1.139 pt 2 [An Unkindness]

Lefteris, the Gold-String Guardian

His boys were dead.

You must take aim, Polyhymnia urged him.

His boys were dead, and their killers were walking free.

Nock the arrow! I shall guide it!

His boys were dead, and it was his fault that they’d died. In his greed, Lefteris had allowed himself to be swayed from his convictions. Beckoned by the bounty of divine nectar, he had strayed from his purpose as a protector. Sure enough, he had rationalized it in his heart - the nectar was for the boys. He’d only taken a sip to see if it would work.

Give me the arrow. Give me the string!

His boys were dead, because Lefteris had allowed himself to forget the revenant’s nature. He had known. Curse him for a coward, he had known and done nothing.

Listen to me!

His boys were dead, because Lefteris had chosen to work for a man that shared a mentor with Damon Aetos and the Conqueror.

Hero-!

HIS BOYS WERE-

ALIVE!

Lefteris returned abruptly to reality, bleeding and battered amidst a cloud of lightning limbs. He didn’t know where he was. He didn’t know for how long he had been fighting. He couldn’t have possibly cared less at that moment.

What did you say!? Polyhymnia!

The children live!

Lefteris’ heart lurched in a dozen directions at once. He didn’t feel any single emotion at that moment. He felt a vast array of them, every one conflicting with horrible intensity.

Why didn’t you tell me!?

Because-

Like a bolt from the blue, Griffon lunged through the cloud of the lightning hands with golden murder in his eyes. Lefteris drew an arrow of his intent and loosed it on instinct, imbuing it with pursuing, overtaking, and the serpent. The arrow swerved eerily through the air, coiling away from the burning blade and striking for his heart.

The daughter of the Oracle lunged out of the lightning, thrusting out a hand to catch the arrow’s tip. The girl cried out in pain.

Griffon followed through and stabbed Lefteris in the chest.

Polyhymnia gasped, and then she was gone.

“Wait,” he choked out, reaching weakly out to grab her. His fingers couldn’t reach. “Tell me where to go! Show me the way-!”

“As you wish,” Griffon intoned, and flung him off the blade.

———

Kyno, the Heroic Huntsman

In all his life, Kyno had felt a fear like this only once before.

He’d been young and on the hunt with his father, secure in his safety, no matter how many times his father warned him not to assume such a thing was true. Every hunt he’d ever been on with his father had been a swift success, and this one was no different. They had set off down the Nile with their client’s well wishes and a promise of a greater reward if they returned in three weeks instead of four. They had their beast skinned and bundled away before the first week had ended.

The hunt itself had been a breeze. The fear had only come after. On their way back down the Nile, following a route they had taken a dozen times before, his father had abruptly frozen in mid-step.

Kino had watched his father watch the riverbank, the naked horror on the grizzled hunter’s face like a freezing waterfall crashing down on his head. He’d been so terrified, then, that he almost hadn’t had the courage to look. But he had.

Across the river, half entombed within the mudbank, there had been an egg. It was an odd egg, jagged, unlike any Kyno had seen before, and that alone was alarming. Worse than its jagged shell was its size. It was large enough for Kyno to fit inside it. Large enough for his father to fit inside it. Even large enough for the two of them to fit together.

Worse still, there was a crack in its exterior. A crack that grew ever wider.

In the years that followed, despite everything he had seen and all the horrible creatures he had hunted, Kyno had never felt that fear again. Not until today.

You have to snuff them out! Erato screamed while the world came apart beneath his feet. You have to kill them now!

The city of Olympia, or what remained of its corpse, was a distant ruin behind them. Griffon and Solus and the Scarlet Seer Selene drove them back again and again, turning their own techniques against them and cutting into their souls.

The young seer was a constant threat, questing for their hearts with her ornamental spear, but she wasn’t suited to this madness and it showed. Griffon and Solus, on the other hand, were. They were more than suited to it, in fact. Despite their wounds and their dwindling hearts, the Revenant and the Scarlet Son were thriving. Even as they reached perilously beyond their station, dancing hand-in-hand with death - no, because of it, they were growing stronger.

