sunslammers

[2.22][Myron] Fortuitous Encounters

Myron,

The Little Kyrios

Alone at sea, there was little for Myron and his stowaways to do but fish and tell stories.

Once enough time had passed for Myron to separate his own emotions from the situation, he was able to acknowledge that meeting the Deceiver and his brother had been a moment of unbelievably good fortune. If they hadn't been there to delay his passage through the breakwater with their would-be banditry, he would have ended up as just another corpse burning beneath the cold Ionian. And more than that, if it had been any other pair of unseemly thieves but them, he would still have no idea what had become of his cousin during his time in Olympia.

It was the sort of thing that Lio would have called a fortuitous encounter. Myron was man enough to admit that, no matter how much the Deceiver grated on his nerves.

And yet, for all that this was an opportunity he needed to grab with both hands, why was it that the more stories they swapped, the less they wanted to listen to each other?

"Stop, stop!" the Deceiver waved his hand in Myron’s face, heterochromic eyes scrunched shut as though he were in pain. "The more you try to clarify, the less that you explain. I can't tell whether it's you that makes no sense, or your whole island."

Normally, this would be the part where his older and more reasonable brother chimed in to chastise him, but even Pyr was grinding his knuckles against his temples, a grimace on his face.

Myron slapped the Deceiver’s hand aside. "I haven't even told you anything noteworthy yet. These are just the basics!"

"The basics, he says," the Deceiver muttered. "It must be the island that's mad. If you were trying to take us for a ride, you would have picked a more plausible story. Unless you knew we would think that..."

"Don't start," Pyre groaned.

"My island isn't weird," Myron insisted, feeling his ears burning as both of them looked searchingly up at him, visibly trying to decide whether or not he was joking. "It isn't!"

"Of course it is!"

"How, then? How! If it's so obvious, put it into words!"

"Where to begin, but with the young master himself?” The Deceiver threw his hands up to the storm-dark sky above. “You claim to be the nephew of Damon Aetos, the eagle that devours emperors, and yet you don't know a single thing about him! You know less than the average cultivator should know about their kyrios, let alone what the average nephew should know about his uncle—I'm surprised you even know his name! At this point, I wouldn't be surprised if you didn't know he swept the Olympic Games."

Myron focused all of his efforts on maintaining his Lio face, even as that latest uppercut of information struck him squarely in the jaw. Caught up in his own ranting, the Deceiver didn’t notice his reaction.

Unfortunately, the same couldn't be said for his brother.

"Truly?" Pyre breathed.

Myron held on to his Lio face for dear life.

The Deceiver stared at him, then at his brother, then back at him.

"You didn't know?" he said in rising disbelief. "Until this very moment, you didn't know that Damon Aetos was the last man to sweep the Olympic Games? You didn't know that your own uncle, the kyrios of your cult, the Tyrant that rules your city—is a Champion?”

“Of course I did,” Myron lied.

Now that the king’s eyes were on him, though, he was seen through all too easily.

“That right there is exactly what I mean. The idea that a Tyrant—any Tyrant, but especially a Tyrant like him—could be a ghost in his own city? It’s nonsensical. A Tyrant’s reputation is everything. It's the source of their ethos—the basis of their authority!”

The Deceiver visibly struggled to find the right words for his outrage.

“A king needs a crown,” Pyre suggested.

The Deceiver snapped his fingers. “Precisely. Precisely! A king wears his accomplishments like a crown upon his head. His domain is an extension of that ethos—his kingdom. Even just walking down the streets of his city, breathing the air that he allowed you to breathe, you should have been able to feel it. The echo of his Epic.”

“Pyr and I lived in a cave on top of a mountain for—what, six months?” Pyr nodded. “Six months, before the Tyrant Riot died. In all that time we never once ventured outside that cave, yet by the end of it we knew more about the Indigo Throne than you know about your own uncle. It doesn’t make any sense!

“It doesn’t make any sense that the Rosy Dawn, a Cult of Greater Mystery, contains only five Heroic souls that you can name.”

Myron’s brow furrowed. “Why not?”

“Heroic cultivators are a mystery cult’s pride! Even if they never returned home to pay their respects to the kyrios in your lifetime, your seniors should have told you stories of them! Your mentors should have been teaching you the lessons that they were taught, holding them up as examples—glories for you to aspire to.

“I can’t decide what’s more absurd: a Greater Mystery Cult that treats its Heroes like ghosts, or one that has only five Heroes to its name!”

“We have more,” Myron quickly said. He had no idea if that was actually true—maybe if he counted Niko’s wife—and yet, how could they not? “Of course we do. I just... never thought about them.”

“You never thought about them. Of course. Naturally.”

The Deceiver was pacing atop the rail of the ship now, balancing with deceptive grace even as his tone grew more frenetic.

“You didn’t think anything of them, just as you didn’t think anything of the fact that you live on an island that receives no visitors from the West, and yet your eastern port has been empty for months.

“The same way you thought nothing of the fact that there are more holes in your education than a pearl-diving bumpkin’s. It’s understandable, really. After all, it all makes perfect sense when you explain it!

“Why wouldn’t the old failures of your cult be responsible for your education, while your mother and father watch you struggle from the peak of the Heroic Realm? Why wouldn’t the Sand Reckoner build his workshop in the shadow of a mystery cult and refuse to teach its mystikos? Much more sensible that he would ignore you all entirely! Even more understandable that such a man would let you stroll into his workshop unannounced and uninvited! And only to be expected that you’d walk back out with the schematics to a boat you had to build yourself—because your free-city’s primary dock had no fucking ships!”

“What next, Aetos?” the Deceiver rounded on him, wild-eyed. “Next you tell us that Griffon really is just a Philosopher? And perhaps after that—”

Again, it was Pyr that caught him out.

“He is?”

Thus exposed, Myron let his confusion show.

“Of course. What did you think he was?”

His stomach sank when even the Deceiver couldn’t find the words to respond to that.

“What? Are you telling me he pretended he wasn’t? Did he tell you that he was still a Citizen?”

Lio didn’t lie, but Myron had heard more than one story of cultivators hiding the full extent of their refinement while traveling—for their own safety, in a world where violence was ever close at hand, and every advantage mattered.

The Deceiver wavered on the edge of the rail, running a hand through the bright red curls of his hair. Eventually, he began to chuckle.

Myron bristled. “Do I amuse you, little king?”

Rather than take offense, the other boy only dissolved further.

“You do. You really do! Every time I think I have your measure, you say something even more ludicrous than before!”

He resumed his pacing, mismatched eyes distant, and beckoned Myron without looking as he did.

“In fact, go on! Let’s hear the next one. Let’s hear about how the Revenant came to know your cousin, I’m sure that will be an unremarkable story. Tell us how he spent his days in the Rosy Dawn. Was he a ghost just like your uncle? Or maybe he composed poems for the marble beauties of the island.”

“Maybe he spent his days gambling at the docks,” Pyre suggested, with his usual dry humor.

The Deceiver barked a laugh, which soon broke and crumbled into hysterical giggles.

“Of course! Gambling at the empty docks, that sounds about right. And I suppose that’s how Griffon found him! He must have tripped over the Revenant while looking for a ship!”

“It would only make sense,” Pyr agreed. The Deceiver snorted, before rounding on Myron.

“Well? Tell us, Aetos—how close are we?”

They both looked so expectant that, for a moment, Myron hesitated to say anything at all.

“Go on! We must have been on the mark if you’re this reluctant. Let’s hear it!”

“Who is the Revenant?” Myron asked.

Just like that, their mirth vanished like it had never been.

“…The Revenant, Myron,” Pyr said after a long, silent beat. “Griffon’s mentor.”

His mentor?

“The Roman,” Leo said.

Myron blinked. Suddenly everything made sense. And nothing did at all.

“You mean the slave?”

The Deceiver slipped and fell into the sea.

Days passed.

They had no supplies, nothing but the open sea to sustain them, but the fish were plentiful enough and the heavens were kind even in their cruelty. The storms that rocked their—his—ship also wet their throats with an endless supply of crisp rainwater. The waves would kill them long before the thirst did.

Assuming they didn’t kill each other first.

“Enough of barking dogs!” Myron shouted through the storm, angry enough to spit blood.

His fingers flew across the myriad levers, dials, and switches that the Sand Reckoner’s blueprints had called for but never truly explained. Through manic trial and error, carried out in the midst of crashing waves that rivaled the Scarlet Stadium at their zeniths, Myron had slowly begun to understand their auxiliary purposes. He was still not entirely familiar with them all, and he still had that gnawing feeling there was an element to their design that he was missing entirely—but he would have to make do.

“I don’t want to hear that from you!” the Deceiver screamed right back at him, red-bright hair plastered to his face by the sheeting rain. He was crouched at the front of the ship, gripping the rail for dear life even as he leaned precariously over its edge—jutting out over the waves like the maidenhead that Myron hadn’t had time to carve.

“Dogs! Idiot fucking mongrels, the both of you!”

“Watch your filthy mouth in the presence of royalty!”

“Try to steal my ship. Mock my upbringing. Waste my time,” Myron raged. “And here you are, about as valuable to me in this moment as a sundial and a bucket full of piss.” Lightning flashed overhead, thunder roaring across a curtain of ashen clouds. “No, less! I’d still rather have the sundial!”

“You asked a question and I answered it, you ungrateful little peasant! Thirty degrees starboard!”

Myron spat an oath that would have gotten both his ears boxed if Lydia had been around to hear him say it. Latching three mechanisms into temporary stasis with his left hand, thus freeing up his right, he gripped a lever by his knee with both hands and yanked it sharply back. The ship groaned and lurched right, carving a wide arc across the rising surface of another wave.

“You can’t even keep your own stories straight! To hear you two tell it, Lio and Sol were here and there and nowhere at all, or else they were everywhere at once! Unseen and unknown, yet felt and feared by all! Depending on the night, of course!”

“I won’t explain the nature of a Crow to you again! I refuse!”

“You couldn’t even explain it the first time, and yet I’m the fool!?”

“You are! You are exactly that! You’re the fool that thought the Revenant was a slave!”

“He was!” Myron howled.

“So it was a slave that took the Gadfly in his hand? It was a slave that stepped into a dead god’s domain and challenged them to a fist fight? It was a slave that dragged four Tyrants of the Raging Heaven Cult into his confidence? That was a slave’s work, was it!?” 

“Saying a thing with an arrogant expression doesn’t make it true, you ass.”

“I might as well be trying to teach a dog Greek,” the Deceiver lamented. His eyes narrowed and he leaned out even further over the rail, snapping, “Hard left! Left!”

“It’s port, fool,” Myron bit out, wrenching at a lever by his left knee. The ship swung back around on an even tighter arc than before, and the Deceiver lurched halfway over the rail before his brother caught him by the back of his chiton.

Pyr hunched miserably over the rowing bench, guarding their dwindling supply of fish from the gale-force winds.

“What is the point of this?” the older brother asked them both. “The two of you grow more stubborn by the hour. Let it be! There are more important matters at hand!”

“Don’t you high-hand me, you bit part,” Myron seethed. “You aren’t as subtle as you think you are. I heard every word that you slipped in under your brother’s ranting. You were every bit as smug as he was back when this began!”

“That was before the sea tried to swallow us!” Pyre screamed, his voice hitting a shrill pitch even as his younger brother howled for another course correction.

“Don’t change the subject!”

“I can see it!” the Deceiver shouted. In the distance, slicing through the rising wall of water, Myron saw it too—a sleek white sword of a fish, nearly as long as their ship.

“Double back, starboard!” the Deceiver called frantically back.

Myron’s hands flew across the levers and dials, drawing his ship around and into a suicidal climb, straight up the long face of the wave.

“No, I said starboard! Starboard—”

“Be silent!” Myron snapped.

They climbed and they climbed, but even as Pyr took up the oars in a hopeless effort to give them just a bit more momentum, they began to slow as the rules of nature asserted themselves. The crest of the wave was bearing down on them now, the great slavering maw of the storm snapping shut, poised to swallow them up.

Both of the brothers were screaming at him now. Myron ignored them both—or tried to, at any rate.

“Now I see it!” the Deceiver howled, the whites of his mismatched eyes standing out stark against his face. Unlike his brother’s expression of pale, bloodless terror, rage had made the Deceiver’s face nearly red enough to match his hair. “Now I finally see it! You’d rather die than admit what this is really about!”

“I told you not to change the subject,” Myron bit out.

The Deceiver stabbed a finger at him from across the deck, a feral tilt to the baring of his teeth.

“Don’t change the subject, because you might not be able to dance around the new one until the sea swallows us all whole! Don’t get to the crux of it, because we can spend the rest of time debating the truth of things that neither one of us experienced for ourselves! Because all you have to do when I tell you that the sky is blue is gouge your eyes out and say you don’t believe me—anything to avoid the reality of things!”

The keel groaned torturously as the mast drew perpendicular with the face of the wave, and the outline of an eagle burned bright beneath the deck as Myron threw his ship into an impossible spin.

“Tell me the truth, then, Deceiver!” Myron hollered back, even as he sent the ship plunging down towards its certain doom. “What is it that a king’s eyes see? What is the truth that I would rather die than accept!?”

The king did not hesitate.

“The truth is that for all that you grew up in a place that defies all common sense, for all that you overlooked the Revenant, for all that you are less pleasant company than the snake that bit me when I was a baby—in spite of all those things, you still have eyes to see! You know what kind of man your cousin is! No matter how much you tried to cover it up, I could see the stories that surprised you, and I could see the ones that didn’t! You can’t fool the King’s eye, Aetos!”

The Deceiver let go of his precarious grip on the rail, risking everything just to jab two fingers at his bloodshot eyes, and then jab them back at Myron.

“I saw the moments that shook you and the moments that didn’t. I saw that no matter how ridiculous your cousin’s crimes became, you never once doubted that he was capable of them. That was never the issue.”

Myron found himself snarling back at the boy. 

“Then what was?”

“It was never about your cousin’s deeds. It was Griffon’s disposition that threw you.”

Myron’s gut twisted and lurched. He told himself it was because the ship had entered freefall.

“You’re not mad at either of us, not really! You’re furious that the caged king you described isn’t anything like the man we met! You’re furious that he’s thriving—that he’s happier without you! Because deep down, you were hoping that he'd falter until you found him!”

Myron screamed, wrenching back on two levers with all the strength left in his body, and the pressurized vitality of a full pneumatic chamber on top of that. The brothers joined their screams to his as they spiraled through the storm—Pyr wordlessly, and the Deceiver with an infernal, frenzied spite.

“So be it!” he shrieked. “We'll settle it beneath the earth!”

It happened too fast for mortal eyes to track.

The virtuous beast—the sword in the shape of a fish—stabbed straight through the surface of the wave and out into the open air in a spray of salt and surging pneuma. Pyr scrambled across the deck, trying desperately to dive in front of his brother, but the beast had struck first and it had struck faster. The Deceiver leaned back, almost casually, staring curiously at the tip of the blade as it closed the distance—a sharp thrust that would skewer his heart and carry them both over the side, to be swallowed by the sea and, soon thereafter, the beast.

Myron exhaled sharply, depleting the second pneumatic chamber that he had held in reserve for this very moment, and his fingers danced across the Sand Reckoner’s controls. 

The ship’s crossbeam swung wide and slammed into the fish like a swung elbow, catching it just above the tail-fin and spinning it like a discus in the air. As the crossbeam swung, the scarlet sail that had been tied down for the last two days straight suddenly sprung open, catching the gale winds and nearly ripping free as it filled to its fullest extension in an instant. But before the storm could take it or the virtuous beast could react to it, Myron had already snapped it shut around the fish, nautical mechanisms grinding through the burning guts of the ship, latches sinking back into place like the teeth of a sleek wooden beast that answered to Myron alone as its master.

It all happened in the span of a second, and it left the Deceiver and his brother both staring up at the thrashing knot of fabric-and-fish in complete disbelief.

Myron inhaled sharply.

“Kill it,” he growled, before turning his full attention towards escaping the crashing wave intact.

To their credit, neither one of them hesitated. While Myron salvaged their ship’s suicidal course, the brothers each took up one of the ship’s oars and beat the struggling fish to death.

Time passed. How much of it, Myron couldn’t say. All he knew was that at some point the worst of the storm passed. The clouds were still churning, and the rain was still pouring, but all at once it was as though the sea heaved a great sigh and gave up on sinking them that day.

That, or he had finally gotten good enough at guiding the Sand Reckoner’s ship that the storm no longer mattered. Either way, the result was the same.

It was in that moment of relative peace, as he watched the Deceiver and his brother wrestle the corpse of the sword beast out from the sail, that Myron finally conceded the point. 

“I don’t doubt that Lio did all of those things you described,” he said. “Not even the ones that contradict each other. The truth is, I believed every story from the start.” 

The Deceiver turned from his work with a victorious grin. Pyr covered his brother’s mouth with a firm hand before he could speak.

“I still don’t know how he did most of those things, but that doesn’t surprise me. As for Sol… I only ever knew him as a slave, up until the very last moment when he broke his chains. But the day that I met him, the day that Lio introduced me to him… he didn’t introduce him to me as a slave, or as a cultivator, or even as a man.”

Myron gazed distantly across the heaving seas, remembering that quiet, golden moment, hidden there among the wheat fields.

“Lio pointed him out to me, one man toiling among many others to bring the harvest in, and he told me—” 

Look there, cousin. Look and see the monster that I promised you.

The brothers exchanged a glance.

“I know more than you think I do,” Myron stated with ironclad certainty. “I understand that some things are ridiculous, but I also understand that my cousin is a ridiculous man. The thing I can’t accept, it’s not the fact that he did the things you say he did. And no matter what either of you believe, it isn’t the fact that he enjoyed himself while doing them. I never wanted Lio to fail, not even for a moment.”

Myron clenched his fists, his eyes stinging where the salt spray struck them.

“The only thing I can’t stand is my place in all of this,” he ground out. “The only truth I can’t accept is that I could have been there, with him, for every one of those impossible moments, if I had only said yes when he asked me to join him. It could have been me, not either of you, if I had only taken his hand!”

For a long while after that, there was only the sting of salt water running down his cheeks, and the distant drumbeat of heaven’s wrath.

Surprisingly, it was the Deceiver who spoke up in sympathy.

“Myron, I…”

Whatever he might have said, though, the hunting cry of a higher-order predator drowned him out.

Myron’s head whipped up. Something hit the deck behind him with a muffled bang, and the two brothers shouted in surprise, but Myron’s eyes remained locked to the skies above, and the massive feathered beast falling from them like a bolt of lightning.

He gathered his pneuma and palmed both daggers as the bird of prey dove down with its talons outstretched. The moment he lunged to meet it, however, the eagle beat its wings once and threw him off his feet, flinging him up against the far rail.

By the time Myron recovered, the beast had already landed, talons wrapping around the crossbeam rather than his throat. The virtuous beast—a golden eagle as tall as he was, with a wingspan twice as wide—stared at him steadily. Myron inhaled and inhaled and inhaled, filling as much of his two pneumatic chambers as he could, heart pounding in his chest as he waited for the moment to pass and the violence to ensue. But it never did.

Instead, maintaining eye contact all the while, the eagle lowered its head and tore a chunk of flesh from the fish that Myron had risked his life to catch.

The audacity.

“Sorea!” Pyre exclaimed, a moment before Myron could fling two knives and a string of expletives at the bird. The Deceiver raised a joyous cry.

“You know this bird?” Myron asked incredulously.

“You don’t? He belongs to them.”

Myron stared at the virtuous beast, and he found himself wondering once again—just how many opportunities had he missed, the day that he chose the Rosy Dawn over his cousin?

“More importantly, look at what he brought us,” the Deceiver said, a drop of that hysterical mirth seeping back into his voice. “Another friend!”

Finally, reluctantly, Myron turned away from the bird, just enough to see what had hit the deck as it descended.

It took a moment to identify the bundle of knobby limbs and sodden cloth as a living human being, slumped over Myron’s rowing bench where he’d landed and only just now regaining his breath. Another moment to realize it was a boy their age.

And then one more moment after that, as the red-headed rat pushed himself up off the bench, to recognize his ugly face.

“You,” Myron hissed. The boy, the same boy that had seen him from the crow’s nest of the Eos the day that Olympia burned—the boy that had ignored him—stared back at him in shock.

“Run,” the Deceiver suggested, and the rat dove across the deck, scrambling for the golden eagle’s protection.

Myron tackled him through the rowing bench, screaming obscenities. Pyr threw himself into the mix a moment later, trying and failing to sway Myron towards reason. The Deceiver, for his part, just cackled and danced around the three of them, heckling the rat and kicking him wherever he found an opening.

Perched atop the crossbeam, the golden eagle observed them placidly as it filled its belly with sword flesh.

[2.21][Lydia] Upon the Alikonia

Lydia Aetos,

The Young Miss-tocrat

First light was just seeping through the wool curtains of the captain’s quarters when Lydia entered, bumping the heavy oak door open with her hip and sweeping through the room with a platter of food balanced on her left hand, a jug of water and a jug of wine tucked under her right arm, and a third jug filled with honey swaying precariously atop her head.

Her steps were certain as she paced across the quarters towards the captain’s commandeered bed, the steady sway of the waves nigh imperceptible even to her refined senses.

More than it was a ship, the Alikonia was a city that happened to sail. As was the case with so many of his designs, the Sand-Reckoner had achieved his primary aim - namely, making sure the ridiculous thing could float - almost as an afterthought, satisfying every other nascent impulse along the way first. The result was an unwieldy behemoth of sophic engineering, overburdened with amenities and riddled with thousands of little insanities that Archimedes had installed in place of a proper crew in order to keep the beast moving.

Lydia set the platter of salted meats, pickled vegetables, and fresh-caught fish down on one of three dining tables clustered beside the captain’s bed - a bed more plush and lavishly adorned than her own was back home, and nearly three times the size, set aside for a man that slept on the floor surrounded by his work if he ever slept at all.

In the Sand-Reckoner’s perpetual absence, Niko had claimed the captain’s quarters for his wife.

Lydia brushed a few limp strands of honey-wheat hair from Iphys’ face, idly setting down the jugs of honey, water, and wine while she did.

“Good morning, Iphys,” she murmured. Her law-cousin didn’t respond, beyond a strained gasp and a fresh wave of tremors. 

With her eyes clenched shut and her lovely face pinched with pain, she could almost be mistaken for mortal. Her Heroic frame gave her away, of course, along with the iron manacles fastened around each of her wrists. Her wrists weren’t bound together in the way of chattel slaves, but fastened down at her sides by fat iron chains anchored to a pair of heavy iron rings set into the floor on either side of the bed. The restraining irons had been there already, a mystery that the Sand-Reckoner hadn’t bothered to explain and no one else had bothered to investigate.

The least alarming possibility was that they’d been installed for a situation exactly like this, a wounded cultivator in need of rest and restraint. As if summoned up by the thought, a fresh wave of agony sent the Heroine into hysterics, arching up from the sweat-soaked sheets and screaming through clenched teeth. Lydia inhaled sharply and snatched back her hand, mindful of the terrible strength her law-cousin had even while the bulk of her cultivation was bound by iron.

All she could do was watch helplessly as Iphys Aetos suffered, until finally the worst of it passed and the Heroine collapsed back into the bed with an explosive sob and the dull rattle of settling chains.

Lydia didn’t waste a moment. Experience and more than a few close calls had taught her that the safest time to tend to the bedridden Heroine was in the immediate aftermath of such a throe, and so she made short work of the sheets and the ruined silk dress that her law-cousin had torn at some point in the night. She wrenched open an ornate wooden chest at the foot of the bed, geometric carvings flaring with faint light and a release of pneuma across its surface, and plucked a chunk of ice the size of her clenched fist from the pile before latching it shut again and activating the chilling array with a careful application of her own pneuma.

The ice sublimated instantly where it touched the Heroine’s fevered skin, scalding Lydia up to her elbow, but she was made of sterner stuff than most. The Young Miss carried on implacably until all that remained of the frozen block was a thin film of condensation on the ceiling.

In this way, Lydia settled into a small routine that she’d built up and refined in the weeks since that stark light had split the heavens. She cleansed her law-cousin as best she could, slid clean sheets beneath her and dressed her in fresh silks, then set about feeding her. The soiled linens were dropped through a hole that opened up in the floor like the yawning mouth of some great beast, panels of wood sliding open and shut at the behest of grinding iron wheels that the Sand-Reckoner called gears. 

Coaxing the Heroine into relaxing her jaw enough to pour liquid past her lips was ordeal enough, but Lydia persevered until the older woman had taken a savage bite out of a bonito, shearing through scale, flesh, and bone with little regard for which was which. Only once that was done and the kykeon jug was empty did she whisper a quiet farewell to the suffering flower of the Aetos family and take her leave.

She found an old man waiting for her outside the threshold, sitting cross-legged on the floor of the main hall and scribbling away with a stick of charcoal on a scroll of papyrus.

“You took your time today,” he said irritably without once looking up at her. Lydia inhaled slowly, imagined a world where she’d brought the soiled laundry with her and dumped it on his head, then exhaled with a small smile.

“Good morning, master.”

“Is it, now? I suppose it must be, for those blessed with diligent students and quiet workshops. Of course, I wouldn’t know anything about that—”

Lydia dropped the platter of Iphys’ uneaten breakfast onto the Sand-Reckoner’s lap, smearing the latest of his scribbles and jarring his hand in the midst of a stroke. The charcoal stick snapped in his gnarled fist.

“A satiated mind is a sound mind,” she said dutifully.

“There is no such thing as a satiated mind, girl.” Archimedes shoved a cut of salted lamb into his mouth, giving her an ugly glare for her troubles. “Meet me in the Antikytherium. Now.”

“I’ll be going to the gymnasium first, master. The others are expecting me.”

Archimedes spat an oath through a full mouth of food, slammed a fist against a mosaic panel on the wall behind him, and fell abruptly out of sight, consumed by the iron teeth of yet another gear-driven chute.

Hours later, dripping sweat and aching in places she hadn’t known could ache, Lydia gratefully accepted the offered hand of a woman with black, burning eyes, and an aura of horrible malice.

“Thank you, my lady,” she spoke, and the Heroine’s expression darkened further.

“I wish you would call me Heka. At my age, it’s embarrassing to be called a lady by a flower in full bloom.” The words were so at odds with the Heroine’s appearance that it was as if another woman entirely was speaking through her as a medium. It was a disorienting effect, but one that Lydia had long since gotten used to.

“At your age?” she asked, puzzled. “Aren’t you and Niko peers?”

“Worse,” the menacing woman said, her lip lifting in a sneer. “I’m older by a year. I’ll be thirty soon enough, too old for anything but a loom and my mother’s despair.” She spun her iron staff around and up onto her shoulder like it was a hollow reed, nodding derisively down at Lydia. “You did well today. I can see why Niko brags so much about you. I’ll be back tomorrow morning if you’d like to exchange discourse again.”

That said, the Heroine spun on her heel and stalked out of the gymnasium, looking for all the world like she was off to commit unspeakable violence.

Heka was an odd one, but she was as kind a woman as Lydia had ever met, and an able sparring partner besides. She’d be back tomorrow.

“Antikytherium,” the Sand-Reckoner called from the far corner of the gymnasium, waving a needle-tipped compass at her like he meant to throw it. “Quickly, now! With a purpose!”

“I’ll be bathing first, master.”

Archimedes snarled and thumped his left heel against the gymnasium floor, falling through it a moment later.

The baths were one of many miracles that Lydia hadn’t been able to help herself from examining further, and the mechanisms that kept them functioning in the belly of a ship put out to sea were truly fascinating. Great spiraling screws spun tirelessly, driven by ceaselessly turning gears, funneling new water in from the very seas beneath the ship to be heated and transferred through to the primary bathing pool, the fouled runoff of which was collected and then returned to the sea by screws of the same type.

A dozen other little sophic oddities filtered and heated the water on its way to the primary pool, creating a bathing experience just short of otherworldly. 

Lydia wasn’t too proud to admit she spent more time than was strictly needed in that bath, basking in the steam and tracing the passage of golden spirals behind her closed eyelids.

She leaned back against the lip of the pool with a soft sigh, letting her eyes drift shut, ignoring the persistent hammering of a fist coming from the other side of the wall.

When she finally emerged from the ship’s belly, the sun was on its downturn and the deck was buzzing with the noise of Niko’s companions, returned from their latest venture inland.

“I’ll be speaking to Niko first, master.”

The Sand Reckoner had only just opened his mouth to speak. While he processed that, outrage darkening his already dour face, she bumped her hip against a mosaic tile in the wall and sent him plummeting down through another vent in the floor, waving pleasantly as she passed.

“No need to thank me,” she called over top of his fading ranting.

Preempting their master's desires was a diligent disciple’s pride.

Lydia found her eldest cousin in a section of the ship that only the Sand Reckoner and his students—past or present—were afforded access to. In practical terms, due to its isolated nature and the Sand Reckoner’s mistrust of every other cultivator frolicking on his ship, it existed for Niko and Lydia alone.

The Young Miss of the Rosy Dawn Cult stepped into the circular chamber and shut the door behind her, lingering there for a brief moment to watch the geometric seal lock it into place. The formation responsible was a chaotic mess of interlocking triangles and a series of looping, golden lines that spilled out across the room in every direction from the central point of the pyramidal knob embedded in the center of the door.

It only lasted a moment before the golden lights faded. It wasn’t the sort of formation she had paid much attention to in the past—the Sand Reckoner made use of similar things in his workshop back on the island, but they’d always seemed a bit nonsensical to her. A cynical part of her had always assumed that the bulk of it was there for aesthetics alone. Or, knowing her master, as geometric noise, meant to obfuscate the true formation buried beneath all the scribblings.

Recently, though… Lydia traced that central formation as it faded, tracking her memory of it with her eyes as far as she could, picking just one of a hundred branching paths and monitoring not the shape itself, but the sensation of her eyes rolling in her skull as she followed it.

Castor and Rena were right. She wasn’t getting enough sleep.

Shaking off the half-formed curiosities, she turned away from the door and stepped into the isolation chamber, where Niko sat quietly with his sword balanced across both knees.

The room itself was bereft of any furnishings, but that was to be expected given its purpose. This place had been constructed with closed-doors cultivation in mind, and given the man that had designed it, it was only natural that it had taken this shape.

Lydia stepped carefully over a curving band of copper buried in the massive disk of stone that defined the boundaries of the room. She crept past that bronze circle, carefully balancing on the tips of her toes so that she could step first into the narrow section of stone where the bronze intersected with a circle of silver. 

As the pad of her right foot touched down in that slim intersection, the two points where the bronze band and the silver band intersected lit up to mark her passage. Each of those two thumb-thick sections, where bronze met silver, had been given all the manic care that she had come to expect in her master’s passion projects. The two intersecting points were neither bronze nor silver, but an alloy of the two that the Sand Reckoner had painstakingly forged himself in the pursuit of a perfect balance—equal parts bronze and silver.

The entire room was like that, overlapping circles of nearly every precious metal known to man. They served as a mental warm-up and a security formation at the same time, preparing the scholar of geometry for their impending stretch of closed doors cultivation, and preparing any would-be intruder for their time to come in Tartarus.

Lydia’s destination was the center of the room. By the time she got there, she had danced just over three full revolutions around it in order to satisfy the sequence that unlocked a cold stone circle for her to sit down in.

Kneeling with both legs tucked beneath her, Lydia waited patiently for her eldest cousin to gather his thoughts—or perhaps to find a stopping point in his current cultivation.

Niko’s eyes remained closed and his breath remained steady. Time passed.

Patience was the lesson of the day, it seemed.

Sighing, Lydia settled in and focused on the circulation of her own pneumatic scripture, passed down from the Sand Reckoner to her—if reluctantly.

The Last Gasp of the Golden Age was a breathing technique that sounded far more impressive than it really was, a product of her master’s occasional flair for the dramatic. It was a breathing technique that became more baffling the longer that you studied it, more difficult to maintain the longer that you kept it going. In many ways, it was the polar opposite of what could be considered a good technique by the average cultivator. Her master had admitted that much himself, though his tone had made it very clear what he thought of the average cultivator’s opinion.

The Sand Reckoner had insisted that there would eventually come a turning point. At the moment where the technique seemed the most convoluted, when the strain of maintaining it was the most overwhelming, the technique would undergo a profound transformation. At the pinnacle of mastery, there would come a time when the Last Gasp of the Golden Age reversed course and became easier to maintain the longer that she kept it going. At that time, all of the branching complexities would narrow and become one, and all the ugly, confounding factors of creation would be pulled into the perfect path that she had pioneered for herself.

Of course, Archimedes had explained all of that in the context of himself, not her. As far as she could tell, it was all just pretty conjecture.

Lydia contemplated those memories and many others while she waited for Niko to acknowledge her, inhaling and exhaling steadily, no matter how many lines split and diverged at the edges of her perception and within the channels of her body. Her head throbbed, and her lungs labored, but the rise and fall of her chest remained smooth.

Out of spite, if for no other reason, she had long ago promised herself that she would surpass her master’s expectations of her in mastering his pneumatic scripture. 

She would surpass his expectations of her, and then, while he was busy patting himself on the back for the accomplishments of his student, she would surpass his own mastery of the technique. Make it her own. Maybe even rename it.

When the throbbing of her head and the crushing pressure inside her lungs became too unbearable for any conscious thought, when even the warrior spirit was ready to throw down spear and shield and admit defeat, Lydia would let her mind settle on the fantasy of that future—the face she imagined the Sand Reckoner would make when he realized that the fool girl he had been forced to take under his wing had not only exceeded his expectations of her, but eclipsed him in his entirety.

Accurate or not, that look that she imagined on his face was always enough to get her through another few minutes of torturous breathing exercises.

"You're getting better every day, cousin," Niko spoke after an indeterminable amount of time, and Lydia let the Last Gasp of the Golden Age go with relief.

As she opened her eyes and looked around, she saw the spiraling lines of gold that acted as visual aids for those honing their pneumatic scripture. They retracted with every normal breath she took, spiraling back toward the central point that was herself until they vanished entirely into the stone beneath her.

"Even the smallest effort of a day is its own crucial step upon the great path," she said wryly, injecting a bit of the usual sophist pomp into the platitude. It was a line the old sophists of the Rosy Dawn Cult enjoyed repeating to its junior mystikos in lieu of real wisdom.

Niko shook his head, reaching out and gripping her shoulder with a hand that was larger than it should have been by half a span.

"I'm serious," he said with earnest admiration. "I've been keeping an eye on your progress since we first met here. Every time, you make it further along the path for less effort. I only know a bit about the technique from my own short, unpleasant eternity trying to learn it, but that’s enough to see how impressive your progress has been. You’re supposed to slow down the closer you get to the tipping point. Yet here you are, speeding up.

It was a genuine compliment. It always was with Niko. That was what made him so difficult to talk to, these days.

More and more, Lydia found it easier to understand her fiancée’s frustrations in the days leading up to their eldest cousin’s wedding.

"Is that why you're always here when I want to talk to you?" Lydia asked archly. "I can't imagine this room is of any value to you."

"You’d be surprised.” He leaned back in the circle that he had claimed for himself—the one in the very center of the stone, and the only one that didn’t intersect with any others. Pure, unsullied gold. "I didn’t last long with old Archimedes as my mentor, and I won’t pretend it was a mutual parting that split us. But that doesn’t mean I learned nothing from the old fox."

Niko tapped the naked iron of his blade meaningfully. "I just never used the things he taught me in the ways he felt I should. Being here reminds me of a few of those things, lessons I’ve started taking for granted since my ascension. I think it’s good that I refresh myself on them now, while I still can."

"While you still can," Lydia echoed. "So you found one? A new ship?"

The Hero shrugged. "Maybe. It’s not much more promising than the last three we found, but I’m beginning to suspect that I’ll never find a vessel that can match the Eos. Not one that’s for sale, at any rate."

"And?" Lydia pressed, satisfied that she had waited long enough for him to reach the point on his own. "Did you find any leads?"

She didn’t have to specify what kind, naturally. Niko and his companions hadn’t been leaving the Alikonia to sight-see.

Niko grimaced. Lydia leaned forward eagerly.

"You did, didn’t you? And you had the nerve to keep me waiting!"

"It’s not what you’re hoping," he said. But still she waited, not letting the wind fly fully from her sails. "It was just a rumor. Maybe the most absurd one yet."

"Tell me," she demanded.

Reluctantly, he did.

“On our way back from Lacedaemon, Thaum crossed paths with a cultivator on the brink of death—a Hero that claims to have spent months in OIympia prior to its fall. The man was half-gone already, but in a moment of clarity, Thaum said he spoke of an unkindness that fell upon the Half-Step City in the wake of the kyrios’ death. A pair of hidden monsters that haunted the halls of the Raging Heaven Cult for months thereafter.

“Supposedly, one wore the tattered, blood-stained silks of the Rosy Dawn. The other walked in the shadow of the Storm Crown, a silent weight upon the mountain, known to its mystikos only as the Raven…”

[2.20] ???

???

A raven’s croaking wakes you.

You groan, swat blindly at it, and roll over in your bed. You were in the middle of a positively bizarre dream, and if you give it up for even a moment you know that it will be gone for good. It is not often that you sleep this deeply. Down here in the chthonic dark, separated from the burden of your body and the sufferance of your soul, your dreams are all that you are. The only thing that you must be.

It is very nearly pleasant.

But the bird is still there.

You pull the sheets over your head and try to block it out. It croaks again, louder. You wrap the pillow of black-feathered down around your head, crushing it against your ears, and the croaking becomes as muffled as everything else.

Slowly, you relax. You drift back into the void where dreams linger, letting it all fade, so that even when the raven gives up its croaking entirely, it is only a dim satisfaction.

Ting.

Your eye cracks open.

It is only a sliver, of course, and only the left eye. You are still astride that line between oblivion and dreams. After a long, tense moment, your eye drifts shut again.

Ting.

You growl a curse into your pillow.

Ting… Ting.

You will not give it the satisfaction.

Ting-Ting.

You will not surrender your first good night of sleep in an age. Not for all the wine on earth, and certainly not for a single covetous bird.

…

Good. You let yourself drift, though you tuck this little irritation away in what remains of your thoughts, to be addressed properly when you awaken. A pet should know its place—

Ting-Ting-Ting-Ting-Ting-Ting-Ting-Ting-Ting-Ting—

You rip the blanket off your head, glaring across the courtyard with half a bloodshot eye.

The raven cocks its head, its beady gray eyes staring unrepentantly back at you. It sits perched atop one of the nine columns enclosing your innermost courtyard, nestled among the creeper-vines. It is a grotesquely large, overfed creature. You can see in that beady stare that it wants something from you.

“Begone.”

Speaking is a reluctant effort. The dream is trying to slip away from you now, slicker than oil and lively as a fish. You hold tight to it.

The raven cocks its head the other way. Its feathered bulk suddenly heaves—once, twice, like the bird is about to vomit up the contents of its stomach.

“Be-ee-eee-gone,” it croaks. It shudders, beating its unreasonably wide wings in discomfort. Then it snaps its beak at the air, as if it’s tasting the word. “Begone.” Finding it to its liking. “Begone.”

“Wretched bird. I’ll kill you.”

“Wrrrrrrr.” Another gag. “Wrrrr-etched. Wretched.” Another shudder. “Ooh. Oooooh. Y-oooh. You.”

Your right eye cracks open a sliver in disbelief.

“Excuse me?”

The bird cocks its head again.

“You. Wretched. Begone.”

For a long moment, the shadowed courtyard is silent.

“Are you mocking me?”

The raven considers you. It is only an animal, of course. More intelligent than the average bird, perhaps, but low cunning and a bit of simple pattern recognition are all it has behind those beady eyes. You may as well be talking to yourself—

Ting.

In response to your question, the raven slowly and deliberately lowers its head and taps its beak against its adamant perch. The resonant chime cuts through every sound barrier, including the black-feather down of your pillow.

You contemplate a great many terrible things in that moment. Contemplation begets awareness, and to your displeasure, you begin noticing again. Processing. Hearing. By the time the whispers start filtering in, you know that there are only moments left before the dream is gone for good, and you are stuck in this place with this irreverent raven, sober and awake. A fate worse than death.

Can’t get out of bed to kill the raven, but neither can you leave it be.

“What do you want?”

“Waah. Waaaaaah. Wan—!” The bird suddenly stops speaking altogether, sitting motionlessly atop the adamant column. Then it spreads its wings and launches itself into the air, circling around the perimeter of the courtyard. It swoops low at random intervals, only to struggle back up into the air and repeat the process again.

Finally, it lands in the gap between two columns, wings and tailfeathers pooling like black blood on the floor of your courtyard. It stares up at the cypresswood trellis bridging the gap between the two columns, and the riot of vines that have grown through it.

“Wuuuh. What.” the bird croaks. Then, more insistently, “What?”

Ah.

“You hear it, do you?”

“Iiiit. What?”

If you weren’t so murderously irritated, you might have been amused.

“Idle words, from aimless people. The usual nonsense heard through the grape vine.”

The raven hops across the room. You let your eyes droop, feigning greater fatigue, but the feathered bastard isn’t fooled. It skirts a wide berth around your bed on its way to another trellis. It listens intently to the voices drifting in, before moving on to another.

Finally, it stops and listens to one of them for so long that your play-act is made true. You doze, resigning yourself to the bird’s presence and the encroaching whispers. It isn’t pleasant, but little is. So long as they stay quiet…

Ting.

You sigh.

“Speak.”

“Want. Werrrr— words. Frrrrrr— from. V—v—vine.”

Now that is almost interesting enough to warrant waking up.

Almost.

“And then you’ll leave?”

“Begone,” it croaks. You snort.

“By all means, then. Choke on it.”

You pluck a grape from the wreath upon your brow and flick it in the raven’s general direction. The beast snaps it out of the air and swallows it whole. It takes wing, flying up and up, returning to the heights it came from, where light and life disturb all truly good sleep.

A few moments later, it plummets back down and hits the floor with a meaty slap. You roll back over in bed and close your eyes in contentment. Won’t be long now.

The raven spasms and lurches, beating its wings against the floor in vain. It tries to vomit up the grape, but it’s too late for that. The seed inside the grape has already sprouted. It grows and grows, winding itself root and stem through the fertile loam that you have given it, as is its nature. A fitting end for such a gluttonous animal.

“Wretch,” it chokes. “You. Kill.”

“I certainly have.”

“Hear you. Mock you. Kill you.”

It’s an amusing beast, you’ll give it that.

“You managed two of three, at least. Good night, raven.”

In the end, it wasn’t the worst distraction. Perhaps next time you wake up you’ll try to find yourself a similar bird, teach it to repeat the things you say and torment the little kings and queens in your absence. There are worse things to waste time on—

Your eyes snap open, and behold a golden light.

The raven stares at you from across the courtyard with beady, burning eyes. It croaks balefully, and blood mixed with burnt grape vines spill out of its beak and onto the floor.

