Excerpt:

Finally, one strong flame burst through to the heavens, bathing them with a golden light before sinking into the nest of the clouds and curling into a cocoon of deep sleep. After an age, it awoke to spread its wings of flame in the form of a very beautiful woman, with skin nearly as white as the stars themselves, just as warm, just as flawless and bright, her eyes as black and deep as the void of the night itself. This was the phoenix, the mother goddess, who would reside alone in the heavens for another hundred ages with only the stars and the sun as her companions.

Sophie put the manuscript down carefully lest the pages crumble between her fingers. Technically, she was done working hours ago. Now, she was just reading. The transcripts of the documents were to the side of the counter; she would make a copy for herself and take it home. But these were a different experience entirely, being graced with such a fantastical sort of bedtime story straight from what would seem to any young child like a magical ancient tome.

To Sophie it was, still, some magical ancient tome, even though she was well past childhood, the degree on her wall not even a testament to her long years of study and emergance into adulthood as much as it was her entrance to a world where her childhood could be extended indefinitely by fairy tales full of ancient wisdom.

Of course, it was a pursuit of knowledge, too, not just of forever youth. Still, there was a certain fascination to be had with this idea of myth and religion -- of creating such amazing, complex stories to answer the simplest seemignly unanswerable questions, like why the sun came up in the morning or where the water went when it rained, or why people could be so different and yet at the core, the same. Why create a new world to find solutions in the one we lived in? Did the people who bore these legends really believe them, or was it the same as Santa Claus, or the way that her mother had once told her lightning was just angels bowling with God?

She slipped the translation into her bag as she locked up and headed for the subway.