and he insisted on praying over the thing before letting me ship it home. He was fairly insistent that we do not cut the seals he placed on the box, but instead peel them back from, and this he was very specific about, their loose corners on the bottom.
I expect I'll be home before you receive this parcel, but travel being what it is these days it seems prudent to include this letter. I look forward to seeing you soon, but should this letter arrive home first please consider making that blended tea you know I enjoy so much.

Yours,
Harry

She sat staring bemused at the message on the simple piece of paper. Her mind had gone fuzzy where the letter had told her she may have passed her hands through the ashes of a Phoenix, though it did pick up that the paper bindings she had cut were likely to have been peeled back and kept intact. Still holding her uncle's letter she began to feel cold even as the paper began to smoke and turn black where she touched it. She only noticed its odd behavior when it flashed into flame startling her back to her senses. Not knowing what else to do she flung the wooden box open and started trying to scrape off the remnants of the ash from her hands using the edge of the box, then she noticed a sudden chill.

In the air her hands felt cold, but they seemed to shed an electric heat when she tried to touch anything. The chair beneath her was beginning to feel warm as well, and she stood before it got too hot. It was as if her entire body was radiating a heat she couldn't feel directly. She started to shiver in the cold that the eerie heat left in it's wake, but was unable to even rub her hands together for warmth because of the blistering heat they generated when they got close to each other. In the strange chill, her fingers were turning the cold color of the ash, and she began to panic. Not knowing what else to do she took the reliquary and ran to her bathroom.

The cold she felt was unbearable, even as her clothing started to smoke and smoulder around her. Her shoes fell in a wrecked heap on the ceramic tile of her bathroom floor, and were presently followed by the remains of her work clothes as the heat she was apparently radiating burned them from where they held on her shoulders and waist. She would think she was mad except that she now stood stark naked in her bathroom while still holding the mysterious reliquary which remained unharmed in her hands. She thought it weird that the wood of the box should remain intact even though the frame around the looking glass on her wall erupted into flames shortly before the wire holding the glass in place gave out. Rationally the glass should have shattered as it hit the floor, but it merely bent in the corner of the room.

This was certainly an irrational situation then. She stood utterly still in the center of her bathroom and watched as her mirror pooled where it had fallen. The fixtures of her sink and bath tub had since given way to the heat and billowed torrents of steam into the heated air. She recognized that she must somehow be the source of the heat even though she could not feel its warmth on her skin. It was as if her bones had become ice, and it hurt her to move even slightly until finally a lick of flame erupted from her own right hand. Startled, she dropped the box which popped open and spilled its contents at her feet. In the ash her feet finally felt warm.

Disregarding the pain in her body and the flame in her hand, she bent and started coating herself in the flame. Even knowing how it might look to a passerby, an upstanding shop owner covering her naked body in ashes like some savage in a story, now she could feel the warmth coming from her core. The coating of the ash even seemed to move with her, where it should have cracked at her joints as she stood, instead it flowed smoothly. She must have looked a fright, the ash was absolutely everywhere, even matted in her hair, but this thought didn't disturb her as it ought to have done. Instead as heat returned to her limbs she felt a strange strength that gave her confidence. She felt that she could even be comfortable at court standing naked covered in nothing but this fine ash.

The heat was building inside her now, even as the temperature in the room began to return to normal. She was calm as the steam issuing from the bathroom's pipes returned to water, then stopped flowing all together as she considered that she might want to shut the master water valve for her home. The ash was sparkling now, and she puzzled that the water would stop flowing in the instant that she thought of the master valve. She still felt an overriding calm as the light refracting through the ash dazzled her eyes and she experimentally thought of turning on that master valve. Once again the water was flowing, but with a thought she shut it off again. This was a curious development, but no more curious than walking into her bathroom and melting or burning everything at hand. Everything that is, except for the unassuming wooden box.