It wasn’t the same as Scythas’ direct advancement, his rise to the second rank of the Heroic Realm elevating his pneuma to staggering heights even as he pressed against its limits. No, Kyno’s muse had assured him of that. Despite all appearances, Griffon and Solus had not advanced a single step beyond the third rank of the Sophic Realm. Their hearts’ blood was a puddle compared to a Hero’s coursing river, and they were burning it away at a mad rate just to keep pace. Kyno didn’t need to win this fight, not really. He only needed to draw it out a bit longer. They were all but dead already.

And yet. There was that terror, clear as crystal in his heart.

Was it the paradox of their existence that unnerved him? A Philosopher with a Hero’s burning heart? No. Was it the Revenant’s invisible hand, shifting the axis of the world as it pleased him? No. No, it wasn’t even the Conqueror’s blade. It was all of these things yet none of them at the core.

Griffon and Solus met the five of them blow-for-blow, pushing them back towards the sea so fast that they might as well have been sprinting, and every exchange refined them further. Their hearts were burning out. The full wrath of the Free Mediterranean was descending on their heads. The docks that they were pushing towards were a blasted out, burning ruin. They had no path to escape. They had no hope remaining.

And yet they flourished. The closer they came to guttering out, the brighter that they burned. In the span of five seconds of blistering combat with Elissa, Kyno saw Griffon pick apart and internalize thirteen separate sword forms as they were used against him, and in the next five seconds turn them back upon the Sword Song. In that same amount of time, he saw Solus shift the world around him like it was a puzzle box, catching every technique sent his way in the current of his virtue and crushing them to pieces in the air - only to reform them, break them down again, and combine them with each other.

You have to burn them out, Erato whispered. The Loving Muse clung tightly to his neck. Her voice was thick with grief. You have to, hero. You have to…

Sah-Bakari plunged out of the counter-current, golden teeth shining as the crocodile spun. Selene was caught flat-footed, unable to avoid the virtuous beast’s snapping maw.

Griffon fell from high heaven, nailing the great crocodile’s mouth shut and pinning it to the earth with his sword. Then, for the first time since he’d drawn it, he let the burning blade go.

Left to its own devices, the Conqueror’s sword fed and fed. Sah-Bakari spasmed and thrashed, hissing in visceral agony. Kyno rushed forward, knowing he was running headlong into a snare even as he did it.

Griffin straightened up and reached with burning hands into his shadow. Each one emerged holding a stolen sword, and as one they buried the blades into the earth around Griffon and Sah-Bakari. Eight lines, each connected to one another.

The scarlet son of Damon Aetos beckoned Kyno wordlessly into the octagon. Every muscle in the huntsman’s body locked up, urging him to freeze. Just as he’d frozen that day.

Until the day he died, Kyno would never forget the sight of that horrifying egg cracking open. He’d never forget the look in that creature’s hungry eye, peering out at him - the first thing that it had ever seen.

It was one thing to endure through hardship, to prevail in spite of overwhelming odds. It was another thing entirely to feed upon the struggle. Too seek it out for its own sake alone. These weren’t Sophists they were fighting. It wasn’t a Hero that beckoned Kyno into his octagon of tribulation blades.

These were monsters being born.

———

Myron, the Little Kyrios

Myron heaved the deceiver up out of the burning waves, tossing him onto one of the few stone breakwaters still largely intact. The red-headed boy immediately began to heave, smoke-sick and half drowned. While he retched, Myron turned and dove back under the waves.

The heat went deeper than the surface. Molton globs of it boiled the Ionian as they sank down to its depths. Blasted out ships and their broken sailors burned blood-orange as they drifted down, the flames that were consuming them utterly unbothered by seawater.

Myron spent the contents of his second pneumatic chamber, diving through the boiling depths.

When he broke through the burning surface again, he had no vital breath remaining in his chambers. He inhaled the smoke and salt, eyes watering, and only hours of practice prevented him from choking on it.

Myron dumped a second body onto the rocks. The deceiver dragged himself across the breakwater, reaching for his brother and pulling him to his chest.

“Pyr?” he croaked. “Pyr?” His brother didn’t respond. The deceiver turned to Myron, slumped against the rocks with numb despair. “He’s not breathing.”

Myron grunted and dropped his fist like a hammer onto the unresponsive brother’s chest. Pyr lurched up, choking and spitting up seawater. The deceiver exhaled a shaky breath and squeezed his older brother tight.