“Good night, wretched Dionysus.”

---------------------

Nights on the Nile are never quiet, but this one has ended up louder than most.

In a slow-flowing offshoot of no particular note, a raucous concert has sprung up from nothing around a pair of Greeks. Smaller ships have gathered round the bobbing Eos in their multitudes, drawn to the sweet sound of the bright one’s voice, and the soulful thrumming of the dark one’s lyre.

Ships and their sailors from all walks of life cluster around the Eos. Poachers lash their little skiffs to the lumbering pleasure barges of upper crust crypt-keepers, foreigners mingle with native sons of ancient Aegyptus, children meet new friends while cavorting across the impromptu city of ships, and adults swap between new dancing partners as often as they do drinks.

Each ship carries its own torches, but the bulk of the light comes from the dazzling lightshow of grasping hands that hang like a cloud above the Eos. Hands of crackling lightning war against hands of rosy light, moving with sublime coordination to act out the contents of every song — the polar opposite of a shadow puppet play. Every time one song draws to a close, another is plucked from the waves of eager suggestions offered up by their audience.

Some try to board the Eos directly, early on in the performance, but the ship’s crew makes a swift example of them, beating them over the head with the ship’s oars and paddling their asses for good measure when they retreat back to their own ships.

It is a lively, confusing, inexplicable atmosphere, conjured up from nothing by the simple joy of good music.

And then it is over.

The strings of the ivory lyre snap so loudly that it rocks the boats anchored closest to the Eos, and everyone freezes. Even the boisterous singer stops in the middle of his verse, the lightshow above his head pausing eerily in the air.

The broken lyre clatters to the floor of the crow’s nest. The string-breaker stares down at his hands, motionless. His lush of a singer gives him a puzzled look. The young woman sitting up there with the two of them lays her hand on his arm with sudden concern, asking him an urgent question.

The string-breaker says nothing. Instead, he rips the jar of liquid lead out of the golden singer’s hand and points the bottom of it up to heaven.

And drinks.

[2.19] Twice-Named and Twice-Forgotten

Sol,

The Raven From Rome

I still couldn't see Selene, but as I ripped and tore my way through the corpse-domain of a long-dead titan, I heard her voice in the distance—clear as crystal and sweet as mad honey.

“Bakkhos offered me the one thing that could withstand the weight of a heart flame’s burden alone,” she said. “A pillar that could not be broken under any pressure, even if it was the only one left standing in my soul. A column of his own creation, dug up from the depths of his own wine-dark heart.

“Impressed by my conviction—”

“A strong word.”

“—dazzled by my resolve, he offered this to me with only one string still attached.”

There came a rumbling, in the dark beneath the surface of the primordial sea.

“You’ll have to come and take it.”

From the soup of titan bile emerged a creature that could swallow cities and shatter mortal minds with its visage. It forced its way up out of the sea, not winding like a serpent, but spilling onto the stage like intestines from a disemboweled stomach.

It opened all eight thousand mouths along the surface of its sinuous bulk, turned its single unblinking eye upon me, and cracked that eye open along the ridges of eight segments, each one blooming like the petals of a flower to reveal a barbed tongue that had tasted titan ichor so many times that it had lost all pleasure in the sensation.

That barbed tongue flickered through the air, tasted my vital essence in the dark, and all eight thousand of its gaping mouths began to keen in slavering desire.

The silver-age gut worm poured over me, like it was liquid more than it was a living beast, and swallowed me up in an instant.

Through the tattered-cloth of the Raven veil, I could see even what went on inside that unfathomable parasite with perfect clarity. It was worse than being blind.

By the time I tore myself out the other end of it, dragging it across the oil-slicked marble and kicking its coils back into the wine-dark sea of clouds one pile at a time, I was more than half mad.

“He promised that no harm would come to me from any demon of his heart while I walked within his shadow,” Selene said, perhaps to reassure us. Still, she hesitated at the next line. “And yet… it may be best if what I saw in that place remains behind the curtain. His domain was not a pleasant place—even to those he wished well.”

“How cruel.”

I found her, then, as I stepped through the quivering chitin of an armored lamprey. I tossed its alien skull to the ground and crushed it underfoot.

Selene lifted her head at the same time that I spotted her, and for a moment I thought our eyes met. But her low-burning eyes slid past me without recognition, or any awareness of my presence at all, and settled on the distant audience while she wrenched her spear from the corpse of a newly risen heart demon. It was one that she had killed before—and I saw that it wasn’t the first one that she’d been forced to kill again.

The crumpled corpses of eight other demons lay scattered at her feet.

As Selene rose proudly to her full height, I realized that she couldn’t see me at all. She stared through the primordial madness that had fallen like a shadow across her heart without a hint of unease, and I knew that it wasn’t me alone. She couldn’t see anything that went on within the shadows.

All this time, she had thought we were sitting quietly in the dark, spectating from the stands—the same now as before.

Even now, she was under the Tyrant Riot’s protection. A protection she wasn’t aware existed. One that did not extend to her audience.

Ting.

Another chime shivered through the primordial dark, and I turned back to look across the short, limitless distance to the opposite end of the stage. There, I saw the hunched figure of the Tyrant Riot, raising that hammer high. In the churning shadows that surrounded him, he looked larger than he had before—his outline blurred, making it impossible to tell where the actress in the blank mask ended and the shadowed silhouette began.

“My tenth pillar of principle was a gift that was very nearly more trouble than it was worth,” Selene declared. “Unfortunately, those are the only gifts a man like Bakkhos is willing to give.”

“I can assure you, I am willing to give worse gifts than that.”

“Still, it was a gift that I needed,” she went on, “and by internalizing it, I found a way to close the incomplete circle of my soul.”

Slowly but surely, the corpse of the long-devoured titan began to fade from the world around us. The sea of clouds that had been there from the very beginning began to thin and dissipate. The scarlet glow did not return, but a new, far more vibrant source of light rose up around the edges of the platform in its place.

“I kill heart demons. By taking that ideal upon myself, I found a way to bind together all the mismatched links of chains that I had broken away from the hearts of others.”

As the last of the clouds faded, I leaned out over the edge of the platform and beheld a mad wonder.

“Nine pillars that I stole with a singular purpose. The one and only tenth pillar that I was given to consolidate them. Bound by virtue, they form an unblemished truth.”

The actress on the stage vanished, and the statue of the Saint appeared once more, perched atop her honeycomb tripod—a statue dedicated to her first heroic act.

“I am Selene,” she declared proudly, and the sanctum of her soul pulsed with the truth of her purpose. “The Scarlet Heart that deviation dreads.”

As the psychedelic curtains fell one last time on the shadowed stage of the Saint, I stared down over the edge at the total eclipse of her heart.

The curtain of heaven stretched out endlessly beneath the platform of her foundation — infinite star-bright constellations that were slowly but surely eating away at the primordial rot, banishing it back to the chthonic hovel where it belonged.

The crown to that celestial kingdom was a ring of fire a thousand-thousand leagues across, burning far below the platform of Selene’s foundation. The surface of that sun loomed larger than it had ever had in the real world—close enough to make ashes of every peak and valley on earth. Close enough to boil every sea down to salt.

The only thing that stood between that sun-crown and the world within Selene’s heart was the shadow-shield of a moon that had eclipsed it perfectly, such that only the burning halo of its majesty could be seen leaking out around the edges.

It was an awe-inspiring vista. And if that had been all there was to it, it would have been astonishing enough for any first-rank Heroine. 

But what drew my eyes in wonder wasn’t the curtain of stars, or even the Total Eclipse of the Heart. It was what those lights had illuminated, directly underneath the platform of her foundation.

I leaned out over the edge of the platform and beheld nine more below it, each one the same size as the first, and beneath them all, a tenth that was as large as the rest of them put together. Each scarlet stage had been hung in the shadow of the one that came before it, joined to the one above it and the one below it by a single unbroken pillar of shadow-tainted adamant that ran through all eleven and supported their combined weight on its own.

Each of the nine lesser platforms carried nine pillars, plus the one that connected them all. Looking closer, I saw that every pillar was different not just from the others in its circle, but from the pillars of the other circles too. 

There was more. Those lower levels weren’t empty.

Broken, sun-bleached bones overflowed from every circle beneath the first— skeletons of heart demons that the Saint of Scarlet Hearts had murdered, piled so high that the lesser platforms couldn’t contain them all. I watched as they toppled over the edges in their multitudes, tumbling down to the greater circle underneath.

That final platform was large enough to fit the first ten inside of it, exactly large enough, and it held dozens of pillars. I couldn’t count them all, not from my vantage, but something told me that if the number wasn’t an even hundred, it was close.

There were no mountains of sun-bleached bones in that final circle, despite the fact that all the lesser circles above were letting the bones of their dead fall like rain. The moment that a heart demon’s remains reached that final platform, it shattered into pieces, and every one of those pieces burnt to ash before they could hit the marble floor a second time, cremated by roaring heart flames. 

It wasn’t just pillars of principle that proudly decorated that greater stage. Statues of Heroes and Heroines alike stood sentinel all across its surface, heart flames spilling out of the hollow sockets of their eyes. Some of them guarded individual pillars at the edges of the circle, one hand pressed protectively against the column, the other held tight to their chest. Others stood ready in the center of the stage with weapons in their hands, their empty, burning eyes gazing up at me.

They were relics of the Heroic souls that Selene had saved. At the outer rim of the circle stood the ones that she had saved in full, guarding the same flawed pillars that she’d stolen from their hearts to save them. The ones standing center stage were the statues of Heroes and Heroines that Selene had only granted a reprieve with the temporary murder of a heart demon, the ones that had dealt with the root of deviation themselves — or died trying.

I recognized two of them, and though it was undoubtedly just a trick of the light, I could almost believe that the statues of Dymas and Scythas recognized me in turn.

Saint of Scarlet Hearts, indeed.

I crept quietly back across the stage as the tenth act gave way to the final curtain call, moving with the receding shadows. As I stepped past the fountain, I pulled the Raven cloak off my shoulders and drew from the dark an ivory lie told in my own image, planting the statue at the edge of the pool and draping the Raven’s mantle over it.

I continued on, not looking back even when my mentor began her closing monologue, tying the lesson all together.

“I am what I am,” Selene explained, “because I cultivate a virtue, one that I’ve known by its face since I was a girl, but not by its name until I laid down that tenth pillar.”

Her heart beat once, and the scarlet sun flared—briefly outgrowing the total eclipse of the heart—before starry night reasserted itself.

“I have explained what a conventional cultivator’s path to providence looks like, and you have seen for yourselves the mess I made of it,” she explained quietly, the scarlet flames behind her eyes burning brighter and pushing back a bit of the dark, illuminating the small circle of her saltwater fountain.

Griffon moved instantly into that light, and some of the furious, rabid tension drained out of him when he did. My ivory lie stayed put at the edge of the firelight, and the Raven mantle it wore drew the shadows closer to it, making a convincing suggestion of the real thing.

The statue of Selene paused, raising an eyebrow at Griffon’s ivory cloak. “Oh? Where did you pull that from? I don’t remember keeping anything like it in my combs.”

“A Raven gave it to me,” was all that Griffon said. He didn’t speak of what he had seen. I’d have wagered a month’s pay that he harbored the same suspicions I did about what had happened in the tenth act.

The statue of Selene glanced at my shrouded lie, sitting at the edge of her heart light. Though she seemed puzzled, she shrugged it off easily enough.

“It suits you,” she told her brother, only half-teasingly, and then returned to her point.

I kept moving. A resonant chime rang out, and a spark of adamant light flew.

Ting.

“In the end, because of that virtue, I not only survived what should have been a catastrophic failure of cultivation, but I thrived.

“There are words for cultivators like me, someone who refines themselves not in the pursuit of immortality, stability, wealth, or power. Bakkhos called us fools—in the tragic sense. My father called us slaves to excellence. The most accomplished of our kind are known to the wider world—or at least to the Free Mediterranean—as pathfinders. Cultivators like the Physician, the Polymath, and of course, the Scholar, the Champion, and the Conqueror.”

I was close enough now to see him clearly. And it was him—not her. The slim Selene dressed up in gaudy purple silks was gone like she had never been. A grown man sat cross-legged in her place before the adamant pillar of Selene’s tenth principle, chiseling away even now that the final act had ended. His back was to me and I couldn’t see his face, but I could see that his hair was not the spun gold that it should have been. It was a wild, raging mane of ink-black curls that cascaded down his back and curled around to frame his face, such that I couldn’t even see the shape of his jaw.

He brought his hammer down again and chipped another shard of unbreakable adamant away from the pillar.

“To cultivate a virtue with purpose is to be marked by the Fates as a figure of note. It is not a power in and of itself, but the promise of its coming. My father cultivated Courage all his life,” Selene spoke softly. “But my father did not cultivate virtue the way that I do, above my own common sense. It is something secondary to him. A tool he keeps inside himself, oiled and sharpened, but subordinate to his heart.”

I drew closer to the man. The shadows grew thicker as I did, gathering around him in a tight circle, seeking shelter from the light of stars and scarlet suns. They resisted my displacement of them, but they could not stop me from advancing.

“To cultivate virtue above all other things is to stake your claim on a constellation before you even have the wings to fly. You are gambling everything. Wagering all.”

I came close enough to reach out and touch him, and the shadows rammed against me like an enemy shield wall, flowing through me like a raging river—yet they failed to move me from my place.

“You,” I spoke. “Revenant. Get out.”

He ignored me, raising his hammer high.

I caught his wrist. The ever-burning, ever-turning channel of wheels within me slowed and nearly stopped.

“Dead men have no place in a young woman’s heart.”

He chuckled, and it echoed through every shadow—including my own.

“You’d be surprised.”

I took a fistful of his ink-black hair in my other hand and wrenched his head back, glaring down at his—

Face.

“This is the why not,” Selene explained. “The reason why I can’t tell you what must come next to bridge the gap from third to fourth.”

It was—

The face of a man that drove women mad. Perfect symmetry that surpassed humanity’s ability to perceive beauty, bypassing the conscious mind and going somewhere deeper—a cold, primordial place where attraction and hatred and infatuation and fear were all the same quivering lump of wrinkled meat and lightning bolt perception.

Nothing.

Nothing but an empty frame in want of canvas and paint. There was nothing there. He had no face.

He had no face.

“Those who cultivate virtue above all other things abide by different rules. Unity is my path forward. When I say it, you only hear the word—but I hear enough to fill three lecture halls in the Broad’s sunken school. There is a framework in Unity that only I can understand… because it was built for me.”

I stared into the void of its—

Wine-dark lips long accustomed to smirking, permanently stained by his proclivities. A stately nose. Thick, jagged eyebrows and long lashes, framing a pair of ever-burning, ever-turning—

Eyes. It had no eyes.

How was it looking back at me when it had no eyes?

“I’ve known this since I was a girl, and I’ve been able to prove it since I internalized my tenth pillar. But what I didn’t know, not until I met the two of you, was how much steeper the slope could get. In the pursuit of Unity, I’ve ignored many of the unfortunate realities of cultivation, and gained in the moments where I should have suffered. 

“But never in my life has the path forward been so clear to me that I could reach out and pluck a principle from the open air, without the slightest hesitation — without even a thought. 

“No, it’s more than that. It’s like the two of you have been skipping past the underlying mechanisms of cultivation this entire time. As if you didn’t even know they existed. The two of you advance as though you’re breathing—without any conscious thought at all.”

“I have to ask, though I already know: Have the two of you truly lived your entire lives believing that a soul refined itself?”

I stared down incomprehensibly at the void where a man’s face should have been—could have been—used to be—was—would be.

I heard—

A mocking drawl.

—nothing but the hammering of my heart—

“Well? Won’t you greet me properly? It’s rude to stare, boy.”

—the roaring of blood in my ears, deafening—

“Every raven knows my name. Even one such as you. Go on, now. Say it.”

My mouth opened of its own volition, tongue fighting against the vision of madness, struggling to form a word—

“Shall I help?”

“I can’t tell either of you what it takes to reach the fourth step, nor what follows after that,” Selene said. “I can’t even begin to tell you how to bridge that gap, because Justice and Gravitas have more than just defined you. And now you may rejoice, because this is good news.”

I tried to let go, to back away, but the wrist I was holding twisted in my grip before I could. The hand attached to it dropped its hammer and gripped my own wrist tightly, while the other hand dropped its chisel and laid itself over the fist I had made in its hair.

“Repeat after me. Bahhh.”

A strangled syllable crawled up my throat, called up from a place my waking mind dared not tread.

Zahhh…

“I suspected it before, but here I can see it plain as day.” Selene reached out and brushed her stone fingers lightly across Griffon’s forehead, dragging his golden hair away from his eyes.

“You are no cultivator at all, brother,” she said gently, with mingled sorrow and admiration. “You are a flame in the shape of a man. I can’t predict what comes next in your journey, but that is good news. Justice will guide you, as Unity has guided me.

“As for you, Solus,” Selene continued warmly, withdrawing her hand from Griffon’s face and reaching out to my ivory lie. “You are more than merely defined by Gravitas. You are the ties that bind men together, the living weight of worlds and…”

Her voice trailed off as her fingers brushed against the ivory cheek of my false face. With a flick of her finger, she flipped back the hood from my statue’s head. Her breath hitched.

“Solus?” she whispered. Then, louder when I didn’t answer, “Solus!?”

Griffon had already turned to face the tenth pillar. His eyes widened.

I heard the primordial drumbeat of a sound—a word—a name. Something no man of my era was meant to hear.

A name that meant nothing, and something, and everything. A man with no face that I had seen and known and been.

“Bahhh… Koh…”

Zahhh… Gree…

I felt it then. The burning of twin suns overhead. The floodlight regard of my shackled Father, the Flame. 

[KING OF NOTHING]

[KING OF NO ONE]

[TWICE-BORN HEIR TO RAGING HEAVEN]

[TWICE-CURSED BASTARD OF FALLEN STARS]

[TWICE-NAMED AND TWICE-FORGOTTEN]

And I remembered.

Griffon sprang away from the safety of the light, leaping across the stage and reaching out for me. Selene cried out a word of power, and the scarlet sun rose up from underneath us, devouring the Total Eclipse of the Heart that tethered us here, casting us back into our mortal vessels.

Too late.

“Dionysus,” I snarled.

The scarlet sun consumed us.

[2.18] Silver-Age Scavengers

AN: There's another ~3k that goes at the end of this, but it's gettin' real late and sleep deprivation already did some weird things to this one. I'll get the other half edited and out the door soon.

----------------------

Sol,

The Raven From Rome

We sat still as stone in the embrace of the first primordial fear.

The darkness was absolute, and yet there were shadows. Small shadows like skittering rats, long shadows like serpents and thriving vines, tall shadows like blood-drunk giants, and swimming just beneath the surface of the sea of clouds, there were enormous shadows, circling the stage a thousand tons over.

“I was warned,” came the frightened voice of a girl who had thought herself a woman before that moment. Her whisper pierced the yawning silence. “I was warned by my father, by the Gadfly, by Dona and the rest. Even Bakos warned me away from the path that I had chosen, in his own way.

“But I would not be dissuaded.”

The faint tremor in her voice was forced out by resolve, even as a menagerie of incomprehensible noise began to flood the sanctum of her heart, as though her little whisper had broken down the barrier of silence for every nightmare in existence, from the least of them to the most terrible.

I heard a distant, scraping struggle, and belatedly realized that it was coming from right beside me. Griffon was fighting to say something, fighting to move free from the wine-dark waters of the pool, but I couldn’t hear what he was saying. The shadows swallowed it up before it could make it to me. I reached out for him—and felt the cold kiss of a raven space swallow up my arm.

A moment later, as that cold, slick darkness shuddered and lurched further up like some oil-slick insect, swallowing my arm up to my shoulder, I realized it was no pocket space at all.

“It is difficult enough for a cultivator to plan out a cohesive set of principles, even if they’ve set aside decades for the task. I ascended to the ninth rank of the Sophic Realm in less than a decade, and no matter how many times I was urged away from my course—no matter how many times my father punished me in the hopes that I would see reason—I did not form even one single pillar of my own.

“I couldn’t bear the thought of taking up those empty places for myself, when that meant a cultivator slipping into stark Tartarus that I could have saved.”

“And what was your reward for all of your troubles?”

“A dead end,” Selene admitted. “They tried—my father, my mentors, even you. They tried to feed me only the broken principles that suited one another best. Like the creation of a mosaic, they tried to salvage a cohesive whole from the black bile of broken hearts. In the end, they came close—so close that it made my father spit blood. But they failed.”

I gripped the oil-slick shadow swarming up my right arm with my left hand, but it slid through my fingers and left a stinking residue on my fingers and palm that burned like tethered fire. I tried wrenching my right arm out by force, but that only seemed to excite the creature. It swarmed further up, until its tiny leech-like fangs were sinking into my collarbone, anchoring themselves in the bone as leverage for the grotesque thing to lever itself further and further up, seeking to swallow me whole.

I tried to banish it with gravitas, but the Captain’s virtue had no place here, in this primordial dark. I tried calling out to Selene for help, or at least some explanation, but with a sinking feeling I realized she couldn’t hear us for all that I could hear her. She kept delivering her lines without a hitch no matter how I roared.

“The nine that I had taken could never function properly together. There was no path forward, no pillar under the sun that I could internalize as my tenth to avoid the reckoning ahead,” Selene explained in quiet resignation. She was breathing heavily, in exertion and in fear.

I couldn't see her. I couldn't hear what she was fighting through on that shadowed stage. But I could imagine.

“The tenth step of every realm exists for the sole purpose of consolidation. At the peak, a cultivator seeks stable ground before they make the leap to the realm above.

“No matter what I internalized as my tenth pillar, I knew it wouldn't be enough to account for all the flaws and dissonant foundations of the nine that I had stolen first. When the time for consolidation came, and the load-bearing nature of my principles was tested, I knew that they would crack and sunder.

“Regardless of my final choice, the heart demons would come. And so, I chose to stop running from the possibility, and instead, I turned and made ready to stand against them when they came.”

Ting.

A spark lit up the primordial dark, if only for a moment, and only just.

It was accompanied by a chime—like a chisel striking stone, but with an otherworldly resonance to it. It was a sound that I had heard only once before, and only then in a memory. It was the sound that adamant made when it was struck.

“Of all the pillars in my heart,” Selene spoke softly, “only one of them was freely given.”

Ting.

Another spark. Another resonant chime.

I was already looking back this time, and so I saw it — the unmistakable shape of the Tyrant Riot, sitting cross-legged before that tenth adamant pillar, chiseling away at it like it was mundane stone. The blank-masked Selene’s back was to me, obscuring all the finer details of her. The shadows were thickest and wildest around that pillar.

As another chime rang out and a third spark illuminated the dark, I saw the faces of the primordial shadows surrounding that tenth pillar, and my blood turned to ice in my veins.

“They had all doubted my resolve in the beginning,” she spoke. “Bakkhos was the last of them to let his doubt go, and only then because he found me out before I could internalize my tenth pillar on my own terms.

“He stopped me, then, before I could face my demons alone.”

“I saved you from yourself, fool girl.”

I felt those curved leech-teeth brushing almost delicately up my neck, ghosting along my jaw as they sought a proper anchor to hook themselves through.

Ting.

A spark flew, and I bore witness to the nightmare that was eating me alive.

At that moment, something all too mortal inside myself, buried deeper than any military conditioning could reach, broke apart in screaming madness.

I felt my heart stop beating, felt my muscles go slack. And I heard — like the distant stirring of salt and ash — the final breath slipping past my lips.

Ting.

My eyes slid off the nightmare’s oil-slick back and fell to the pool at my feet. I saw Griffon in that moment of adamant clarity. I saw what he had been struggling against.

I saw it consume him.

I reached for the wheel inside my soul. Once, twice, I tried to grip its spokes and they slid through my fingers, oil-slick with that primordial taint. The captain leads from the front. I’ll rise.

Ting.

I saw Griffon vanish into the mouth of darkness. Our eyes met the moment that it swallowed him, gone but for a single outstretched hand that the nightmare eagerly gagged and swallowed down.

My fingers closed around an ivory spoke.

[I am a raven, and I am an unkindness.]

The wheel turned.

My undulating carrion-feeder wailed at a pitch that could shatter stone as I pried its hooked teeth out of my cheek and ripped it open from tooth to tail-tip, disemboweling it and spilling its guts into the wine-dark pool.

Ting.

The titanic parasite in the pool stared up at me with its thousand milk-blind eyes. It was no leech or serpent after all. I could see it for what it was now—clearer than I could have even in the light of day. 

It was a maggot. A corpse-eater from a long-dead era, one of many that fed and grew fat upon the buried titans that the Father cast down.

The maggot rippled in panic, tried to dive and slip away into the hidden depths at the bottom of the pool.

I caught Griffon's hand in mine and pulled him from its stomach in one savage motion, tearing out its insides along with him. Griffon emerged in an animal fury, flinging himself over the side of the pool and gripping my wrist tight enough to crush iron, his chest heaving with that same pre-human panic that had nearly killed me.

He stared down at the wailing, gutted mess of a silver age bottom-feeder, outlined by the intermittent flashes of adamant spark-light.

“What?” Griffon rasped, the whites of his eyes stark. “Is that?”

I could hear him clearly now— in fact, I could hear it all. I could hear every ungodly, boiling nightmare sound that went on in this primordial dark. I could see it all clearly too, through the thin veil of the Raven mantle.

“Put on your cloak,” I told him.

But he only jerked his head to the side.

“Sol?” he hissed. “Where are you?” As if he couldn’t see the hand gripping his.

“Your raven mantle,” I urged him. His jaw flexed.

“I can’t.”

I frowned, considering our surroundings. I couldn’t leave him here alone, at the mercy of the shadows that had languished longest in that deepest dark beneath the earth. If he couldn’t don his Raven mantle, a lie would have to do.

Reaching out, I drew a shroud of ivory silk from this nightmare and settled it over my brother.

Griffon lashed out the second he felt it touch the crown of his head, nearly tearing it apart on instinct, before his higher reason asserted itself and he went still. I pried my hand away from his and stepped back, watching closely. The ivory gave off only a false light, too dim for anything but a shadow to perceive it — but that alone was more than these ugly, wriggling things could bear.

I watched the bottom-feeders shy away from it, skirting around the dim glow rather than testing it. Satisfied, I stepped away from my brother and up onto the stage.

Off to commit unspeakable violence.

[2.17] The Broad Strokes

Sol,

The Raven From Rome

The Broad strokes of it were thus:

The Civic Realm was a period of relatively carefree cultivation—the formative years in which a cultivator was punished the least for dabbling in contradictory concepts, and rewarded the most for broadening their horizons. To advance beyond that first realm, up to the first step of the Realm of Philosophers, was to set your soul in stone. That was why the Greeks called it Foundation Establishment. What that truly meant—what those limitations implied—was something no two sophists could agree upon.

The common consensus was simply that the experience of refinement changed after the Civic Realm. In Broad terms, it was the point where one began cultivating with principle, with passion, and with purpose.

Principle, passion, and purpose. That was one of many rules of three that characterized the classical model of Greek cultivation. Another was the Broad’s insistence that ‘true’ cultivation could be divided into just three primary realms—Sophic, Heroic, and Tyrannic—, as was his assertion that each realm could itself be divided primarily into thirds.

The early stage of a given realm encompassed the first three steps. The middling stage encompassed the fourth, fifth, and sixth steps, while the late stage covered the seventh, eighth, and ninth steps—but notably not the tenth. In the Broad’s view, to stand at the tenth step was to be the captain of your realm, half a step from a higher plane of existence.

Yet, why separate the steps at all? Supposedly, for the same reason the realms themselves were separated: qualitative changes. Supposedly, these changes were too significant for the Broad to ignore, but not significant enough to warrant a realm all their own.

To advance from the second step of the Sophic Realm to the third was to enjoy an increase to your pneuma, a doubling and redoubling of your vital essence that would enhance every other aspect of your cultivation in turn—but not by an astounding amount in the grand scheme of things. Taking that step from second to third also meant internalizing a third principle, a key construct that would shape the rest of your life.

But both of those things could be said of every other step through the Sophic Realm.

To advance from three to four was to step away from the largest crowd of lowly sophists and don the mantle of a maverick. Mid-stage Philosophers were pioneers of metaphysics, no longer bound by the conventional wisdom of their chosen specialties. The Broad asserted that to properly advance through the mid-stage of the Sophic Realm, a sophist had to innovate upon the common thought—or at least break out of the mold they’d established as their foundation.

It was an odd contradiction on the surface, one that reminded me of the memory of my master that I’d seen through Stavros Aetos’ eyes.

At times, in order to move forward, a man had to go back first.

The late-stage of the Sophic Realm was the bleeding edge of enlightened innovation. To advance from the sixth step of the Sophic Realm to the seventh was to upend the status quo wherever you went.

The Platonic ideal of a late-stage philosopher’s progression was that of a ship the size of ten triremes, with radical truths manning every oar, cutting sharply through the waves of human thought and leaving a wide, rippling wake behind them.

To become a captain of the Sophic Realm, advancing from nine to ten, was to step out onto the same stage that the Broad himself occupied. It meant standing shoulder-to-shoulder with men like Aristotle and Socrates. In theory, anyway. In practice, few lived long enough at this level to approach the Gadfly at all, let alone regard him as an equal.

To stand at the peak of the Sophic Realm was to be half a step from glory. It was easy to envision what that meant in relation to the next step—the Heroic Realm was within reach, the heart’s blood was ready to burn. But what did it mean for the men that lingered there, at the peak of plain mortality?

Life as a Captain of the Sophic Realm was defined by a personal struggle against natural law, and the chafing of its chains.

There was a pressure that every sophist felt, a weight that pressed down the harder they pressed out at the boundaries of natural philosophy. There was a particular madness that afflicted all the greatest minds at the peak of the Sophic Realm—a madness that even Hippocrates couldn’t cure inside himself, a mania that put down roots and grew, taking more and more for itself the longer that a cultivator lingered at that tenth step.

This was the reason why the greatest minds in the Free Mediterranean were often so… strained. How could they not be, when they had struggled against the suppression of natural law the longest? When they had gone where no mortal man had gone before, had reached the pinnacle, and had still refused to break the chains that bound them.

Because in the end, that was the unique audacity of men like the Broad, the Gadfly, and my mentor. They could have been Heroes, any one of them. But they’d refused, because casting off the chains of mortality and letting the heart’s blood burn meant spitting in the face of natural law and disregarding it entirely.

For men like my mentor, that was a failure. Rhetorical creatures that the great philosophers were, they saw ascension to the Heroic Realm as the concession of a point.

Men like that needed to peel back the curtain of majesty and wonder that hung between the second and third realms—between the mortal and the divine—because in their minds, there was nothing that a god could do that a man could not do in kind. There was only the informed and the uninformed. The ignorant and the enlightened.

For men like them, every impossible innovation was one more stone chipped away from the face of the divine mountain. Every argument won against the earth mother herself, every great leap forward in mankind’s understanding of the metaphysika, was another tug upon that heavenly curtain. Pulling it back inch by inch, until the fateful day came that even the mortals in the cheap seats would have a clear view of the stage.

It was this arrogance that killed most captains of the Sophic Realm. Not the failed attempts to ascend to glory, but the refusal to even try. It was common knowledge that it was a hero’s nature to burn, and a tyrant’s nature to starve. Lesser known yet every bit as devastating was the curse of all Philosophers. The curse of wonder. The ever-burning, ever-gnawing need to push the boundaries of human understanding.

It was their curiosity that killed them in the end.

The question then became, what was the purpose of a principle for cultivators such as the Broad, the Gadfly, and the Man Who Knew Everything? 

For men that had existed long enough to know themselves, and know they would never reach for the glory of the third realm, what need was there for a load-bearing pillar? Why bother building one at all, let alone ten? Why risk deviation by imposing restrictions that weren’t needed?

As it turned out, there were a few reasons that the Broad found compelling. 

A principle was a powerful thing, and not just in the obvious ways that I’d experienced for myself when invoking my first and third pillars. It was here that Selene's understanding of the Broad’s teachings faltered, but I could hardly hold it against her. From the sounds of it, even the Broad  himself had not been entirely certain of the phenomena he was trying to describe. Maybe if he’d had more time to study it before the Coast cast him down, and his Academy along with him, this portion of the lesson would have been more robust.

As it was, he had spoken of a phenomenon—a gathering of great thoughts, a natural mechanism like that of moths drawn to open flames, or ships guided home by the steady light of constellations. By internalizing an ideal, in the same way that a mortal apprentice might declare themselves for a trade, the Broad believed a pillar could draw good fortune in its chosen field towards the scholar that had established it. He spoke of the eureka, those moments of quasi-divine enlightenment that struck the great thinkers as hard as any Hero or Tyrant’s tribulation lightning. 

He spoke of this phenomenon as a combination of factors, united and multiplied by the principle. A combination of personal mastery, the mind’s restless wandering, and the endless scholar’s grind. In a way, it reminded me of Aristotle’s model of the metaphysical. There was a connection there between his theory and the Broad’s that would have maddened my mentor if he knew I’d drawn it. 

Magnitude, motion, and time — three factors that Aristotle firmly believed Philosophers were meant to master. Three elements of natural law that, in the Broad’s theory, could be bound by principle and catalyzed to create that holy breakthrough, the heavenly eureka that every sophist coveted.

There was more. When it came to the Broad, it seemed that was always the case.

The rule of three was a recursive constant in the Broad’s theoretical framework of enlightened cultivation — the magnum opus that he had dubbed his Theory of Man. Three realms, three partitions of the soul, three dimensions to the waking world.

And, of course, a Philosopher’s three voices.

These were the core conceits of the Sophic Realm that the Free Mediterranean knew best. The voice of our principles, the voice of our lived experiences, and the voice of our influence. Though, to hear the Broad tell it, these were only the shadows on the wall cast by a more ancient struggle, one that took place within every sophist’s soul. The impossible question that a wise man carried with him everywhere he went, a paradox of purpose that lurked within the deep subconscious waiting to be dug up and unraveled.

So, then. What did this Theory of Man look like, played out in the real world?

According to Selene, while the Broad’s approach was all but universally accepted as the framework for refinement in the Free Mediterranean, it was not quite enough on its own. Or at least that’s what the cults claimed. Each of the Greater Mystery Cults had their own frameworks, their own guidelines, which they claimed were the product of their own profound, foundational mysteries. The kyrioi of these institutions would have sooner vomited a river of blood and killed themselves before any one of them admitted to the truth of the matter. That being that each of their personalized paths to providence were, underneath the mystique, nothing but an unnecessary series of add-ons to the Broad’s simplified — and wasn’t that a Greek joke — Theory of Man.

They had their differences, that much was true, but most were cosmetic in the grand scheme of things. As such, they could be largely disregarded, and I intended to do just that.

Outside of the Greater Mystery Cults, an independent sophist’s refinement might look like this:

First, establish your foundation and set down your first pillar — your Philosopher’s Reason. While the first principle isn’t necessarily more important than any of the other nine to come, it is the first real choice you’ll make as a cultivator. It’s a narrowing of scope.

There is more to the Sophic Realm than pillars of principle, of course, in the same way that there is more to the Heroic realm than a burning heart flame. No matter what stage or realm a man resides in, the Broad believes that it is a tragedy for him to not know the joy of his body’s full potential. You are a cultivator, and before that, you are a man — and a man exists both body and soul. So while you are refining your mind, you also take time to refine your body.

The tempering of a cultivator’s physique is a constant process, but the Broad suspected that it had its own qualitative stages. This side of refinement is one where a Greater Mystery Cult truly shines. Their martial scriptures are the envy of every rogue cultivator in the Free Mediterranean, and most beyond it, too.

Without such connections, you can only do your best, exercising your body to its mortal limits. Without the good fortune of a mystiko’s resources, or the inheritance of a benevolent old monster, you will almost certainly turn to the tempering method that the Broad passed down to all of his students in Greek cultivation.

It is called The Book of Broad Shoulders, and while it is a grueling, unremarkable, bare-bones technique — one of the few that does not reward the consumption of natural treasures, and does not function at all in the later stages without a partner — it is undoubtedly a monstrous martial scripture when pushed to the limits of its potential.

He is called the Broad for a reason, after all.

So while you deepen your understanding of the fields within your chosen scope, you temper your body as well. In the earliest stages, you master the solitary meditations — the calisthenics and flexibility formations that make a man the master of his body, and not the other way around. You refine the physical facet of willpower, through long fasting and aggressive modifications to the baseline meditations. Again I am reminded of my own mentor, and the connections that he refuses to draw between himself and the Broad. Magnitude, motion, and time are tools that every student of The Book of Broad Shoulders turns upon themselves in its early stages.

Add weight upon your back while pressing up. Adjust the position of your hands — closer together, farther apart, or entirely offset — to change the range of motion. Adjust the time spent at the lowest point of the exercise, where the struggle is greatest.

Without the active use of pneuma to trivialize all but the most extreme movements, you can spend the entirety of the early and mid stages of the Sophic Realm cultivating the Broad’s martial scripture on your own, before you’re finally forced to move on to the joint tempering of the late stages. But for the you that exists here and now, at the first step of the Sophic Realm, that is little more than a distant distraction. For now, you have mass to move.

You study diligently, familiarizing yourself with the work of greater minds that came before you, you temper your body, and you nourish all three portions of your soul. You refine your reason by stripping away each of the little contradictions and hypocrisies that you indulged in as a Citizen. You refine your spirit by venturing out and providing guidance to those less fortunate in matters of refinement. And of course, you refine your hunger by burning both ends of the candle and pursuing innovation like a starving hound.

You do all of these things in the closest thing to equal proportion that an imperfect man can manage, and soon enough you advance to the second stage. Your advancement comes with a new principle — or, as the Broad advises, you decide upon your second pillar, and the realms above make room for your advancement.

The choosing is the key. Selene emphasizes this more than once as the acts go by. The synergy within the soul is paramount, and it is the lack of that synergy that doomed each of the cultivators that Selene saved.

The Broad urged his students to apply the rule of three to this process of choosing as well. Three chances to reconsider. Three upon three upon three times as many months spent considering as months spent internalizing—and one more month upon the pile of nine, just for good measure. And then, most interestingly to both me and Griffon, three different portions of the soul for your principle to address. Three questions that must all be answered in the affirmative before a cultivator can proceed:

Does this nourish the mind? Will it nourish the heart, and the hunger?

Put another way, does this suit the needs of the philosopher? Will it suit the needs of the Hero? The Tyrant?

Is this column built to last?

If every answer is yes, after all of that, you may move forward and internalize your second pillar. This one will be your Philosopher’s Passion.

If the first, the Philosopher’s Reason, is a narrowing of scope, this is the prospecting phase. You have spent your time in the first stage of the Sophic Realm gathering as much knowledge as you can about your chosen field and the existing contributions to it. Now, in the second stage, you begin to weigh the worth of those contributions against one another.

It is an unfortunate truth that every man with a thought in his head believes himself to be the second coming of Socrates. Your second pillar is a statement of your values—the passion that you hold in your heart for the narrowed scope of your sophistry. It is at this stage that you truly begin to form your own opinions of the world and its natural laws, and it is here that you first begin to clash with the opinions of your so-called betters.

Your second pillar is the culmination of those passionate certainties—the lens through which you view the world—and that is why it is so very important to internalize the one that fits you best.

If you do this, and if you are diligent with the tempering of your body and the nourishment of your reason, your passion, and your hunger, then the time will come sooner or later that you ascend to the third step of the Sophic Realm.

The third pillar requires every bit as much careful preparation in its choosing as the first and second—perhaps even more so—because the third pillar is the culmination of your efforts in the early stage of the Sophic realm.

If the first principle is a narrowing of scope, and the second principle is a prospecting of the great minds that have done work within that scope, then the third principle is the plumbing of your chosen depths.

In the first stage, you familiarized yourself with all the noteworthy teachings in your chosen field. In the second stage, you chose for yourself the resources that you felt captured the truth of things best. Now, in the third stage, you devour your chosen sources—following the diamond vein all the way down to the bedrock of your field.

Your third principle is thus the assertion of your purpose as a scholar. It is the path that you cannot help but walk—the unfinished road that you will follow to its inevitable end, drawn along by the curse of your burgeoning curiosity. The third step of the Sophic realm is where you gorge your starving mind, and you prepare yourself for the cold water plunge that follows when you inevitably run out of material to consume.

The third step leads to the fourth. Eventually.

Moving from three to four is considered the first bottleneck of the Sophic Realm, and for good reason. It takes time to properly absorb all of the conventional wisdom of any field—especially in a place as rife with scholars as the Free Mediterranean. Even just reading the material is often the work of months or years in closed-doors cultivation, depending on the particular scope of your first principle. And that is only what is required to reach the peak of the third step.

Breaking past the boundary that separates three from four means blazing a trail—or at the very least, taking that first step off the edge of the well-paved road. Depending on the path you've chosen, that plunge might be the difference between a city’s marble street and the dirt road at its limits… or it might be a thousand-foot plummet off a cliff and into the sea.

Either way, taking that step over the edge is a declaration of your intent, a promise of the trails you will blaze, and the rules of nature that you will drag from the shadows of divinity out into the light. From this point forward, you are resolved. And assuming you’ve built the beginnings of a Broad body as well, you are ready.

What comes next is the breaking of boundaries.

I frown pensively, watching the curtains close on the ninth act.

Selene had laid out the steps that followed these first three, and I had listened—could repeat them verbatim if questioned. But there was no connection.

Rather than understanding more as I neared the end of the lecture, I felt like I understood less than when I’d entered.

Try as I might, I couldn’t find a way to step into the sandals of that hypothetical student of the Broad. To stand where he stood on those first three steps, to hold up my pillars instead of his, and to make sense of that process—I couldn’t do it.

It didn’t fit. I didn’t fit. And I knew Griffon felt the same.

Still, it wasn’t over yet.

Griffon and I applauded once more as the curtain rose and Selene bowed modestly. She was older now, in the early stages of her adolescence—still graceful, as a cultivator of her standing couldn’t help but be—yet clearly not finished growing.

Straightening up, she addressed us with finality. If there was any mischief to her in that moment, it was only a glimmer—an ember in the flames behind her eyes, gone as quickly as it appeared.

“Thus concludes the Study of Selene, and the myriad thefts that she committed on her path to principle,” she announced. Both Griffon and I straightened up.

“That’s it?” I asked. The restraint that Aristotle had beaten into me early and often held my tongue from saying more. Thankfully, I had a fellow student to be presumptuous in my place.

“We were promised ten acts,” Griffon protested. “Ten pillars—that’s what I paid the price of my admission for. It’s written on my ticket!”

“And where is your ticket, then?” Selene pointedly asked, raising an eyebrow.

Without looking, Griffon stabbed his hand through a streamer of psychedelic mist and pulled from it a scarlet ticket painted with a much younger girl’s childish script. As he thrust it toward the stage, I saw that the words had also been written on the back of it.

