By Claire M. Banschbach

No, this isn’t a post about a Fantasy punk rock band. 😉 My fellow Scriptoriumites and I thought you as readers might like to know the inspiration behind our various pieces of flash fiction that we post and if it’s something we’d like to keep on the never-ending project pile. And as sort of the generator of this particular idea, I got tapped to go first. :)My short entitled The Phoenix’s Death can be found here.

So what inspired it? I really love Griffins and I use them in stories just about every chance I get. So when brainstorming a way to use the word phoenix in a story, I had a quick mental image of an elf riding a griffin. Curious, since even as a fantasy author, I’ve never written about elves. But I decided to roll with it. Then I had the particular thought that even though griffins are a staple in fantasy literature, do riders ever use guns? How cool would it be to build a world with kevlar-wearing griffins ridden by gun-toting elves? Answer – cool.

So even though you see none of this in my submitted story, it’s probably where this particular world will end up.

In the original idea, Phoenix  was a person’s name. Then I took it a step further and made it a prophetical spirit that was hosted inside a person. That lucky individual then takes the name Phoenix. After the spirit awakes inside them, their hair turns red and they get a thin red ring around their iris. When they die, the spirit “dies” with them and will be “reborn” inside an infant born within the next 24 hours of the previous host’s death.

I have some vague ideas on where to take this idea. So which pile am I throwing it on? The “Maybe” pile.

What do you think about this idea? Is it something you want to hear more about?