“Where’s the ship?” the deceiver asked him. Myron pointed wearily at the burning surface of the sea.

“We have to-“ Pyr choked halfway through the words, derailing into a wet hacking fit. The deceiver held him steady through it, expression tight as he looked over the beach.

It wasn’t a beach anymore. It was molten glass and burning flame as far as Myron’s eyes could see. As the seconds passed, the fire spread further and the glass sank into the boiling sea.

“We’re trapped,” the boy spoke quietly.

“The king has eyes.” Myron flopped onto his back. The piled mound of rocks that made up the breakwater were heating up like cooking stones. “So tell me, where is-“

Myron sat straight up, his eyes going wide.

“Look,” he breathed. Then louder, “Look!”

There was a ship coming in to shore, sailing through the flames as if sprung from a dream. More than that, it was a ship that Myron recognized. One he had seen before, impossibly and against all common sense. Yet there it was.

The Eos sailed implacably through the burning wreckage of the dock city and its break waters, and not a single lick of burning flame marred her stern. Through the smoke and haze of heat, Myron saw the silhouettes of ten men at her oars. They focused grimly ahead, bellowing in time with one another as they heaved the ship along.

In the crow’s nest above the ship’s scarlet sail, a boy about their age was perched with an enormous eagle on his shoulder. His flinty eyes roved over the wreckage from above, and every time he barked a word the man at oars roared in unison and shifted the ship’s course. In this way, they navigated the graveyard of molten glass and burning breakwaters, sailing steadily to shore.

Myron was howling before he knew it, leaping to his feet and waving his arms like a fool.

“HERE! OVER HERE!” he screamed. The deceiver and his brother joined in a moment later, shouting at the ship.

Just when he was beginning to think the distance was too great for their voices to carry, the boy in the crows nest turned his head their way. His flinty eyes swept across the wreckage, then back - and finally, settled squarely on Myron. The relief nearly knocked him off his feet.

“Help us,” Myron mouthed.

The boy sneered and turned back to his vigil, ignoring them entirely.

The deceiver and his brother slumped back down to the stones in despair. Myron, for his part, stared at the distant shape of the Eos in utter shock.

Then came the rage.

“Hey!” Myron shouted furiously, picking up a hot stone and flinging it as hard as he could at the distant ship. It fell just short. He tried again. “BASTARD! That’s my cousin’s ship! HEY! I know you can hear me!”

He ignored them like they’d never been. Myron seethed, his chest heaving in rage. In half the time it usually took him to fill a single pneumatic chamber, he filled both of them to bursting.

“Fine,” he hissed, and fell into a diver’s crouch. The deceiver jerked up in alarm. His brother, Pyr, reached out to grab Myron’s ankle.

“Wait-!”

“Don’t!”

He’d do it himself.

Myron dove into the burning Ionian, eyes set on the distant Eos.

Only to be caught by a firm hand.

The deceiver and his brother cried out in relief, but Myron fought like a cornered animal as the steady hand hoisted him up. The Eos drifted further and further away, sailing through the flames. Lio could be on that ship. Lio had to be on that ship. He had to catch it!

“Let me go!” Myron snapped, twisting in the stranger’s hand and stabbing at it with one of two daggers.

The dagger skittered across the man’s flesh like it was solid stone, not even drawing a scratch. The man’s eyes burned as he raised Myron up to their level. The flames behind them were blue, but a deeper blue than Niko’s. Darker. Somehow frayed.

“I won’t,” the Hero denied him sharply. “I’ve seen enough children die today.”

Myron thrashed and fought with all his strength, but in the end he could do nothing but be carried. The Hero leapt up from the breakwater, soaring clear over the dock city and its glassed beaches. They landed in a forest of fir trees and prickling undergrowth. The moment the Hero set them down, Myron made a break back for the shore.

He never felt the blow that knocked him out.

———

While the Scarlet City descended once more into chaos, sparked by the collapse of Stavros Aetos and the Conqueror’s thundering decree, Damon Aetos sat out on his terrace and watched the stark light split the heavens.

Bright rings of concentric light spun slowly in the kyrios’ eyes, black now where they’d been sky blue before.

In the shadow of it all, no one saw his smile.