The Saint of Scarlet Hearts
A Ten Act Triumph — Ten Labors of Love

And in the corner, scrawled almost shyly:

This seat reserved for my future junior brother.

There was a long moment of silence as Griffon held his ticket out expectantly, and the actress on stage stared back at it with calm indifference.

Her poker face was admirable, but even here in the sanctum of her soul, she couldn’t hide the rosy flush creeping up her neck.

The ninth intermission ended abruptly, the curtains rushing in to cover the stage. One of them snapped like a hound at the brandished ticket as it passed by, trying to snatch it, but Griffon pulled it back and slipped it behind his ear, all too satisfied with himself.

“When did you find the time to draw that up?”

Griffon chuckled, sliding down into the saltwater pool so that his elbows were propped up on the stone lip.

“I didn’t.”

When the curtains rose on the tenth act, there was no resurgence of light. In fact, there was no light at all. The scarlet glow of the clouds flickered and went out like a snuffed candle. The eerie luminescence of the vapors bled away. Even Selene’s scarlet heart flames vanished.

There was a long, heavy silence—no sound at all came from the stage, no narration of any kind. It wasn’t until my eyes fully adjusted to the pitch dark that I saw the shadows begin to move.

“I warned you, girl.”

The tenth act dawned in darkness.

[2.16] Load-Bearing Principles

Sol,

The Raven From Rome

“You may have heard these words before, but bear with me until the end. There are as many paths to heaven as there are stars in the sky, but that doesn't mean that any man or woman can walk just any path they choose. Fortune, whether good or bad, opens a thousand doors and closes a thousand-thousand more. In the days of our ancestors, it was a cultivator’s burden first to find their favored path.

“Today, we look first to the Broad and his theory of the tripartite soul, because it suggests a path forward in and of itself. 

“I have seen cultivators both great and small, Citizens and Philosophers in their multitudes. I have seen cultivators follow paths that defy all reason, and I have even seen it work to their benefit—at least for a time.

“But more often by far, I have seen cultivators walk the path that the Broad set out for us all, before his Academy sank into the sea. This framework is the standard for a reason, and so it is where we must begin.

“First, we must ask ourselves this: why is it that we speak of our refinement in terms of realms and rankings? What is it that separates a tenth-rank citizen from a first-rank sophist other than a single step? Why does that tenth-rank citizen not deserve a more impressive title than the ninth-rank citizen below them, and why does that ninth-rank citizen not deserve a more glorious epithet than the eighth-rank citizen below them?

“The Broad asserted, and countless scholars have agreed, that there is a qualitative change between cultivators of different realms. I'm sure you can both think of a few.”

The intermission was a far more straightforward lecture than the events leading up to it, and that was ironically what made it the most jarring. As I tried my damnedest to focus on its contents and internalize every word, I became aware of a dissonance that had been all too easy to miss in the theatrics of the first act.

I was still under the influence of that psychedelic venom. Worse, I was farther gone than I had thought. Sitting here and breathing in the fumes hadn't just been maintaining my buzz like I’d thought, but progressing it—well beyond any reasonable threshold.

It felt similar to being drunk, on the edge of blackout senselessness. You could sit there with your cup in your hand and listen to someone speak, could understand the meaning of the words and even respond in kind, and not realize just how far gone you were until the moment you went to stand. Like a curtain being flung back and light pouring onto the stage, the truth of things would reveal itself all at once to you, and there would be no going back for the rest of the night.

The harder that I tried to focus, the more that exact vertigo came creeping in.

A distant part of me was confident that I could shrug this off, turn the wheel inside myself and purge these little poisons, but I knew that that would break the spell. So for now, I straddled that line and remained in my seat, content to let the play unfold according to my mentor’s design.

The first intermission was only a primer, and soon the second act was underway. The vapors converged in a closing curtain, and the lights inside the clouds dimmed to brief blackness, then flared to life once more and the curtains opened back up on a new scene.

Griffon played with a strand of vapor as it went streaming past us, plucking at it like it was a string and frowning when it parted around his fingers.

"Pay attention," I muttered. He snorted, but obliged.

The unmasked Selene and the blank-faced Tyrant Riot were there once again, and in place of the vinekeeper, a man—a Selene—was dressed in the most ragged cult attire I had ever seen, hunched feverishly over a workbench that had been piled high with half-finished curios and schematics. I saw piles of papyrus covered in Pythagorean scrawls, scrapped dissertations from every field a natural philosopher could be expected to dabble in. There were star charts, geometric formations, metaphysical treatises, and even a few half-cocked forays into civil engineering.

Not a single one of them was completed.

"Four months passed before I took my next step," Selene began, striding across the stage with her spear in hand. "I was more confident this time. My foundations were firmly established, and my purpose was clear."

Without preamble, she twirled the spear twice in her hand and rammed it through the hunched cultivator’s back.

At once, a tattered heart demon exploded up out of the floor, scattering a mountain of discarded designs to reveal the broken pillar buried underneath them. The mask of the new demon was just as hateful as the first had been, but rather than spite, it bore down on her with an expression of black glee. As for the mask of the cultivator that had created it—I couldn't tell. The hunched figure hadn’t raised its head from the bench yet. Even as the demon lunged and nearly tore Selene’s head off her shoulders, the scholar remained shackled to his work.

"Unfortunately," Selene narrated in a strained tone while she danced around the heart demon, "The second step was more challenging than the first."

"You could always let him rot," the Tyrant Riot suggested. "If he can't be bothered to lend you his strength, now of all times, is the world really any better off with him in it?"

"I won’t accept that," Selene replied, parrying a stab that the demon had attempted with an iron stylus of all things. “How can I judge the act of any living thing when their heart is not their own?”

“Easily. I do it often.”

“It isn't my place! And it isn't yours either! I won't allow it!”

The ungrateful failure of a Philosopher ignored the dialogue and the violence, scribbling feverishly away at the latest of his designs.

“Your place this, my place that. I'll tell you this, girl: I have a place for this incompetent—a plot of dirt in my garden that's just his size.”

“Stop talking if you don't have anything helpful to say!”

“What else am I to do with my mouth? My cup is empty.”

It was an ugly affair from beginning to end, but the young saint prevailed, running the heart demon through with her spear and collapsing to one knee, fighting hard to maintain her pneumatic scripture while oozing blood from a multitude of wounds.

“I have never been a fighter,” she explained in quick, panting bursts. “My second step into the Sophic Realm was almost the end of me. It was a lesson that I should have learned from the start. I couldn't do this alone—not every time. If I couldn't find a way to bolster the afflicted and bring them into the fight, I would forever be limited by my own personal strength when trying to mend a deviated heart.

“Perhaps it would have been wise to accept that limitation,” she admitted, rising unsteadily to her feet and hoisting the heart demon over her shoulder. “Perhaps the most sensible way forward would have been to focus on my own refinement above all else—to only help those that had no chance of harming me at all, even in their lowest moments.”

“Your father would have preferred it.”

“But that selfishness sickened me,” Selene said sharply, striding over to the battered pillar. “That lack of care was what I couldn’t stand the most. That was how heart demons thought!”

That said, she lashed out with a vicious kick and sent the onyx pillar flying across the stage.

It was that which finally broke the man from his creative trance. His head snapped up from the bench, revealing a mask frozen in an expression of wide-eyed anticipation. The voice that emerged from behind it was shrill and petulant.

“No!” he cried, scrambling up and nearly falling again as the piles of his unfinished work slid out from under his feet. “No, I was almost there! I was finally about to finish! Give it back, just for a moment, just until I’m done!”

“You’ll never be done,” Selene tried to comfort him, sympathetic even now. “Not as you are now. It will be harder than it was before, once I take this away, but it will be better in the end. Once it’s gone, you’ll finally be able to finish what you’ve started. I promise you.”

The man fisted his hands in his hair, yanking and tearing handfuls of it out in frustration.

“Be silent! I want it back, you thieving witch! I changed my mind! Give it back!”

He lunged, and overburdened as she was, his savior could only run. 

Watching Selene flee desperately from him, only barely managing to drag the pillar and the heart demon’s corpse out with her, I found myself reconsidering the Tyrant Riot’s suggestion.

“On second thought, the garden is too good for him.”

I wondered what it said that we were of the same mind.

The curtain closed after Selene set down her second stolen pillar, and Griffon once again pawed at the streamers of vapor as they swept past us to obscure the stage.

“Focus,” I ground out.

“Worthless Roman. What does it look like I’m doing?” he replied, pinching at the multicolored mist.

I shook my head and waited for the second intermission.

When it arrived, Selene was a bit older, and a full head taller. She picked up where the first intermission had left off, speaking frankly about topics that Greeks had only ever played coy about in my past experiences.

“Having seen two ideals and their impact on the hearts of the cultivators that internalized them, you begin to see how it is we shape our cultivation to them, and why it is that we call these columns load-bearing.”

She swept her hand back to the first limestone pillar.

“With this pillar as her base, this cultivator could in theory pursue any path that she desired, and expect steady growth without setbacks—so long as she had the resources needed to sustain that growth.

“You can infer many things about the path a cultivator intends to walk, if you look first to the pillars they’ve chosen to build upon. A well-kept vine can only thrive. This woman feared bottlenecks above all else. She would have happily spent twice as much time and effort on every step of her journey, if it meant she never had to worry about her future advancement. Better to spend five years refining each step and be a Heroine in fifty, rather than soaring to the peak of the Sophic Realm in ten and then hitting a wall—even if only for a moment.

“This cultivator, on the other hand,” she continued, nodding to the onyx column, “despised the mental struggle above all else. He was happy to throw away the work of months—even years—if the alternative was forcing himself to finish a job that he’d lost all interest in.

“There was a unique joy to the pursuit of innovation for him, a mania that all of the greatest Philosophers have been known to possess. The difference between those great thinkers and this man was that he couldn’t bear to separate that joy from the creative process. If the mania wasn’t present, then he wanted nothing to do with the work.

“He didn’t mind leaving a thousand works unfinished, because he was confident enough to bet his heart on the belief that eventually he would find for himself a thought, an idea, a discovery, that sparked joy from beginning to end. Anything less than that was imperfection, anything less than perfection wasn’t nearly good enough.

Selene lifted both palms, encompassing the twin pillars.

“It’s easy to see where they strayed. I believe—though he never admitted it—that the Tyrant Riot led me to these first two pillars for that very reason, as a primer on flawed foundations. Obvious, glaring schisms that I could keep in my own heart as touchstones—references in deviation—for the future, when I inevitably encountered subtler afflictions of the heart.”

“That sounds like work,” the Tyrant Riot said doubtfully. The featureless mask tilted down, peering into the Tyrant’s empty golden cup. “Thirsty work.”

While Selene refilled the Tyrant’s cup, I considered the two columns on stage.

“The vine keeper deviated because she set her sights too high,” I said, thinking out loud. “She laid claim to something she couldn’t afford—something known for its pitfalls, maybe. Some scripture or virtue that rewarded the risk taken to internalize it. Maybe she thought her principle would let her sidestep those risks entirely. Maybe it would have. But she underestimated the raw refining material required, and by the time she realized it, it was too late to stop. She’d already committed.” It seemed right. I had seen that sort of hubris played out countless times, if not in this specific way.

“Am I close?” I asked.

“Very,” Selene said, pleased. “It was a principle she internalized later on that did it. The two fed upon each other in the worst way, and that demon was the result.”

“The second fool was the same,” Griffon guessed, dragging his attention away from the streamers of multicolored mist to briefly engage with the lecture. “Cycling through projects for the rest of his natural life wouldn’t have been enough to crack that pillar, whether he was discontent or not. 

“He must have internalized something new, built himself a promise to finish what he started. He tried to hem himself in so that he had no choice but to see it through.” Griffon’s nose wrinkled. “A shackle on his heart in the absence of self-control.”

“I’d like to say that’s a pessimistic view of his intentions,” Selene said with a sigh, shaking her head, “but it’s more right than it is wrong. There’s a reason why the process of choosing a principle is meant to take ten times as long as the actual internalizing of it—at least, according to the Broad.”

Griffon and I shared a confused look. Choosing?

“The principles that we choose to live by as cultivators in the Sophic Realm are more than just pretty little poetries,” Selene explained. “They’re structural, load-bearing. And most importantly, they offer us new methods of refinement, if we choose them wisely and live by their tenants.”

She gestured to the limestone ideal. “Take this one, for example. If this first pillar was yours, Griffon, how might it help you in your pursuit of the heights?”

Griffon considered the limestone column with narrow eyes. I expected a sneer of disgust—perhaps a flippant comment dismissing the hypothetical entirely.

Surprisingly, he had an actual answer.

“It might have saved my cousins time,” he eventually said.

“Oh?” Selene didn’t have to feign interest. She had been careful not to pry earlier, when Griffon was telling her about his life on Alikos and the family he had there in the context of his virtue, but I could tell she was painfully interested in knowing more about them all.

Griffon nodded thoughtfully. “When all of us were younger, and they still hadn’t found the arts that fit them best, I helped them practice certain skills. Some were obvious mismatches from the very start, but others were almost a good fit. It took them some time to realize they weren’t suited to it, and by that point they were reluctant to let it go. For some reason, my cousins are all very stubborn.”

“Some reason,” I echoed.

Selene’s lips twitched, but she managed to maintain her timeless composure.

“I already had experience with all of the arts they were exploring, naturally,” Griffon continued, ignoring me. “But it’s one thing to understand the cost incurred in personal effort, the time it took me to master a bow, a sword, a spear or a javelin. It’s another thing entirely to have those requirements quantified.”

Now Selene looked very interested. “Meaning?”

Griffon shrugged. “If this pillar can quantify the progression of a skill without any setbacks in the form of material treasures? I might have been a better mentor to them, then, warned them away from the costlier pursuits when they were still in the whimsical stages of their development. Or, if I found a way to fold them into the function of my principle directly, I could have helped them discover their own talents directly.”

I frowned, stubbornly ignoring the rising buzz of vertigo humming around the edges of my soul. Intoxication muddled my thoughts as I followed the convoluted threads of Griffon’s logic.

“You’re taking absurd liberties with that interpretation of it,” I pointed out. “And you skipped over the most obvious use case—evaluating the resource cost of techniques to gauge your own talents first.”

Griffon glanced at me like I was simple. 

“I’m talented at everything, Sol.”

I closed my eyes and prayed for patience.

“I like your thought process,” Selene complimented her brother, amused. “And while your interpretation did take things to a very different place than what the cultivator intended, it is often the case that these principles we keep are not entirely set in stone.” She knocked her knuckles against one of the stone columns and winked. “I’ve certainly accomplished things with some of them that their creators would have never thought possible.

“As for the Philosopher’s Passion,” she said, striding over to the onyx pillar, “what say you, Solus? If this principle were yours, how might it guide your refinement?” I eyed the glossy black column, considering.

A wise man rides the wave.

“It might have helped me on campaign,” I decided.

Griffon snorted. “She could have put a pillar for sandaling horses in front of you, and you would have said the same thing.”

Now it was my turn to eye him like he was simple.

“Yes. Obviously.”

“Go on, Solus,” Selene urged, cutting in before Griffon could respond.

I hummed, coming back to it. A wise man rides the wave.

“There are an infinite number of factors that must be considered while on campaign,” I said, thinking back to long, long days and longer nights spent crouching over sand tables, listening to Gaius’ Logisticos rant. “It isn’t a question of considering everything, because no man possibly could. Not even the greatest warmonger comes close. In the end, you account for everything that you can, and you pray that the enemy accounts for less.

“The more an officer knows, or at least knows of, the more they can account for. The more fields they dabble in, the better they can understand the men in their command that have mastery of those fields. In the legions, I didn’t have to be the best equite on the field to make use of my cavalry. I only had to be a good enough horse soldier to understand what an expert was capable of.

“A principle that not only allowed for, but incentivized that sort of study?” I nodded, more confident the longer I thought about it. “There was a time where I’d have killed for that kind of edge.”

Griffon scoffed. “And I’m the one taking liberties? That fool couldn’t keep himself on track long enough to add two and two and reach a conclusion. You wouldn’t have enough time to develop anything useful.”

“I’m not some flighty Greek that needs all the labors of his life to be a profoundly enjoyable experience in order to see them through,” I countered.

“No, you’re a Roman, aren’t you?” Griffon smirked. “I suppose that’s why you’d rather outsource your creativity to an incompetent dog’s principle.”

“Let the third act begin,” Selene declared loudly, and darkness swallowed up the stage.

The lesson went on like that, each act in Selene’s performance painting a clearer picture of her path through the Sophic Realm, while the intermissions between acts shed a light on the core tenants of Greek Cultivation that Griffon and I had refined ourselves in ignorance of for so many years.

It was exactly what I had been hoping for, and at the same time, it was… odd. There wasn’t anything I could point to and call out as falsehood. None of it was wrong, as far as I understood things, and Selene gave me no reason to doubt her.

Yet even so, the more I learned of Greek cultivation, the more I felt at odds with it. Maybe that was just the Roman half of my foundation making itself known, but I doubted it.

There was a gap there, between the Broad’s model of refinement and my own lived experiences. A dissonance that I would have to resolve one way or another if I wanted to survive long enough to bring Rome’s lost legions home.

I was still pondering that, as the seventh act approached its violent conclusion, when Griffon nudged my knee with his. I glanced over, irritated, and…

“Where did you get those?” I asked incredulously, staring at the handful of crystalline figs he was offering me. They were radiant to my ichor-honed pneumatic senses, refining treasures worth a small fortune.

It wasn’t the fact that he had them. I knew him well enough and we’d spent enough time apart in Olympia that he could have gotten his hands on just about anything there and it wouldn’t have surprised me. It was the fact that neither of us had cast a shadow from the moment Selene drew us into this place—he had no raven space available with which to pull something from nothing, and yet he’d done it anyway.

Griffon smugly pressed the crystal figs into my hand, and then without looking reached out and plucked a cup of kykeon from a nearby wisp of psychedelic vapor.

He drank languidly from his new cup, nodding at the stage. “Pay attention, now.”

I ate my figs in sullen silence.

[2.15] Unsanctioned Salvation

Sol,

The Raven From Rome

The world went dark, so abruptly that I feared the poison had knocked me out. In the next moment, however, the sea of clouds surrounding the platform of Selene’s heart flared to life once more—brighter than before, and with a narrow focus.

Many-colored vapors still hung heavy in the air, but they drifted in purposeful streamers that blocked off the mountains overhead like vast psychedelic curtains. I could see Griffin sitting beside me again, and I could see the center of the dais even more clearly than before. In fact, the lights and the vapors drew my eyes towards it.

In the split second that the darkness had overtaken her heart, the scene had changed. The honeycomb tripod was gone, and where there had been one young Saint of Scarlet Hearts before, there were now three.

Each of them was Selene, but it was clear that they all intended to play a different role.

The first of the three was the only one to not have visibly changed anything but for her location in that shifting of scenes. She was still the same younger version of the woman I knew, swimming in her sunray silks. She stood tall and proud, her sacred spear held tight in her right hand. Her expression was calm, but her stance was just a bit too rigid, and the knuckles of the hand holding the spear bled white, giving away her uncertainty.

The second Selene was a quivering mess, slumped over on her knees and clinging desperately to a lonely limestone column that was riddled with stress-line fractures. Her fingers were bleeding, and her tattered Raging Heaven attire was so mudstained you could hardly see the indigo in it. She wore a theater mask of the same young woman’s face that I had seen carved into the surface of that very limestone pillar. The mask was frozen in a singular moment of betrayal realized.

The third and final Selene lounged on a plush couch, one hand propping up her head while the other idly swirled the contents of a golden cup round and round its rim. This third Selene was dressed the most ostentatiously of the lot, and it wasn't close. She wore a many-layered robe of amethyst and gold, and every one of her ten fingers was heavy with the weight of rings and the gemstones set into them. This Selene wore a mask as well, but it had no features at all—only a flat, blank surface.

Griffin leaned forward eagerly, and I found myself being drawn into the anticipation of the atmosphere myself. The Saint of Scarlet Hearts had set the stage, and now the play was ready to begin.

"It is an oracle’s sacred duty to ease the burdens that heaven heaps upon the hearts of mankind," spoke the Selene that wore no mask, save for a younger version of her own face. She didn't move, not yet, and neither did the quivering wreck of a woman clinging to an unsteady pillar. Only the blank-faced lush moved at all, and only then to swirl the drink around in her cup.

“Mortals and cultivators alike seek them out for succor, offering up the bounties of their lifetimes in exchange for just a few moments of an oracle’s time. They lay bare their broken hearts, their battered spirits, their befuddled minds, and their blasphemous hungers. It is not necessarily the case that every visit to an oracle bears fruit, but rather that some fruits can only grow amidst the holy smoke.

“The oracles are not what they once were, or so the oldest of them tells me,” the unmasked Selene continued, still motionless beneath the glaring lights. “But a sanctified oracle still has her little majesty. She's capable of things that an ordinary cultivator is not. She cannot always make miracles, but she can soothe the scarlet hearts brought before her–if she so desires.”

The scarlet light emanating from the clouds pulsed, and Selene sighed.

"But I was never sanctified, and I have never been taught the lessons that every oracle must teach her daughter before passing on her mantle. The others did what they could to help raise me, but even then, there are some lessons that only the Scarlet Oracle can teach her successor. I was no Scarlet Oracle then, just as I am not now—not in the ways that truly matter."

Finally, the stage shifted into motion. The quivering wretch clinging to the pillar suddenly lurched forward, collapsing to the scarlet marble and retching black bile all over herself.

"But that did not stop them from coming to me with their troubles," the unmasked Selene whispered, and somehow the acoustics of her heart made it echo. "It did not stop them, and in their desperation, they showed me such terrible things. Cultivators in the second and third realms, men and women that were decades my seniors—the specifics mattered not. They all groveled at my feet and begged me for a salvation that I had no way of providing them. I was only a girl, but the children of the sun hadn’t lost their need for an oracle when my mother fell into her coma.”

Selene abruptly cast her spear aside, rushing to the collapsed cultivator’s side and gathering her up in her arms. She wiped the bile from the painted lips of the tragic theater mask, pulling from a fold in her oversized silks a draught of healing honey, which she poured carefully through the gap in the mask’s lips.

"I tried to help them anyway," she explained as she poured. "Oh, how I tried. Every day I secreted away little treasures that my father had given me to nourish my cultivation, anything and everything that I thought might soothe a cultivator’s broken spirit. I poured fortunes down their throats, offered up to them untold riches in the hopes that it might cure what ailed them."

The young woman of the Raging Heaven cult thrashed herself out of Selene’s arms, spewing up the healing honey and all four of her humors in addition, dying loudly and messily, like an animal, while the young daughter of the Scarlet Oracle watched in horror.

"Nothing worked. Nothing. There was nothing I could do."

"I wouldn’t say that," came the voice of the third and final actress on the stage.

The voice was so sharp a contrast to Selene’s own voice, that for a moment I forgot where I was entirely. I leaned forward with my elbows planted on my knees, enraptured.

It was an exact match to the voice that Scythas had called up with his unique mimicry when we were in Thracia. The voice of a dead man. A mad man.

The blank-face mask of the Tyrant Riot tilted sideways to regard the dying woman.

"There were many things you could have done, even then," he spoke, and while his blank mask of a face gave nothing of his feelings away, the tone of his voice made them clear—faintly amused, faintly disgusted. Disinterested above all.

"But I didn't want to just do something," the unmasked Selene replied hotly, kneeling back. "I wanted to help them. More than that, I wanted to save them. I wanted to do more than just soothe them for a moment. I wanted them to be able to walk free of that place with their hearts made whole again."

The Tyrant Riot chuckled, and I marveled at Selene’s ability to reproduce such a sinister sound, even here in the confines of her own heart.

"And they say I was greedy." 

The Tyrant Riot beckoned her over with one hand, and raised that golden cup to the spot where the mask should have had lips, tipping it back. Wine that shimmered in the spotlight with a faintly metallic sheen slid off the smooth surface of the mask and splattered onto the marble floor, mingling with the dying cultivator's humors.

"But I don't hate the sound of it. So bring me the body, and that spear of yours too. If you have the stomach for it, I'll show you a little something."

"Will it help her?" the unmasked Selene asked hopefully, dragging the body over to the couch and scooping up her spear along the way.

“I suppose you’ll find out, won’t you?”

"It was a foolish thing to try. I'm not so naive that I can't acknowledge that," the unmasked Selene confided to the crowd, while the Tyrant Riot helped her adjust her grip on the spear, poking and prodding at her until she had assumed the proper position, with the tip of her bronze spearhead angled just so, hovering over the mystiko's heaving chest. "But I’ve never claimed to be made of stone. I couldn't bear the thought of spending my life watching others come apart at my feet. It was too much tragedy for a girl my age to bear."

"Don't hesitate," the Tyrant Riot advised her. "Even a total eclipse only lasts a few seconds."

The unmasked Selene breathed deeply, until the white faded from her knuckles. She looked down into the death mask of a woman with no hope left of life, and I saw the first spark of that ageless resolve kindle in her heart.

With a sharp exhalation, she thrust her ornamental spear down through the cultivator's heart, and a fourth actress erupted up out of the marble beneath the fractured pillar.

The fourth actress wore the same costume as the deviated cultivator, with a few key differences. She wore a crown of thorns where the deviated cultivator wore a crown of leaves. Rather than mud, her Raging Heaven attire was stained by blood and the rancid juice of overripe fruit. And most notably, her theater mask was not set in a rictus of pain and betrayal, but one of demonic hate.

She clawed her way up out of the floor like some nightmare undead, ripping through the marble like it was wet-rotted wood. The pillar of the dying woman’s principle tilted dangerously as the heart demon forced its way free of the foundation, all but upending the principle on its way out.

The creature wasted no time on pleasantries, lunging at Selene with a shriek of pure hatred.

The half-dead cultivator tackled her out of the air before she could reach the young Saint, and the two mirror images rolled across the floor, ripping into each other like wild animals.

“I gave you everything!” the cultivator half-sobbed, half-screamed. “I worked harder than anyone on that mountain! I went without a thousand times while others were feasting, passed by a thousand opportunities and struggled through a thousand sleepless nights, all so I could feed you!”

The young woman rolled them until she was on top, straddling her heart demon, taking its head between her hands and slamming it down against the scarlet marble with all her waning strength.

“I sacrificed everything so you could grow!” Crack. “I gave you more than all the other pillars of my heart! More than all of them combined!” Crack. “And still it wasn’t enough!” Crack. “Why wasn’t it ever enough!?”

Half-dead and delirious, the heart demon still managed to get her own hands wrapped around her creator’s head.

“Because you promised me fruit,” the demon hissed, and stabbed her thumbs through the young woman’s eyes.

They screamed and screamed, the two of them, in hatred and in rage. They were so consumed with killing one another, neither one noticed the young slip of a girl creeping up on them. They certainly didn’t notice her spear.

“I was just barely prepared for the rigors of the Sophic Realm,” the unmasked Selene narrated while she crept up on the murderous twins. As before, despite speaking in the lowest tone possible, I heard her as clearly as if she had been whispering her lines into my ear. “I had no business matching myself against the heart demon of an experienced Philosopher’s heart demon. If she hadn’t flung herself into its path from the start, it would have killed me in an instant. It was luck that defined my journey that day.” 

She cast a wry look over her shoulder.

“Luck, or the careful consideration of the most careless man in the world.”

“I’m sure I have no idea what you mean,” spoke the Tyrant Riot.

“I’m sure you don’t.”

While Selene turned her attention away to banter, the heart demon was winning. It was part of the performance, I knew—a play-acting tactic to raise tension in the audience. Of course, knowing what she was up to didn’t stop my gut from clenching when the heart demon bit down on her counterpart’s throat and made to rip it out in one savage motion.

Then the demon jerked, stopped short by a wet, sucking sound. Her snarling mask stared down, and the deviated cultivator’s mask stared up, both of them in shock, at the spear jutting out of her chest.

“Whether by luck or by design, I prevailed that day, and took my first step into the realm of scholars and skeptics,” Selene said.

“Not yet you haven’t,” the Tyrant Riot chided her from across the stage, waving that empty golden cup like a whip. “I told you not to hesitate, girl. You know the work’s not done.”

Selene’s shoulders slumped, and with a whispered apology to the half-dead wreck of a woman moaning on the floor, Selene hoisted the demon up and over her shoulder, dangling it off the edge of her spear like a fisherman’s prized catch. Then, without looking back, she walked across the stage and kicked the leaning pillar fully from its foundation. It toppled over with a boom, and the cultivator let out her ugliest scream yet. Her voice gave out not long after, and she sagged against the stone like a puppet with its strings cut.

Selene crouched beside the toppled pillar, rocking it back and forth with some effort, and then, with a sharp inhalation, rolled it onto her palm and heaved it up onto her shoulder. She wobbled dangerously, on the verge of falling over the edge of the stage and into the sea of clouds, but the heart demon on her right shoulder was just barely able to balance out the weight of the pillar on her left shoulder.

Exhaling, she rose and walked back across the stage, stepping over the unconscious—or dead—body of the cultivator, approaching the couch that the Tyrant Riot lounged upon and waiting expectantly.

“Naturally, it isn’t enough to kill the little wretch,” the Tyrant Riot said, head tilting curiously, and idly flicked the demon mask. It fractured like glass—or more appropriately, like the pillar balanced on the Saint’s opposite shoulder.

“Doing so provides the cultivator a brief respite, but it isn’t as though the deviation has been addressed. The demon will simply come back. It’s what they do.

“There are easier ways to purge a heart, naturally. Proper ways. A sanctified woman can suppress the demon long enough for the cultivator to address the root of things themself. Depending on the circumstances, a seasoned oracle like my leathery old sea witch can even assist directly in the mending of a pillar. This is how a heart demon is meant to be purged.

 “Proper, grueling effort, put in by the incompetent who gave the demon life. It builds character.”

The Tyrant Riot held the golden cup out under the demon’s fractured skull, letting its tainted blood drip down into the chalice. The fracture was severe, and the cup didn’t take long to fill. The Tyrant Riot swirled the demon’s blood around the rim of the cup thoughtfully, raising it up to the portion of the mask where a nose should have been. Then, after a pensive moment, the Tyrant shrugged and knocked it back.

“Tragically, the right way wasn’t good enough for this girl,” the voice of the Tyrant went on. “Absurd little creature that she was—and is—she wanted all of the gain with none of the suffering it demanded. She wanted an instantaneous cure, and she wanted it for even the most undeserving of her visitors. And to that end, there was only one path forward that I could see.”

Selene walked past the lounging Tyrant and straight over the edge of the stage. I was halfway out of my seat before she appeared mid-stride on the other end of the platform, continuing on as though nothing had happened.

While I settled back down into my seat and swept my eyes across the stage, I realized that the broken body of the young woman had vanished, along with all of her blood and bile. The Tyrant Riot was still lounging at the far edge. And when Selene paused at a particular spot on the stage, the Tyrant tossed the golden cup at her head.

“Any time now.”

“If I couldn’t kill the demon in any way that mattered, and I couldn’t soothe the source the way a proper oracle could,” Selene explained, narrowly ducking the cup, “then it seemed clear to me that a third option would have to serve instead. In the end, I simply had to steal the source of the deviation itself.”

That said, she hefted the heart demon’s corpse off her shoulder and flicked it off her spear onto the marble floor. Abruptly—like the caught fish she’d treated it as—it flopped to life and lunged for the edge of the platform and the open sea of clouds beyond it.

With a sharp huff of effort, Selene heaved the fractured pillar off her shoulder and dropped it into place, crushing the heart demon underneath it.

There came a rush of meaning through the multicolored mists, then, and the scarlet clouds brightened like the rising sun as the actress on stage ascended to the first step of the Sophic Realm.

As she did, the vapors billowed and drew back, converging onto the stage and then parting to reveal the original platform, with all ten of its columns—the first of which jutted up proudly from the very same spot the unmasked actress had just planted it.

“Thus concludes the first of our young heroine’s many thefts,” Selene declared, bowing good-naturedly while Griffon whistled and I applauded.

“Now comes the first of our planned intermissions: a lesson, a brush with metaphysics, and a short demonstration for the crowd.” She winked. “Before we begin, does anyone in the audience have a question?”

Griffin raised his unbroken arm.

“Where am I meant to piss in this place?”

“On yourself,” Selene responded pleasantly, and began the intermission.

[2.14] The Prerequisite to Providence

Sol,

The Raven From Rome

"You've seen it for yourself now," Selene spoke up from the central dais. She smiled. "Though you'll need context to make any sense of the why that stands before you."

The Saint of Scarlet Hearts waved her hands invitingly, urging us back to the saltwater pool her tripod sat inside. Griffon and I shared a glance.

"We're filthy," I said, reluctant to make an even greater mess of the place.

"Some more so than others," Griffon said, eyeing the soiled chiton that I’d used as a rag with disgust. I slapped the broken bone jutting out of his arm, returning to the center of the platform while he cursed my city, my bloodline, and the dog I’d raised when I was child.

I sat at the edge of the pool and let the salt-water cleanse my feet. Griffon joined me a moment later, choosing the spot to my right so he could elbow me with his unbroken arm.

Selene waited patiently for us to gather our thoughts, smiling faintly at our back and forth. She had always been a living contradiction, since the day that I had met her on that indigo pavilion beneath the Storm That Never Ceased – simultaneously wise beyond her years and as childish as a girl could be. She was on the cusp of the rest of her life, eager to see all the wonders of the world, desperate to experience all the joys and the tragedies, great and small, that she had been denied by her father. That portion of the girl was all too similar to her brother. I had seen that side of her more and more as time went on—in the days she kept me company in the Tyrant Riot's underground estate, and during the weeks that we’d spent questing for a golden cup of wine.

But it was in these moments that I saw the other side of things—the woman that she had risen up to be, far before her time. There was a steadiness to her, seated on that tripod, a certainty in her soul. The girl who had stammered and huffed her way through the first repetitions of the combat training that Griffon and I had promised her was nowhere to be seen now. Griffon could have threatened to tear the pillars of her principles down and cast them over the edge right then and there, and I had a feeling she wouldn't have blinked. Neither would she have allowed either of us to lay our hands on anything that could make a mess of her cultivation. She was in full control of her heart.

It was that certainty more than anything else that quelled the worst of my concerns. Griffon was still furious—insulted on a personal level, and viciously defensive of a familial bond that was still newborn and fragile to him. But he kept his silence for the time being, kicking his feet idly in the pool and considering her honeycomb tripod with a frown.

"I promised you both the why not, in the absence of the how," Selene began. She gestured once more all around her, to the pillars of her principles. "Behold, the why not. These pillars that you’ve turned your noses up at in disgust," she said with amusement, "are the best example I can provide as to why I cannot tell you what comes next in the fourth step of your journey through the Sophic Realm. But that won’t make any sense without the proper context.

“First, you have to understand how I came to be this way. You’ll have to retrace the steps I took myself.”

Griffon tensed up beside me, leaning forward, and a moment later the tripod began to buzz beneath the Saint of Scarlet Hearts. From the ink-black darkness of the myriad honeycombs, smoke and vapor began to seep out into the open air. Every cone seemed to belch a different color of smoke, until the pavilion was swallowed up end-to-end by a riotous light show of smog.

I held my breath, uncomfortably reminded of a night I had suffered through a lifetime ago as a young man, caught out in the boglands of northernmost Britannia—naked and afraid, and higher than any upright son of Rome had any reason to be. I’d been out of my mind, then, under the influence of a bowl of mushrooms that my fellow soldier from Gaul had promised me were a Black Forest delicacy.

“Trust,” Selene repeated softly, and I reluctantly inhaled the vapors.

At once, the mountain range hanging above my head began to spin, and the saltwater pool started to bubble and churn around my ankles. It was a relief when the mist got thick enough to block out the sight of the mountains entirely — it settled my stomach and allowed me to ignore the fact that they looked like they were falling.

The buzzing grew louder, and Griffon lashed out with his unbroken hand, plucking a wriggling shadow out of the smog. I leaned over, and we both peered down at the struggling honeybee caught between his fingers.

“This part may hurt,” Selene said soothingly. “But I have faith in my ancient brother and the revenant’s ability to endure it.” Then, without a hint of duplicity or humor, she motioned like she was pinching a bee out of the air and jabbing her arm with its stinger.

Griffon rolled his eyes and, without looking, jabbed the bee’s stinger into my neck.

I made it halfway through the motion of dunking his head into the saltwater before the venom met the vapor somewhere inside my soul, and melted together to form a far more esoteric poison.

I blinked… and found myself looking at a girl with sunkissed skin and lively scarlet eyes, no older than ten, if even that.

I squinted, wondering why the girl looked so familiar.

“The Civic Realm,” Selene said, with a younger voice to match her younger frame. Yet that ageless certainty was still there, marking her as she was. “The first stage of refinement, or as some call it, the prerequisite to providence. The first step, and no step at all, depending on who you ask. This is the phase of a cultivator’s life that defines their struggle, but it must be said that the obstacles involved aren’t quite as… spectacular as what follows in the higher realms.”

The young girl reached through the mist and pulled from it a cup of kykeon. She took a sip and then let it go. It hung there, suspended as if on strings, while she reached out again to pull an olive from the miasma.

She went on like this for a while, explaining between bites and sips. “The consensus on the Civic Realm—if there can be any consensus at all—is that it is the time for preparation. Natural treasures are thought to have their greatest impacts on a cultivator’s development if consumed and internalized during their formative years. Habits, both good and bad, are ingrained deepest in this stage of life. It is in some ways the least important stage of a cultivator’s development, and in others… well, there aren’t many races where it hurts to have a running start.”

When she finally stopped reaching for treasures, there were hundreds of them gathered around her, a cloud of riches nearly as thick as the vapors themselves. Enriched food and drink, precious herbs, and priceless powders—bounties that I only recognized from my time abroad on campaign, and many more that I couldn’t even begin to guess at.

“There are other considerations as well—far more, if you have the good fortune to be born into a wealthy household. For example!”

The young girl hopped to her feet, balancing on the tripod and flourishing her arms. “We exist both body and soul, and thus even a sedentary existence like an Oracle’s daughter must properly temper her body if she is to have any hope of advancement.”

Balancing elegantly on the tips of her toes, the girl began to glide through the liquid choreography of a dance routine. The scarlet vestments of her station had not shrunk down to match her smaller stature, but she danced so smoothly that the voluminous silks weren’t any hindrance at all.

“Despite what you might think, violence is not a requirement for a cultivator to progress,” Selene said with careful consideration, not looking at either of us while she said it. “Exercise is a universal good, and far less demanding than the martial path. The more strenuous the tempering early on, the better the foundation in the end.

“I would have spent my youth swimming if it had been up to me, but my father didn’t trust the other Raging Heaven mystikos outside of his domain, and the pools were so rarely empty. So instead, I tempered my body through dancing.”

The young girl paused in the middle of a dizzying heelspin, glancing sidelong at us and grinning impishly.

“It wasn’t as thorough a tempering as some of the more barbaric methods, admittedly. But you might be surprised by the strength and flexibility required to meet Donna’s exacting standards. If nothing else, I honed my reflexes to a keen edge while avoiding her sandal.”

The girl settled gracefully back into her seat, inhaling and exhaling steadily.

“The other primary consideration, for those fortunate enough to be concerned with such things, is the development of a proper pneumatic scripture.”

Selene inhaled at a precise cadence, measured and slow, and the many-colored mists began to swirl around her, mimicking the motion going on inside her body. It was a visual display entirely at odds with the ever-turning, ever-burning wheel that Griffon and I had internalized during our trip to the Orphic House. The Hunting Bird’s Breath wasn’t any closer a comparison either. 

This was a smoother thread—not in the sense that the other two were less refined, at least as far as I could tell, but more in the progression of it, the movement of the pneuma through her channels.

The Hunting Bird’s Breath was a breathing technique that caught and stored pneuma within the hollowed-out bones that gave the scripture its name. It sat there, and it waited, under pressure as the user gathered more and more and more, until it became an impossible thing to contain—and was released, in a single explosive outburst of vital energy and devastating force. 

On the other hand, the wheel was a constant, grinding agony. Its benefits were meted out alongside that agony in equal proportion. It was a steady technique, but I couldn’t say that any part of it was smooth.

Compared to those two, the rhythm of Selene’s breathing technique – her pneumatic scripture – was almost hypnotic to watch, whirling round and round through the vapor currents. After watching the completed circuit a few times without any further input from Selene, I caught the pattern she was trying to show us. The motion of the completed circuit was a perfect match to the dancing forms she had just performed atop the tripod.

“Which came first?” Griffon asked. “The breathing technique, or the choreography?”

I couldn’t see him by my side—the vapor was too thick—and a part of me wondered why that was, when the space between Selene I was so clear by comparison. The more I thought about it, the louder the tripod’s buzzing grew, so I set the thought aside for the time being.

Selene smiled, pleased. “Good question. In my case, the choreography came first. When I found out how much easier it would have been to learn those steps with prior knowledge of the accompanying breathing technique, I was very cross with Donna. But Bakkhos told me it was for the best that I’d done things in that order. Learning the proper steps ahead of time gave me a better understanding of why I had to breathe the way that I had to breathe. And that was a far more valuable instinct to have than the reverse.”

“And you’re certain that wasn’t another one of his passing humors?” Griffon asked, and I didn’t need to see him to see the scowl on his face.

Her smile widened. “If you had known the two of them, you would understand how extraordinary it was for Bakkhos to speak up in defense of any decision she made. The fact that he didn’t immediately feed the flame of my irritation with her is all the proof I need that he was telling the truth. And knowing what I do now, I can see the logic behind it for myself.”

“Ho?”

“If you were forced to choose between, say, a sublime body tempering technique, and total mastery of a pneumatic scripture, you would be better off picking the scripture ninety-nine times out of a hundred. Maybe more. We exist both body and soul, and a well-matched breathing technique nourishes both. Though well-matched is the key to remember.

“There are as many pneumatic scriptures as there are blades of grass upon this earth, and each one has its high points and its lows. It isn’t a mistake that the best of these are passed down from father-to-son and mother-to-daughter, hand-in-hand with the family’s mystery arts. In a way, a proper breathing technique is its own lesser prerequisite for future advancement. Some scriptures can’t be cultivated at all without a compatible breathing technique. Others are rendered half as effective, even with twice the effort devoted to mastering them.

“Such a thing closes as many doors as it opens. That’s why it’s so important to carve the channels best suited to your goals.”

“How can you tell?” I asked intently. “Which doors it opens, and which it will close?” I traced the passage of the vapor through that burning channel inside my soul, the wheel and all ten of its spokes.

Selene’s answer was swift, if sympathetic. “The only sure sign is the source. If you have no one to guide you, the method used to require it is the surest place to start.”

I thought back to the two formative events that carved that wheel out of my guts. The starlight marrow and the mad-honey milk. The raven, and the ever-turning, ever-burning wheel.

