The legend of the phoenix

Fallen leaves

It wasn't the first time that the young boy has seen the leaves fall like golden raindrops from the trees, but it was the first time he was able to stand under one of them that day.
Until his fifth birthday, Tsuki wasn't allowed to leave the royal palace's gates, but now with the company of his dear mother he was allowed to play on the huge and wide valley.
The valley was very close to where the royal palace was, so there were no big fears concerning him getting in trouble.

There the boy was pulling on his mother's hand as they were walking down the now golden valley, which was firmly covered underneath orange, yellow and a few red leaves.
Tsuki was giggling because of excitement the whole time, his mother trying to walk as fast as her son who was a few steps ahead of her. She was laughing "Tsuki, slow down a bit!"
And Tsuki stopped under a tree, which he found to be fitting for his liking to play underneath.
Just when his mother finally approached the boy, he was too busy developing plans of games he could play at this mid autumn day to notice her standing next to him by now.
Build a castle or a cave made from these beautiful leaves?
Make a leaf-man instead of snowman, since it wasn't the fitting season for snowmen? Or maybe, as his mother suggested before, they could start cooking sweet potatoes under the leave piles, just like the villagers used to do back in the days.
He didn't know how the process of that cooking-sweet-potatoes-under-leaf-piles would look like, but he knew how sweet potatoes tasted. And he knew for sure how good they taste.

The boy grabbed a handful of the scattered leaves and threw them above his head so that they flew around him and landed everywhere on his clothes.
He cleaned himself off and bend over to grab hold of more leaves to throw, just then strong wind came and blew all the leaves away from the boy. He looked to the direction where the colorful shapes were taken to, not turning back to his mother, and ran after them.

The laughter of the amused boy faded as he was moving away from where the mother was, towards the distance. She noticed it immediately and ran after her son, she should always watch over him, even if they were alone in here.

What made the mother wonder was that Tsuki suddenly stood still, while the leaves were still flying around him as if trying to lure the kid to follow them.
He didn't pay attention to the waving leaves and his gaze was glued up to the sky instead. There he stood in the middle of the field and stared up. As the mother approached him she tried to follow his gaze to see what was more interesting to the boy than the colorful confetti-like leaves.
There she spotted a red object that threw a heavy contrast to the light blue sky. The scenery looked like a painting of a perfectly harmonic landscape, the red thread like if someone took a brush and smeared a thin, red line over the light blue color.
The mother thought that it might be a bird, since the lines were, on a closer look, two symmetrical swings which resembled bird wings.
But the red color was so radiant that it seemed a bit untrustworthy to the mother, like a bad omen would declare it's presence.
She held her son's hand to go back home, but Tsuki resisted and freed his hand from his mother's tender grip. He ran directly towards the position where the red line was waving. Both the mother and the son realised that the line was getting bigger and the form of the red object becoming more defined, gaining true shape of a bird.
The mother guessed right, it was a bird!

But what was unnatural about it is that is seemed to glow in the sky, behind it followed a tail of orange colored smoke. Just what was that?
While the mother was trying to figure this bizarre scenery out, Tsuki was entertained by the beautiful colors of the bird, and waved with his hands to get its attention.

The mother couldn't believe that it was a phoenix.

And the phoenix was flying towards their direction.

As a protective woman she was, she grabbed her son's arm harshly and pulled him with her. The boy screeched in surprise and whined very loudly as he realised that his mother was trying to take him away from the fun he was having.
Tsuki cried and yelled that he wanted to stay and that his mother was a meanie for not letting him play some more.

Ignoring her son's loud whining, she walked down the valley with large and angry steps, throwing looks behind her back a few times to see if the strange bird was after them or not.

The phoenix was now above the spot where Tsuki was standing before. It made a few circles before changing its course, flying to the opposite direction of Tsuki and his mother.

The orange smoke that followed the bird like a tail lasted there in the sky for a few moments before vanishing and clearing the blue again. It was pretty beautiful, but also a very rare sight.

Tsuki stopped crying, but he sure was still upset about the killjoy mommy, his sniffing and sobbing were so quiet that it was firmly mixed with the sound of the blowing autumn wind.

The mother continued thinking about the strange bird until she came to the conclusion that it truly was a phoenix. Just what was it doing in a place like this?
These lands weren't the natural habitat of a phoenix, that was for sure!