The box that had held the ashes was now floating in about an inch of water pooled on her bathroom floor. The water itself was kept from running down the drain by the glass that had been her mirror. Stranger still was how the water failed to wash the ash from her feet as she walked through it. The ash had lost its light, but had found a new color. Now it was an orange with yellow overtones, and the way it held to her feet made them look disturbingly avian. As she thought it she was able to flex the four long toes of her talons and a ripple of shock appeared on the calm of her mind. Her feet were not the feet she had always known, for that matter the hair on her legs had changed as well. Now the light dusting of dark hair on her cream-toned legs had grown more sparse, but what was left was quickly thickening in diameter.

As she watched, alarmed but still somehow calm, her broader hairs burst into plumage of red and orange and yellow, covering her from mid calf and quickly filling in up her legs. Instinctively she realized that the changes were following the path she had laid out in the ash as she covered herself. Even now her middle, ring, and pinkie fingers were melding into a thick appendage, leaving only her index finger and thumb which were covering over with the same scaly skin of orange and yellow that adorned her feet. As her body continued to change she felt naught but the incredible heat that had so destroyed her bathroom. Her arms and the thick remnants of her hand were, she understood, becoming wings, and while she stood pondering this her posture began to change.

Her hips changed drastically, dropping her ever so slightly into a sort of crouch, but her legs altered to accommodate her new posture. Her plumage filled in around her belly and two long tail feathers grew ahead of their fellows. She was glad all she could feel was the amazing heat as she was slowly becoming something like the bird of legend. Emotionally the most she could feel before she was again overtaken by the calming force was a vague annoyance towards her uncle for having shipped her the ashes in the first place. Meanwhile rows of feathers began to adorn her new wings and her head began to reshape.

The first thing she noticed was a broadening of her nose, because of the way it effected her vision. For just a moment she was very disoriented as she saw a little more of her periphery and a little less of what was in front of her. She surmised that her eyes must have moved slightly towards the edge of her face, but at least they hadn't gone all the way to the sides of her head like a natural bird's. Now she also felt a slight annoyance that her mirror had melted, but she could feel the bones of her face shift and move as a dull pressure prodded them along their way. By now she was expecting the beak that was sprouting from her mouth, but it didn't make the loss of her lips any easier to take. She had always rather liked the look of her mouth, and she vaguely wondered if her beak was the black that tipped her talons or if it might have more of the color of her plumage. While her face had changed, the feathers had covered her bust and presumably her head, because as she moved she could feel their weight on her crown.

As her form seemed to settle she wondered what she should do. In the distance she could hear the bells and barks of the fire brigade and their dogs, as well as more than one police whistle. Looking up she noticed that the roof of her house was gone, as was the door to the bathroom and most of the hall leading to it. The ceramic tile on the walls and floor was badly scorched, and the rest of the bathroom was melted or completely burned away. She still felt the fantastic heat in her core, but now she began to feel the breeze on her feathers, and to her it seemed like a lover's caress. It thrilled her mercilessly, and with a careless leap she was in the air before she knew what she was doing. Had he been there to see it her uncle would have said she took to flight like a duck to the water.

She knew she was no longer human, but neither did she think she was fully avian. Rather she expected that upon looking in a mirror she'd find she was something between, a mix of both morphologies. The feathers on her head were likely more decorative than functional, as she could feel them pull against the air that glided around the rest of her. She puzzled for a moment that she cast no shadow on the ground before remembering that she was now the bird of legend that had somehow been contained in that box. Of course she didn't cast a shadow, instead the proof of her passing was an abnormally bright spot on the ground.

* * *
Seems FA doesn't parse RTF :p
Did the best I could to get the letter formatting in with BBcode

Sarah is in the habit of receiving questionable mail from and for her uncle even though it often leads to adventures she'd could live without. This time her habits may get the better of her.

Putting this in scraps because it's a rough draft, submitting it because I may never go back to finish it. I had a fragment of this story from back in 08 when I was still writing with some regularity. I started the TF and realized it didn't fit what I was working on, so I put it in another document and kept it for later. The Thursday Prompt this week is "Ashes" and since the first thing that popped into my head was that phoenix TF I kept meaning to get back to, and I only had four sentences of that, I decided to run with it.