“What next?” I asked, resigned. What’s done is done. I’d tear that wheel out by hand, offal and all, if it became an obstacle in my future.

Selene hummed, rocking back and forth on the tripod. “Perhaps a thousand other things, and perhaps none. The scholars of the Free Mediterranean are hopelessly divided on the topic of a proper progression through the Civic Realm. The Broad was more interested in defining the realms that came after, and that left the matter of the Civic Realm to the squabbling of lesser sophists. They haven’t made much headway in the centuries since. Or, at least that was the case amongst the sophists Bakkhos allowed on his mountain.”

The girl shrugged, the motion swallowed up by her oversized silks.

“In the end, this was how I prepared for my advancement to the Sophic Realm,” she said, tracing a circle in the air to encompass the lingering currents of her pneumatic scripture, the echo of her body-tempering routine, and the refining treasures that still hung in the air around her.

Then she snapped her fingers, and all of it vanished—replaced by a single bee. It bumbled through the air, landing clumsily on the tip of her outstretched finger and settling down as if to sleep.

She curled her finger back slowly and ran her thumb gently across its fuzzy thorax.

“Advancing to the Sophic Realm requires the internalization of an ideal. The first thought worth having, as the Broad so famously put it. My father likened it to striking a spark, the first of many needed to catch and light a Hero’s heart flame. 

She smiled wryly. “Bakkhos called it the first sip, but I think that was more a mockery of my father than it was any true belief of his. Still, no matter what you call it, the underlying truth is this: a cultivator’s first step into the Realm of Philosophers is an act of creation, the construction of a load-bearing column inside your soul. It’s the establishment of an ideal.

“You could ask a thousand philosophers if this was the case for them when they took that first step, and all of them would have the same answer. You could ask a thousand-thousand, and it would still hold true.

“But if you asked me…”

Selene smiled sadly down at the docile bumblebee resting between her forefinger and thumb. Then, so suddenly that the bee didn’t even have time to struggle, she pinched her fingertips together and crushed it.

“My ascension to the Sophic Realm,” she said softly, “was not the striking of a spark. It was not an act of creation at all. It was a burial. The first of many to come.”

The vision of a girl lifted scarlet burning eyes to meet mine.

“Every single one of the pillars you see before you belonged to another cultivator before they belonged to me. And all of them but one were stolen at the tip of my spear.”

[2.13] This Kills Heart Demons

Sol,

The Raven From Rome

Griffin had already moved past the second column and on to the third by the time I pried myself away from this first flawed ideal.

The scarlet marble of Selene’s soul was cool beneath my feet, free of any imperfections. No matter how much I tried to set the thought aside and focus on the actual lesson she was trying to teach me, I found myself comparing the pillar to the pure foundation and finding it lacking. It had no place here. It wouldn’t do her any good in the future, even I could tell that much.

So why was it here? Why had she been made to internalize such a flawed principle?

The second column was carved from onyx, the murals decorating its surface shimmering with a nearly liquid sheen. This column was much like the first in its composition, despite coming from a different source entirely. It had the same central band, the same scattered etchings of self-contained moments.

These little murals were more than twice as small as the ones carved into the first pillar. That central band—running all the way around—was the same size, but all the other murals were minuscule in comparison. Was it because the hands that carved them knew exactly how many they intended to squeeze into this pillar? Somehow, I doubted it.

Carved into the crown of the second pillar were the words φιλοσόφου πνεῦμα — The Philosopher’s Spirit. And once again at the base of the pillar, the onyx ideal:

[A wise man rides the wave.]

The little moments carved into this pillar were even more scattered and disconnected than the ones from the first. Those had been a confusing mess, but an overarching theme of nourishment had eventually suggested itself, hinted at by the story of the central band. Here, the harder I tried to find a thread that bound them all together, the more my head began to throb.

There were plenty of connections to be made, of course, but never one that united them all. I saw chiseled silhouettes of a man going about a thousand different tasks, pursuing a thousand different things. But the only thing that connected them all was their lack of connection to each other.

Following the central band around the pillar, I supposed it made sense. The story of this sophist’s ideal begins with a man beset by rivers and seas. The borders above and below are slow-moving currents. He ignores them, toiling away at the construction of a workshop.

In the next frame further along the band, the man is fully submerged in his work. The workshop has been built, and now he has turned all of his considerable enthusiasm towards his work. His workshop is filled to the brim with caged beasts, exotic pockets of nature harvested for his study, and piles upon piles of reference material: clay tablets, delicate sheafs of paper and rolls of papyrus, schematics drawn by his own hand, notes jotted down in their thousands.

There is a central design that begins to emerge as I progress further around the pillar. I watch him work with undiminished enthusiasm. I watched him suffer the setbacks inherent to all pursuits of this kind, stone walls of flawed reasoning that he can’t possibly break through, only go up and over or around. Yet through it all, the man radiated vitality. I could feel that rare thrill of creation, of breaking through, of discovering something monumental. I could practically see it seeping out of the stone.

And yet, as I made my way around the pillar, I saw the tide coming in.

At first, it was only a trickle, easily ignored by a man fully absorbed in his great work. Then it became a stream, flowing through the man's workshop and threatening to carry away his efforts with it.

In a frozen frame, the man diverted only just enough of his attention from his work to gather up the most important materials he still needed off the floor, so that the stream couldn’t carry them away. The failed attempts, ancillary notes, and all the references that he had so painstakingly gathered, were soaked through and carried away while he closed in on the breakthrough of his life.

In the next frame, the stream had turned into a torrent. The live specimens the man had captured were drowned in their cages. The current ran rapid through the workshop. The man was scrambling now, forced to step away from his work so he could salvage as much material as possible. Try to stem the flow. The workshop was still standing, if only just.

The twisted lines of chipped stone on the man’s face managed to convey a sense of shock—as if to say, after all this time, he had only just now realized the current was shifting at all.

The next frame showed the man reaching back for his great work, only to have it swept away by the raging river. His arms were full of a dozen different bits and bobs that had seemed crucial before, but now were all but worthless in comparison. The walls had come down. The ceiling had long since been carried away. The water was chest height.

In the next frame, the man was drowning.

His great work glittered at the bottom of the river. But it was too far for him to reach. Wasn’t it?

Above his head, the underside of a small ship could be seen gliding within his reach. The man was caught between the two, unwilling to decide.

The final frame showed the man racing along the current, riding that little ship to safety. He mourns the loss of his great work, yet he leans eagerly over the rail, exhilarated by the possibilities he could see on the horizon—just around the corner of the pillar.

I completed the circle and stared again at that first frame: a man filled with the passion of creation. Then I glanced back, to the abandoned work that had been positioned just so, so that the viewer might see it vanishing around the bend of the column, if they knew what they were looking for. Discarded at the precipice of completion, in pursuit of this new wonder, so that the new wonder could be abandoned in the pursuit of another one, further ‘round the bend.

[The wise man rides the wave.]

I felt a sneer twist my lip.

Further off, Griffin spat over the edge of the platform in disgust, stalking away from the third column and moving on to the fourth. 

We were of the same mind, then. These pillars weren’t just the product of other people. That would have been alarming enough, but this was far worse.

These principles weren’t worthy of a heroine.

The third pillar followed the trend of the first two. Its crown named it ‘The Philosopher’s Hunger’. The base revealed it to be an even more wretched ideal than the two that came before it. The next five were little better.

The hero’s reason, spirit, and hunger weren’t any more impressive than the philosopher’s. The tyrant’s, if anything, were even less.

“This is a disgrace,” Griffon said.

He turned away from the ninth pillar just as I was stepping back from the eighth.

“A tyrant for a father. A tyrant for a mentor. Eight wise women and a gadfly buzzing in your ear, and this is what they made of you. The full bounty of the Free Mediterranean at their fingertips, and this is what they gave you.”

His expression was thunderous - here, inside the heart, at least. Out in the waking world, he was smacking at my shoulder insistently, demanding I take out my lyre and play a tune for him to sing along to. The contrast would have been worth commenting on, if I wasn’t so disgusted.

I approached the ninth pillar with some dread. This would be the last of the tyrant’s set: The Tyrant’s Hunger.

The column was a squat, ugly thing, carved from slate by clumsy hands. The label on the crown was chiseled out in a jagged, sloppy script.

Wrapped around the pillar, the central band told the story. 

A child slept soundly in his young mother’s arms. 

The child woke up to an empty bed of roses. 

The child ran frantically through the woods in search of his mother. The child became an adolescent, scouring the countryside in search of his mother. The adolescent had become a young man by the time he finally found his mother, buried in an unmarked grave—her bones broken up and ravaged by the roots of a withered old vine.

The young man dug deeper, unearthing another woman’s bones beneath his mother’s. And another. And another. The young man tore the vine out from the earth length-by-length, thorn-by-thorn. He tore trenches from the earth large enough to bury cities in, dug up the corpses of a thousand young mothers.

In the final frame of the cycle, the young man burned the vine and salted the ashes that remained.

My eyes slid grimly over the myriad disconnected murals outside the central band. They were all of them cruelties. I knew the name of this pillar in my gut, but I looked anyway.

[Root and stem.]

I grit my teeth and turned away from it.

Selene sat upon her honeycomb tripod, unphased by her brother’s outraged interrogation. She met my eyes over the top of his head and nodded toward the tenth and final pillar—the one that Griffon had skipped.

It was the ugliest of them all.

I couldn’t even guess what sort of stone it had been chiseled from, because from crown to base, the miserable thing was covered in an opaque crust of dried blood and offal. I paced a circle around it and couldn’t find a single clear spot.

I took the heel of my palm and dragged it across the crown. It did nothing but stain my skin. Resigning myself to it, I dug my nails into the muck instead, peeling finger-thick strips of unspeakable rot and grime away from the pillar of her soul. With a sinking feeling, I realized I hadn’t felt any stone beneath my nails.

I pulled more and more of it away, clawing through the grime until I began to suspect there was nothing of substance beneath the grime at all. The tenth pillar of Selene’s heart, the consolidating colonnade, last to come and most important, wasn’t even made of stone.

At some point, Griffin noticed my efforts. His eyes widened in disbelief at the vile effluvia trapped under my fingernails and piled up on the scarlet marble at my feet. It was enough to stop him mid-rant and draw him back across the platform.

Irony of ironies, the more livid he became in here, the more boisterous he grew out there. He’d woken the men up with his singing a while back, and now his shanty reached a fever pitch. My body dutifully strummed away at my ivory lyre, and I saw more than one skiff paddling our way across the Nile. Plastered to the peak of Olympus Mons and back, the fool somehow never missed a note. His voice was as sweet as it had ever been—maybe even a bit better than usual.

Inside the Total Eclipse of the Heart, his disgust and his outrage gave way to something far more murderous as he joined me, scraping fistfuls of waste away from his sister’s tenth pillar with both hands.

“The audacity of these fucking dogs,” he said quietly, almost to himself. His eyes were distant now. His tone was measured.

He pulled another rotten chunk of rot away from the crust and crushed it in his fist.

“They say the Tyrant Riot loved a good joke. Do you think he laughed about this one, Sol?”

“Maybe,” I said grimly, scraping deeper and deeper through. I’d reach the other end of it soon. At this rate, perhaps the whole thing would collapse. Maybe that would harm her. But she wasn’t telling either of us to stop—just watching us from atop her honeycomb tripod. Waiting patiently for us to learn our lesson.

“Do you think he’ll be laughing when I find him down in Tartarus?” Griffin asked me, conversationally now. “After I’ve turned him inside out and drowned him in the Styx?”

I hummed, a considering sound. “You know, he might.”

It exploded out of him then—a hateful, feral sound—and he drove his arm through the center of the pillar with all his strength.

I turned my head and raised a hand to block the explosion of grime that followed, but instead of that explosion, all I heard was a muffled thump, and then the sharp snap of fracturing bone. We both froze, looking first at each other, then back at the pillar.

More confused than hurt, Griffin jerked his arm out of the muck and twisted it back and forth to observe the bone that had broken and punched through the skin. The wound was caked in all manner of vile filth, maybe even enough to infect a constitution as robust as his. Assuming any of this translated to the waking world.

“There’s something in the center,” he said, puzzled. “It’s sturdier than stone.”

That was all that needed to be said.

With three arms between us, we peeled the filth away one layer at a time, working our way up and down the pillar until the waste was piled to our ankles. Up to our shins. Until finally, we reached the pillar.

And stared, silently, at its glittering surface.

Sapphire, ruby, amethyst, and gold. All of them. None of them. Brighter than all the precious gems of the earth combined, stronger than any man-made metal.

The tenth pillar, the consolidating column, was carved from unbreakable adamant.

I fell to one knee and scraped away the last of the muck around the base, probing with my fingers until I found the principle. It was rougher than it should have been. When I cleared the grime away, I saw that the plaque had been ground down and shaved away.

Whatever had been written there once was gone now.

A new label had been written in its place, with veins of glowing amethyst:

[This kills heart demons.]

[2.12] From the Vine

Sol,

The Raven From Rome

It was a nostalgic feeling, marching outside myself again.

Selene had been right to assume that gravitas would allow me to function within the boundaries of her soul. She had been right, right enough that it made me wonder. What else did she suspect about the captain’s virtue? It wasn’t a connection the average cultivator would make. It wasn’t even a connection the average heroine could be expected to draw between the flashier applications of gravitas and its underlying mechanisms.

It was a nostalgic feeling because I hadn’t shown myself to be capable of it in all the time I had known Selene, or Griffon for that matter. It had been more than three years since my soul last walked outside the boundaries of my body. Three years since Gaius died.

On the surface of it, it was nothing more than a platitude to say that a Captain carried the weight of all the men that served beneath him. Of course the captain didn’t physically march with three thousand men piled up on his shoulders in a mountain of arms, armor, muscle and meat - as much as Griffon might have found that an amusing picture. Yet even so, it was the case that the Captain carried his men with him wherever he went.

I had never been the sort of scholar that would try to break it down to actual ratios, but I knew what I needed to—for every man, every true Roman that served beneath me and swore the sacrament to me as their Captain, I took a portion of their soul with me wherever I went.

It was not a painful schism. In fact, most legionaries never noticed the separation at all—at least, that’s how my adopted father had explained it to me. In hindsight, I wondered if the men of the Fifth Legion had felt it from the very beginning, when they swore themselves to me. Felt that portion of their souls trapped outside of themselves—tethered to an incompetent child, forced to buoy him up, when the opposite should have been the case.

Done right, I knew the process was painless. I had observed it from the soldier’s side of things. At fourteen, Gaius had brought me into the fold of his legions, and until the day he died three years later, a portion of my soul had marched alongside the Tyrant of the West, no matter how far my body strayed from his in the theater of war.

It was one of the most understated uses of the Captain’s virtue, and not by mistake. Gaius had warned me never to speak of it, not even to my fellow officers. I had never truly understood why, until the moment I recruited the new men of the Fifth Legion and held their hearts’ blood in my hands.

In my time as a soldier in his legions, Gaius had been a pillar, an unshakable support for the portion of my soul that marched in his wake. He had been a beacon of light and an impenetrable shroud both, a shield against all but the most devastating spiritual attacks.

It was impractical to the point of foolishness for a captain to carry his troops with him physically every second of every day. But with gravitas, the same didn’t hold true for their souls.

Flexing that old, forgotten muscle and forcing my soul to march while my body hung back took only a moment’s effort. It was strange, doing this without any captain or general to anchor my soul. It felt aimless—dangerous, in a way I couldn’t quite explain. But it was a familiar motion all the same.

“What do you make of it?” Griffin asked in a low voice, kneeling beside me to observe the first of Selene’s pillars. Carefully, he traced a line of chiseled artistry with the tips of his fingers—more carefully than he would have prodded at a lion’s teeth. He frowned.

“Make of what?”

“The pillar. The engraving. The material. All of it. This place makes no sense at all.” His scarlet eyes flickered my way. “Why are you glaring at me?”

I stared flatly, my spirit to his, while my body massaged its temples and tried to block out the boisterous shanty that Griffon’s drunken body was belting out for all the Nile to hear.

Selene had been right about my virtue. She had been right about the Tyrant Riot’s method, too. Unfortunately, intoxication had worked too well. The mermaid ichor hadn’t loosened up the tether that connected Griffon’s soul to his body–it had severed it entirely.

Unless the smug cock was only pretending not to notice the things his body was getting up to while he calmly investigated the Total Eclipse of the Heart. Which was possible. But assuming that wasn’t the case, he had been all but fully severed. The soul was blind to the body, for as long as we resided here within the confines of his sister’s soul.

I sighed and turned back to the pillar.

“It’s nothing. As for this… I haven’t seen anything like it, but that doesn’t mean much. There has to be some thread that connects it all. She didn’t bring us here just to tell us that Greek cultivation makes no sense. There’s a lesson to be learned here.”

Griffin muttered some grudging agreement, moving on to the next column. I hung back, observing the first pillar for a few moments longer.

It was chiseled from limestone, tattooed top-to-bottom by carved iconography and what looked for all intents and purposes to be the daily life of a young woman. Mundane little murals covered every handspan of the column’s surface, senseless in their composition, underwhelming in their scenes. The moments depicted were so varied that I struggled, at first, to draw any clear connection between them all.

Here, a young woman picking apples from a tree.There, the same woman running naked across a stadium’s sand pit. Over that way, sitting with an open scroll of papyrus on her lap and a stack of several more beside her. Simple moments, drawn from a simple life. Varied and scattered as they were, they were all roughly the same size, as though the owner had known from the start exactly how many moments she planned to carve into the column. Or, as though they had shrunk to make room each time a new one was added.

The only portion of the myriad scenes that stood out from the rest was a small string of iconography cutting through the middle of the pillar, wrapping around the full circumference in an unbroken ring. The frame outlining it was a sculptor’s approximation of creeping grapevines.

A circular moment wound its way infinitely around the column.

A young woman tended to a withered vine in the earth.

The wretched little plant was hardly strong enough to breach the surface of the loam. Its leaves were all shriveled, split from its stem—dead before they could truly live—forming a carpet of decay on the earth around it.

A continuation of that scene presented itself further along the ring.

The young woman was on her hands and knees, toiling at the earth. Jugs, pouches, and baskets surrounded her, filled with fertilizing bounties. There were enough agricultural treasures there to nurture an entire field of crops, but she was spending them all on that pitiful little plant.

It looked stronger now than it had in the first frame. Not quite healthy, but visibly recovering. It had grown a bit taller, sprouted a few new leaves, and the bud of a single flower at the end of the vine tickled the young woman’s nose while she worked. Almost like it was reaching out to thank her.

Further along, far enough now that I had to lean right to see it, the young woman swung a heavy axe at the base of a tree. She was surrounded by fallen logs, in the middle of clearing a wide circle in the woods. In the center of that circle was the vine.

The hands that chiseled the column had managed to suggest sunbeams with the finest little lines. The vine was proud and upright now, basking in the light the young woman had cleared for it. Nestled amongst its blooming flowers was a single fruitful nub. Nothing but a promise for now.

I had to move now, circling around the column to observe the next scene in the cycle.

The young woman had not let the fallen trees go to waste. Instead, she had made a mighty trellis of them all—a towering latticework that supported the vine and allowed it to grow taller than it ever could have on its own. The vine was an astonishing sight now.

It had made full use of the artificial frame and the treasures packed into its soil, growing far beyond its natural limits. It towered above the young woman now—glorious, thriving, the full flourishing product of her efforts.

It reached down to her now, as she had once reached down to it before, laying a crown of leaves upon her head.

The young woman was beaming.

I circled further around, and found the young woman toiling again.

It was nothing but lines carved out of stone, but I could feel it. There was an edge of desperation to her efforts now, a panic that had not been there before.

She was surrounded by ten times as many jugs, pouches, and baskets of fertilizing treasures as the earlier frame, but these were all empty. Most had been overturned. A few of the clay jugs had been shattered and scraped clean of their contents. There were broken axes scattered around her, too. Their edges were chipped and dulled by repeated use, their hafts fractured by the desperate force she’d swung them with.

Blood dripped from the young woman’s overworked fingers. And yet, she carried on.

The vine was a truly monstrous creature now. The latticework was taller than a free-city’s walls, and expanded outward in every direction, reaching, as if with hunger, toward the distant silhouettes of forests on the horizon. As though it was not the beneficiary of the young woman’s toiling, but rather a beast all its own, one that could swallow up that distant life whole.

The sun was gone again, smothered by a canopy of vines. Flowers and thorns covered the surface of it like bristling armor, or a monster’s thick hide. The undeveloped nubs had grown into fat, juicy fruit that clustered thickly on the vine. But they were too far to reach, propped up by the latticework frame out of the reach of mortal creatures.

The young woman eyed one of them wantonly while she worked.

I shifted around the column.

The young woman had run out of trees to expand the trellis with. She had run out of fertilizing treasures to nourish the earth with. She was surrounded by a labyrinth of overburdened wood-framing, and all of it was breaking beneath the weight of the vine.

It was clear to see that the ravenous plant had grown beyond the young woman’s capacity to nurture it. Perhaps even beyond the earth’s ability to sustain it.

It was a wilted, dying thing now, and the young woman knew it.

Hair-thin tear tracks had been chiseled down her cheeks. But not all of her efforts had been in vain, it seemed. Even as she wept, she reached up to accept the offering of a single withered tendril. There was a fruit there, weighing it down like an anchor, fat and overripe. The woman’s bleeding fingertips were just barely brushing its bulging surface.

The still frame was frozen there.

She did not even notice the thorny tendrils creeping up behind her, slithering across the trellis like serpents, reaching for the back of her neck.

I followed the curve of the column.

The young woman screamed silently through the stone.

The vine was tearing her apart, ripping into her with its thorn-fangs and dragging her beneath the earth to nourish its roots. That rancid, overripe fruit continued to dangle, unplucked and overripe, far past its prime.

The next frame was the final one.

There was no way of telling how long the young woman had kept the vine alive after her death. Perhaps its starving greed had been as pointless as her toiling, and no time had passed at all. Either way, the vine was all but dead now.

The vast, looming skeleton of latticework frames had collapsed in on itself. The dead wood rotted alongside the vine. The fruits went uneaten, and in the end, they found little purchase in the long-depleted soil.

The plant curled in on itself—not so much a towering beast now, but a colossal insect, trapped in honey and left to cook beneath the merciless sun.

I returned to where I had started, and looked upon a young woman kneeling over a withered wretch of a vine. It was surrounded by robust, towering trees that blocked out the sun with their canopies. A crown of dead leaves decorated the earth around the vine.

The young woman began her toils.

The plant began to mend.

She couldn’t see what the vine used to be, or what it would become as a result of her efforts. She could not step outside her world of chiseled limestone to observe it from an outside perspective, as I did now. She could not see that her story—framed above and below by bands of creeping vines—was already written.

She could not see that in the frame just before this one, and in the frame soon to come, those bands above and below her, the borders that defined her world, were the very same root and stem she had cultivated so diligently with her treasures, her labors, and, in the end, her life. She’s already trapped, but she doesn’t know it. And so, she cherishes her wretched little vine and dreams of a future filled with fruit.

I lean back from the column, scowling.

This cyclical band in the middle of the column is the only one with any coherent progression to it. The rest are all self-contained moments, cleaving to the same theme, perhaps, but thinking nothing of one another beyond that. A chaotic mess of a pillar. Almost nauseating to look upon as a singular piece.

At the top of the column, carved into the load-bearing crown, are the words φιλοσόφου λόγος — The Philosopher’s Reason. And at the bottom, carved into the base, is the young woman’s principle:

[A well-kept vine can only thrive.]

[2.11] A Total Eclipse of the Heart

Griffon,

The Risen Flame

Sol’s eyes shut, his chin dipping down to his chest. His shoulders shifted all but imperceptibly, moved by a sigh that the Roman did his best to stifle. It was the reaction of a man that was all too used to being disappointed by his mentors, a man that was far too considerate of them in spite of that. As the student of a mentor, he held his tongue.

As the brother of a sister, I did no such thing.

“Haaa!” My sigh was explosive. The crack of my skull against the mast as I flung myself back in disgust, sharp as a knife. The flourish of my hand as I pressed my arm against my eyes — admittedly a bit dramatic.

“To think I haggled on your behalf,” I lamented. “To think you let me!”

“Griffon,” Sol sighed, too defeated to properly rebuke me.

“The shamelessness of it, to accept my brother’s gold with a smile when that’s all you had to say! Even a brother can only take so much from his sister—even I!”

“Would you like to know why?”

I lifted my bicep and peered up at my little sister’s face. She wasn’t as flustered as I had expected her to be. In fact, she wasn’t bothered at all. She was still sitting there on the edge of the crow’s nest, hands folded one over the other in her lap, with a patient smile on her lips.

I straightened and sat back up in interest. Sol raised his head, watching her intently.

“I can’t tell either of you what you must do, because I don’t know,” the daughter of the Oracle said with sympathy—but not, I noted, a hint of apology. “But I can tell you why I don’t know. If you trust me enough to listen.”

Her heartbeat was steady, and though there was some sadness there—and some worry—there was no shame. My ribbing hadn’t flustered her because this was something she believed she couldn’t know.

“You don’t have to ask for our trust,” Sol told her without hesitation. “You already have it.”

I hummed in agreement. “We know your word is good.”

“Thank you,” she said softly. “But that isn’t quite what I meant.”

The scarlet heart-flame behind her eyes flared, and in one swift motion she pulled the Oracle’s ceremonial spear from a fold in her silks and spun it around with two hands to point the tip at her own heart.

Blood-stained hands of my intent seized her in a dozen places up and down her arms, folded themselves protectively over her heart, and pressed the spearhead back while Sol and I lunged toward her.

She stopped us both with a single look. I had never seen its like before. It was too old for the rest of her, unsuited to her face. Too heavy for her heart to have produced it on its own, it seemed.

“Do you trust me?” she asked again, though this time the question was mine alone to answer.

One by one, I forced the blood-stained hands of my pneuma to pull away. Some of them refused to budge and had to be broken by the more obedient manifestations of my violent intent. The last one, cupped over her chest—directly over her heart—was broken in all 27 places that a hand could be broken, until Sol finally grabbed it himself and pulled it back.

“Of course I do, sister,” I said, swallowing down my bile.

The joy that radiated from her heart felt like a betrayal.

“Thank you, brother,” she said, and stabbed herself in the heart.

Something lurched inside me. The world changed in the blink of an eye. The sensation started in my gut. The Nile fell away—like a fist—no, it gave way—wrapped around my intestines—no, it had always been this way—clenching—no, it had never been there at all—twisting—no, it was still there now—

I opened my eyes.

I was kneeling—on the ship’s mast—in the shallow basin of a fountain filled with saltwater. Above me—on the lip of the crow’s nest—on a tripod carved from honeycomb, sat a woman I had known by many names, and who had been known to the world by many more than that.

I knew her as the daughter of the Scarlet Oracle, as the girl, as the heir to Polyzalus, as the heroine, as my junior, as my sister, as Selene.

My stomach roiled.

There were other names that I had never known her by, that I had always known her by, that I would inevitably know her by. Dear heart. Little bee. Honeydrop. Saving grace of Burning Dusk. Young blood. Daughter of Destiny. Mother of Mercy. Names that made no sense, names that could never apply, names that I could not deny.

I had known her—wrong.
We had known her—wrong.
The world had known her—wrong.
The heavens had declared her—WRONG.

She was the Saint of Scarlet Hearts.

“What is this?” I ground out.

Her lips did not move, but her voice struck me from every angle.

[The broken chain that binds.]

“Those pillars,” Sol murmured, just barely audible over the ringing in my ears.

I glanced sidelong at him—in the crow’s nest—crouching on the balls of his feet in the saltwater fountain beside me.

If the Roman was disoriented at all, it didn’t show. His eyes swept across the portrait of the world that the Saint of Scarlet Hearts had painted over—had unearthed—had forged—with naked fascination.

I clenched the muscles of my stomach, seized the wheel of channels that had been carved out of me by Orphic madness, and I wrenched it into motion. The vertigo tried to fight me, tried to hang on, but the wheel burned and the wheel turned, crushing it under its spokes.

Breathing very slowly, very carefully, I followed Sol’s gaze and looked upon the sanctum of the Saint.

It was an island of sorts, an open air temple without any roof to speak of, only ten colonnades ready to bear weight. Beyond the salt water fountain we were in, the floors were scarlet marble veined with amethyst and gold. The temple was a perfect circle, lovingly carved, with ten steps that encircled the entire structure, leading down into a sea of softly glowing clouds.

Above our heads was an entire world writ upside-down, a mountain range cut in two and an ocean of glittering blue waves, stretching out as far as the eye could see. The earth mother as she was seen by birds and the heavens, staggeringly vast and beautiful and bleeding. 

I turned the wheel and forced myself to focus.

The pillars.

I looked at them, closely now, pushing back the image of the Nile that vied desperately for their place in reality, and in an instant I realized what it was about them that had caught Sol’s eye, more so than the impossibility of this place and the absurdity of its scale.

There were ten pillars, the load-bearing principles that gave structure to the Saint of Scarlet Hearts. As a Heroine, it was only natural that there would be ten, and as they were my sister’s principles, it was only natural that they were each a masterwork of spiritual architecture. But what wasn’t natural, what screamed at me from a primal place within my psyche and made the King’s Curse burn at my hip, was the sight of them together.

Every single one of them had been chiseled by a different hand.

“What is this?” I asked again, the words rough with disgust and an animalistic alarm. The Saint of Scarlet Hearts - my sister, that deepest part of me snarled, wrenching the wheel around when the false world tried to overwrite it - tilted her head back, considering the distant mountain range hanging above us where the sky should have been.

“There is a technique that every Oracle knows, passed down from mother to daughter in an unbroken chain, known as the Empty Throne of Heaven.” She fanned out the fingers of her right hand, and then closed them one by one until a closed fist rested against her chest. “It allows the user to retreat within themselves during moments of prophecy, to a place that even heaven can’t lay claim to. Of the seven women I shared a home with in Olympia, only one was old enough to remember what the life of an Oracle was like before this technique’s creation.”

I remembered milk-blind eyes with trifurcated pupils, the stench of brine and holy vapors. A cypress mask of tragedies.

“Dona,” Sol supplied the name of the Broken Tide’s withered Oracle, and my sister inclined her head.

“Back when I was still young enough for her to coddle me, she told me stories of those days. She was always fond of describing the mania, the way their minds would bend back upon themselves and fracture. She never forgot the sound that the pieces made when they scattered.” Her voice was sad. “In those days, madness was a mark of authenticity for a wise woman. We were not meant to share our mortal vessels with divinity, not even for a moment. And so the technique was made.”

“That’s what this is, then?” the Roman asked doubtfully. “An empty throne?” Sol and I were of the same mind, then. It sounded wrong.

“The opposite,” she said, a bit of that impishness returning to her as she splayed open the fingers of her hand again, then curled the first four into an arch and left the thumb jutting out. I reached up and curled my fingers to match hers, forming the other half of a heart. She winked. “Dona would beat me if she knew I was calling it this again, but she’s not here right now and this is my heart anyway, so I’ll say what I want. This is an inversion of the Empty Throne of Heaven, a technique that Bakkhos helped me create against all common sense:

[A Total Eclipse of the Heart] 

The world pulsed in recognition of the name, and I felt the countless truths of the Saint of Scarlet Hearts impose themselves upon me once again. I couldn’t have avoided understanding it if I’d tried. If the Empty Throne of Storms was a defense mechanism used by fragile mortal seers to escape the consequences of divine possession, then this was…

“An attack?” Sol looked as confused as I felt.

The Saint shook her head. “An invitation. It wouldn’t have worked if the two of you hadn’t accepted it.” She raised her left arm, sweeping it around in a wide arc and drawing our eyes back to the chaotic mess of pillars encircling the temple of her heart.

“I promised you a ‘why not’, in the absence of a ‘how’,” she said. “See it for yourselves.”

Sol stood from the sea water pool and made to step out–off the crow’s nest–only to pause, grunt in fleeting irritation, and then step out anyway.

To my astonishment, the Sol I saw on the Nile remained standing in the crow’s nest while the Sol in the temple of my sister’s heart strode out of the fountain and approached a limestone column.

“How did you do that?” I demanded. Sol glanced back at me, at first with confusion, and then sudden understanding.

“Like this.”

I felt gravitas seize hold of me. I refused it instinctively, but forced myself to relax after a moment and let it pull me to my feet. I felt the worlds shifting around me, my spirit stepping away from my body to follow the riptide pull of the captain’s virtue. I saw the worlds from two different vantage points, no longer overlaid exactly overtop each other, but off-center, shifting with every step my soul took away from my body.

I swallowed down my nausea and let the wheel turn.

Sol allowed the pull of gravitas to slacken, and I lurched forward as my body and soul were suddenly forced to reconcile the fact that they existed in two different places at once, one kneeling and the other mid-step. Sol caught me again. I shrugged off his virtue, jaw clenching as both worlds fought for my full attention.

I tried to take another step, slowly, and felt my body tense up in response. I glared at Sol. 

“How do you keep the two separate?”

He smirked. “It’s a skill. You’ll learn eventually.” Then, to add insult to injury, the Sol that stood in the crow’s nest very deliberately sat back down.

I tested every small motion my body could make, but each attempt was met with failure. Trying to move without moving was a maddening contradiction that my body instinctively rebelled against. It felt like I was a child again, trying to master all the little movements that the human body was capable of but rarely made - like twitching my ears, or flexing certain fingers or toes without the others following suit. It was something I could master eventually, I felt it in my gut. But it would take practice, and I had more pressing concerns.

“Is there a trick to it?” I asked the Saint.

“No,” she lied.

“Tell me.”

“It would be better if you leaned on Solus, if only for today…”

“By all means,” the Sol sitting in the crow’s nest said blandly, while the Sol within the sanctum continued to observe the pillars. “Better yet, climb up on my back. Or would you rather sit on my shoulders?”

The Saint of Scarlet Hearts winced.

I waited patiently.

“Fine,” she sighed. “Stepping outside yourself is a skill that requires precise control of both the body and the soul, operating separately yet in tandem. I suspected that Solus would be able to manage it for the two of you with his virtue, but if you insist on doing it yourself… there is a way. It’s the way that Bakkhos taught me, in one of his less responsible moods.”

She paused meaningfully, but if she thought that would dissuade me she was sorely mistaken. Finally, she gave it up.

“Intoxication.”

Without hesitation, I reached into the shadowed place where ravens kept their trinkets and pulled from it a glossy clay jug I’d pilfered from the Raging Heaven Cult months ago. I thumbed the beeswax stopper from the mouth of the amphora with a sonorous pop and tilted my head back, downing the undiluted kykeon.

Dangerously concentrated spirit wine coursed through me, warming my body from fingertip-to-toe, and I exhaled slowly. It had been too long since I’d enjoyed a good drink.

As I sat there waiting for the drink to do its work, however, I quickly noticed a problem.

I wasn’t getting drunk.

A second beeswax stopper popped and tumbled into my shadow storage, a second jug of spirit wine was drained to its dregs, and still I didn’t feel anything but warm. After the third empty jar yielded the same result, I snorted in disgust and tossed it aside. It shattered on the scarlet marble floor of the sanctum, and it fell into the wine-dark Nile with a splash. The vertigo of that contradiction made the wine churn in my stomach. I turned the wheel again, feeling the wine burn out of me along with the nausea.

The Titan Flame’s golden ichor had wrought a thousand-thousand little changes on my physique before I repurposed it as fuel for my heart’s flame. It seemed that this was one of those changes. I’d need a stronger poison than this if I wanted to step outside myself.

I pulled a wider, thicker jug from the raven space, and this time both Sols turned their heads to stare at me. Neither one looked particularly amused.

“If you fall into the Nile, I’m not fishing you out.”

I scoffed. “Of course you are.”

Raising the jug of mermaid ichor to my lips, I drank.

[2.10] The Going Rate

Sol,

The Raven From Rome

The haggling carried on long into the evening.

Beyond the bare basics that every mentor of a young patrician was owed, Selene was to be my master in cultivation. That demanded more. Her hallowed status of Oracle, anointed or not, demanded more still. She was a Heroic soul, standing head and shoulders above my own Sophic soul, and yet I was the older one of the two of us. Pride, if not convention, demanded compensation for that as well.

My father had spent half a day and a full night establishing terms with Aristotle after my mentor sought him out. It had been amiable enough at first, but by the time the moon had reached its zenith, there had been hollering fit to wake the dead.

Ours was a family that hadn’t known want for generations, not for anything material at least, and my father was far from a miser. Aristotle’s price had simply been that ridiculous. Had he been any other man, approaching the captain of the Fifth and demanding a consul's ransom for the privilege of teaching his son, my father would have fit him to his foot like a new boot and gone marching. Aristotle wasn’t any other man, though. He was the man who knew everything, and my father paid his price in the end.

Selene’s guidance was every bit as valuable to me now as Aristotle’s had been back then, and not just because she was the only Heroic cultivator I knew that didn’t want me dead. She was unique, even for a Heroine, just as Aristotle had been unique among scholars. She likely had insight that even Aristotle couldn’t have given me, were he with us on the Eos and at all inclined to teach. Selene had grown up immersed in aspects of mystery faith that Aristotle had always scorned. In all honesty, I wasn’t sure a material value could be matched to her at all. Yet even so, a price had to be paid.

It was a different sort of frustration than what my father had suffered. If Aristotle was the hunting hound, Selene was the hare. Beyond food and water and a very good horse, she suddenly became a woman with no earthly wants worth noting.

It took Griffon stepping in on her behalf to negotiate, masking it as a series of brotherly jabs, to finally get somewhere productive. By the time she realized what he was doing, it was too late.

Only then, after negotiations were all but settled, did the daughter of the Oracle and the Burning Dusk throw false modesty to the wind and ask something substantial of me. Something more than substantial. A request so heavy, a part of me wondered if she had been playing coy all along, just so she could sink me with it in the closing.

Unfortunately, I had little time left to fill the gaps in my education, and nowhere near enough at that to keep looking for Aristotle. It pained me to accept her final offer, but that was how negotiations like this went. The terms were set and signed there on the deck as night fell.

Another day came and went before our first lesson.

“I’m surprised,” the Scarlet Oracle said quietly, once we’d settled into place atop the crow’s nest. “With how determined you were to set a price, I expected us to start this right away. Why wait?”

The crow’s nest was a spacious throne for a boy like Lync, more than wide enough to fit him and Selene comfortably whenever she felt like joining him. For me, though, it was a somewhat tighter fit. Selene sat on the rim of the wooden outpost, balanced precariously with a cultivator's casual grace, while I hunched down in the center of it. Griffon, for his part, lay stretched out across the mast’s uppermost royal yard, one leg idly skimming back and forth across the face of the sail.

I leaned back against my side of the crow’s nest, mindful of the weight I was putting on it. With my own legs crossed underneath me, I could just barely fit inside the glorified bucket. With the full weight of the Greek captain’s virtue and my own burning heart’s blood to buoy me, I could also avoid snapping the mast beneath it like a twig.

“The men were too frightened to sleep last night,” I answered just as quietly. “They wouldn’t have slept tonight either, if we hadn’t found a slower river vein to slip off to.”

Thankfully, we had found one of the Nile’s thinner veins, and managed to avoid the worst of the rapids on our way to it. For now, the men of the Fifth slept like the dead, put down by their own frayed nerves as much as by the ship’s gentle rocking.

“You act like they’d have fallen to pieces if left to their own devices for a lecture's span,” Griffon said, shifting his gaze from the starry skies just long enough to raise an eyebrow at me. “What does it matter if they’re asleep or at their oars? Our blood won’t stop burning on their behalf.”

I grimaced. “It wasn’t their fatigue that held me back.” Though that had played its part. “It was  their ability to listen in.”

Another reason to regret setting Scythas against me. His ability to stifle conversations on the breeze had been convenient when I was only one man, alone in my disgrace. Now that I was a captain again, no matter how minor, it would have been an invaluable skill to have at hand.

“You don’t trust them?” Selene asked, saddened.

“It isn’t a matter of trust. It’s a matter of expectation, between an officer and the legionaries he commands. Whether or not they realize it yet, they have expectations of me as their captain, responsibilities to me, and the same is true of me to them.”

She frowned. “Solus…”

“Is legion morale so fragile that even the plainest truth can shatter it?” Griffon mused. He smirked up at the stars, sensing my irritation. “They know you aren’t a god, fool. Not yet. They know you’re still climbing, and they had half a day to overhear us talking terms. Is your opinion of them so low? Or are you just that greedy?”

"Neither."

"Go on."

"It’s one thing to know that the captain is only a man. It’s another to see it for yourself." I shrugged. "They know that I have just as much to learn as they do, and now they know the lengths I’ll go to in order to fill those gaps. There’s some value in that, knowing you’re not the only one toiling. But they don’t need to see it."

"You’re afraid they’d see you fail," Griffon realized.

"No, I am certain they would see me fail. They have worries enough without adding that burden to the mix. Knowing your superiors toil just as you do, that’s a comfort. Seeing them struggle and fail firsthand? That’s a curse."

My brother hummed. "I can’t tell if that’s an admirable sentiment or the most arrogant excuse I’ve ever heard. Either way, it’s paper-thin."

"Welcome to the legions," I said blandly.

It was enough for Selene. She relaxed, turning and watching a squat midnight crawler of a ship drift past the Eos. The further from the heart-vein of the Nile we got, the more prevalent other ships became. Tonight, the river was aflame with torchlight and bobbing skiffs, all of them heading deeper inland towards the Old Kingdom. Raucous shouts clashed with the oppressive drone of an Egyptian jungle at night, and every now and then the late-night revelry won out. It was only the smallest sign of things to come, I knew.

When Selene turned back to regard me, she had the mantle of an older woman wrapped around her like a cloak. She favored me with a small, knowing smile, and in that moment the crow’s nest became a temple.

I dipped my head.

"Why have you come here, cultivator?" the Scarlet Oracle asked of me.

"To seek your wisdom."

"And what have you brought me?"

"Open ears."

"And an empty head," Griffon chimed in. Selene didn’t rise to it. She only nodded and raised a single finger.

"First, tell me something: What is the first virtue?"

Gravitas.

Justice.

"Freedom," Griffon and I spoke at the same time.

Selene considered us both, scarlet flames burning bright behind her eyes. "I’ll need to know the full story."

Griffon and I shared a look. Up on high, the moon rose steadily among the stars. Thirty ship-lengths down the river, there came a splash and a swell of laughter. The night was young. There was time enough to tell it.

So we did.

Throughout it all, Selene maintained a composure well beyond her years. Her smile never strayed from that soft sympathy, and the flames behind her eyes never once dimmed.

When it was done, she leaned forward and clasped my right hand in both of hers.

"Solus," she spoke my name solemnly, with the echo of an Oracle’s majesty in her voice. "Hear me now, and know my word is truth in heaven—your mentor was a bastard, and your uncle didn’t help. We’ll have to start from scratch."

Griffon chortled until he choked.

