From the Ashes

 - We are Phoenix, he stated. - All human beings are, reborn time and time again throughout eternity from our own ashes. That sounded so right to her, like dark lightning in a storm raining blood. Lillian Donner grows up as a normal, somewhat well-adapted girl. She has trouble, major trouble with her parents, and the strict religious upbringing they give her, but she liberates herself from that, and move out of her childhood home the moment she comes of legal age. Her university studies bring both enlightenment and frustration, but they are liberating. They do bring her a long longed-for freedom. Lillian suffers violent dreams, nightmares both scaring her and fascinating her. They bother her, but they also further awaken her natural curiosity, her yearnings for a deeper explanation of everything. The dreams don’t really seem like dreams at all, but memories, and she begins her more thorough, personal investigation of life and what it means to be human. It dawns on her that she has always wondered about those issues. Her strict upbringing and an equally oppressive society didn’t destroy that, not that either. She takes a casual look at the current human, or rather inhuman society, and concludes with a casual shrug that... that... The world is wrong. It displeases her in all ways that matter, and she sets out to correct that. A story about the deep life of humanity.