Griffon,

The Risen Flame

It was refreshing to see someone else suffer in vain for a change, trying and failing to civilize the son of Rome. Doubly so when it was my haughty junior sister heaving the boulder uphill.

Selene sighed softly, kneading her temples. I lent her a few hands of my violent intent, massaging her skull and shoulders. She glanced wryly my way, smiling thankfully.

"You are the reason why most cults won’t let their civic cultivators leave their city until after foundations have been established," she told Sol frankly, knowing him well enough to not waste time trying to soften the blow. "You’re the only Roman I know, Solus. The Greek half of your foundation I can guide, and some aspects of refinement are universal, I’m sure, but the rest… I could cripple you beyond repair, introduce you to a technique that’s anathema to the Roman soul without realizing it and send the whole structure tumbling down. This schism…"

"Ignore it," Sol offered.

"You can’t ignore any portion of yourself if you wish to move forward, let alone half of all that you are. It won’t go away."

"I’ll manage it," the Son of Rome said, meeting her gaze with stoic resolve. "Let it be for today, and do what can be done. What is the Greek portion of my soul lacking?"

"Common sense," I suggested.

"I’d accept that from a corpse before I took it from you."

"Says the wretch that drank fermented offal and called it spirit wine."

"I was twelve years old, and it happened once."

"And how many times did you douse your rations with it after that?"

Sol gave me an ugly look. "Garum is delicious. You’d enjoy it with lamb."

I sneered. "That sounds repulsive. Show me."

Selene rolled her eyes as Sol struck me with a lived experience, nearly knocking me off my perch in the process. I licked my lips, contemplating the phantom flavor of seared lamb doused in fish sauce.

"... it is good," I admitted. "But you’re still a fool for drinking it."

"Your foundations are set in stone," Selene cut in, shifting her golden veil away from her face and silencing us both with a stern frown. "I can tell you what I know of the Sophic Realm, and I will, but I didn’t experience it in the way that most do. I can tell you the nature of each labor a cultivator must perform to advance from one stage to the next, but you both already know what that entails—"

"I don’t," Sol cut in. Selene’s lips parted.

"What do you mean you don’t know? You’ve advanced a dozen times, Solus—transcended an entire realm. That doesn’t just happen." She paused, biting her lip. "Unless this is another Roman conceit. Griffon, did you really never bother explaining the fundamentals to—?"

Her voice trailed off when she looked my way and saw my face.

"No," she said in disbelief. "You? You don’t—? Your father is Damon Aetos."

My silence echoed.

I knew of the Champion’s labors, of course. I had seen the truth of the eleventh with my own eyes, exchanged words with the titan flame Prometheus, and I had been made witness to a perfect ideal made manifest in an imperfect world of iron. The eagle of the Caucasus, the Phoenix that flew on freedom's wings—

Libertas.

Yet I could tell that my sister had a far more specific set of standards in mind when she referenced the labors. A set of expectations, a charter that I had never been given, let alone taught to read.

Not for the first time, I wondered if it had been like this for Nikolas when he set foot in the wider world beyond my father’s Scarlet City. How much had been withheld? For what purpose? I held a blood-stained hand up to the sky, and I wondered what it would have looked like in a world where I knew exactly what came next.

Imagine a Nile river that runs as red as it does rapid, and seas that stink of iron instead of salt. Chisel into your mind’s eye that hand of yours, cleaner than marble and untainted by sin. And all the world a bloody stain to contrast it.

As always, my dead ancestor chose the worst possible moment to make himself known, and the worst possible sentiment to put words to.

The spirit scoffed, sprawling upside down on the ship’s mast in a mirror image of my own posture, heedless of the natural forces that should have sent him tumbling to the deck.

You can hardly stand the smallest portion of this life, parceled out to you in these creeping moments. What makes you think looking ahead would give you any succor?

A dead man couldn’t possibly understand.

Would that a living man could. 

"The two of you really are mad," I heard my sister say and lurched up from my sprawl. Selene wasn’t looking at the specter of the Aetos ancestor, though, nor the scarlet gem around my neck that anchored him to me. Her eyes flickered between Sol and I, vexed and wondering at the same time.

"What gave it away this time?" I asked curiously. Sol snorted.

Selene was quiet for a long time, peering down the Nile and the night-lit ships drifting along with its current. Finally, she answered my question with a question of her own.

"If I asked you to explain the Civic Realm to me in only one word, what would you say?"

"Duty," Sol answered at once. Selene hummed, neither approving nor rejecting the answer. "Griffin?"

I thought back to my life in the Scarlet City, as the young aristocrat of the Rosy Dawn, one and only heir to the tyrant Damon Aetos. I recalled the roar of fifty thousand cheering slaves, felt the sand between my toes, and the itch of laurel leaves against my skin.

"Discontent," I decided.

"Two very different answers," Selene mused, "and both of them different from mine. Yet… what if I asked you to define the Sophic Realm instead? One word."

"Reason," Sol and I answered at the same time. Selene smiled faintly and rolled her wrist.

"What of the Heroic Realm?"

Again, neither of us hesitated. "Spirit."

"And finally," Selene said, "the realm of tyrants."

We answered as three.

"Hunger."

"There are several reasons why the Akadēmía states that the true journey begins at the second realm, and this is one of them," Selene explained, shifting on the edge of the crow’s nest and drawing her sunray silks tight around her. "We exist as both body and soul, but we are three before we are two. The Broad identified this delineation and labeled it the tripartite soul. Just the same, it was the Broad that named the realms of philosophers, of heroes, and of tyrants. Which of those came first is a subject of debate among sophists to this day.

"At first glance, these realms might seem a perfect match to the partitions inside our souls. It’s a tyrant's nature to starve, after all, just as it is a hero's nature to burn and a philosopher's nature to wonder. It would be reasonable to look at the Broad’s framework and conclude that these realms exist to hone our soul in three turns.

"Or perhaps, that they should serve as gatekeepers to divinity. If reason is all that a philosopher is, why should they bother stoking their spirit? Why suffer their hunger? Neither one is necessary to progress. Not until the higher realms are reached. Reason is the philosopher, spirit is the hero, hunger is the tyrant."

"If," I said simply.

"If that were true," Selene agreed. She tilted her head, the sunburst stitched across her golden veil shifting in the breeze. "Is it not?"

“Of course not.”

“Why?”

"Because cultivation doesn’t change our nature," Sol said quietly. "It only makes us more of what we are. Some men are born starving, but no man is born a tyrant. If desire is the brand upon your soul, the world won’t wait for you to advance to the proper realm to make it known. You’ll starve as a citizen. You’ll seek knowledge to blunt your hunger as a sophist, reach for ever greater glories as a hero."

"I agree," Selene said, warmth briefly overtaking vexation. "The Broad gave us the realms as we know them to make sense of the world outside ourselves. On the other hand, he gave us the tripartite soul in an effort to describe the worlds within ourselves. External and internal truths. Never one without the other."

"Three by three," I said, eyes widening as another piece fell into place. Selene turned to me at once, though she did an admirable job of restraining her excitement.

"Three by three what?"

"Three steps by three steps. Three labors by three labors. We refine ourselves both body and soul, not one over the other. A philosopher refines their reason, that much is known, but that alone isn’t enough. They have to refine their spirit and their hunger as well. Sophist, hero, or tyrant, that won’t change.”

The backdrops might shift, depending on where you stood, but their nature stayed the same. Ten ideals, ten glories, ten domains. 

Ten.

"That leaves one," Sol said, voicing my thought. "Ten steps to a realm, but only nine combinations. An outlier. The question is, which one?"

Rosy light bloomed above our ship, forty hands of my pankration intent grasping and clawing and jabbing at the stars above. The abrupt light show set off a wave of hooting and hollering from the ships nearest to our own. I ignored them, leaning forward with my elbows on my knees. 

"The day we met, I was a ninth-rank citizen," I told Sol, brandishing ten of the forty limbs. "I could manifest ten hands of my violent intent, never more, and only less if I desired it. The day I advanced to the 10th rank and became a Captain of the Civic Realm, that number didn’t change. It wasn’t until four months later that I became a first-rank Sophist, and ten became twenty. When I advanced again, twenty turned to thirty. Now I stand on the third step of the Sophic Realm, and I have forty for my troubles.”

"The first nine labors refine us bit by bit, both body and soul. You’ll have a hundred hands at the ninth rank of the Sophic Realm," Sol mused. "Which means the last step is the outlier. To what end, though?"

"Consolidation," Selene’s answer was as simple as it was succinct, and more than that, it was right. I felt it in the marrow of my bones.

"Three labors for the Sophist, three labors for the Hero, and three labors for the Tyrant," I said. "Finally, a tenth to tie them all together, and ready the ship for the higher realm to come."

Sol and I shared a look, the air between us charged with anticipation. We both had eyes enough to see the line Selene had drawn for us from one point to another. Far from being disappointed, I could feel my spirit soaring. If this was the only thing my precocious little sister ever gave me, it would be far more than I’d ever expected to get.

“What comes next?” I asked her intently. “What does the fourth labor look like?”

The daughter of the Oracle unfurled the fingers of both hands, palms to the night sky, and lifted them as if coaxing up an early dawn.

“I have no idea.”

The old ghost chortled until he choked.

VS 2.9

Sol,

The Raven From Rome

In the end, we didn’t turn the ship around.

There were practical reasons. The whirlpool that had nearly sunk us, for one. I thought I had the trick of navigating it now, having watched the solar barge, but that ship had been moving with the current. Even if Griffon, Selene, and I all added our full strength to the effort, I wasn’t sure the Eos would be able to do it while fighting against the Nile. 

Beaching the ship and marching back the way we’d come had its own problems. Leaving a vessel as fine as the Eos unattended was all but begging the Fates to see it stolen. It was too heavy for the men to carry it with us over land - a year from now, with the proper training, maybe. But not as they were. Beyond that, I had seen with my own eyes the sort of beasts that lurked along this river. I wouldn’t leave my men to guard the ship in my stead, not even if all ten of them together stayed back to do it.

Those reasons alone would have been enough for any sensible man, without adding on the fact that Griffon and I remembered nothing of what had taken place between the shores of Alexandria and deep veins of the Nile river. We hadn’t even remembered Alexandria was our intended destination until Selene reminded us of it. Even then, it was only a place in our minds. The motivations to go there were gone. 

It was all lost, hidden somewhere beneath the surface of the sea that was our souls. A flower of a phrase, but I hadn’t been able to disagree when Griffon spoke it out loud. The words fit. Selene hadn’t teased him over it either, only peered at him with a strange expression.

We didn’t know where to look, and even if we did, we were too far down the river now to turn back without giving up our ship. All of those things were reason enough, and all of them combined would have been worth less to me than the wooden coin in my pocket if that had been the end of it.

Like him or loathe him, Lync was a part of our crew. The foul-mouthed pirate child was too young to be a legion man, and because of that I hadn’t recruited him the way I recruited the other ten, but he was a part of us. The same way I had been part of my father’s legion, when I first came to them as a boy. If it had to be done, I would swim through the whirlpool myself to see the boy safe. If it had to be done, I would hitch myself to the Eos like a mule, and drag her through the riverbank all the way back to sea - and heaven help whatever creature tried to stop me.

I didn’t need to do those things, though. Because I knew the boy was alive, and I knew he was not alone.

“The eagle cried its dim defiance, and it took the boy up in its talons. It took flight from the crow's nest and fled north. It was followed, but you, Captain, and you, Flame, you two lit up like the dawn, burning, clearing out a way…”

Sorea had saved the boy in my stead, and would stay with him until the danger had passed. I knew it, though I didn’t know how I knew, and in that same way, I knew that Sorea still lived to see it done.

It wasn’t the same certainty that I felt about the men under my command. The night sky might be large enough to take no notice of a single absent star, but I was not nearly so vast. I was as aware of the men of the Fifth Legion as I was the fingers of my hands, and I knew from past experience that I’d feel their absence just as keenly. 

What I felt for the eagle that had followed me from Rome was not that. It was more than just my own hopes, but a different shade than pure gut feeling. The only reason I knew it was there at all was that I didn’t feel it for Scythas, nor for Jason, not for Anastasia or the Flame. I did feel it for Atlas, that would-be warhorse I had ridden from the Orphic House. That discovery had led me to ask Griffon if he felt the same awareness of his pure white mare, Kronia. He did.

It was enough to keep me in the boat, if only just. In the hours that followed, I probed that vague awareness like it was a loose tooth stuck in my mouth. Griffon hadn’t known any more than me about the feeling, and he clearly took that as a personal insult. We both knew the virtuous beasts we’d marked as our own were alive and well, but we didn’t know how we knew that. We didn’t know where they were or what connected us to them. 

We lacked context. It was a familiar frustration by now.

A good man once told me that uncertainty killed more soldiers than any sword or spear. If there ever was a thing that I didn’t understand, I owed it to my superior officer to ask him about it. If he didn’t know, then he owed it to the man above him to swallow his pride and ask. No matter how many laurels a man wore on his brow, no matter how many triumphs had been celebrated in his name, there wasn’t a soldier under the sun who wouldn’t die if he fell on uncertainty’s blade.

Years later, beneath the canopy of a legion captain's command tent, I had asked that same man what I was to do with my uncertainty, now that there were no men above me left to ask. His answer was succinct.

“You ask your oldest spear, sir.”

So I spoke to my new men of the Fifth. I settled them back onto their benches, put their oars back in their hands, and I spoke to them of myriad things as we flew along the river Nile. I asked them questions. Questions about themselves, about their circumstances, about the places they had come from and the people they had known. I asked them, with some regret, about the terms of their enslavement. I asked them what they knew. I asked them if they would teach me. I asked them questions I would have never dared to ask my father’s men, for fear that I would lose their faith in me as their captain. 

I asked, and I listened, and I buried deep my pride. It was the uncertainty that killed a legion.

I spoke to my men, and we sailed, racing against the sun.

The heartland of Aegyptus had been an arid desert, once. The Republic's oldest records spoke of a corpse kingdom long past its prime, the land’s shifting dunes and sun-baked stones its tomb. Greek civilization had been old long before Rome staked its claim on the seat of Seven Hills, but the golden age of god-blooded pharaohs had been a distant memory long before the first Greek Hero was born. What remained of the great nation could hardly be called an echo.

Perhaps it had been that way, back in the earliest days of the Republic, but at some point things had changed. I had seen it with my own eyes, marching down the golden road that Gaius paved for all his legions on campaign. Four years ago, I had come to Egypt expecting a desert waste, and instead I had found a thriving wonder. We flew through it now, on the Eagle River’s wings. Lush green jungles as far as the eye could see.

The river ran rapid through the heartlands of Aegyptus, both the channel and the veins. Wherever a thread of Nile water flowed, the green growth was doubled. More than one legion man had remarked with dark humor that there were almost as many beasts of virtue on the Nile banks as there were in a legion brothel. The creatures were all twice and twice again too large, too dauntless, too hungry. 

Every serpent carried a bit of dragon in its blood, and every stork a bit of golden eagle. The thicker the river vein, the stronger the wildlife grew. A hippopotamus was dangerous enough on its own, but the hulking bulls that swam about the Nile’s heart veins could break a war elephant's spine with their teeth, or simply drown the beast in shallow waters.

And then there were the crocodiles.

The men were still too tense to appreciate the sights, and that was a shame, but that meant they were also too tense to worry about what we shared the river with. It was better that way. Let them dedicate their bodies to rowing and their minds to answering my questions. Let the outside world wait until we’d escaped to a thinner river vein. The Nile was a winding river, and I knew from my time on campaign that it had as many offshoots as the Black Forest had roots.

Griffon and Selene were not nearly as preoccupied. I found them both equally enthralled when I finished my rounds and rejoined them at the front of the ship. An idle thought struck me as I watched them drink in the sight of something they’d only heard stories of before - the Titan Flame had been lazy when he molded these two from clay. Born of different fathers, I had seen identical twins that didn't look as similar as they did in their wonder.

"It makes sense," Selene was insisting when I approached, leaning with her arms crossed on the ship's rail, next to the wood-carved figurehead of a curious woman. "In fact, it makes more sense than all of your ideas - all of them put together, maybe!"

"Ho? Then where is the foam, sister?"

The only sign of her consternation was a faint flush of red.

"Scattered, I should think."

"You should think, and yet here you are instead-"

While they jabbed at one another as siblings did, I pulled an ivory lie in the shape of a bench from the dark place where ravens kept their baubles. I set the bench down just behind them, angled to catch the setting sun. It cast no shadow of its own, frail fiction that it was, but I did. At the angle I'd placed it, my shadow covered the entire bench. And when I sat down on it, the bench held me - sturdy, like it had been carved from horn. I let them bicker on a moment longer while I settled myself, pulling a mermaid bone and a celestial bronze spear from my raven's place. I'd kept half an ear on every conversation on deck while I made my rounds, so I knew what they were arguing about.

"Four years ago, in the spring, I marched down that riverbank with Gaius’ Fifth Legion." I finally spoke up, and pointed. "During that time, the river flowed as all rivers do - into the sea. When we left Cairo and marched back west, two seasons had passed, and the river had started to flow in reverse.”

“Why?” Selene asked, eagerly. Griffon looked on with clear interest.

They wanted a concrete answer, but I only had hearsay and a sickly gut instinct. “None of the natives could tell us for certain what had caused it, but they weren’t surprised it had happened. It was a phenomena they’d seen before. A good omen, they said.”

“Praise to him whose throne is Right and Truth. Repent and give your thanks, soldier of the west. The new Pharoah will be strong!”

“Barbarians and their superstition,” Griffon mused, cheek propped up on a closed fist. The disdain was still there, but there was a thoughtful undertone to it.

“One scholar’s superstition is another’s mystery faith,” Selene said, tilting her chin up smugly. Scarlet hands of Griffon’s violent intent dipped down into the Nile and returned dripping wet, flicking cool river water at her from all sides. She only stood taller, basking in the spray. “Be not afraid, ancient brother. I won’t force you to say the words. At your age, I understand it’s difficult to concede a point.”

“A bold tongue indeed, for a girl I could fit in my pocket.”

The color at the tips of Selene’s ears flushed a bit deeper. She hadn’t been pleased with me for shoving her into my raven space - though I couldn’t remember doing it, or why I had - for many reasons, but one that Griffon had guessed with shocking accuracy was that it had made her feel small. I’d done my best to explain the nature of the raven’s shadow, but the more I talked the brighter Griffon’s grin had grown, and the more embarrassed Selene had become.

She managed to brush it off, this time, and maintained her haughty posture.

“Envy is a foul look on an old man’s face.”

“You hear that, Sol?” Griffon asked sardonically. “My sister thinks I’m ancient. What do you suppose that makes you?”

“Archaic,” I replied, whittling away at my mermaid bones. These dice would be the finest I’d ever rolled once they were done. The materials were sublime, and Prometheus’ golden ichor had made my fingers nimble as any master carver.

“There’s more to age than years alone,” Selene assured me, a touch hurriedly. She was oddly considerate of me at times. No doubt a product of the days she’d spent in the Oracle’s temple, tending to her elders when they should have been tending her. “My brother’s personality is rotten beyond his years, that’s all.” Griffon pressed his right hand and three more of rosy light to his chest, wounded. 

“Besides,” she continued, nodding to herself, “Donna always told me it was a man’s soul that told you how old he really was.”

“In that case,” I said, “Primordial.” Griffon snorted. 

“What brings you to our humble corner of the deck, primeval one?” He nodded towards the men-at-oars, raising an eyebrow. “Is it our turn to tell you our favorite foods? Or perhaps you’ve come to seek our guidance. I could teach you how to sing, I suppose.”

“You’re welcome to try,” I said. “If Orpheus could teach a stone to dance, anything is possible.” From the way he smirked, I knew he planned to hold me to that. “But it’s Selene I need to speak to first.”

Selene blinked. “Me?”

“You,” I agreed. “I have far too many things to learn, and far too little time to learn them. Olympia showed me that, and this new torment set it in stone. I can’t afford to wait for men like Aristotle and Socrates to parcel out their wisdom, always on their own time. Not anymore. I need you, Selene.”

“You want me to teach you?” she asked, fingertips pressing lightly to her collarbone. She sounded flustered, but she knew just as well as I did that there was a vast gulf of experience separating the two of us. I may have been the better killer, but I needed more than violence if I was going to keep my men alive and find my legions lost.

“I mean to wring you out like wet cloth.” I set aside my spear and reached down into my raven space, searching for the sack of coin. I had to pay the men before I paid myself, but the mermaid’s scales would take care of that once we got a bit further downriver. Hiring a mentor required prompt and proper payment. 

My fingers brushed against a draw string, and pulled the purse out. It was heavier than I remembered it being. Softer, too. Almost…

I stared at the fat leather bursa sitting in my palm, bulging at its finely woven seams. It was a fine thing, embossed with a trumpeting bull elephant, and sturdy enough to take on any campaign. When I untied the knot and pried it open, the sun caught the pile of golden aurei and made them shine. I’d seen their kind minted, during the Gallic Wars. I picked up a coin wonderingly, twisting it one way, then the other. Caesar’s stern profile on one side, a skewered elephant on the other.

“So you were holding out on me,” Griffon said quietly. 

I shook my head. “No.”

Yet another thing I couldn’t explain. Another thing that couldn’t wait, but would have to even so. I flipped the single coin back into my shadow, then cinched the leather bursa shut and tossed it on the deck at Selene’s feet.

“My overture,” I said, and leaned forward with my elbows on my knees. “Room and board and all other necessities included as well, naturally - your needs met before mine. If I only have one tent and a day’s rations left, I’ll sleep hungry under the stars.”

“Wait, Solus,” Selene protested, nudging the bursa with her foot like it was an ornery snake. “This is already too much. You have to pay your men, and anyway, I’d do it for free-”

“Absolutely not,” I said firmly. “I’m not asking you for advice. I’m asking you to be mine, until I’ve learned every scrap that you can teach me. It will take time. Now what do you want?”

“What about Socrates?” she said quickly. “He taught you, and you didn’t pay him!”

“The Gadfly was my master’s master,” I patiently explained. “It was his prerogative to step in if he felt his student was erring as a mentor. If he had demanded payment I would have told him, with the full respect a master is due from their student, to lick the underside of my boot and take it up with Aristotle.”

“A shame he didn’t ask,” Griffon chimed in, amused.

“Socrates taught me a few things too, you know.” Selene shifted slightly from foot to foot. Hardly noticeable, but for a Heroine it was a loud gesture. “And I do outrank a Philosopher, so surely, it would also be my prerogative-”

“That was that,” I said, waving the sentiment away. “This is this. What do you want, Selene?”

She sighed, shifting her veil aside. “So stubborn. Very well. I want a souvenir for every city we visit, and a tour of their most noteworthy places.”

“Denied,” Griffon said at once. The daughter of the Oracle whirled on him, scarlet eyes flashing.

“Decrepit things should stay silent in their tombs!”

“No, he’s right.”

Selene whirled back around on me, stricken.

“What? Why!?”

“Foolish you may be, but you’re still a Heroine. More importantly, you’re my sister,” Griffon said, jabbing a finger at his chest and another one of violent intent at hers. She slapped it away, but he only jabbed her with a dozen more up and down her sides. “I won’t let you undervalue yourself. Not even if you beg!”

“A horse, then!” she shrieked, batting at the poking pankration fingers. “I want a horse! A nice one, like yours!”

I considered that. A horse was nothing, but a horse like mine was another matter. A virtuous beast, on par with Atlas’ stock… I hummed.

“Done.” The Heroine slumped against the ship’s rail in relief. “What else?”

She moaned in despair.

Saint Slayer Supreme [Title Pending] [0.1]

This is my first attempt at a litRPG story. It's not great, but then again, I'm trying not to split too many hairs with this one. I'm pretty new to the genre, so feel free to let me know if you have any suggestions (or warn me if I'm committing any unforgivable litRPG sins). For those wondering, the next chapter of Virtuous Sons is nearly done. Should have it out soon, god willing.

'Til then, enjoy.

~<< >>~

Saint Slayer Supreme

“Light on your feet, now. It only takes one day to decide the rest of your life. You’re not planning on sleeping through it, are you? No? Then wake up!”

Mason woke up.

Thrashing himself upright, he returned to the waking world with a foul taste in his mouth and a monstrous, pounding headache for his troubles. He felt like he’d been run over by a truck. He tried to throw his bulky old comforter off the bed, only to realize it wasn’t there. After a bit more flailing in the dark, he realized he was still fully dressed - he hadn’t even taken off his shoes.

Actually, this wasn’t even his bed. What the hell had he gotten into last night, and where had it led him? Mason squinted irritably, willing his eyes to adjust to the dark while he rifled through his pockets for a phone that wasn’t there.

[“... Mason?”]

He froze.

[“Mason, are you there?”]

It was a woman’s voice, a startled whisper that could have come from anywhere in that darkness. It wasn’t any voice he knew. But it knew him, evidently.

[“No, this isn’t right. Mason, quickly, go back to sleep! It’s not too late. You can still…”]

The voice kept on whispering, growing more urgent by the second, but he only gave it half an ear. He’d spotted something in the distance. Either his eyes were starting to adjust to the pitch black, or someone had turned on a light. Though at this point, he could have just as easily passed out in a park somewhere, and that speck of light could be a firefly. He blinked, and suddenly there were two of them. Then four, then eight. A dozen. A hundred. Thousands.

Mason stared out - out, not up - at a sea of shining stars. And just like that, he felt it. He felt it like a cattle brand had burned it into his skin, tasted it on his tongue and inhaled the smell of it like cheap body spray in a middle school locker room. It was deafening, and blinding, none of those things and all of those things at the same time.

It was a message.

Please standby for world Creation.

A pair of meteors hurtled into view, one heading east and the other heading west. Against all odds, they were on a perfect collision course with each other. Mason pinched himself, hard.

The meteors collided.

In the chaos that followed, the disembodied voice of a woman spoke up again.

[“... Right, then. Mason, you must have questions. Ask, and I will answer.”]

Mason considered the distant cataclysm. Distant, but not distant enough to have saved him if it was really there, and if he was really here. His throat was dry. Awe made his voice rough. That, and the throbbing hangover. He had a thousand questions, but only one of them was important enough to ask.

“Is this a dream?”

[“No.”]

Mason rolled off the bed, only it wasn’t a bed at all, and there was no floor underneath it. He fell. Floated, really, like a feather in the wind. A third meteor went soaring on by, and oh, would you look at that - it was headed straight for the impact-warped love child of the first two. What were the odds of that, he wondered.

“What is it, then?” he asked. The third meteor struck the first two like the fist of some over-caffeinated god punching through a plaster wall. Idly, he massaged the palm of his right hand with the thumb of his left hand, pressing until the skin turned white.

[“A Game.”]

He could practically hear the capital ‘G’. “What sort of game are we talking, here? RPG, first person shooter, racing sim?” It had better not be a fuckin’ MOBA.

[“It’s… not something I can put into words. Not in any way you’ll understand.”]

Mason’s eyes rolled as he fell through the endless void of space.

“I’m not into that indie dev stuff.”

[“Are you sure you don’t want to go back to sleep?”]

He chuckled.

[“Very well. Repeat after me: Initialize.”]

That last word hit him so hard it might as well have been a fourth meteor - ah, no, the fourth meteor was over that way, and would you look at its trajectory - and overwhelmed all five of his senses, just like the standby warning had. When everything settled back down, he found another message waiting for him.

Character Creation initializing…

Standby…

Standby…

The fourth meteor collided with the cancerous mass of the first three, and at the same time a flashbang of muddled sensation struck Mason blind.

~<< ERROR. SESSION HOST NOT FOUND. >>~

“Son of a-”

[“Just a second, Mason. I’ll fix this.”]

Mason pinched his nose. It didn’t do anything for the foul taste in his mouth, and it didn’t do anything to his lungs no matter how long he held his breath. That made about as much sense as anything else. Honestly, it probably made more sense. If oxygen was an issue, the cold vacuum of space would have taken him out long before he thought to hold his breath.

Two more meteors. One from above, the other from below.

[“There. Now, let’s try that again.”]

“Wait-”

[“Initialize.”]

Character Creation initializing…

Standby…

[“Dreamer sessionHost = ‘Mason Slayton’;”]

Session Host initialized. Welcome, Mason. The Game is about to begin. Are you ready?

Mason stared blankly past the shining text, past the titanic rocking of half a dozen meteors colliding in quick succession, past even the stars. For a moment, his thoughts were one with the black void that was the absence of all things.

“Was that Java?”

The woman’s response was more than a bit exasperated.

[“Ready.”]

Mason hit the floor hard enough to bounce. He twisted and struggled like a fish on dry docks, trying to find his feet in the dark. The floor was slick and cool, like a sheet of black ice floating aimlessly through space. He wouldn’t have been able to tell it was there at all if he hadn’t almost broken his back on it just now. He squinted. Actually… now that he looked close, he could see his reflection in it. And above that, a steadily growing light.

What is the Essence of Mason Slayton?

The lights that appeared after that weren’t words, but symbols, shining dimly under the ice. Three of them in all. A trench lighter, the Joker from a deck of playing cards, and a bullet’s empty casing. They were almost too faint to make out, but when his eyes passed over them, their meaning echoed in his mind.

Flame {Common}

Fortune {Common}

Full Metal Jacket {Rare}

The voice spoke up. Softly, with sympathy. He wondered if the woman behind the disembodied words could see his face.

[“This is your first choice, Mason. In some ways, it is the most important choice you’ll ever make. The Essence of a man is the seed from which all other things sprout. These three… Maybe you should see for yourself. Don’t worry - you won’t be locked into anything by mistake.”]

Mason supposed there was nothing for it. He reached out and tapped a finger on the faint outline of the trench lighter.

Flame {Common}: Strongest in the heat of the moment, you are the spark that sets the world on fire. You thrive in ranged combat. Close combat is possible, but not recommended for the {Common} man. Be wary of ocean waves.

• {+1 Somatic Skill Slot}

Source: Any open Flame.

“Source?” Mason murmured.

[“The Essence you choose will serve as the foundation of your build - if you choose the Flame, every skill you learn will be fuelled by the Essence of fire. That Essence lives within you, but it is not a limitless resource. You can run out. Thankfully, you can also replenish what you’ve spent. The Source is the external provider. If you chose the Flame and used every bit of your Essence up, it might take you a full day to naturally build back up to your full capacity. However, if you had a bonfire in your camp, you could do it in seconds.”]

Mason wondered how much a trench lighter’s flame would be worth as a power source. Somehow, he didn’t think it would amount to much.

He tapped the Joker card.

Fortune {Common}: Strongest when the odds are long, you are the wild card that sweeps the winners’ table. You thrive in non-combatant roles. Fortune is the strongest weapon on any battlefield, but when lives are on the line, it’s best not to bet on the {Common} man’s luck. Be wary of broken mirrors.

• {+1 Somatic Skill Slot}

Source: Any game of chance.

“Any game of chance. I’m guessing not all Sources are created equal?”

[“Correct.”]

It was easy enough to imagine a ‘good’ and a ‘bad’ source for something like Flame. If he had to guess, the larger a flame was, the more it had to offer as a Source of Essence. The relative heat of the fire and the amount of fuel it had left to burn likely mattered, too. He asked the voice in his head if he was on the right track, and she confirmed it.

“For something like Fortune…” Mason hummed thoughtfully. “It says any game of chance, but some games have more to do with luck than others. Poker might feel like it’s all up to chance if it’s your first night at a table, but compared to betting on a horse race…” He blinked. “Come to think of it, are stakes a factor? If I bet a dollar on a coin flip and win, that’s good Fortune. But if I bet a million on the same coin flip and win, that’s very good Fortune.”

Stakes could also just as easily have nothing to do with the quality of a Source of Fortune Essence, but his gut told him he was on the right track. The more he considered it, though, the more questions he had. Did cheating play a part in this? It had to. If you used loaded dice, you were taking Fortune out of the equation. That much seemed obvious enough. Did the same rule apply if your opponent tried to cheat you, though?

[“Not all Sources are created equal, and not all forms of Essence, either. Some are more complicated than others. Fortune is especially so.”]

Mason was still mulling over the finer details of skill and chance as he stood up on the slick platform of black ice and turned away from the glowing symbols.

[“Mason?”]

Six meteors was the limit, apparently. No matter which way he looked, there didn’t seem to be any more coming. They’d served their purpose. In the center of their improbable collisions, a newborn rogue planet spun in the earliest stage of terra-genesis. Fragments of the six meteors spun off from it into the empty reaches of space, and the puffy shroud of a budding atmosphere, rich in hydrogen, obscured the planet’s surface.

[“Focus, Mason. There’s still one option left-”]

“I’m good.”

[“You are not good. This is important, Mason. You must at least consider all of the options available to you. I know it may not be pleasant, but the difference between {Common} and {Rare} is greater than you think. Qualifying for a {Rare} Essence of any kind is an incredible advantage.”]

“Qualifying,” he echoed, watching the newborn planet spin. Was it a trick of the eye, or was it really spinning as fast as he thought it was? “How am I qualified for anything when the Game just started?”

The voice hesitated.

[“Full Metal Jacket {Rare}”]

The spent brass casing glowed beneath the ice.

Full Metal Jacket {Rare}: Strongest when the chamber is loaded, you are the iron arbiter of death. You thrive in lethal combat. Peace is possible in theory, but violence will always find you. It’s a {Rare} man that walks your path long enough to die of natural causes.

• {+1 Somatic Skill Slot}
• {+1 Arcane Skill Slot}
• {+1 Signature Skill Slot}

Source: Bullets. Brass. Bloodshed.

More skills, and a Source as broad as it was simple. There may not be any bullets left in the mag, and there may not be any brass lying around, but there was always more blood to be shed. The advantages of a {Rare} Essence. And more to come as the Game progressed, no doubt.

[“The Game hasn’t yet begun, but your options weren’t chosen at random. These memories may not be pleasant, but they are a part of you. They are the seeds, planted by your choices in life up to this point. It is up to you which of them you let grow. But you must let one of them grow. Our past decides our future.”]

“This Game,” Mason said. “Does it have a name?”

[“It has hundreds of names. You may even add your own to the list, when all is said and done. But the oldest one I know of is Ascension.”]

Ascension. Mason rolled that one around on his tongue. In the distance, the newborn planet was changing. Its atmosphere shifted before his eyes, flashes of lightning and spiral storm currents racing across the surface. He toed the edge of the invisible platform. The planet was close enough to inspire awe, but still hundreds of thousands of miles away.

“And you?”

[“Me?”]

“Do you have a name? If you don’t, can you come up with one? I’d rather not do it myself - naming the voice in my head feels like crossing a line.”

For a long moment, Mason didn’t think he’d get any response at all. He felt around a bit more, with his mind as much as his body. Visualize. Manifest.

[“... It’s Carrara. You can call me Carra.”]

Mason smirked. “You sound flustered, Carra.”

He’d found it.

[“Focus. This phase deserves your full attention. If you’re unable to decide on an Essence, I can advise you. Truly, though, any one of them will do just fine.”]

“No thanks. I don’t want any of that garbage.”

Mason stepped off the platform of black ice. Unlike when he’d rolled off his ‘bed’, though, he didn’t fall. This time, he stepped through the gap between where he was and where he wanted to be. Through the seams he’d found with his questing mind.

In one step, he stood over the newly formed planet.

[“Mason!?”]

This close, he could see the primordial roil seething just under the surface of the new atmosphere. He reached out again, this time with his actual hands, and wedged them into that seam he’d felt. Then, slowly but surely, he pried the edges apart.

Maybe ‘seam’ wasn’t the right word for it. Maybe Menu was a better fit.

[“Don’t-!”]

Whatever else Carra said after that, it was cut short as Mason slipped through the gap between Character Creation and the first stage of Ascension. As he fell through the uppermost layer of the vicious atmosphere, he pinched himself one more time, hard enough to draw blood. Lightning ripped through the air over his head, close enough to make his hair stand on end, and thunder rolled past in its wake. He laughed.

Whatever those stupid bastards had gotten him wrapped up in, he’d face it on his own terms. The past was dead and buried, and the future was his to take. If the powers-that-be wanted to give him nothing but shit choices, then so be it. He’d make his own way forward. That was the essence of Mason Slayton.

~<< >>~

Achievement Unlocked: {Vanguard of Mankind}

~<< >>~

2.8

Apologies for the radio silence. Holidays and a cross-country move have been kicking my ass, but that's all over with now. Going to do my damnedest to get back into the swing of things and power through this arc starting tonight. You've all certainly waited long enough.

'Til then, enjoy.

Griffon,

The Risen Flame

For a time I just leaned against that forward rail, basking in the afterglow of our survival while Sol wrangled the crew. My arms burned, throbbing painfully where I had torn the muscles while acting as an anchor weight. It felt as though my skull had been stuffed full of wool and buzzing insects, the effect only worsening the more I probed my memories in search of answers. Somewhere in that empty space between Olympia and now, my heart’s blood had been reduced even further.

While Sol grilled his men for answers and Selene scampered up the mast to the crow’s nest, I called upon the healing hands of my intent. They spun into being around me, the manifestations of my pneuma made visible by the dry blood that coated each of them from fingertip to wrist, and went to work mending my torn muscles.

I inhaled slowly, steadily, bidding the wheel of channels to move inside my flesh. It obeyed, burning and turning, and to my deep satisfaction I felt the confirmation of a prior suspicion - the burden of my healing hands lightened. The wheel made their efforts twice as effective, for half the prior cost.

Selene beat the Eos’ scarlet sail like an old blanket as she shot up the mast, searching its folds with sharp eyes. Whatever had rattled my brother and I so severely, it hadn’t laid a finger on my sister. She was still every bit the nimble Heroine, while I felt the same way Sol had looked when he staggered out of the Orphic House in Thracia. My brother was little better off than me, remaining on his feet only by virtue of spite and the bronze spear he’d pulled from his shadow to leverage as a walking stick.

Whatever entity it was that had put its filthy hands on our hearts and minds, I didn’t know. Sol didn’t either, and I could tell from the looks on their faces that the crew wouldn’t have anything meaningful to tell him when he asked. Something ominous had taken place on this ship, that much was clear. But there wasn’t a living soul among us that could remember it.

Of course, that still leaves you.

The lingering spirit that called itself my ancestor chuckled, the sound just as I remembered - deep, menacing, and vaguely bored. Of all the lived experiences that had been stolen from me, our thief had left behind the one thing that I’d have freely given.

How cruel.

Selene vaulted up over the lip of the crow’s nest. I sneered at the spirit lingering in my blindside. Cruel, me? No, the true cruelty was a perfectly fine piece of jewelry being wasted on a-

“They’re gone!”

Sol’s head snapped up, the riptide current of his influence sweeping over the ship as he took another count of those on board. I saw it, the moment that he realized what he’d missed. What we had both missed in our torpor.

Selene leaned out from the crow’s nest, panicked. “Lync and Sorea! They’re gone!”

Something flashed behind my brother’s eyes. Something that wasn’t quite terror, wasn’t quite rage. He turned to the men who’d gathered in loose ranks around him, and barked a word I’d never heard before today.

“About face!” That was what the worldly tongue rendered as its meaning, but beneath that, the true word was vertere. A Latin word of power - a captain’s order. It wasn’t the first of its kind that Sol had spoken in the days since he’d taken our crew into the fold. And like the rest that had come before it, I watched it move the men on its own.

As one, like it had been rehearsed, the new men of the Fifth pivoted on their right heels and spun to face the stern. Sol ground his teeth in frustration.

“The ship,” he corrected himself, pressing vainly against the Nile’s current with gravitas. “We have to turn the ship around.”

I waved the bronze boarding hook. “And what? Give the whirlpool a second taste of us?”

“We know the trick of it now.”

“The oars will break long before this river does if we try to row against it,” I told him through our joined shadows. “Even if they were made of adamantine, our crew is not.”

He stared hard at me, his shadow rippling. “Then we beach the ship. Retrace our steps.”

“Retrace them where? I can’t remember a thing. Can you?”

We both reached for some touchstone, some beacon in the wine-dark waves of our recollection, and both of us grimaced as the drums beat double-time against our skulls.

Selene leapt from the crow’s nest, twisting with a Heroine’s careless artistry in midair and pulling her spear from the fold in her silks. I tucked and rolled sideways across the deck, separating my shadow from Sol’s as she thrust her penumbral spear down.

The shadow cast by her spear sank into the shadow cast by Sol, but my brother didn’t dodge. His jaw tightened, and his right hand lashed out to catch the Oracle’s spear by its prophecy-carved shaft. Selene gasped but hung on, hanging a handspan above the surface of the deck. A few of the men eased back, watching her warily. The rest had turned and torn across the deck, overturning rowing benches and calling out the ornery pirate child’s name.

Sol stared flatly at Selene. “Why.”

“You were doing it again.” She glared back at him, dangling. “Cutting me out of things.”

“There are less violent ways to make yourself heard.”

“Less effective ways, perhaps. If I want the two of you to understand me, what choice do I have but to speak your primary language?”

Sol snorted, unimpressed. I raised one hand, the other kneading at my aching temple.

“If I may?” I asked politely.

Two crackling limbs of my intent struck out and speared the soft flesh of my sister’s wrists. She yelped and fell to the deck, her fingers spasming as the lightning current swept through her. When she turned on me, her heart flame flaring, both of my pankration hands smacked her over the head.

“Violence is our native tongue, that much is certainly true,” I said genially, while my foolish little sister tried and failed to smooth down the hair that the lightning current had frazzled. I leaned forward. “But never mind fluency - you’ve yet to string a proper sentence together in this vicious tongue of ours.”

Close enough now to feel the low hum of the lingering static, I lowered my voice to a murmur that only she and Sol could hear.

“Do you recognize every man on this ship?” 

The Heroine went very still.

“What-?”

“Answer the question.”

The scarlet flames behind her eyes flickered. Her gaze darted past me and traced from ragged sea dog to ragged sea dog, paranoid and pondering.

“Yes. Why?”

“Because one of them does not belong.”

Sol stared over our heads, his expression carved from stone.

“What?” Selene whispered, disguising her alarm as anger towards me. “That can’t be. I know all of these men by name-”

“As do I.”

“Then what are you trying to say? One of them is a… fake?”

“An interloper.”

She struggled visibly to parse the difference.

“How do you know?” she finally asked.

Sol answered in my stead, tossing her ornamental spear so that it skewered the deck halfway down the length of the ship. It didn’t hit any of the men, didn’t even come close. But even so, a man’s pained scream split the air.

Nine men spun and turned to regard one as he clawed at the deck in vain, trying and failing to escape the spear that had pinned his shadow to the deck. It held him there, tethering him, and his silhouette writhed in terrible agony around the spearhead. Beside me, Selene exhaled like she’d been punched in the gut as she finally noticed what Sol and I had seen the moment she jumped down from the crow’s nest.

Where I had rolled and Sol had braced for the impact of the penumbral spear - the silhouette of the Oracle’s weapon, which could strike at raven mantles like they were flesh and blood - the rest of the men on board had reacted to the descending Heroine herself. Only one other, the interloper, had reacted as Sol and I had.

The men parted to let Sol pass, his every step a crack of thunder against the deck. Such was the downed man’s agony that he didn’t notice his captain’s approach until Sol was looming directly over his head. The new man of the fifth bit down on another animal sound of pain, his fingernails broken and bloody, and looked up into Sol’s eyes. Whatever he saw there, it chased the pain away with terror.

I remembered this man, of course. He was a reserved soul, dark of hair and skeletally thin, even by the standards of his fellow slaves-turned-soldiers. His skin grew pale with dread, making the dark bags under his eyes stand out twice as starkly.

While the man froze like a cornered rat before a hunting hound, the man’s shadow continued to writhe and claw at the silhouette of the spear that had skewered it. The shadow and the self were out of sync, just as they had been when Selene leapt down from the crow’s nest with her holy spear in hand.

“Sephor,” Sol said quietly, taking the spear in hand. “Grit your teeth.”

The man’s name was Sephor, and he was the only Egyptian in our crew.

Sephor shivered and nodded once, speaking through his clenched teeth. “Aye, captain.”

Sol ripped the spear out of the deck, and Sephor jerked like it had been his own flesh. I knew the pain well.

I brushed one of the men aside and stepped into the tense circle they’d formed around their captain and crewmate. I crouched beside Sephor’s head, peering down into the man’s bloodshot eyes. He was terrified, that much was clear as day. More than that, though, he was confused. I knew that look. I’d seen it in the eyes of countless young mystikos after I broke them down to their smallest parts in the marble octagon. I’d seen it in my own reflection the day my father took the first manifestation of my violent intent into his hands and broke every one of its incorporeal fingers, one by one by one.

This man had been hurt in a way that he didn’t know he could be hurt.

I tilted my head to regard the true interloper, the shadow intermingling with my own. The hungry raven stirred, snapping its beak in hunger.

“Hello, stranger. What’s your name?”

To my surprise, the interloper answered.

“Sephor-shut.”

Sol dropped to one knee in a smooth, controlled motion. His shadow mingled with ours, the raven within the captain’s mantle shifting in agitation.

“Do you remember what I told you the day we left for Thracia?” he asked me in the raven’s voice.

“Of course.”

Sol offered a hand to his wounded soldier, and after a moment of hesitation the emaciated Egyptian took it. Sol pulled him up to a seated position, and he kept their hands clasped. Slowly, the soldier’s fear faded.

“The Egyptians believe a man exists in eight parts. Khet and Sah, the physical and the spiritual bodies. Ib and Ka, the heart and the vital breath. Sekhem and Ba, the power and the presence. Ren, the man’s name. And Shut.”

“The shadow in his frame,” whispered Sephor-shut.

Jarringly, Sephor the man spoke overtop of his own shadow, his voice rough with pain and unease.

“Captain, what is this? What happened?”

Sol considered him. “What do you remember?”

“Nothing,” answered the man.

“Everything,” declared his shadow.

“I saw nothing but the deck. I heard nothing but the beating of my own heart. I swear it, captain, on my life!” Around us, the men muttered their agreements. Sol stared hard at his soldier, then nodded and pulled him to his feet.

“Tell us everything,” Sol’s raven commanded. “What did you see? Leave nothing out.” He guided the shaken soldier to a bench and sat down beside him on it, gathering the other soldiers to him and questioning each of them on their recollections while our shadows did the real work.

“It came from the coast. You felt it first, but it was too late by then. It blotted out the land and sea, smothered the sun with its arrival. It knew your face, and it named you Captain. Captain of the salt that shrivels corpses. Captain of the ash that falls from sundered heaven.”

“What was it?” I asked, at the same time that Sol asked, “What did it want?”

“It wanted you to remember its face,” Sephor-shut murmured. “It wanted you to return its greeting in kind.”

Selene was beside me, whispering questions in my ear. I leaned forward, entranced, the thunder in my skull doubling and redoubling with every word the shadow spoke. Like sharks beneath the wine-dark waves, the memories swam and struggled towards the surface. The closer they came, the worse the pain. It wasn’t that the moments had been stolen. No, it was a deeper violation than that. They’d been sealed within our own souls, shunted into a corner of ourselves that was closed off to the rest.

More than anything, that was what made my heart skip. The realization that my lack of clarity wasn’t restricted to just the world outside myself. There was a portion of myself that was stranger to my eye.

The gods gave you a weapon the day that you were born, my father once said. You can play with knives once you’ve mastered your body’s full potential.

A man couldn’t truly master a sword until he’d first mastered his body. That principle applied to more than just martial cultivation. It applied to more than just violence. The drums thundered on, growing louder still. I had decided that I would strive to understand this world and all of its wonders. I had resolved to find the truth, in all of its myriad forms. And yet, I still didn’t know the full truth of myself?

Better that the memories had been stolen. Better that the walls had been broken down and the treasures taken from their vaults. Better dead than derelict in duty to my soul. This would not stand. I refused.

While I wrestled with the thunder and the waves, Sol glowered at the sun.

“What was her name?”

He asked it like he already knew.

I breached the surface of the waves within me, heedless of the roaring thunder, diving down in search of silent sharks. My vision wavered at the edges, Selene’s whispers turning frantic. I ignored the pain of something breaking, venturing deeper into the dark.

What was her name?

Sephor-shut spoke a word that slipped through my fingers, slippery as an eel. It melted like sea foam on my tongue. Fleeting. Familiar.

Lie, my dead ancestor said, and pulled me from the waves. The thunder fell away, and I found myself present in my own body once more. Staring across the deck at Sol, who was staring back at me.

“Lie,” I echoed, interrupting a man halfway through his recollection of events. The sea dog turned to me in panic, wondering what he’d said wrong.

The shadow of the Egyptian held its hands out to its sides and splayed all ten fingers wide.

Then, slowly, deliberately, it folded one finger down.

2.7

Sol,

The Raven From Rome

Echoes.

In the false light of a Roman pre-dawn, on the first morning of my married life, my wife took me by the shoulders and shook me out like an old toga. In the gray light of the coming dawn, I saw those schemes shining in her eyes and knew that I was lost. Her smile was devious, her braided chestnut hair and silken gown disheveled in a purposeful sort of way.

She leaned in close, gripping my shoulders tight, and whispered as though she was sharing with me a terrible secret.

What was it she’d said, again?

A young woman’s delicate hands shook me insistently by the shoulders. They were stronger than I remembered, but they moved me less. My bed was colder than it should have been, firm where feathered down was soft. Instead of cloying floral perfumes, I smelled silt and sediment in the air. Yet even so, it was just as difficult as I remembered to crack my eyes open. I felt as though I’d slept a thousand years, and could sleep a thousand more if only I was left undisturbed.

The woman that was shaking me like a dog wouldn’t have any of that, though. Peering through the slits of heavy eyelids, I saw her shadowed silhouette and heard the whisper of her calling. Somehow, I still couldn’t make out the words.

How was it full night already? Some instinct told me that those shadows weren’t right. I hadn’t slept that long, I was certain of it. It only felt as though I had. In fact, had I even slept at all? The last thing that I remembered was…

Was…?

[The sun.]

My eyes snapped open.

I was flat on my back, laid out on the Eos’ deck like a drunkard in his cups. The sun was blinding overhead, the scant few clouds too faint and wispy to block any of its light. There was no woman looming over me, no hands upon my shoulders.

When I forced my head to turn, straining like I was rolling a stone uphill, I saw Griffon splayed out on the deck beside me. At a glance he could have been lounging in his usual way, but when I looked closer, I saw feverish motion behind his closed eyelids. His fingers twitched, curling and uncurling, making half-formed shapes in time with the unconscious flexing of his body’s muscles as he combatted something only his mind’s eye could see. Trapped inside a dream and fighting to get out.

Through the haze of my stirring mind, I wondered how I had gotten here and realized I had no idea at all. I felt my heart pounding a drumbeat against my chest, but couldn’t fathom what had my body so panicked in the throes of deep sleep. I forced myself to slow down, to relax, and took control of the deafening thunder of my own rushing blood. Seconds passed, the panic ebbed, until finally I could hear myself think. Until finally I could hear my surroundings.

The men were screaming.

“Captain! CAPTAIN!”

I grunted and lurched sideways, the sun and sky whirling as I rolled myself over. My vision swam and I was immediately light-headed, the renewed pounding of my heart scattering my senses like a stone striking still water. Was I drunk? Had someone drugged my wine? What day was it?

“Captain! Wake up, captain!”

My arm was heavier than a marble column, but I leveraged it up and underneath me. I pressed my hand flat against the shadowed planks of wood, straining against the siren song of sleep.

From the opposite side of my shadow, I felt another hand pressing up against mine.

Wake up, Solus!

[I’ll rise.]

I exhaled steam through clenched teeth and rose up, reaching down through my shadow as I did and taking the hand that had been pounding at its veil from the other side. Selene plunged up through the curtain of ink like she’d been falling, only for the rules of nature to reassert themselves and pull her down to earth again. The Scarlet Oracle tumbled across the deck while I slumped my torso across the bone-white bench I’d made. She plowed straight into Griffon’s sleeping figure and knocked him fully from his dream.

The instant my brother’s eyes snapped open, fists of blinding light and scouring flame exploded outward in a cloud around him, lightning limbs darting between them too fast for untrained eyes to see. They lashed out at anything and everything within their reach, and I was too slow to stop them. Fortunately, they weren’t alone. Among the thirty appeared ten more pankration limbs covered in what looked to be dried blood, the least flashy of the lot by far, and they moved with precision where the rest of his violent intent ran wild. They slapped away and struck down every limb that reached for a sailor or Selene, leaving the rest of them to slip through and beat at the ship.

Though the new men of the Fifth Legion flinched and cried out in fear as Griffon’s mad lightshow crackled and roared over their heads, they did not leave their rowing benches. Indeed, they didn’t even raise their heads. One and all, they kept them bowed and stared straight down at the ship’s deck. For a moment, though their posture was bizarre, they seemed to me like the picture of military discipline.

Then I felt the throbbing of the captain’s virtue in my soul, like a muscle that I had kept tense for far too long, and realized they hadn’t moved or raised their heads only because they couldn’t.

I tore away the heavy cloak of gravitas, the action causing something to spasm and clench deep within me, and the men threw themselves away from their benches like they’d been burned.

“Wait-! Stop! Just be still, you-!” Selene cried out in pain and I turned sharply, jabbing a finger at Griffon as he wrenched his sister’s arm behind her back in a pin. The Greek captain’s virtue struck him twice, first at the foot he had tucked underneath his body, and second at his chin. His foot went out from under him, stealing his stability, and the captain’s fist hit him like a hammer across the jaw, forcing the two siblings apart.

The blow wasn’t strong enough to knock him unconscious again. In fact, it was just enough to rouse him fully from whatever waking nightmare he’d been fighting. The violent cloud of flying fists dissipated immediately as his scarlet eyes cleared, and he stared at me in utter bewilderment. I knew at once that he was just as lost as I was.

“What happened!?” Selene cried, flying to her feet. “What did you see? Why did you shut me out of it?”

What had I seen? Why had I- it was my doing that she’d been trapped inside my shadow? My head throbbed, pounding like Bakkhos’ funeral drums behind my eyes.

“I don’t know.” The words felt coarse against my throat. Like gravel grinding through my flesh.

“No,” Griffon spoke, his voice as rough as mine. He held a burning hand to his face, digging the tips of his fingers into his no doubt pounding head. His bloodshot eyes bore into mine. “We don’t remember. There was something there, but it’s gone now. Something took it from our heads.”

“What are you saying?” Selene asked, aghast.

I scowled. “We’ve been robbed.”

The thought of it was horrifying on its own, a violation that I instinctively wanted to dismiss. But my instincts told me he was right.

My mind flew at once to assessing losses. The men were unharmed, I’d made sure of that first, but Sorea was nowhere to be found. The Eos herself was untouched, as far as my inexperienced eye could tell, and the sun’s position… I couldn’t remember where it had been before we were robbed. I remembered Olympia and our flight from it as it fell, but beyond that, the drum beat drowned out all my thoughts. How much time had we lost?

Where had we been heading, and where were we now?

The heavy scent of silt and sediment in the air was too familiar to be coincidence. I swept unfocused eyes across the rail, forcing my thoughts through that wall of beating drums, and finally made the connection.

The Eos was all but flying without any need for oars or even a full sail, carried along by a frothing current of freshwater that flowed sideways as fast as a waterfall fell. The freshwater flow carried with it a coating of milky foam, spirals of salt-water froth that shot through the freshwater like mineral veins, becoming thinner and thinner by the moment as the river overwhelmed the saltwater intrusion.

I recognized that current, and I knew well that sea-foam froth. The distant banks of the river were a sight I hadn’t seen from this angle before, but they were still a vivid picture in my mind. I’d marched along those mudbanks just a few years ago. I’d heard the rushing of the river and smelled the silt and sediment in the air.

There was only one river in the world that flowed so fast that it felt like flying to sail along it. The people of this country had called it The Eagle. To the rest of the world, it was simply known as the river.

Or, in the language of its people, the Nile.

“Captain! Look!”

The Eos dipped, her wood-carved figurehead gazing at the surface of the Nile in apparent curiosity as it rushed up to meet her. My stomach rolled at the sight of it, a sense of deja vu that wasn’t quite my own washing over me. The memory of Stavros Aetos screamed at me that something had gone terribly wrong. It warned me it would get much worse if I didn’t find my feet and fix it.

I grunted, levering myself up against the rail, and saw the Eos plunging down into the open mouth of a frothing seafoam whirlpool. I reached for the memory of the Brothers Aetos, searching for a solution. How had they solved the problem of the monstrous sea-swallower then?

Ah, right. They’d crashed their ship into the fucking rocks.

I made a fist and flexed the Greek captain’s virtue. By the right of my own third rank Philosopher’s soul, the Greek half of my foundations could command the strength of forty men. With the sacrifice I had decided to make in perpetuity when I recruited the Eos’ crew into the Fifth Legion, one moment for every moment, that strength doubled to eighty.

I formed a counter-current in my mind’s eye. Manifesting an opposing helix of motion with the Greek captain’s virtue would do the job, I was confident of that much. I knew painfully little about sailing, but even as a Young Patrician I hadn’t been too proud to run laps in the public baths with the plebians and the street rats, just to watch the whirlpools form. All I had to do was run the other way, and the whirlpool’s work would be undone.

It was a delicate task. Too delicate, I realized at once. The whirlpool roiled and lurched in places, spraying as though I’d pitched boulders overboard into it, but it did our ship’s bearing no good at all. It only battered us harder, rocking men off their feet and sending their rowing benches sliding across the deck.

“To oars!” I shouted, abandoning the working and turning to my men. Gravitas sent the benches sliding back into their proper places and returned the men to their seats. Griffon’s pankration hands joined them in taking up the oars and heaving at the current.

We dipped further, listing down and to the right even as we fought viciously to pull ourselves out of the Nile’s hungry maw. I pressed with the Greek captain’s virtue, but the strength of eighty men wasn’t enough to pull the Eos from a river this wrathful.

The Eos groaned and shifted further still. The men screamed and threw their scrawny selves against the oars. Selene was racing across the deck, her hands a blur as she lashed rope around the waists of the men.

Griffon hadn’t found it any easier to stand than I had, still reeling from something. He’d dragged himself up the ship’s figurehead and slumped across the wood-carved woman’s head, hanging precariously over the rushing whirlpool. He was leaning out further still, tempting the Fates as he strained to get a look at whatever lurked at the center of the whirlpool.

Grimacing, I reached for the dregs of what remained of my heart’s blood. As I did, I saw that there was even less of it than I remembered. It had taken that too.

There was no helping it. We were in too deep, and I was no sailor. I’d break this whirlpool over my knee, or I’d fling the Eos up out of the drink and onto the nearest riverbank, whichever worked first. Reaching out a heavy hand, I made of it a fist.

“Out of my way, red-ass!”

The voice of a stranger bellowed across the river, close behind and getting closer, and I looked back to see a nightmare made manifest by the day-bright sun.

A solar barge hurtled over the lip of the enormous whirlpool behind us and above our heads, not rowing against its current like we were, but into it. The barge’s narrow cedarwood hull cut through the water like a dagger, its high-handed prow easily carrying above the water even as the ship tipped - not low, but sideways, nearly parallel to the waves.

I watched, astonished, as the cedar barge rode the whirlpool’s spiral current past us without losing a single handspan of elevation. Where our pace moments before had felt like flying, the barge looked like it was flying, so at odds was its speed with the whirlpool’s hungry pull.

The cedar ship had no sails. Combined with its narrow hull and the spindly oars its men were frantically hauling away at, it looked like an enormous insect skittering across the water. The ship’s oars in motion were such an odd sight that I didn’t notice the man heaving something at our ship until the incoming projectile caught a sun ray and briefly blinded me.

“Incoming!” one of the men roared.

The projectile never landed. Griffon caught it out of the air, holding it up for all of us to see.

“A boarding hook?” he muttered, eyeing the dull bronze claw in confusion.

Then he grunted as the rope attached to it went abruptly taut and tore him off the ship’s figurehead and into the whirlpool. Selene lunged forward as he fell, wrapping her arms around his waist and bracing her hip against the ship’s rail, screaming in effort. I tried to stand again and failed.

Up. Up. UP.

The bone bench ground against the deck, and I clamped a tight hand around my brother’s wrist.

“Let go of the hook, fool!” I snarled.

“Worthless fucking Roman,” Griffon shot back, teeth bared and muscles straining. “Why do you think they tossed it to us?”

The Eos lurched, her frame groaning as the forces acting upon her pulled her in three different directions. The men at her oars kept rowing madly, trying in vain to move her back against the river’s will, up and out of the whirlpool. The whirlpool tugged her inevitably down, into the depths at its core. And the dull bronze hook, held stubbornly in Griffon’s hand, sought to pull us up along the cedar barge’s path.

The boarding hook wasn’t an attack on our ship, of course not. How could it be, when it had been thrown after the barge had already passed us? The other ship was trying to tow us.

I let go of Griffon’s wrist and grabbed the hook instead, bracing my knees against the rail on either side of Selene and heaving back with all my might.

“Draw in the oars!” I commanded, and after a brief moment of terrified hesitation, the men obeyed. The Eos lurched, turning fully in the barge’s direction and careening straight into the whirlpool’s current. She dipped, and for a horrible moment I considered the possibility that this had been an act of spite rather than salvation, but the ship never fully gave in to the current.

The cedar barge reached the other side of the whirlpool’s rim moments later, and rather than continuing to turn and tumble down into the spiral trap, it broke straight through the current and vanished overhead. The rope attached to the hook remained taut, and just a few tense moments after that we ceased descending and began to climb instead, pulled steadily along by the other ship like we were some ill-suited anchor.

When we finally breached the other side of the whirlpool, erupting back up onto the Eagle River’s surface current, the line connected to the bronze boarding hook abruptly went slack and sent all three of us tumbling back to the deck.

We lay there in a tangled pile for a moment, chest’s heaving and muscles aching, half-wondering if we were still dreaming. The men crowded around us, reeling and in dire need of guidance.

I winced, shifting Selene carefully off me and onto the deck. She blinked rapidly, still gasping for breath, and pressed her cheek gratefully against the cool wood of the deck.

Griffon, for his part, continued to slump bonelessly across my chest.

“Move,” I grunted.

“Ho? No consideration left for your sworn brother-?”

I shoved him off. Griffon cackled as he rolled.

Dragging myself back to my feet was a horrible effort, but I managed it. In the distance, I saw the spindly Egyptian barge that had saved us from a near certain sinking. The ship’s oars were still pumping frantically, the river’s breakneck current apparently not fast enough for the crew’s liking.

The barge was nearly too far for me to see the man standing at its stern and waving his arms expansively back at us. I squinted.

“What’s he doing?” Griffon asked, peering curiously up over the rail. “I’ve never seen that signal before. Is he trying to warn us? Something under the ship, or-?”

“He’s telling us to fuck ourselves,” I said, finally placing the exaggerated gesture.

Griffon blinked, looking back at me. “You’re joking.”

As if the man had heard my brother speak, he hollered at us from the top of his lungs and somehow made the words carry.

“Burn your oars and walk back to Peloponnesia, you ugly fucking monkeys!”

2.6 [Scythas & Myron]

Scythas,

The Hurricane Harvester

“Look at what they did to us.”

Jason sighed and turned back to his raft. Lefteris and Kyno stared at him from across the beach, that same wariness to them as there had been in Elissa. Like he’d bleed liquid lead if they cut him. Elissa faced the waves that had claimed her blade, but he knew she was listening.

“Look at us,” Scythas repeated, lifting his head and spearing them with a glare. “The favored champions of the great and terrible Tyrant Riot. The prodigies among the prodigies. We were so great that the Elders clamored for our favor, offered us their wisdom as mentors and their daughters as brides. We were meant to be the exceptions. We were meant to be glorious. And look at what they did to us.”

They tried to avert their eyes in shame and stubborn rage. He wouldn’t let them. Scythas whistled sharply and the wind rose up from the sands and blew their hair back from their eyes, forcing them to lift their faces. He bared his teeth in disbelief and hate and rage, the bulwark of his denial finally crashing down. Giving way to all his sorrows.

“They were children, hardly twenty years of age. At the end they had nothing but their hearts to pit against ours. And they ruined us.”

It was agony to stand, and halfway up he nearly fell again, but Stone-Urania was there to steady him. She slipped into being beneath his arm and propped him up, sharing the stone-silk robes with him so that she wasn’t made fully nude. As blasphemous as the sensation of her stone flesh pressing against his side was, though, he hardly spared it a thought. His attention was drawn instead to her grimacing expression, and to the sound of rolling gravel her body made when it shifted.

There was a crater in her back, a spiderweb lattice of fractured marble that emanated from a central point between her slender shoulder blades. Scythas stared down at it, aghast.

What happened?

Stone-Urania glanced up at him through bangs of chiseled stone, offering him only a pained smile. His own lingering wound, the ugly black bruise that had persisted despite the hardiness of a Hero’s constitution, throbbed in sympathetic pain. And he remembered.

He remembered the Son of Rome lowering his shoulder and striking him in the gut like a minotaur, a charging bull in the shape of a man, and knocking the wind out of him so that for a brief-but-terrible moment he couldn’t whistle. He remembered falling, twisting, trying to dodge, and seeing only the golden light of scouring flame in Solus’ eyes as he dropped an elbow on his chest.

He’d blacked out briefly at the impact, skewing the moments before and after in his mind, but looking down at the latticework cracks in the stone Muse’s back, he remembered the split second before the meteor hit.

Stone-Urania dove over top of him, her back to the Revenant, and Scythas saw the sculpted terror on her face. Terror for him. And yet, what could a member of heaven’s Chorus possibly have to fear-?

Then darkness.

“What is that?” Lefteris’ hushed question shook Scythas back to reality. The Gold-String Guardian was peering at the stone Muse tucked inside his robes with furrowed brow and flickering flame. Absently, his hand rubbed at his dented breastplate, directly over his heart.

“Not what,” Kyno said quietly. “Who.”

“I was beginning to wonder if I’d only been seeing things back then, but you did it, didn’t you?” Jason chuckled, stripping another log of its branches with smooth strokes of his hand and lashing it to his raft. “Here I thought Griffon was the mad one, taking sword monuments from the storm like they were his by right. But then you went and stole Urania.”

“Not quite,” Stone-Urania spoke, and Jason fumbled the knot he’d been in the middle of tying. “The truth is, I stole him.”

It was the first time Scythas had heard the Muse speak, out loud rather than directly to his heart. He hadn’t known the stone goddess was capable of it.

Stone-Urania smiled, one arm wrapped around his waist, and reached up with her other hand to pat him on his chest. It was no coincidence that the arm she’d kept tucked against her side was the one that Griffon’s blade had fractured. Still, despite her wounds, she was offering him her strength. It made him feel ashamed. He owed her more than this. Scythas forced himself to stand up straighter, to wrap his own arm around her and hold her steady as she held him. Her smile deepend, and her eyes crinkled at their corners.

The sight overthrew him. When Scythas finally managed to extricate himself from it, he found the sands had shifted, and three Heroic souls had appeared kneeling at his feet. Lefteris, Kyno, and Elissa knelt with their hands pressed flat against their thighs, their heads bowed in reverence. Idly, Scythas realized that Kyno wasn’t almost as tall as him while kneeling anymore. How much had he changed, really?

“Sacred goddess of stars and charters,” Lefteris began, gripping the flesh of his thighs tight enough to break mortal bones.

“Blessed patron of Heroic hearts,” Elissa spoke in turn, the words a hoarse whisper. Scythas had never once heard her speak with such supplication.

“Heavenly Muse Urania,” Kyno finished, looming largest in the center and as always the steadiest of the three. His eyes were ringed by dark shadows, his mountainous shoulders slumped in defeat, but his voice was like an anchor dropped at sea - deep and heavily set. “Though our hearts may be unworthy and our spirits yet infirm, we beg of you your majesty - please lend us your aid.”

Stone-Urania tilted her head, observing each of them curiously. He couldn’t begin to guess what those stone eyes of hers saw. Distantly, so long ago that it felt like another life entirely, he vaguely recalled a lecture given by one of the Howling Wind Cult’s natural philosophers on the nature of the eye, and how it achieved its vision. Was it some mystical wonder that made it possible for an orb of stone to capture the light like a living eye, some echo of the Muse’s majesty? Or was she observing the world around her through a different sense entirely, and simply mimicking the mannerisms of man to set their minds at ease? Maybe both. Maybe neither. It hardly mattered - a mortal had no business questioning the mechanisms of divinity.

And yet.

Scythas realized… he wanted to know the answer anyway.

A flash of some half-remembered moment, of hungry scarlet eyes and a knowing smirk, made his stomach churn and his heart flame burn brighter in his chest. He banished it and his curiosity both from his thoughts, irritated at himself.

“I’ve seen you three before,” Stone-Urania mused. “My sisters know you well. They brag about you, at times.” When the three Heroes perked up, she smiled apologetically. “Mostly, though, they worry.”

“We will strive to ease the burden of their care in the future, this much to you I swear,” Kyno said, while Lefteris and Elissa nodded shallowly on either side of him. “But if ever there was a time that they worried for our souls, it would be now. Heavenly Urania, sworn sister of saints, we beg you your salvation. Our hearts are not our own.”

The giant huntsman bowed until his forehead brushed the sands. He looked smaller, somehow, without the mantle of his crocodile cloak. Bare.

The statue of Urania hummed. It was an odd sound, melodic and yet grounded.

“We don’t presume to ask you for your favor,” Lefteris spoke up, just a bit too hastily. He started to raise his head but caught himself before he could lock eyes with the goddess, jerking back down to stare at the sands. “We only want our patrons back. We want to feel our hearts beat freely, not…”

“Not what?” Stone Urania gently prompted. Rather than Lefteris, it was Elissa that answered.

“The faker,” the Sword Song hissed, her rage warring with her reverence. “The one that dared to strike your sister, Tragedy’s Melpomene - Damon Aetos’ bastard son. He put his filthy hands on our hearts. He violated us, and even after he fled like a rat across the sea, his touch lingers there still. I can feel it with every beat. Our hearts are trapped inside a cage of his creation. Our Muses are gone. He took them!” Her pneuma lashed out, but only at herself, cutting thin lines across her pale skin that slowly beaded blood.

“I understand your anguish,” Stone Urania said, and Scythas saw the hope built in them like the rising tide. “What would you have me do?”

“Rip his hand away!” Lefteris hurriedly suggested.

“Break every knuckle and bone,” Elissa added with vicious heat.

Kyno clasped his hands together, a quiet plea. “Break our chains and set us free.”

Stone Urania leaned against his side, frowning down at them. As the moments crawled by, their frantic hope gave way to an electric tension, and a thick and creeping dread. Scythas saw their clenched fists tremble in their laps. He saw their jaws clench and the shuttered flames behind their eyes dim.

“I can not.”

“Why!?”

Naturally, Elissa was the first of them to snap.

The Sword Song’s head whipped up, supplication forgotten as she stared up at the state of the Muse in manic disbelief.

“Name a price and we’ll pay it! Name a labor and we’ll see it done!” Lefteris blurted, raising his own gaze as well in desperation. His face twisted, and the next words were horribly strained. “Please. I’ve lost my children. I can’t find them on my own.”

“Why not?” Urania asked him.

For a moment, the Gold-String Guardian could only stare up at her. Eyes wide, entirely lost for words.

“Why?” Elissa asked again. And there it was, that heat that Scythas knew all too well. She was furious, and swiftly losing the battle against her wrath. “You know what that man did. You know what his father did before him. If you won’t act for our sakes, then fine, but this man and his maker struck your sisters down. Because of Damon Aetos, Calliope is lost. A ninth of the world’s Heroes left without a patron, the heavens deprived of the leader of their Chorus! And now the son has come and razed Olympia to the ground. Lio Aetos put Melpomene to the sword, and still you won’t lift your hand against his own!?”

Stone Urania listened patiently, hearing the Heroine out in her grief and taking no offense to her accusatory tone. However, once the rant had run its course, the Muse said nothing more. Elissa’s expression turned ugly. The scar that cut across the corner of her mouth twisted and warped as she began to say something she would assuredly regret. If not because of Stone Urania’s direct reprisal, then because of Scythas’. He felt his eyes narrow and his pneuma build, greater and more focused than it had ever been before.

Kyno placed a hand over Elissa’s mouth, silencing her. Of the three, he was the only one that hadn’t raised his head when the Heavenly Muse denied them.

“May we ask why you won’t do it?” he asked quietly.

Stone Urania sighed softly. “You’ve misunderstood me. It isn’t that I won’t. I can not.” She shifted the stone silks and removed her hand from Scythas’ chest, reaching out instead for the huntsman’s. “Perhaps it’s better that I show you. Brace yourself, child. This will sting.”

The Muse’s stone fingers pressed briefly against the tan skin of Kyno’s chest, and then slipped inexplicably past the barrier like it was made of water rather than flesh. Kyno shivered, but otherwise remained still as Stone Urania reached deeper into his chest, delicate marble fingers questing for his heart-

There came a sound, like rushing wind and the beating of some great bird’s wings, and Kyno gagged like he’d been stabbed. His eyes flew open wide, and when his lips parted, smoke billowed out of his mouth like it was a forge. Lefteris and Elissa lunged for him, gripping him by the shoulders and heaving him back. The solemn huntsman spasmed and ripped himself away from Stone Urania’s hand with their help, flinching in agony and fear. Thankfully, the marble hand slipped out of his chest as easily as it had slipped in, and the hulking Hero collapsed on his back in the sand, retching and clutching at his barrel chest.

Lefteris and Elissa hovered over him, reaching out but hesitating to touch as they searched frantically for a wound. There was nothing, though. Nothing on the outside, at any rate.

“What was that?” Lefteris breathed.

“What did you do?” Elissa snapped.

Stone Urania held out her hand for all of them to see. The tips of her marble fingers were scorched and blackened.

“He won’t let you go,” she explained somberly. Scythas took her hand in his, brushing carefully at the marks on her fingers. She spared him an affectionate glance before turning back to them.

“I could remove the hand, that much is true, but not without harming the heart. He’d sooner crush it than let it beat unguarded. He’d rather burn it to ash than let it fall into another’s hands.”

Watching that wash over them, Scythas felt his own heart clench in sympathetic pain. First came the disbelief, then denial, and finally despair. It devastated them. Even now, separated from them by the sea, Griffon had laid them low again.

“This is madness,” Lefteris muttered, clutching his head in his hands. “It makes no sense. It’s absurd.”

“Third rank.” Elissa said, the heat draining out of her and leaving her empty and cold. “A third rank sophist, and there’s nothing we can do. An arrogant, lying child.”

“You know better than that.”

Stone Urania stared each of them down, her disapproval heavy as a stone.

“Hate them if that is what your hearts desire, but do not turn your eyes away from the truth they plainly see. Be honest with yourselves, acknowledge your failings, but do not sell yourselves short. The forces you contested were not anything so trivial. They were present. They were real. They were a threat then, and they are even more so now. If you struggle to understand the why and how of their existence, remedy your lack - don’t bury your heads in this sand and pray for me or mine to sweep them into stark Tartarus.”

“Help us learn from our mistakes,” Scythas entreated her. The stone Muse hummed, considering, and he elaborated. “Everything I’ve ever been taught by a senior or a peer tells me that the two of them should not exist. It’s not… there is talent, and then there is this. We were wrong about them. We were wrong about them twice. Help us understand.”

They held their breath while the Heavenly Muse deliberated. Even Jason paused in his work, not looking back but dedicating every bit of his focus to what she would say next.

“It has been so very long since I’ve seen the sun,” she finally said, lifting her chin to regard it. Veiled as it was by the smog and the soot in the air, it wasn’t much to look at. But even so, Stone Urania regarded it with joyful wonder. “Long enough that I don’t have the words to properly describe it. I stopped counting the days so very long ago. It could have been a thousand years. It could have been a million. I suspect I’ll never know for certain.

“In spite of that, humanity remains the same.”

Stone Urania twisted her scorched fingers, tugging at the sky above, and the veil of ash and smog parted like a curtain overhead. Warm, untainted sunlight rained down upon the glassed beaches that had once been home to Olympia’s dock city, bathing them in its comforting glow. Scythas marveled at the simple act along with the rest of his peers, admiring the scope of a goddess’ strength - and then, for the smallest beat of time, he wondered if such an act was truly so far beyond him. If the Queen of the Amazons could fire an arrow from her bow and turn the evening to night, what of him?

Could he clear the skies too?

“You could,” Stone Urania answered. Scythas flushed, embarrassed and yet strangely pleased. “The acts you see as wonders are well within your reach - now, as then, it has only ever been a question of your own desires. All of you, all of you, are capable of outrageous things. That is your right as human beings.

“But along with that blessing comes with it a curse. Man’s virtue is limitless in its scope, and the same is true of his vice. You think less of yourselves because you have no idea what is possible, and you have no idea what is possible because you have no proof before your eyes.” The statue leaned in, with the mischievous air of someone telling a secret they had no business sharing, and whispered, “This is why we tell your stories. Not because they please us, though they do, but so that they’ll guide the way for your sons and daughters long after you are gone.”

“You…” Lefteris bit down on the question and forced himself to wait, hanging on her word.

“I,” Stone Urania confirmed, “and my sisters, too. We do what we can to aid the children of man, to keep their flame alive. Unfortunately, we are not without our limits. And even worse, given time and a lack of new examples to inspire, even the greatest of our stories start to lose their way. At some point, the great acts cease to inspire, and instead invite despair. Why was I born in this era, and not the one that came before? Why is the light in the sky so bleak for me, when for them it shone so bright?”

Unbidden, Scythas thought of them again. He grit his teeth and banished it from his mind. This time, it only came right back.

“Yet as much as things change, the foundation stays the same. Mankind is its own curse, and so too its own salvation.” Stone Urania closed her stone eyes, basking in the sun’s rays. “Past the peak of their fleeting existence, it is the elder’s nature to stagnate and grow old. However, the opposite holds just as true. On the way to the peak of their potential, change is the providence of young blood. Inevitably, stagnation gives way to the storm. For good and for bad, mankind paves their own way.”

The Heavenly Muse sighed contentedly, opening her eyes and regarding them all fondly.

“Those children are the storm,” she said. “Hate them if you must, but understand their nature. This will not be the last time they tear the world down. So long as they draw breath, they will rake their purpose across the earth, upending land and sea. They will never stop. It isn’t in their nature.

“They are not your friends, but neither are they your foes. They are the flood that drowns your village and revives your dying soil. They are the quaking of the earth that topples your cities so that new ones might be built, both the hurricane and the hail.”

Stone Urania smirked gently up at Scythas, grasping his chin pulling him eye-to-eye with her.

“They are the storm, young hero,” she told him, her voice husky and intent. “When it comes to men like them, there is only one question that matters.

“Will you endure them? Or will you be more?”

Your story is-

No.

Scythas banished the voice of his Muse, his first Muse, from his mind. He was done clinging to her words.

He walked past the trio of kneeling Heroes and none of them tried to stop him. They were all absorbed in their own thoughts, their hopes and fears and ever-burning desires. When he stepped up behind Jason, he found him wrenching the last knots tight around his makeshift raft.

Jason stood tall and stretched his arms to the skies. Though they’d both grown by leaps and bounds in the course of their advancement, their relative heights remained the same.

“You’re sure that thing will float?” he asked the reaver.

Jason flashed him a boyish grin, and kicked the raft across the beach. It hit the Ionian in a spray of salt water foam and bobbed cheerfully above the waves.

“If Sol wills it, I’ll sail on a mat.” Jason offered him one of two rough oars that he’d carved somewhere along the way. Scythas took it.

Whether it ended in heaven or in Hades, the road ahead was clear. No matter how dark the clouds above, regardless of the tribulation’s sting, Scythas wouldn’t hesitate another moment.

His story was one of chasing storms.

—------

Myron,

The Little Kyrios

Myron woke up spitting mad with a mouthful of seawater.

“Woah-! Wait, easy-!” a boy his age shouted.

“He lives!” cried another in glee.

The self-proclaimed king and his brother Pyr, the red-headed civic cultivators that had pretended to drown so they could rob him - and then actually drowned when the nearby docks exploded - leapt back as Myron lunged up with swinging fists.

The deceiver had an empty bucket in his hands. Myron’s lip lifted from his teeth, pneuma rising up around him. He inhaled slowly, filling each of the pneumatic chambers he’d carved out of his body and readying himself for a sophisticated exchange of higher ideals. He flexed his fingers and cracked his neck. The larger of the two brothers, Pyr, visibly began to panic, pulling his brother back behind the ship’s mast. As if that would be enough to shield them from his wrath-

Myron blinked and looked around him, at the familiar features of a ship. His ship. And beyond it, stretching from horizon to horizon, endless blue waves.

“... where are we?”

The deceiver gladly shoved his older brother aside and made to answer. Myron held a hand up, stopping him short, and shook his head. That wasn’t the right question.

“No, how long have I been unconscious?”

The king again opened his mouth to respond, and again Myron cut him short.

“No, wait, what happened?”

Now the smug redhead was starting to look a bit annoyed.

Myron rolled his hand impatiently. “Well?”

The king threw the empty bucket at his head. Myron slapped it aside and watched it clatter across the empty deck. The ship was small by any standard, but it had at least had room enough for him and his things. Now those belongings were gone, and in their place were a pair of vagrants. Myron dearly wished that he could trade them for his snacks.

“In order,” the deceiver said, crossing his arms and ticking fingers off one at a time. “First, assuming Pyr did his job, we’re somewhere in the Mediterranean Sea - on a direct course to the southern continent.”

Myron jerked, eyes darting around at the waves in sudden alarm. “Why are we-”

“Second,” the deceiver said loudly, “You’ve been asleep for most of the day. At first Pyr was worried-”

“He was worried,” Pyr interjected.

“Pyr was worried that Jason had broken your neck by accident when he went to knock you out.” Jason? So that was the Hero’s name. Come to think of it, where was he? “You were still breathing, though, and we figured that you’d worn yourself out sailing to Olympia in the first place, so we let you sleep it off.

“And third!” the king flung his arms out wide, an incredibly pleased grin revealing pristine white teeth. “Jason knocked you unconscious and told us to stay put in the woods, the entire beach caved in on itself, and we grabbed you and made a run for it when I spotted this little lady bobbing her way east! Turns out the blast just knocked her off course a bit. She was the only thing for stades in any direction that wasn’t on fire.”

“The ship was on fire.”

“She was a little on fire,” the king conceded, patting the ship’s mast fondly. “Nothing she couldn’t handle, though. What’s her name, anyway? I would remember it - she’s a humble looking vessel, but swift, and more than sturdy enough to suit a king.”

“The ship doesn’t have a name,” Myron said absently, looking closer at the ship’s bare innards. At once he saw that it was true. Where even the hardiest triremes docked at Olympia’s shores had been reduced to scorched and sinking kindling when that colossal whip of flames had struck the earth, the majority of his ship’s frame was entirely untouched.

“Impossible! Even skiffs have names!”

The only sign the ship had burned at all was that the scorched lines in the wood were a bit thicker than they’d been before, as though the lines had been painted over by a thicker brush. Myron traced one of the lines of burnt wood, wondering what it meant that the depiction of the eagle had been the only thing to burn.

“What kind of worthless, wrung-out husk of a man would bring a ship into this world without the blessing of a name?”

In truth, Myron had almost ignored that portion of the Sand Reckoner’s schematics altogether. Despite his efforts, he had yet to learn the myriad intricacies of the Rosy-Fingered Dawn, the foundational technique that allowed cultivators like Lio and even Myron’s own brother to call upon the rosy light of dawn and wear it like a second skin. That being so, he hadn’t been able to use his finger for a brush and his fire for the paint, as the schematic seemed to assume he would. Instead, he’d been forced to skulk back into the ancient philosopher’s home and steal an armful of his mirrors while he was absorbed in his circles.

“You’re being dramatic. It’s fine if the ship doesn’t have a name.”

It had nearly been too much trouble for such an unnecessary aesthetic feature, but the schematics had insisted upon it and Myron had liked its style. Now he wondered if that idle choice had meant something after all.

“An insult is what it is. You. Tell us who built this ship and consigned her to the heartless sea without a name. This king will see them punished!”

“I built the ship,” Myron snapped, finally looking up from the lines he’d painstakingly burnt into the ship’s frame. “Listen to your wiser brother. Not every ship needs to have a name!”

Quietly, and in the privacy of his thoughts, Myron cursed himself for a fool. He’d spent days teaching himself how to use the Sand Reckoner’s accursed mirrors, wasted long and torturous hours burning what he thought was a purely cosmetic design into the bones of his creation, and yet he’d forgotten to name it?

Now he’d run his mouth and it was too late! If he tried to play it off like he’d named it and forgotten until just now, he’d look like a fool! If he admitted that he wanted to name it but had forgotten to in all of the excitement, he’d look like an air-headed child!

The deceiver looked down on him like Myron was worse than a dog, sneering in disgust. “You disgust me from the bottom of my heart.”

Myron bristled, rising to take the bait.

Only to sigh and slump back to the deck. He’d tried his best to ignore it, and perhaps the deceiver had even tried to help him do it, in his own way. They’d both failed.

“The sea was full of corpses when I fished the two of you out,” he said, resting his cheek against the ship’s single rowing bench. At once, the deceiver’s affected wrath dimmed. Pyr edged closer, concerned. “So many that I couldn’t count them all. And that voice… Right before the whip cracked, I could have sworn it said…”

“AETOS!”

“Lio,” the deceiver whispered his own name.

“Not right now,” Pyr said at once, irritated.

“I’m telling you, it makes sense! Some monster screams his name loud enough to wake the dead in Tartarus, the world explodes, and then the next thing you know ‘Theri and the rest of them are chasing him down like they’re possessed!” Myron glanced up at the deceiver, eyebrows furrowing in confusion as the other boy ranted at his brother, flinging his arms this way and that to accentuate his point.

“It must have been about him! Think about it, Pyr! What is a griffon if not a lion and an eagle?”

Then and there, Myron nearly lost control of both his pneumatic chambers and blew a hole in his lungs.

“Lio Aetos,” the king insisted. “It fits! That had to have been about him!”

“I still say it’s a reach,” Pyr said doubtfully.

“Luckily for us, we have a scarlet son right here that we can ask.” The king whirled back to Myron, pointing an imperious finger at his face. “If you are a scarlet son, this should be a simple question, so tell us - do the Rosy Dawn’s Aetos family have a son named Lio?”

Myron felt curiously numb. So much so that it took him a moment to realize his lips had been moving but he hadn’t spoken a word.

“Yes,” he whispered.

Both boys’ eyes widened, Pyr’s in shock and the king’s in triumph.

“I knew it! I told you it made sense!” the king crowed.

“But that means he… we…”

“It means the king’s eye never lies! I knew he was of finer stock from the moment that I met him, no matter how he tried to hide it!” The king puffed his chest out, his off-colored eyes glittering smugly as he gloated. If there had been room for it, he might have started strutting like a peacock. “One day you’ll learn that nothing escapes my eyes, Pyr. That man might have tried to disguise himself as some vagrant off the streets, but the difference between him and this one are like night and day to me.” The king hooked a thumb at Myron, but he was still too shocked to be mad.

Abruptly, the king turned to Myron, self-satisfaction and that bizarre mix of smug disdain and good-nature cheer radiating off of him like heat from a flame.

“Speaking of, what is your name, stranger? Your parents at least gave you one of those, yes? Though since you didn’t have the common sense to name your ship, perhaps not-”

“Myron Aetos.”

The deceiver’s teeth clicked shut. Myron met his mismatched eyes, stared through them, and watched that burning whip crack over the horizon over and over again.

“My name is Myron Aetos. Lio Aetos is my cousin.”

2.5 [Scythas]

Scythas,

The Hurricane Harvester

When Scythas woke, the sun had risen behind a curtain of ash. The Sanctuary City of Olympia had been reduced to an airborne miasma, a sickly yellow film that tainted the morning skies. It reminded him of the extra set of eyelids that some beasts had, thin enough to see through yet thick enough to smear. The film was thin enough to see the sun’s glow through, yet thick enough that he couldn’t feel its heat.

The sand beneath his cheek was still hot, as if it had been baking all day long.

He heard voices on the wind.

Who do you think you are?

Let me go. Let me go! I’ll kill you! I’ll kill your mother, I’ll slaughter your sons! Let me go!

Please. Please. Please.

Three lines for the same act, but each was delivered by a different voice. There were more, every pleading word drilling into his head just a bit deeper. He heard the voices of grizzled men and hard-hearted women, grown adults who had made their choices with open eyes. He heard the wary words of crones and old wise men. He heard children.

For a moment, Scythas was sure he heard his brother.

Not there! Don’t! Please, please! Stop!

Urania, he reached out for the goddess of stars. What is this? Why won’t it stop? For a moment he feared that she’d left him once again, but then he heard her quiet voice.

"These are the final words of the fallen. A burden that the wind chose you to bear.”

I don’t want it. Make it stop, close my ears to it. Please.

The Heavenly Muse had done it before, sparing him his sanity when a line of fire had broken Olympia. This time, though, her mercy never came.

"A hero shouldn’t be so cruel," said Urania, laying only a comforting hand on the back of his neck. It was colder than ice. “The wind won’t tell any other. Without you, they'll only waste away."

Scythas wrestled with their death throes until the breeze waned and ceased, taking their voices with it. He had no idea how much time had passed when he opened his eyes again. The sun was still there, lurking behind the curtain of ash. For all that he knew, it could have been a full day. Belatedly, he took stock of his surroundings.

Olympia’s dock town was gone, claimed by the waves. There was nothing left of it other than that tainted film in the air. Fire wouldn’t have been enough for such a scouring, he knew. There should have been evidence of the cataclysm, burned remains of broken homes at least. But the burning heat of dusk was no mundane fire, and the tyrant Polyzalus was no mundane man. Everything the whip had touched, whether wood or stone or living flesh, had burned until there was nothing left but ash.

All that remained was sand and molten earth, steaming where it met the sea, and mingling with the smoking miasma in the air. If any of the wild beasts had survived, they had long since fled the wreckage.

But that didn’t mean he was alone.

There were four sorry souls trapped there with him, straddling the line between the blue Ionian Sea and Olympia’s smoking corpse. He watched them with dull eyes.

Elissa stalked up and down the beach, lashing out at the air with a jagged little shank that had once been a Heroine’s proud sword, striking out over and over again at an opponent no one but she herself could see. Every few seconds she would jerk away from an invisible blow, only to stumble and flinch away as she took a blow that only she could feel. Every time, her lips would move silently, her hand would tremble and clench around her worthless shank, and she would turn and move back the other way, beginning it all again. Steam rose in thin, steady streams from the corners of her burning eyes.

Kyno sat motionless in the Ionian’s shallow waters, hunched over with his head cradled in both hands while the waves lapped at his bare chest. His crocodile cloak was nowhere to be seen.

Lefteris, surprisingly, wasn’t the worst off of the three. What Scythas could see of him without moving his head was a man possessed by manic purpose. He had eschewed them both to seek out another hero, which struck Scythas as being even odder. Then Scythas realized he didn’t recognize the larger hero that Lefteris was exchanging frantic words with, and lurched up from the sand in alarm.

“Who-?”

The three that he knew froze at the sound of his voice, each of them looking at Scythas with foreign expressions. Not disdainful, as he had grown so used to. Why were they looking at him like that? Who was that man?

The man pulled tight a knot of rope around two fallen tree trunks, looking back from his work and offering Scythas a tired smile.

“How’d you sleep?” Jason asked, taller than he had ever been before. Just a bit larger than life.

Scythas went to push himself to his feet, a thousand questions on his tongue, and promptly fell back on his face.

His limbs were longer than they should have been.

“You…” He grimaced and spat sand.

“Advanced?” Jason asked wryly. “I’m not the only one.”

“You saved us?” Scythas asked instead, and Jason’s faint good humor faded.

Jason scratched his cheek. He had shaved at some point while Scythas was unconscious. Combined with his longer limbs and the new depth of passion carved into his soul, he looked like he had stepped forward through time. Finally, he nodded.

“Then, that means he couldn’t keep you down,” Scythas said, pushing himself carefully back up. He felt like he had been crushed into a ball, compressed and trampled by a herd of wild horses. His silks were gone, replaced by robes of cold liquid stone that could only belong to Urania. They shifted as he rose, revealing an ugly black bruise that emanated from a central point on his collarbone, as though the valley of his throat had been struck by a meteor.

Though he had been to the Underworld once, Scythas had never actually died. He imagined that when the day came that he did, it would feel something like Solus dropping an elbow on his throat.

"You saved us from him," Scythas clarified. Even though he knew it was hopeless, he allowed himself a moment of blind optimism. "You matched yourself against his-"

High on rising currents and stronger than he’d ever been. Soaring heaven and harvested storms. No burning sea can save you from me.

The lying raven held out an empty hand of broken promises and made of it a bloody fist. He cocked his thumb out.

He turned it down.

[Judgment.]

Heaven and earth, and sea and stars. Everything that he could see. Everything the captain led. Goddesses and heroes alike. All of it, none of it, no one.

They fell.

"-him. You matched yourself against him," Scythas pressed. "And you won. You must have."

He had seen the look in Solus’ eyes that final moment before the captain took him to the bottom of the Ionian. There had been no mercy there. The golden light of burning dread, and lightning behind it. Solus would have dragged him down to Tartarus if he hadn’t been interrupted. Scythas was certain of it.

"You beat him," Scythas said. He can be beaten, he meant.

Jason turned to look down at his work. To call it a ship would have been an insult to any proper sea vessel. Even calling it a skiff would have been generous. Whatever it was, the platform of lashed-together trees was clearly meant for the sea.

"I did what I was allowed to do."

"What?" Lefteris spoke up for the first time since Scythas had made himself known. He leaned away from Jason, suddenly as wary of him as he had been when he looked at Scythas. "What are you trying to say?"

"I should have known," Elissa kicked up sand as she stalked back towards them. Pneuma rose up around her, sharp and uncontrolled. Jagged, like her shank. "I should have known better than to trust the coward. You worshiped him until the end, even when he confessed his crimes to your face! I should have known something was amiss the moment I woke up and saw your ugly face. You’re no hero. A clean shave can’t hide a dog’s face-!"

"Enough," Scythas whispered.

Elissa tensed and went still.

It only added to the vertigo he was feeling. In the short time they had known one another, Elissa had never respected him as an equal. There had always been a measure of contempt in her eyes when she looked upon him. The day he had fled the Storm That Never Ceased, the Sword Song had marked him as a coward, and that had been that. Why was it, then, that she looked at him now as though he were a snarling beast?

“What do you mean?” he asked Jason, noting that the other rank two Hero hadn’t risen his Pneuma in the slightest bit while Elissa was stalking Torrington.

Jason sighed, hefting up a branch that he had stripped from one of the logs. He rolled it between his fingers, considering it. “Do you remember what I did in the scarlet oracle’s room? Before you went to Tricia?”

You lost control.

“I did. And in my anger, I struck him with the essence of my spirit.” Jason didn’t have to specify whom he meant. Scythas remembered it clear as day. Jason’s new Ma rose up around him in a controlled current, more potent than it had been the day before. “It didn’t do a thing to him, and at the time, I thought that was only right. After all, what chance does a Hero’s stray wrath have of harming a tyrant in their prime?”

Jason exhaled, and his Numa crushed the heavy branch into a ball of splinters the size of his fist.

“About as much chance as a philosopher has of surviving it,” he finished, letting the crumpled ball of wood drop to the sand. “A Hero’s heart is an open flame. It’s dangerous to mortals; we learned that the moment we advanced. But here was a man that had only just set foot in the heroic realm, and the flames didn’t so much as singe him. The pressure, the crush that is my full heart’s way, couldn’t so much as bend him. How can that be?”

“It should’ve been obvious. He all but told me the answer himself, the day that I swore to stand by his side.” Jason looked down at the crumpled ball of splinters, haunted. “Our origins rhyme. We were both captains once. That much I know was not a lie.”

“You share a virtue,” Lefteris realized.

“Not quite. Just like the circumstances of our suffering, our virtues only rhyme. The day my ship went down, I tempered my spirit at the bottom of the sea, crushed and slowly drowning. But I left the work incomplete. I fled the sea that had raised me since I was a boy. I fled the shadow of my sunken ship, left to me by my mother. I fled the corpses of my crew. I fled. And a part of me stayed behind. That day, a part of me went down with the ship.”

Jason considered the gentle, crashing waves of the Ionian. There was a deep unease that yet lingered in his eyes, but there was fondness too.

“If I hadn’t left her, maybe things would’ve been different. Maybe my virtue would have changed. Maybe if I had stayed…”

“But you didn’t,” Kyno rumbled, pulling away from his cupped palms to look back at them. He looked tired in a way that sleep couldn’t fix.

"But I didn’t," Jason agreed. "And because of that, and perhaps because of a thousand other choices, our virtues only rhyme. In the end…"

Jason clenched his hand into a fist. "His path is mine… but more."

"You still believe in him," Scythas felt sick. "After what they did, you still—"

"I don’t know what they did," Jason shook his head. "None of us did, and we still don’t now, no matter what you think. I won’t pass judgment until I understand."

"You still haven’t explained what you meant earlier," Lefteris said. "What did the revenant allow you to do?"

"He allowed me to fight. He demanded it. If he had wanted to kill all of you, there isn’t any question that he could have done it. At the start of that fight when he snatched us up like unruly children and tossed us into the sky, I was the only one unable to fight it. When he banished us to the far horizon, and I was the only one whose heart burned in vain, that’s when I understood the nature of our paths. The rest of you exist outside of his jurisdiction. I do not.

"He moved me like I was another limb," Jason shook his head. "If he had wanted you to die, he would have banished me back to Olympia, and I wouldn’t have been able to do a single thing about it. He let me dive in after you. He wanted me to contest his virtue in the only arena where I could properly fight it.

"Solus dared me to defy him. He wanted me to win."

It was too much for Elissa. The Heroine screamed, her aura cutting trenches in the beach, and she turned and flung her broken shiv of a sword into the Ionian. Her chest heaved and her shoulders shooked, her jaw clenching hard enough to crush marble between her teeth. Her hair was a mess of mismatched locks, chopped and singed and severed by Griffon’s burning blade. She was scarred. Worse now than ever before.

Scythas didn’t feel any better off. The more he thought about it, the less sense it all made. Every time he thought he’d gained a bit of understanding, some coherence, he remembered another offhand comment that Griffon had made, something so absurd that it couldn’t possibly be true. Every time he thought he’d come to terms with the reality of things, he remembered another impossible act that Solus had taken and treated as the minimum expectation. The more he tried to make sense of it, the more his vision swam. He tried to imagine himself in their place, standing where they stood, and every time he failed.

He had been a rising star in his own right, a prodigy that the Howling Wind Cult was proud to claim, and he remembered vividly how invincible he’d felt when he first advanced to the Sophic Realm. The first time Scythas had reached out with the refined senses of a Philosopher and first brushed up against the whirlwind currents of what scholars called logos, pathos, and ethos, he had felt as though the whole world was unfurling like a scroll before his eyes. He’d never forget that arrogance.

And yet, even in that high, could he imagine himself charging headlong into a fight with a man he didn’t know, pursuing assassins whose capabilities he couldn’t even begin to understand, just to save a stranger that should have been able to save themselves? Maybe. Maybe, if he didn’t understand the danger. But Scythas knew the moment he’d felt the stirring of a Heroic soul in that shadowed alleyway, he would have fled as fast as the wind could carry him. Even then, at the height of his arrogance as a fresh-faced sophist, nothing could have compelled him to strike out at someone a full realm above him. Nothing.

“Nothing?” Stone-Urania murmured in his ear, a question without accusation. “You sell yourself short.” Scythas grimaced.

There was madness, and there was madness.

In the press of a foreign crowd, surrounded by cultivators his equal or greater, and within spitting distance of eight Tyrants whose ages could be more readily measured in generations than seasons, could Scythas imagine himself slapping Elissa in the face? Even as he’d been that day, at the kyrios’ funeral, Scythas knew the answer was no. Because he hadn’t. He’d bit his tongue when she called him trash, and not solely because it wasn’t worth the fight.

Could he imagine himself standing where Griffon had stood as a first rank Philosopher? Watching a Hero back down from an apparent peer, seeing the desert-flames burning in her eyes that marked her as a legend, and choosing to slap her across the face regardless? Could he imagine doing it twice? All because she’d torn his shawl and insulted an acquaintance he'd only met a moment ago?

Of course he couldn’t. There was sticking to your principles, and then there was suicide, and then somewhere distantly beyond that, there was that. The more he remembered and the closer he examined their actions, the more apparent their madness became. Had it been Justice to step forward rather than shrink back when the Sword Song shoved an innocent aside and called her fellows trash? Perhaps. Perhaps if one considered those facts and nothing else at all.

Was it a Captain’s obligation to charge into a losing fight for the sake of two strangers, one he’d met minutes ago and the other that he’d never met at all? That didn’t make much sense to Scythas, but the alternative was hardly any better. Had Solus already marked him as an eager recruit, even then? From that first conversation Scythas had felt as though the Roman saw through every layer of him, straight through to the core, but that wasn’t possible if he was a lowly sophist. Right?

Right? he wondered, seeking an answer, and heard Stone-Urania sigh.

“These delineations that men have made for themselves aren’t absolute. Your great thinkers have done what they can to make sense of senseless things, and their efforts are admirable - but ultimately, they are incomplete. You are capable of more than you think, young reaper. The same holds true for others. If the stratification of your cities was cosmic truth and not just common law, nothing would ever change. Were your own origins not humble? Yet here you are, capable of greater things than most will ever be.”

Because I refined myself. I am what I am because I cultivated my strengths and cut away my weaknesses. The things that I’m capable of now are a direct result of that refinement. I couldn’t have done half those things before I advanced.

Why was he arguing about this? Why was he gainsaying the literal word of heaven?

“You advanced, and that made you capable of great things? Is that truly so?” Stone-Urania sounded wholly unconvinced. “Or could it be the case that you advanced because you were capable of great things? In the throes of your ascension, are you certain that you didn’t conflate one for the other?”

No. That’s not…

Why did it bother him so much?

“Think back,” the Heavenly Muse urged him. “Every great story begins with a labor. Was yours the product of your ascension, or was it the cause?”

Scythas had ascended to the Heroic Realm in tragedy. He’d watched his sworn comrades die gruesomely, cut down in a foreign land by demons in the shape of men. He had fought more furiously than he thought possible, and he had lost regardless. He’d fled, so close to death that he could feel its breath upon his neck, and clambered onto a ship that had been designed for a crew of thirty oarsmen. Bleeding and broken, he’d sailed it into a storm that blackened the skies and made mountains of the waves, careening across the sea like a leaf caught in a hurricane.

At what point in that nightmare had the lightning struck his head? Between the blood loss and the grief and the howling of the storm, the memory had been blurred like smeared paint across a canvas. He’d decided at some point that Urania had come first, blessing him with her favor. The lightning had struck. And then, once he’d paid the price of his ascension, only then had his passion lit a flame inside his heart. Only after he had been blessed and struck in turn could he have ascended. It was the only thing that made sense.

Every day he told himself it was true, it became a bit more real in his mind. The muddled paint that was his memory seemed to get a bit clearer every day, refining itself into a portrait of that day that he could at least make sense of, regardless of how much it hurt.

Scythas had ascended in tragedy because that was heaven’s will. He had advanced where all of his peers had died, not in spite of their deaths, but because of them. Thinking of it that way saved him from the weight of what could have been. If he had only advanced a day earlier, could he have saved them from the wolves? Ridiculous. That wasn’t how his story went. Urania had told him as much herself.

His story was one of weathering storms.

Scythas watched his fingers dig furrows in the sand, distantly, as though they belonged to someone else.

In the story that Griffon had shown them, the story of the man that he’d vowed to defy, Damon Aetos - his father - and his brothers three, Scythas had seen the process of ascension from an outsider’s perspective. With clear eyes, he had watched Anargyros Aetos set fire to his heart long before the lightning or the Muses tried to claim him. Scythas had seen tribulation strike the whirlpool sea, he had seen the whirlpool die alongside the monster responsible for its creation, and he had seen Damon Aetos stride out of the waves with bright blue fire in his eyes. He’d watched him pull an arrow from his chest and strike down a serpent that bled liquid lead and repelled all mortal blows as a matter of course. All of that before Calliope the Muse had laid her golden crown upon his head.

It had been simple enough to explain it all away in the aftermath of the telling. Lived experience was subject to the storyteller. Stavros Aetos could have forgotten details in the press of violence and filled in the blanks with his best guess later on down the line. His memory could have been at fault. The scribe responsible for recording his tale could have falsified events for the sake of narrative appeal.

“Could have, would have, should have,” he muttered under his breath.

How much of what he’d been taught was truly set in stone? The more that Scythas forced himself to ponder the question, the more pessimistic his answer became. And yet still, there was a part of him that recoiled from the mere thought of a sophist doing even half the things that Solus and Griffon had done. Why? Why did it bother him so much?

“Oh, hero,” Stone-Urania said sorrowfully, brushing cool fingers across his cheek.

It bothered him, because it meant that Griffon was right. It maddened him, because it meant he could have done more. The time he’d wasted in Olympia, the insults that he’d suffered and the favor that he’d demeaned himself to curry, all of it in the hopes of saving his brother - all of it had been for nothing. If he accepted the truth of what they’d done, the truth of Anargyros and Damon Aetos, the truth of his own ascension, then he had no choice but to admit that he was more frightened of the Eye of the Storm than he was worried for his brother.

In order to acknowledge that his shackles were self-inflicted, Scythas first had to admit that Griffon was right.

He’d been a coward after all.

2.4 [Selene] (I am so sorry)

BORN TO WRITE

STORY IS A FUCK

Kill Em All 199th Olympiad

I am trash author

410,757,864,530 DEAD GODS

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Selene, Saint of Scarlet Hearts

Selene had met more than her fair share of prodigies in her time as the Raging Heaven’s would-be Scarlet Oracle.

By the standards of most, she had known nothing but prodigious souls. Cultivators were exceptional existences, one and all, when compared to the common man. The greater mystery cults of the Free Mediterranean were institutions that only invited the brightest of stars into their ranks, and the Raging Heaven Cult was twice and twice again more selective than that. Sheltered - stifled - as her childhood had been, Selene had looked down upon more outstanding legends from the high vantage of her holy tripod than most aristocrats would meet in their entire lives.

Prodigies, one and all. At a certain point, the title lost its meaning. Everyone was a prodigy to someone, somewhere, in some way. Even the Raging Heaven Cult's abject failures had stood at the pinnacle of their communities once upon a time. For every peak, there was a greater height to climb.

Or, as Bakkhos would put it, for every valley, there was a darker hole to find.

The late kyrios of the Raging Heaven Cult was perhaps the only man on the mountain who believed every man’s potential was equal - equally worthless. Once, when Selene had repeated one too many of the Tyrant Riot’s sentiments in her father's presence, Old ‘Zalus had warned her that the kyrios was the only one to carry that torch because he was the only one it couldn’t burn. In the real world, her father had told her with dark regret, only the greatest prodigy of them all could afford such a cavalier ideation.

She hadn’t wanted to believe her father then. She still didn’t, even all these years later. Yet, while the smoky scent of burning Olympia still stained her silks, she couldn’t quite shake his sentiment. Every time she closed her eyes, she saw another broken corpse. And she wondered, though it helped her none and harmed her much, how many of those lives could have been spared if she had been a prodigy of the kyrios' caliber.

By the standards of the Raging Heaven Cult, and even of her father, Selene was exceptional. It had taken her less than a decade of active refinement to reach the Heroic Realm, and she had done it at an outrageous age. Both her father and the kyrios had promised her that if she kept on as she was, she would reach the next peak before she turned thirty. Polyzalus had sworn that oath with pride, of course. From Bakkhos’ lips, though, it had sounded more like a curse.

Yet what did future power matter when the world was ending today? What did twice the reward for half the effort matter when she had been born five hundred years too late to make a difference? What good was a fleet foot when the competition straddled the finish line before the race began? What good was courage when cowards lived the longest lives?

What good was a prodigy, any prodigy, in a world like this?

“Griffon. Selene. To me," spoke the son of Rome.

"Now?" With reluctance, Griffon tore his eyes away from the distant sliver of Alexandria. "You’re certain?"

"I am."

Her senior in scarlet faith sighed dramatically, but stood from his work on the mermaid's tail and snapped a finger at the men working the oars. At once, the hands of manifested pneuma that had been helping each of them row instead rose up and clamped themselves tight over each of the conscripts’ ears. The former pirate child, Lync, hissed and tried to bite the first hand that reached for him, so the second hand smacked him over the head. The two hands together wrapped him up in a ratty blanket and tossed him back up into the crow’s nest.

Griffon joined Solus at the bow of the ship. Selene cast an uneasy glance around, but the sailors didn’t seem discomforted, or even all that alarmed by the hands clamped over their ears. They each took it in stride. She supposed that after the things they had seen over the last few days, it would take more than this to shake them. One of the men noticed her staring and gave her a firm nod, glancing meaningfully at the ship’s bow. He didn’t speak, but his sentiment was clear enough. Don’t keep the captain waiting.

Since their time in the Orphic House, Solus' steps had burdened the earth far more than his stature would imply. On the return trip from Thracia, he’d been forced to act as a counterweight against the virtuous beasts that had insisted on following their riders back across the sea. Over the last two days, weighing even more than before, the solemn son of Rome had been forced to plant himself like an eagle standard in the middle of the ship's deck, lest he sink them all.

Something had changed the moment he swore the Eos’ crew into his service, however. As abruptly as that oppressive weight had burdened him, it was gone again. Or at least, its impact on the world around him.

Now, Solus sat at the foremost point of the ship on a bench of hand-carved bone. There were only enough wooden benches on the Eos to accommodate her men-at-oars, and the captain had flatly refused to commandeer any one of them despite the men’s insistence. In the end, they hadn’t stopped protesting until he reached into his own shadow and pulled from it the stark white bench. It was the awe that shut their mouths.

Griffon leaned against the ship's maidenhead, his arms crossed and his eyes back on the distant horizon. Idly, his thumb picked at his middle fingernail, as though digging for something caught underneath.

There was space on Solus' bone bench, so Selene sat beside him.

"Is it truly necessary to cut them out of this?" she asked. "It's very rude."

Griffon snorted. Solus, for his part, set aside his own small project - a handful of bone dice that he had meticulously carved out of mermaid bone using his celestial bronze spear. He turned storm-gray eyes on her. The full weight of his attention settled on her like a thick blanket.

It was another of the many changes Olympia’s fall had wrought. Solus' focus had always been intense, especially for a junior sophist, but it was something else entirely now. Even when he wasn’t looking, he could see her. Not like a civic cultivator could perceive her, with their eyes clenched shut against the full force of her spirit. Not like a Sophic cultivator - like the Sophic cultivator he was - could, squinting stubbornly up at the sun and trying to resolve its shape, even as it blinded them.

At some point during their flight from the Raging Heaven Cult, Solus had opened his eyes fully and now looked upon the world and its people as a Hero did. It was likely a byproduct of his premature ignition. A Hero’s perception, achieved before its time. At least, that’s what Selene had first thought.

Over time, as the Eos drew closer to the southern reaches of the world, she had begun to wonder. The weight of his notice felt different than even the heroes she had met before. It was heavier, to be sure, but she also felt it deeper in her self. During their impromptu strength training, it felt as though he could see her muscles failing before she felt the strain.

There were even moments like these, fleeting and half-formed, when his eyes reminded her of Bakkhos.

"Yes," the son of Rome said, snapping her from her musings. She looked away first. Her ears burned. "It is necessary. For your sake."

"How so?"

He didn’t answer immediately. Selene chanced a glance back at him out of the corner of her eye and saw him considering the horizon just like Griffon. Unlike Griffon, however, there was no curiosity there. Where Griffon gazed upon the distant shore of the conquerors' Pearl City with ravenous wanderlust, Solus regarded it with only grim determination.

"What will you do?" Solus asked. It took her a moment to realize the question was for her. Even then, she didn’t know what to say.

"We'll be in Alexandria before midday," he went on, eyes not leaving that distant pearl. "Of all the cities I’ve seen, none have ever surpassed Rome in her glory - but of them all, Alexandria is the only one that came close."

Selene leaned in, unable to stifle her curiosity. Even Griffin glanced away from the distant shore to regard him with scarlet skepticism.

"It may not have the deepest roots, but the city is a flower in full bloom," the Roman said, oddly sentimental. He'd been like this before, in Thracia, when they had stumbled upon one of the Conquerors' abandoned outpost cities. "The Greeks call Olympia the beating heart of the Free Mediterranean, the nexus of enlightened thinking. Maybe that much is true.

"But Olympia was built for the children of Helen," Solus said quietly. "For the rest of the world, there are two beacons that guide the hearts and minds of man. For the western world, there is Rome. And to the east, there is Alexandria. Neither one beholden to the sensibilities of Greeks. Both of them ascendant, while Olympia stagnates for generation after generation."

"There are more opportunities in Alexandria than there are grains of sand and crashing waves. By this time tomorrow, I could charter you a ship or a mule to any place on this earth. If you want to return home, I will find you safe passage. If you want to walk the Silk Road, I will enlist a worthy guide. Whatever it is that you desire, know that I will see it done. Anything can be purchased in the Pearl."

Overwhelmed, Selene pointed out the first thing that came to mind.

"You have no money."

Griffin reached into his shadow, splayed across the ship's maidenhead, and upended a jar filled with coins onto the deck. The coins clattered and chimed, a cascade of gold, silver, and more mundane materials as well. Solus caught one such coin out of the air as it fell, turning the wood-carved drachma around in his hand. He gave Griffin an unimpressed look, but the scarlet son was observing a stone coin of his own with narrow eyes.

"Scythas gave me these."

Solus grunted, storing the wooden coin in his own shadow and waving to the pile of mostly gold and silver.

"We have enough. If this doesn’t suffice, there are merchants of every kind in Alexandria. What we can't purchase with gold and silver, we'll buy with mermaid scales."

Selene folded her hands in her lap, staring down at them in quiet contemplation. Truth be told, she had her own store of wealth tucked away in the same folded logic that she kept her spear. The how of it wasn’t a concern. Neither was the why.

"What do you want me to say, Solus?" she finally asked, her voice just on the wrong side of soft. For the first time in days, she missed her veil of gossamer gold.

It wasn't the son of Rome that answered. Instead, Selene heard Griffin heave a disgusted sigh and step away from the stern. He sat heavily down beside her on the bone bench, forcing her to shift closer to Solus until they were all three pressed together, thigh-to-thigh and shoulder-to-shoulder.

"He wants you to say goodbye," Griffin explained, leaning forward when the Roman went to swat him over the head. "He worries you'll be marred by the same brush as us if you choose to match our stride. He wonders why you haven't said a word about Olympia since we burned it to the ground. He suspects it's because you secretly resent us. He hopes to leave you at the Conqueror's Pearl City, to see you live a better life - or not see it, I suppose."

Though Solus cast an ugly look over her head, the weight of his ire a burden on her own pneuma, he didn't deny any of it. Selene considered the creases in her silks.

"And what about you, Griffin?"

"What about me?"

She dreaded every answer that came to mind, but she forced herself to ask the question anyway. She had waited too long as it was.

"What do you want me to tell you?"

"The truth."

She couldn't help it. Selene choked on a giggle, then scoffed, looking up from her lap to spear him with an arch look.

"No matter how profound your principle may be, ancient brother, it loses its luster when you swing it like a club at every conversation."

"Ho! Such flagrant disrespect. You expect me to tolerate it?" Quick as a whip, Griffin seized her with hands of flesh and blood and manifested pneuma, pinning her to his side while he dug his knuckles into her hair and scrubbed. She hissed and laughed, jabbing her fingers up and down his bare torso, searching in vain for a fleshy weak spot.

"Grovel! Beg for my forgiveness!"

"I won't! I refuse!"

Solus' deep voice carried through their squabble.

"I want you to prosper."

Selene jerked back, and this time Griffin let her go. Solus was smiling, a small and quiet thing, as he watched the waves. She stared at him, wondering why it was that she couldn't look away.

“This world is full of so-called prodigies, countless children favored by the fates, and every one of them is worthless.”

"Even you?"

"Especially me. I’m the most worthless of them all."

"Why do anything, then? Why waste your time teaching me?"

"For the same reason that I still tend my vines, knowing they’ll only bear me sour fruit."

"You want to be proven wrong?"

"Fool girl. I want you to prosper."

"My city fell three years ago, and it took my heart and soul with it," Solus continued. Somehow, his smile didn’t fade. It just grew sadder. “I lost a mother, a father, three thousand brothers, and millions of my fellow Romans. I lost a wife."

The son of Rome clenched an empty fist. "In the end, I even lost my way.

"But I was found," he said, letting his fingers unfurl. "And now I know I didn’t lose them all. My city’s legions are still out there somewhere, waiting on some distant shore for a light to guide them home. So long as that remains true, I’ll keep searching until I find them. No matter what enemies it earns me, no matter what sacrifices it takes, I will find my city’s wayward sons and bring them home."

He regarded her frankly. "I won’t darken your skies with mine. Your kindness deserves a better reward than the storms on my horizon."

Selene matched him eye for eye, refusing to be cowed.

"You’re so… so…" she struggled to find the proper word.

"Arrogant," Griffin suggested, chuckling when she snapped her fingers and pointed to him.

"Spoke the raven to the crow.”

“We’re both ravens, fool.”

Griffon and Solus went back and forth over her head, trading barbs as easily as they breathed. It sparked a familiar greed inside her stomach, a hunger that she had long ago learned to suppress. After so many years, and so many hurts, it hardly registered in her mind before she’d smothered it.

Then, abruptly, she stopped. She let it go, little more than an ember now, and let it flicker fitfully. Solus and Griffin kept on bickering like brothers, and though she was wedged between them, Selene felt the wall that separated her from them still. The sight of it fanned that dampened ember. This time she let it grow. For the first time since she was just a little girl, Selene let it run wild. She let it burn her up inside, flooding, flowing up and out of her.

"I used to pray to heaven for a brother."

The bickering stopped. Selene smiled ruefully, wondering if she had made a mistake. Even if she had, it was too late now.

"It isn’t all that I wanted. These days, it isn’t even what I want the most. I want to do more than what I’ve always done, more than what an Oracle can do. I want to be a hero. I want to help people, truly help them - save their hearts before they break, not just help them scavenge for the broken pieces. I want to see the world and all its thousand wonders. I want to live my life unbeholden. I want to dance, dare, and die knowing that I’ve opened every door I possibly could."

The fire, that raging inferno of desire, didn’t burn her as it had when she was a girl trapped by marble walls and expectations. It warmed her spirit. Every word stoked it higher. It made her want to fly.

"All these things and more I’ve desired, but I wanted a brother long before I wanted them," Selene waved aside a touch of steam rising from the corner of her eye. "I knew the gods wouldn’t answer, but I prayed to them regardless. For a long time, I’d beseech them every day. I loved my father and my mother, and I still do now - but my father was my father, and my mother was a ghost. I wanted a family. I wanted someone that would tease me, challenge me, but hold me when I cried. I wanted someone I could dream with."

Selene chuckled, dashing more steam from the air above her head. "I wanted someone who had no choice but to be my friend."

The waves lapped against the Eos, carrying with them a thick layer of sea foam. The closer they drew to shore, the more of it there was. Viscous and bubbling, from horizon-to-horizon it was wholly ever present. The saltwater froth gave the seas around the city a pearlescent sheen. It clung to the sides of the ship, coated the distant beaches, and painted the sandstone stilts that Alexandria had been built upon so that from afar they looked almost like rainbow pillars of light. It was faintly unsettling, but it was beautiful.

This world was beautiful.

"A part of me does resent you," she admitted, patting each of them on the knee to lessen the sting of it. "But it’s only a small part. The same part of me that still thinks I could have found a way to save my mother on my own. The rest of me knows better. As much as I loved her, and as desperately as I hoped, I’ve known she was gone since I was a girl. No matter how it ended up, what the two of you did - it was a miracle. Those moments that you brought her back… they were more than I ever thought I’d get."

"And yet," she whispered, "I can’t help but hate you, just the slightest bit, for taking her final moments for yourself. I’ve only had a brother for three days, and already I resent him for stealing my time in the sun from me - when he’s the one that hung it in the sky for me. How unreasonable can I be?"

"Witless little sister." Her brother's arm, tan and strong, wrapped her up and pulled her close. When she dared to look, she found none of what she’d feared in him. His scarlet eyes were only fond. "It’s your sacred right to be unreasonable. That’s what the Flame sculpted siblings for."

Selene tried to laugh, but it came out choked.

"I don’t want to leave," she decided, as if there had been any doubt. Turning back to the captain, who seemed caught between warm approval and dread, she snatched his hand in hers and pulled it close before he could step away. "I told you back then, didn’t I? I’m with you, Solus. We’ll walk this road together."

"To the peak," Griffin vowed, laying his own hand over theirs.

"To the peak," Selene insisted.

Sol’s jaw flexed, gray eyes going distant, withdrawn - then they turned away from the past, focused on the two of them instead. The son of Rome sighed and squeezed her hand in his. Ruefully, he agreed.

“To the peak-“

The last thing she saw was the lightning in his eyes as he turned to face the shore, a sudden alarm so swift and fiercely bright that it stung her senses. The bench scraped against the deck with an ugly sound as Griffon surged to his feet, pneuma rising like a fire along with the hands of his violent intent.

Solus covered her eyes with a single heavy hand. His virtue slammed down upon the men at oars, forcing their heads to bow.

“Don’t look!” Solus snarled at her brother. Whatever his response was, Selene never heard it.

Two hands of scarlet sin spun out from the sea of her brother’s soul and covered her ears tight, blocking out all sound. Denied sight and sound, she reached out frantically with her enlightened senses, feeling nothing but the flickering lights of the panicked men at oars and the roaring flames of her companions. The sparked higher and higher, burning what little time they had left-

And then even that was gone.

Selene held her breath, reaching out with all her senses for something, anything, and finding nothing there at all.

Silence.

2.3

Griffon, the Risen Flame

The day I watched my cousin’s golden mother die, a question had taken root in my mind. No matter how completely I’d tried to suppress it, utterly uncaring of my efforts, that uncertainty had remained - festering somewhere in the shadow of the soul that every man feared to shine light upon. Years had passed, and I had met Sol. I’d allowed myself to forget.

Then I’d met Melpomene, the Tragic Poet of the Muses, and she had reached out through the Oracle of Broken Tides to remind me of the question that I had for so many years refused to ask.

A vow sworn with golden intention, yet in the end not upheld - was that a failure, or a lie?

As if you needed someone else to tell you the color of clear skies.

Decrepit old ghost. Get back into your tomb.

No.

I glared irritably at the shimmering ruby gem hanging from my neck. Not for the first time, I cursed my past self for stealing it from the Rosy Dawn’s ancestral pools. Priceless relic that it was, it was far from the only gem in this world that was pleasing to the eye. I could have draped myself head-to-toe in jewelry like a low-class reaver - or worse still, a Persian - and not suffered a single spoken word from the finery. Instead, I had chanced upon the one and only scarlet stone among thousands with a parasite attached.

This barking act demeans you. A lion of my line should roar.

Festering corpse.

Foam of my loins.

My thoughts were under siege, and the flickering remains of the Titan Flame’s golden ichor had yet to find the root of my so-called ancestor’s presence in my mind. Until that leading thread was found, I’d have no choice but to suffer him.

Fortunately, I had no shortage of interesting things to distract me in the meantime.

“Push.” Sol’s voice carried easily over the light crashing of waves, and eleven voices rose up in response to the captain’s command.

“THIRTY-EIGHT!”

Ten newly awoken cultivators and one exalted Heroine pressed against the ship’s deck, straining with all their might against an unseen pressure. Teeth gnashed and muscles bulged. Ever so slowly, they rose.

I pushed myself up in one smooth motion, basking in the familiar burn of overburdened muscles like an old friend’s embrace. How long had it been since I’d enjoyed this simple pleasure? Years and years, and far too long.

“Drop,” Sol demanded, and I lowered myself alongside him until our noses brushed against the wood. The muffled grunts and groans from the crew and my sister were a nostalgic sound, one I had never forgotten but for so long been unable to take part in for myself. We held ourselves there, half a hand from kissing the Eos’ deck, and I relished every breath.

“Push.”

“THIRTY-NINE!”

Past a certain point of physical refinement, a cultivator ceased to feel the burden of their own weight. In many ways this was a boon, allowing for the deft alacrity and thoughtless acrobatics that so dazzled mortals who had yet to start their climb. However, the drawbacks to this weightlessness were keenly felt in the gymnasium. Beyond a certain point, one that I had surpassed early in my life, calisthenics weren’t worth the time.

It was possible to add on to the body’s natural weight, of course, and many did - but it was an imperfect solution at best. It was all too easy to lose track of your body’s ideal balance and overburden one portion of your musculature at the expense of others. Even beyond that concern, there came a point where it simply wasn’t practical to strap a boulder to your back and push.

“Drop.”

I lowered myself once more to the deck, and it was an effort to hold myself steady. The sensation of the Greek captain’s virtue was not like a boulder balanced on my back - it was like a second skin, a coating of oil that pressed down upon every muscle at once and burdened them in perfect proportion to one another. My breaths were steady, my arms flexing without tremors, but I felt sweat beading on my brow.

“Push.”

“FORTY!”

I pushed myself up off the deck, and it felt like I was a child again. I felt my body refine itself in real time, and it was the simplest sort of wonder.

I glanced at Sol through the curtain of hair hanging over my eyes. He’d discarded his breastplate and shrugged the white chiton off his shoulders while he went to work on his new soldiers, and his back glistened with sweat as he pushed himself up beside me. Muscles like coiling iron flexed beneath the Roman’s tan skin, struggling against a weight far heavier than the fraction he’d allowed his men to shoulder while they trained. He’d given Selene and I more, of course, but not the full amount - he’d promised I could try it when we had firm land beneath our feet, and I intended to hold him to that.

Still, though his burden was greater than the rest of ours combined, he watched his soldiers like a hawk. That distant look I’d grown so used to seeing in his eyes was gone as though it had never been, replaced with a focus sharp enough to cut clean through iron. His eyes flickered from man to man, and through the lense of my pneumatic senses I observed his continuous adjustment of their burdens. The instant before a man began to falter, he’d find his burden lightened just enough to keep going. Every time a man grew too comfortable with the pace, he’d blink and find the weight had become just a bit heavier.

Like this, Sol kept each of his men toeing the line of failure without letting them tumble fully over into it. It was a deceptively complex working of his virtue, artful in its way, and I’d praised him for it when I first noticed what exactly it was that he was doing. The Roman had rolled his eyes and otherwise ignored me, but he’d been unable to hide the hint of thrumming pride in his heart.

“Drop.”

“Give me a bit more,” I urged him under my breath. He ignored me. “The ship can take it. She was built to last.” He ignored me still. I blew a lock of hair away from my eye, cocking an eyebrow at him. “Perhaps that isn’t it. Could it be the captain’s worried his good brother will show him up in front of the men? How embarrassing would it be to pass that weight off onto me and see it makes no difference? Perhaps it’s for the best this way-“

Sol snorted, and the weight of another twenty men nearly slammed me through the deck. I braced myself with the limbs of my own pankration intent, hands of rosy pneuma vanishing from the oars of the Eos and appearing beneath my own to act as stable ground. I grunted, teeth gnashing, and matched myself against it.

“Push,” the captain called, the men of the Fifth roaring their effort in turn.

Grinning ferociously, I rose.

———

The men ate ravenously, and they ate well. A common misconception of the crude masses was that cultivators needed less nourishment than an unrefined man, owed to their ability to go days, weeks, and months ascending without eating a meal, depending on their level of advancement. In reality, a Civic cultivator required far more to sustain them than a crude soul. A Philosopher required yet more than that to nourish their ceaselessly wondering mind. A Hero needed more still to nourish their passionately burning heart. And a Tyrant…

A Tyrant’s hunger was never truly satiated.

Why was it, then, that cultivators were not seen gorging themselves at every opportunity? The short answer was that we were. Just not in a way that an unrefined soul - or even a newly awoken cultivator - could understand. We feasted every moment of our lives, endlessly hungering for more even in the moments that our souls were so overfull we wanted to retch. It was our lowest nature, the one we shared with every beast on this earth.

Naturally, we ate food as well. When the demands of our hunger outstripped our means, we had only two choices. Devour, or starve.

The Eos’ crew, the ragged sea dogs that Sol had commandeered as men of his Fifth Legion, tore through their stores of salted meats and wine in a single day. They had each worked hard, as diligent as they were clumsy, to meet their new captain’s demands. Sol was being gentle with them to start - too gentle, a searing voice inside my soul insisted - but it was still worse than any of the work they’d done as slaves. They ate desperately when they could, and slept like the dead when Sol eventually called an end to the first day of their training. When they overturned the last of their jugs the next morning and found them empty, I saw the men of the Fifth fall fully into panic.

Sol waited patiently in the middle of the ship’s deck, back straight and arms crossed while he stared up at the cloud-darkened skies. I sat behind him, on the opposite side of the ship’s mast, my legs crossed and the lead-stained silks of my station pooling around me as I went about my steady work. Neither of us had slept the night before, of course. After what we’d seen and done, I wasn’t sure we’d ever sleep again.

So dramatic.

On the other hand, a night’s rest might be exactly what I needed. Perhaps my mind would be free of buzzing flies when I awoke.

Or perhaps I’ll make use of your body in your mind’s absence.

I paused in my work and looked narrowly at the man looming behind me, his body shifting like smoke where it overlapped with the wooden beam of the ship’s mast. Throughout all his heckling and all my movement around the ship since he’d first announced himself, I’d still yet to see his face. No matter which way I moved or how swiftly, he was always there just behind me when I turned to look, his back to mine and his arm propped indolently upon my head.

My so-called ancestor chuckled. It was a low and ominous sound.

Forgive me, child, at times I forget my age. I’ll explain. In my time, this process was known as gag-šu.

The last word was utterly foreign to my ear, and that was enough to warrant my full attention.

Gag-šu. What could such a word mean in this context? I’ll make use of your body in your mind’s absence. I turned the linguistics of it over in my mind, gnawing at it while I scoured my memories of past lessons for derivative words from younger languages. Possession? Usurpation? A curse, some nascent corruption? Or-

A joke.

I spat on the ghost’s ephemeral golden sandals and banished his laughter from my thoughts.

Sol was looking back at me, an eyebrow raised. I waved him off and returned to my work. Before he could comment on my behavior, the first of his men made their hunger known.

“Captain! We’re out of-”

“Kall,” Sol sharply interrupted the man, and Kall froze. A beat passed as the new man of the Fifth visibly forced aside his panic and searched his memories for what he’d done wrong. Then his hunched back straightened, his filthy bare feet came together, and he thumped a fist to his chest.

“Captain!”

Sol nodded. “Go on.”

“We’re out of food, sir!”

“By whose measure?”

Kall stared at Sol, caught off-guard by the question. He looked back at the rest of his fellows. Three of them were so stricken by morning hunger that they were scraping the salt off the insides of the empty jugs and barrels and licking the crystals from their fingers. The remaining six were watching intently. Kall swallowed.

“By mine, sir,” Kall finally said, turning back to the captain. Sol’s neutral expression didn’t change, but I could tell that answer satisfied him.

“We’ll be ashore before long,” Sol told him, and the men behind him. “A day of hunger won’t kill you. I can tell you now that you’ll suffer far worse than these pangs in the future.”

The men visibly swallowed their protests down, each of them turning their eyes away from the captain’s intense stare and dispersing from around the empty jugs to take their places at the rowing benches. Had Sol been a different man, that would have been the end of it. The new men of the Fifth were only newly awoken, and only then because of his grace. He could have ordered them all to tie anchor weights to their waists and jump overboard into the sea, and after what he’d given them, after what they’d seen him do just two days before, they would have done so without hesitation. He could have starved them for weeks, let alone a single day.

Fortunately for them, my brother was all too softhearted when it came to the soldiers in his care. Sol reached out and clapped a hand on Kall’s shoulder, halting the man when he tried to slump dejectedly back to his bench.

“That being said, you’re more useful to me strong than you are starving. And by my measure, we have food enough to spare.” Sol smiled faintly at their confused looks and tilted his head back. They followed the gesture, tracing it down to me and my work, and the realization spread like a flame.

I dragged the Oracle’s adamant knife down the length of the mermaid’s tail again and again, scraping scales off with each pass. They clattered heavily against the deck, more like metal coins than fish scales, each one shining dazzlingly like sunlit waves. The portion of the corpse that might have been a woman in a kinder world was gone - we’d sawed the mermaid in half the day before, burned her human half and scattered its ashes to the wind, then strung the fish tail up with rigging rope and placed empty clay jugs beneath it to catch the liquid lead draining out of it.

A day later, it looked almost like any other catch of the sea. Monstrously large, of course, the tail alone longer than even Sol and I were tall, and wider at its thickest point than Sorea’s spread wings. Beyond that, though, it could have just as easily been a fish’s head we’d sawed off its end. That was, until you turned a cultivator’s senses upon the meat.

The flesh of a virtuous beast was a delicacy that every cultivator coveted. Unawoken metics with more gold than sense regularly paid small fortunes for even a single plate of such meat, believing a single bite could turn a crude man into a cultivator. Even the seemingly inedible portions of a virtuous beast’s carcass were never wasted - claws and fangs were ground into powder and mixed into wine or used as reagents in alchemy and medicine. Feathers, furs, and scales were fashioned into priceless garments, some even carrying small echoes of the creature they were fashioned from. The hunt for virtuous beasts was an industry that men from every walk of life took part in, the bountiful rewards well worth the risks.

The flesh of a monster, though? Well. That was another matter entirely.

“Captain…” Kall hesitated. “Are y’sure? That rancid blood-”

“Ichor,” I idly corrected him.

“Ichor,” the man amended. “That ichor, it wasn’t-”

“Wasn’t meant for man’s consumption,” spoke up one of the other men, already seated at his bench and hunched over his oar. His voice was faintly haunted, his heart pounding at the memory of our encounter with the mermaid. Or perhaps a more formative memory than that, a superstition passed on from the older generation.

“If the captain says it’s good enough, it’s good enough!” another man insisted, one of the three starving ones that had been scratching at the jugs for salt. He, along with the other two, had been too nauseous from the exertion of their training to eat when Sol told him to yesterday, and now he was paying the price.

“We’re eating the mermaid?” Selene’s golden hair appeared above the crow’s nest, the Heroine’s excitement rousing her immediately from a dead sleep to full wakefulness. Her eyes burned bright with excitement. “Oh, you’re all going to love it!”

“You’ve had it before?” I asked, bemused.

“Of course! It was one of Bakkhos’ favorites - he’d go out and hunt them himself, and if it was a special occasion he’d save a plate for me.” The daughter of the Oracle grabbed the end of the sloppy rope hammock strung up under the crow’s nest and shook it firmly. “Wake up, Lync! You’ll miss the feast!”

The red headed pirate child that the Eos’ crew had seemingly accepted as one of their own flailed and tumbled completely out of his rope hammock, screaming in shock as he woke up in freefall.

A hand of my violent intent caught him by the back of his chiton, a hand-span before he hit the deck, and held him there while he gasped for breath and returned fully to the waking world. Selene stared down at us with wide eyes, both hands covering her mouth.

When the little pirate Lynceus finally caught his breath, he looked first up to the rosy-burning hand that had caught him, and then down to me. I cocked an eyebrow.

“I’m not thanking you,” he declared, and I threw him over the rail.

“You’re not wrong to be wary of this creature,” Sol was telling his men, unbothered by our exchange, “Even in death it would have been a threat to you as you were before. Even now, its flesh could kill you if you consumed too much of it in one sitting. But make no mistake, this is a boon. I’ll show you.”

Sol held out an expectant hand, and I drove the ritual knife down through the thickest part of the mermaid’s tail. It was no cleaver, but its blade was still forged from adamant. It carved easily through the infernal flesh, and I slapped a thick filet of silvery flesh into Sol’s hand.

“Pay attention,” he said in that sharp voice of Sol the Captain, demanding, and the ship’s crew focused all of their senses upon him as he bit into the monster’s flesh. He chewed slowly while I cut another two filets for Selene and myself. Then he swallowed it down.

The effect was immediate. As I swallowed my own mouthful of the bizarre flesh, I traced its path down through my throat and observed the effects from the outside and in. To the men of the Fifth, their pneumatic senses still dull and new, it was nonetheless a vivid reaction. The quality of our pneuma, our vitality made manifest, deepened. It wasn’t a reaction any of them could have put words to, but I certainly could.

The Titan Flame’s meddling had rebalanced us, making order of our bodies where our choices up until that point had made disorder. That balancing of our humors had made all the functions and flows of our bodies subtly smoother - as though we’d been unfamiliar with our bodies before that moment, and only then gained full control over them. By contrast, the Titan’s golden ichor had refined us, acting as the catalyst for outrageously swift growth. It had allowed us to shape ourselves, body and soul, as though we were clay.

The monster’s flesh did neither of those things. It did nothing to the shape or order of us. It gave us no further control, though it did try to wrest that control away - it was a familiar routine now, a process that had started in the Temple of the Father with the Rein-Holder’s starlight marrow, been carried on in the Orphic House, and continued with the ravenous consumption of the King’s Curse and the Titan Flame’s own well-intentioned urges. I seized the foreign presence in my hand and crushed it, dousing what remained of the mermaid’s nascent taint.

Thus subdued, the monster’s flesh was made a part of me. And unlike the marrow of Crows and the ichor of Titans, the mermaid’s essence did not seek to change our shape. No, instead, it changed our substance.

I felt my pneuma deepen, felt the substance of myself take on a new quality, as though I had been a painting on a wall all my life and was now just a bit closer to being the model that painting was based off of. As I took another bite and swallowed it down, observing its path through my system with the perceptions granted by the Titan’s residual ichor, I saw that it wasn’t changing my body’s composition any more than it was my pneuma’s. The quality was all that changed.

It was common knowledge that a virtuous beast’s flesh was brimming with vitality, a single cut of its meat enough to satiate a cultivator of equivalent standing for weeks. The greater the beast, the more nourishing its flesh and the more profound the properties of its pelt. In the end, though, the consumption of it was a transient affair. Even the grandest beast’s flesh was digested eventually.

This, though? This was different. I supposed it made sense in its own way. This was a creature that had been cursed to live forever. It was in its nature to linger.

“Look closely.” Sol spread his empty hands after he’d finished his cut, presenting himself for the inspection of his men. “Do you see any infirmity in me? None. Now look closer, and you’ll see the opposite is true.”

For some reason, though, even the three hungriest men looked hesitant. The first man to approach, Kall, put their doubt to words.

“Captain… we knew it wouldn’t hurt you.”

I snorted. Mad dogs that they were, at least they weren’t complete fools.

“Take that faith in me, and put it to better use,” Sol said, accepting another filet of mermaid flesh as I carved it free. Above our heads, Selene gnawed happily away at her own cut. Sorea perched over her in the crow’s nest, staring intently down at me. I rolled my eyes and tossed him up a chunk as well. “Trust me when I tell you that I know what each of you can handle, and I won’t give you a single morsel more.”

The captain weighed a portion of silvery flesh in his palm that was worth more than all of their slave’s prices had been combined. His next words were dry. “It’s in an officer’s nature to spare only what he must, after all. This is too valuable for you to go retching it overboard.”

A hilarious understatement. In many ways, this flesh was priceless. Cultivators could and often did fight over the bounty of a virtuous beast’s carcass, but they would commit bloody murder for a taste of this.

Kall accepted a small portion of the mermaid’s flesh, hardly larger than his pinky finger, and the rest of the men soon lined up for their own. Sol fell fully into the sharp focus of his station, instructing each of them carefully on what to expect and how to process the meat, silently wrapping each of them up in the eddies of his influence in a way that went beyond even my understanding - there was a Roman touch to this working, one that I resolved to ask him about later.

For now, I left him to his work and focused on finishing mine. I carved the mermaid up into usable cuts of flesh, gathered the scales up into my shadow for later use, and cleaned the adamant blade of the carcass’ liquid lead ichor. I wiped my hands off on my silks, but those were already soiled and the act did me little good. So I filled an empty jug with sea water, dragging the sputtering Lync up out of the sea as I did so, and set about scrubbing my hands clean.

“Griffon?” Selene spoke quietly, suddenly by my side. I blinked, looking up at her. When had she finished eating? “Are you alright?”

“Of course.”

“What are you doing?”

My eyes rolled. “Surely Bakkhos allowed his Oracles the privilege of a bath in their quarters. I’m washing my hands.”

“Washing them of what?”

“The blood.” Obviously.

Selene reached into the jug of crimson sea water and pulled my hands free. To my irritation, they were still stained scarlet. Some of the blood had been buried so deep beneath the nails of my fingers that I had no idea how I’d get it all out.

“Your hands are clean, Griffon,” Selene murmured. I scoffed, a swift retort flying to my tongue.

Then I paused, staring down at my hands.

The mermaid’s ichor was the color of liquid lead. Not scarlet blood.

Ah.

“No,” I finally said, pulling my hands away from hers. “They’re not.”

A vow sworn with true intent, but lacking the context needed to succeed. I had known what I was capable of, known that I could succeed if I only took the proper steps along the way. In the end, my understanding of this world and its histories, its rotting ages and its miseries, had been lacking. I had been wrong in the end. I had lost, because I had been playing a game without knowing the full extent of the rules therein. No, worse than that. I hadn’t even had all the pieces needed to play.

I had decided in the ashes of Olympia that my failure wasn’t a lie. But that was only if I corrected my mistakes. I had been lacking proper context since the day I was born, and that lack in and of itself wasn’t my fault alone. Now, though, I had been made aware of my lack. The origin of blame didn’t matter - if I continued on as I was, I’d have no one to condemn but myself.

I had only two options in the end. I could open my eyes, or I could carry blindly on, burning everything I touched because I hadn’t bothered to learn any better.

Unacceptable.

For the first time since our joining, the corpse and I agreed.

Sorea let fly a hunting cry above our heads as the Conqueror’s Pearl City appeared on the horizon.

2.2

Sol, The Raven from Rome

I moved silently through their ranks, looking the sailors up and down. They stood frozen, waiting for something, the same thing that I was searching for in them. The closer that I looked, the more wretched that they seemed. Still too thin. Still too filthy and unkempt. All of them too crude, and not a single awakened soul to be found among them.

"I told you not to come back," I said, and the man closest to me jerked back as if I’d slapped him.

"But the eagle came to us-!"

"And how far did he have to fly to find you?"

The men shuffled their feet, ducking their heads or casting their eyes to the side.

"We told you to make better lives for yourselves," I said heavily. "We told you to be free. Twice we offered you your choice of tomorrow, and twice you chose to stay instead."

They shrank away with every word, unwilling to accept my message but unable to speak out against me in the wake of what they’d seen me do to Olympia’s burning dock city.

"You’re all too weak to sail the course I’ve charted for myself."

Their backs hunched. Their fists clenched and unclenched. Impotent. Undisciplined.

"You should have followed Kabhur’s example," I told them frankly, because it needed to be said. "You should have gone home."

"What home?" a boy snapped overhead. The unruly pirate child, the one that had shot my brother with an arrow the day we assaulted the slavers he’d kept company with, glared down at me defiantly. Beside him, Selene looked down with clear concern.

"Whatever home you chose," I answered. "You should have sailed this ship to paradise and sold it once ashore. You could have lived comfortably. You could have done anything you desired, lived any life you wanted."

"Not like this!" The pirate child heatedly denied, banging his fist on the edge of the crow's nest. "We sell this ship, we’ll never see her like again! We sell her and we’ll spend the rest of our lives shoveling shit for slave wages anyway! We’ll never be a part of something like this again! We’ll die old and fat, wishin’ that we’d stayed!"

Bit by bit, I watched conviction straighten their spines. Not one of them disagreed with the irreverent child that had once had a hand in their enslavement. Not one of them had been swayed. They raised their eyes to mine once more, and though the terror and the awe made their pupils shake, they did not turn away.

They were the castoffs and the dregs, as Griffin had so kindly put it once before. They were men with nowhere to go, and nothing to their names. The only strand connecting them to one another was a desire for a greater purpose. Their only common ground was an insatiable hunger, a desire to be a part of something larger than themselves.

Emboldened by the pirate child, they added their voices to the mix.

"Don’t toss us out, captain!"

"Don’t leave us for the waves!"

"Let us stay, cap’n!"

"We can serve!"

"Please, captain!"

"We want to live-!"

Amidst the gently rolling waves, a monster exploded out of the foam.

Selene shouted a warning while Sorea beat his wings and took flight. The oarsmen screamed, flinging themselves away from the creature as it surged over the ship’s rails. But it was too late, and they were far too slow. The monster reached out with nails like sweeping daggers, each one of them a killing blow.

I caught the siren by her throat and crushed her slender neck.

The men tumbled over rowing benches, over each other, and failing that, over their own feet in their panic. They stared up at the foul creature, wide-eyed, as she thrashed against my grip and slammed her glossy scales against the deck.

"And they say fishing’s hard," Griffin chuckled, appearing by my side while forty hands of his intent swarmed across the siren's body, holding her in place.

The monster was half woman, half creature of the sea. She was nothing quite so terrible as the drakaina that we’d seen the Aetos brothers fight, more fish than serpent woman, and she had missed her opportunity to sing. Though she struggled harder than any fish, her snarling lips could do little more than hiss with my hand around her neck.

Of course, she was still a monster. No matter how hard I clenched my fist, my mortal strength was not enough to break her neck. She knew it, too. And though she was in no position to sway us with her song, that didn’t stop her from speaking out.

"Captain of salt and ash," the mermaid hissed, her tone as intimate as it was cruel, "you have no place on this earth. There is no room in heaven for you, no punishment cruel enough that yet exists below. Look into my eyes and know that your luck will never turn. Look into my eyes and know that every word I say is true."

"I recognize that ugly voice," Griffin leaned in, golden hair shifting in the sea breeze. Golden light shone behind his eyes. "Hello again, Melpomene. I was hoping you’d bleed out."

The mermaid's expression became something truly ugly then, and her voice grew twice as venomous to match it.

"Son of scarlet sin-"

Griffon slammed the Scarlet Oracle's adamant dagger up through the underside of the siren's mouth, hooking her like a fish. Ichor like molten lead spilled from her split tongue, and for a moment the siren's black hatred turned to terror. Then the muse returned, and the siren dislocated her own bones in an effort to slip free and tear my brother’s eyes out.

A holler split the air, and a plain old skinning knife scattered off the monster's scales. Undeterred, one awoken sailor threw himself bodily onto her tail and tried again, searching for a gap that his mundane knife could cut into. He was joined by another, this one hurriedly winding a length of rope around the thinnest part of the monster's tail and the rail of the Eos, seeking to tie her down. Then came another, rushing across the deck with a rusty harpoon in hand. Then two more, each of them working together to raise a heavy rowing bench above their heads and bring it down on the siren's back. Another, and another, all of them surging forward to lend their hopeless aid.

Not a single one of their attacks did anything but incense the monstrous woman. Yet they fought, and they struggled, knowing all the while that it was in vain.

"Useless," the siren slurred in Melpomene’s voice, contorting her sinuous body in a violent snapping motion. It wasn’t enough to shake my grip or Griffon’s, but it was enough to break the rope and send the swarming sailors crashing back across the deck. "Useless!" she said again, her voice rising mockingly as she directed her scorn at us. "Now, as then, forever more, useless-!"

Selene buried her spear in the monster's naked chest, scarlet eyes burning bright, and the siren shrieked in ear-splitting agony.

The oarsmen staggered to their feet, spitting bloody phlegm and broken teeth, and surged back across the deck in a roaring tide. They threw themselves upon the shaft of Selene’s spear, adding all their strength to hers as she drove it slowly through the siren’s heart.

"Look closely, all of you," I demanded, calling upon the Greek captain’s virtue and wrenching the Siren's head down further onto Griffin’s knife. The siren made unimaginable sounds, a nightmare made manifest. With my empty hand, I gripped the shaft of Selene’s spear and forced it deeper through the monster’s chest.

"This is what we’ve earned for all of our exciting living," I told the straining men behind me. They stared at the monstrous woman, undying to the end, their eyes wild but intent. "This is what will follow us until the day we die. This is our reward - a sea of monsters, and a storm on every horizon. This is our fate, and it is yours should you persist."

The siren screamed at the top of her lungs. The sailors’ ears began to bleed.

"Let go of the spear," I urged them. "Step down, and this will be the last monster you ever see."

I waited for them to waver. I waited for them to break.

Instead, they planted their feet and screamed back in the siren's face, struggling with all their strength to press forward.

The pirate child’s bolted arrow shattered against the siren’s open eye, and Griffon burst out laughing. He twisted the adamant knife around, dragging it down and sweeping it sideways out of the siren's throat in a spray of liquid lead. We held her still as she twisted and thrashed in her death throes, until the deck was coated in metallic lifeblood that shimmered in the sun.

When the life went out of the creature's eyes and the specter of the Muse had left us in temporary peace, the men threw up their hands and cheered in heady disbelief. They screamed their defiance at the sea, beat their skinny chests with clenched fists, and embraced each other in relief. Selene joined them, bruising more than one poor soul with the strength of her embrace.

I threw the monster's corpse to the deck and their celebrations stopped dead.

"Unacceptable," I snapped. The smiles vanished from their faces.

Selene hesitated, looking between Griffin and me. "Solus-?"

“Your bearing, your weakness, the rusted state of your arms and your utter lack of armor, all of it is unacceptable.” I stalked over the siren’s corpse and bore down upon the ragged group of sorry souls. They watched me come like I was death itself.

Still, they held their ground. One man grit his yellowed teeth and forced himself to speak.

"We may not be worthy, sir, but we still-"

"No." I seized him by his filthy chiton and heaved him up, forcing him to straighten his spine and rise up from the hunch he’d learned while chained to an oar. "Worth has nothing to do with it. You aren’t ready.

"Straighten up!" I barked, and they all strained for the skies. "You should have listened when you had the chance."

"But-!"

"Silence."

Their teeth came together. I stepped back and looked them up and down. They were wretched. They were lost.

But they wouldn’t be forever.

"Listen to me, and listen well - this is the last chance anyone will ever give you, and one more than you deserve," I informed them, and their confusion turned to sudden hope. "Sit down, cast aside your suicidal ambitions, and accept the life that the Fates prescribed you. Leave this ship at a port of your choosing and live a peaceful life."

Sorea swooped down onto my shoulders, dagger-sharp talons digging into my chest and back as he spread his wings wide over my head.

"Or stand," I told them fiercely, these hopeless men at oars, "and condemn yourselves to my company. Know that you will suffer like you have never suffered before. Know that the only reward for one backbreaking labor will be two more in turn. Know that no matter where you go, no matter who you come to be, you will always be marked by my association."

I stood straight and squared my shoulders, clenching my hand into a white-knuckled fist. Within myself, my pneuma roiled like deep sea waves, crashing and rattling the foundations of my soul. I let none of it show. That wasn’t an officer’s way.

"Stand proud here and now," I told our ragged sea dogs, "and you will be a son of Rome until the day that raging heaven strikes you down."

I raised my fist and slammed it to my chest, the sound like clapping thunder. Together as one, the castoff crew of the Eos shouted out and struck their fists against their chests in a proper Roman salute.

All at once, like the lifting of a curse, I felt the weight on my shoulders lighten. Not entirely, not even by half, but enough to ease the strain. As it did, a new awareness exploded across my senses. Ten lives, ten worlds, each one mind-boggling in its scope. I felt them coalesce under me, submitting to my command, and I felt them take a portion of the weight off my shoulders and onto theirs, carrying it alongside their own. With my naked eyes, I saw their knees buckle and their shoulders bow as they struggled to adjust, gritting their teeth and straining without complaint.

Beyond that, deeper than I had ever seen before as the captain of the Fifth, the enhanced perception of Prometheus’ golden ichor showed me the bounty of their hearts. Each reserve of blood was a fraction of what I’d had before Olympia fell, but far more than what I posessed today. With this, I could do it. With their lives, I could survive. More than that, I could make myself strong. Strong enough to-

No.

I crushed the ichor’s whispering urges in my hand.

Never again.

The oarsmen straightened back up as my added weight was lifted from their shoulders, gasping in tense relief. Then I took the rest of their weight as well, and their relief turned to shock and wonder.

The weight of ten worlds joined the forty on my shoulders, and the liquid lead coating the ship’s deck began to boil as the Eos’ eagle formation burned itself out from the inside. I clenched my jaw, unwilling to let my weakness show. I felt the boards of the deck begin to bow and crack beneath me. It was time I put an end to this particular annoyance. Alone, I couldn’t yet carry their weight. But if the weight was divided, cut in two, could I withstand it then? I could.

I sacrificed a single moment of my future to the golden burning embers of my heart. The specter of my mirror image, stolen from that frozen moment, shouldered himself beneath that weight and helped me raise it up. Then the moment passed and he was gone. So I sacrificed another moment. And another. And another after that.

With this, every moment of my life from here on out would cost me double. In exchange for carrying their weight, my shriveled lifespan would be cut in half.

It was the easiest trade I’d ever made.

"My fellow soldiers," I addressed them with unbowed shoulders and soaring spirits, "welcome to the Fifth."

With that, their sleeping souls awoke.

2.1

Sol, The Raven from Rome

Cultivation.

The race against mortality went by many names, depending on who was asked and where. The people of Rome knew it as the course of honors. The children of Helen called it the stairway to heaven, and the hollow Macedonians referred to it mournfully as the hitching of their stars. I had learned these terms, among others, from my mentor Aristotle.

Others still I had gleaned from the men of my father's legion. The rank-and-file of the Fifth Legion were native conscripts, harvested like wheat from foreign fields by the General of the West. By his blessing, and by their actions on campaign, these men had transcended their origins and become shining sons of Rome, one and all - but they had never forgotten their roots. Around warm night fires and in the ranks of marching formations, they had shared those origins over the years with me.

The Gaelic tribes were a fractured union on the best of days, and bloody rivals the rest of the time. Yet there was a throughline that connected them all, a Celtic understanding of this life and their place within it that spanned further than even the endless Black Forest - traversing the seas themselves to reach the misty isles of the inscrutable Britons.

The officer ranks of the Fifth Legion were reserved for natural-born Romans, but the First Spear was ever a pragmatic man. Even his black hatred for the western hordes couldn’t blind him to the true value of a soldier in his care. It was one of many reasons why my father had fought to have him in the Fifth. So while he couldn’t promote them in full, the First Spear had elevated the brightest of the Black Forest's people to positions of authority and advisement just beneath his own centurions.

One of those bright sons of Rome had been a druid in his past life, a holy advisor known to his people as an oak-seer. It was this hulking man of wizened faith that had sat me down in the shade of a gnarled willow tree shortly after my father’s death, and showed me how to build a wicker man in his memory. I had seen this druid tear the heads off grown men and beasts with his bare hands in the press of war, but he was as gentle as a summer breeze and patient as a stone while my fingers fumbled and I drifted in my grief.

When the work was done and the wicker man stood tall and proud, we dressed it in the druid’s own armor. I remembered asking him who had given him permission to use the legion’s resources in this way, and I would never forget the ease with which he’d answered that no one had at all. When we lit the wicker man on fire, it was like watching my father die again.

As the wicker man burnt away, the oak-seer who had followed my father into terrible war finally relaxed. It was only in its absence that I noticed the tension had been there at all. Warmed by the fire and protected from the rain by the solemn willow tree, the oak-seer explained to me the divine dividing - the perfecting of a Celtic soul.

To cultivate was to refine. What that meant was a subject of unending debate. Every culture on this earth had their own answer, every man and woman within those nations their own interpretation. Which of them was correct? Was there only one true way forward, a single golden road, or were there many? Could it be that every gate to heaven was made of horn? Or were they one and all of ivory?

I inhaled deeply, filling my lungs with ocean air. I breathed in beyond those limits, tracing the excess breath as it spilled from my lungs and filled my pneumatic channels instead. The unnatural pathways had been carved out of my flesh by the starlight marrow of the Rein-Holder and further refined by my time in the Orphic House, taking the shape of a wheel. Beyond the obvious utility of the expanded channels allowing me to more efficiently circulate my pneuma, I hadn’t found any clear use for it in the weeks since.

That had changed the moment that I’d advanced to the third stage of the Sophic Realm. In that moment I had felt a shifting in my flesh, and with the awareness granted by the Titan Prometheus's golden ichor, I had seen the carving out of a new channel. At the time, there had been more pressing concerns.

Now, I filled the wheel to its limits with vital breath and focused on that newest addition. The wheel had three spokes, and as I took that third spoke in my hand-

[I’LL RISE.]

-I forced the wheel to turn.

Flesh and blood that had been burnt away by starlight marrow regrew from full cauterization, creeping like weeds from the western edges of the wheel. At the same time, the eastern edges smoldered and surged forward, burning away new flesh at the same rate that the old flesh was mending. In terms of healing wounds, the pace was unbelievably fast. In terms of a spinning wheel, however, it was an agonizing grind.

I exhaled slowly, steady as my innards burned away and regrew. Stubborn determination allowed me to maintain control. That, and the experience of dozens of prior attempts that had ended in horrible coughing fits. As the wheel turned, consuming and mending, it worked that same wonder on the rest of my body. Gouges given to me by Scythas knitted themselves shut strand-by-strand. Nicks and burns left by Anastasia cycled through a kaleidoscope of ugly inflammation as her poison worked its way through my body and was purged. Time passed. The wheel made my body well.

As for my heart and soul?

My eyes were shut, but I watched on the back of my eyelids as the wicker man burned. It was larger now, so much larger that it dwarfed the willow tree we had sought out for its shade. Rather than a legionnaire's armor, it wore the tents that I had ordered burned the night that the Fifth Legion fell - it wore them like a captain’s cloak. Inside the hollow frame of the burning wicker man, the soldiers of the Fifth Legion screamed and begged for mercy as they were burned alive.

The fire seared my face, but I couldn’t have turned away from it if I tried. The oak-seer gripped my head tight, as he had gripped so many heads before he’d torm them from their shoulders, and he whispered in my ear as the legion went up in flames.

"For every rise, there must follow an equal fall. Do not avert your eyes from your works, young tyrant. Observe their flesh now as it cracks. Observe the thrashing of their limbs. These things describe the future - their death throes are the path. You’ve bid your soul to multiply, but ascension is a provocation of natural law. For one of us to rise to greater heights than three thousand men combined, heaven demands three thousand men must fall in kind." The druid's broad and calloused fingers dug into my skull. His voice took on a scathing edge -

"Observe the divine dividing."

And he tore my head off my shoulders. My breath caught, the wheel of channels grinding to a halt within me and scattering the image from my eyelids. I bit down on another coughing fit, smothering it in my chest. I inhaled. Exhaled.

When I opened my eyes, I saw Griffon staring back at me.

"You can do better." His lips didn’t move and his philosopher’s influence didn’t stir, but I heard the words all the same. We sat in mirrored positions across from one another on the deck of the Eos, one knee pulled up to our chests and the other folded underneath. Our shadows mingled with that of the ship's mast, and the ravens lurking inside them murmured quietly to one another.

You can do better. “How do you know?"

"Because I am doing better."

Though he wasn’t diverting breath to speak to me the normal way, it was still a diversion of focus that I couldn’t have afforded while turning the wheel. Yet as I watched, his chest continued its steady rise and fall, and his wounds continued to mend themselves at a pace that had nothing to do with what Anastasia had taught him. He was still maintaining it.

If we had been having this conversation a week prior, that would have surely frustrated me. If we'd been having this conversation just a day ago, he likely would have taken the opportunity to taunt me for my lack. As it was, I understood the problem now in a way that I had been all but blind to before.

"From the body comes the soul," I told him, certain of it after this latest attempt. "I can’t isolate the Greek portion of this any more than I can turn one half of a wheel and not the other. Whatever this is, it’s an all or nothing effect."

"And the Roman portion of you won’t tolerate anything that’s beneficial to your heart."

Griffon’s scarlet eyes narrowed. The golden flames behind them had burnt down to fading embers, imperceptible unless you knew to look for them. Where they had blazed before, they now lent just a touch of golden light to his gaze.

"Be done with it, then," he told me.

I inhaled. "Do away with half of all that I am?" Exhaled.

"Do away with the portion that yearns to do away with you."

"I’m too weak as it is. I can’t afford to cripple myself now."

"You’d be better off with one leg than with this rotting limb you insist on dragging along behind you. It’s a poison to you. You don’t need me to tell you that."

I didn’t.

"Amputate it," Griffin urged me without words. Above our heads, Sorea let fly a hungry cry.

I closed my eyes. Exhaled. Inhaled. The wheel began to fill.

"I should," I admitted.

And it was true. The golden ichor that I had drunk out of my brother's hand was all but gone now. I had burnt it for fuel, rendering it all but worthless in our running fight to flee Olympia. What remained was too diminished to refine even the crudest aspects of my cultivation, too weak to be a threat against my better judgment. Still, even rendered down to almost nothing, the golden substance remained a force of change. It was too weak to change me directly, so instead it had settled in the back of my mind as that same passive awareness of myself that had allowed me to precisely direct its efforts before. If it couldn’t do the work itself, it could at least give me the clarity needed to see it done.

Through that intimate awareness, I had been able to distinguish the Roman half of my foundations from the Greek. At the time, that clarity had allowed me to call upon my adopted father's virtue without suffering the consequences that had plagued me since I’d stepped out of the Orphic House. Now, that same clarity made it impossible to ignore the first and most daunting obstacle that stood between me and further advancement.

The Roman half of my foundation was fractured at its core. Any monument I built upon it would suffer the consequences of that infirmity. There was no point in denying it. I should have cut it away the moment I broke my chains and fled the Rosy Dawn. Now, it was even more important that I rid myself of its taint.

"You should. But you won’t." The raven in Griffin's shadow snapped its beak in corvid irritation.

I seized the second of three spokes-

["I am a raven, and I am an unkindness."]

- and turned the wheel again.

"No. I won’t."

Had I possessed the clarity I needed to isolate and cut away that portion of myself a week ago, I would have likely done it. Back when the destruction of accursed Carthage was my one and only aim, an amputation of my heart would have seemed an all too fitting consequence. Now, though?

"Say that your vision was true,” Griffon said, reading me like an open book. "Say that you seek these safer shores and find your legions lost. Why should it matter what they think of you when you pull them from the pit? What could any of them say to you that you haven’t told yourself already? Their judgment doesn’t matter."

"It doesn’t. And it does."

"Worthless Roman. I won’t forgive you if you fall behind."

I smirked faintly, watching broken roads unfold behind my eyelids. "I’ll do my best."

"Will you?" Something about the tone of the raven's voice made me open my eyes, abandoning the wheel before I could truly get it turning. Griffon was still watching me. The accusation was deeper now.

"Say it plainly," I told him, and every eye on the ship turned to watch us in response. Some were furtive about it, others less so. Selene, for her part, poked her head out from the crow's nest and stared openly down at us alongside the red headed pirate child. Only Sorea wasn’t swayed, eyes firmly set on the horizon.

Griffon sighed, releasing his own breathing technique in a rush of steam and leaning forward.

"Since we left Thracia, you’ve ignored this half of who you are and I haven’t said a word because you’re better off without it. But if you must cling to it, then you owe it all your efforts. If you’re determined to keep this unsightly leg attached, I want to see you run with it. It isn’t a question of whether or not you can. I know you’re capable of it. This is a question of will."

The salt of the sea coated my tongue.

"I have no right to lead a legion now."

"Would you let those legions die if they desired it?"

I blinked, utterly thrown by the question. "What?"

Griffon held out a hand, offering it to the open air, and a rosy-fingered hand of his pankration intent appeared opposite of it.

"If you found your lost legions and offered them your hand-" his pankration hand slapped his hand of flesh and blood aside, "-and they refused to take it, would you accept their judgment of you? Even if it killed them?"

I watched the rosy limb sink down, down, slipping through the deck of the Eos like the planks were ocean waves. The men of the Fifth beat their fists against the confines of the wicker man, crying out in misery.

Would you let them burn?

I seized the pankration hand by the tips of its fingers and dragged it back above the deck, tightening my grip when it fought to escape me.

"Of course not," Griffon said, satisfied. "Let them judge you safe and sound upon the shore. Until the day comes that your lost legions are found, you are what remains. You are Rome. The only judgment you have need to fear is your own."

After a heavy beat, Griffon grinned and spread the fingers of his hand. "And mine, of course."

I threw his pankration hand back in his face, and he laughed as it exploded into cinders.

The ship dipped as I rose to my feet, the men at her oars shifting quickly to keep their balance. I swept my eyes over them, searching for something. Some flinched when I laid my focus on them. Others began to sweat, their eyes shivering as they met my stare. Though their reactions varied, the ragged men that Griffin and I had freed from a pirate galley the day we broke our chains looked back at me, one and all, with fear and crushing awe.

I raised my hand and beckoned. "All of you. To me."

Had I invoked the captain's virtue, they couldn’t have crossed the deck any faster.

Interlude: Caesarion

Caesarion

“Beware, cultivator. Your sins are set in stone.”

Caesarion knelt upon the cool marble of a dead man’s dias, back straight and regally poised. His words were carefully measured, his voice a royal tone. Shadows of painted gold encircled both of his eyes, blending seamlessly with their outer rings - gold, where a common man’s eyes were white, and pure gray where a common man’s eyes had color - to create the illusion that his eyes were twice their true size. He stared wide-eyed and unblinking, his gaze an otherworldly thing.

Across from him, on the eastern side of the tomb, a man sat with a book balanced in the cradle of his crossed legs. He was well-manicured in the way of most self-made men, wrapped head-to-toe in flamboyantly dyed silks with a ring on all ten of his fingers. The man’s lips were still painted by the contents of his last cup. His demeanor was cool and self-assured, but the shadow of his self betrayed him. His shut, the dark silhouette behind him, fidgeted in clear unrest.

In the center of the tomb between Caesarion and the man, there lay an open coffin. Inside of it was a shriveled corpse, drained of all fluids and preserved in strips of linen. All of its organs but for its heart had been removed before the coffin lid was first closed. Now the heart was gone as well, nothing but a bloody stain upon the corpse’s bandaged chest left to mark its absence.

Caesarion raised the dead man’s beating heart up with both hands. It was hot to the touch, like sun-baked sand. With reverence, he lowered it onto the golden scale before him.

The heart abruptly throbbed and slipped out of his hands, hitting the marble dais with a gruesome wet sound. The man made a strangled noise of protest in the back of his throat.

“Calm yourself,” Caesarion scolded him, though his own ears burned as he scooped the heart back up and set it on the scale. “The trial has begun.”

The merchant lord turned the pages of his book, settling on the thirtieth chapter. Of course, he didn’t need to actually read the glyphs recorded on the papyrus while he recited them. He’d long since memorized their contents in life.

“O my heart, gift of my mother,” the man spoke, his voice ever so slightly strained, “O my heart, gift of my father. O my heart of lasting ages.”

With a hand still dripping red, Caesarion pulled a raven’s pitch black feather from behind his right ear. The merchant’s voice began to tremble just like his shut.

“Do not stand up as a witness against me. Do not oppose me in this tribunal.” The merchant held Caesarion’s gaze with tight apprehension. “Do not betray me in the presence of the Keeper of Balance.”

Caesarion placed the raven’s feather on the empty scale and watched it swing.

“For you are my ka!” the man gasped, gripping his book desperately. The scales swayed, the heart rising while the feather fell - and then rebounding. They both watched intently as each side rose and fell, seeking equilibrium.

When the motion of the arm ceased, the heart hung above the feather. The man of great means heaved a sigh of profound relief, turning to the next chapter of his book-

“Almost.”

The cultivator jerked his head up, startled. “What?”

Caesarion looked down on him, severe and unblinking. His eyes were starting to burn. He kept them open anyway - for the effect.

“We’re not finished yet,” he declared, and pulled another feather from behind his ear.

“That’s not-!” the man lurched, but his sins held him in place. Caesarion plucked the raven’s black feather from the scale, and before the heart could swing back down to the stone, he replaced it with a swan’s snow-white feather.

The scales swung. The merchant gnashed his teeth, and his heart pounded on the plate. When it finally settled, the heart hung once more above the feather, lighter than the swan. The man sagged forward.

“Another.”

“No-!” The cultivator watched in horror as Caesarion plucked an eagle’s yellow feather from behind his left ear and swapped it with the swan’s. The scales tilted slowly but surely, the heart falling, falling…

When the scales had finally settled, Caesarion tilted his head. Left first, then right. Absently, he adjusted his neme when the oversized headdress slipped and began to fall.

He squinted. It was very close.

“What do you think?” he asked the distraught cultivator. “It looks heavier to me.”

“It’s the feather!” the cultivator insisted, raising his empty palms to mimic the scales. “The feather is heavier, I promise you - look upon it from this angle and you’ll see!”

Caesarion hummed, eyeing the scales doubtfully.

“Ask the heart yourself,” the cultivator went on desperately. “Ask the heart and it will tell you!” As he did, his shut whispered in a voice it thought was too low for him to hear. Do not tell lies about me in the presence of the Keeper. Listen to me well, lest we descend…

“Very well,” Caesarion decided. “I believe you.”

“Then it’s done?” the cultivator asked him desperately. “I’ve passed judgment?”

Caesarion nodded firmly.

“Almost.”

The eagle’s yellow feather burst into flames, and the heart began to fall as its opposing weight burnt away.

“Stop it!” the man howled, tearing through the pages of his book in vain as the feather became lighter and lighter. “Enough! This isn’t fair! This isn’t-!”

The golden tray holding the heart chimed brightly as it hit the marble dais.

For a moment, the cultivator was lost for words. He stared at the beating heart, heavier by far than the phoenix’s burning feather. The shock gave way to panic, the panic to denial, until sure as sunrise came the rage. His eyes snapped up to glare at Caesarion, and the hatred there was blacker than any curse sent from below.

“Who are you to decide?” the cultivator hissed. He jabbed a finger at him like it was a knife he could stab him with. “Who are you to say that I have sinned!? You’re not Justice! You’re not my king! Why should a boy have any say in my salvation?”

The shadows on the wall of the tomb rippled like river waters parting, tracing the motion of something unseen as it crossed the tomb. The cultivator’s shut noticed immediately, flinching and fleeing as far as it could. Unfortunately, the shadow could only flee so far from the man, and the man was too furious to see it move.

Caesarion puffed his chest out and pouted ferociously.

“You should know me by my name. I’m Caesarion! I’m-”

“This Pharaoh’s son,” Cleopatra-Ka declared, wrapping her arms around him from behind as she melted into being. The cultivator flinched, tracing the majestic pillars of her ears, seeing the truth of things for himself and knowing what was to come.

“Please. I beg the Pharaoh-”

The Devourer cut his last words short, exploding up from the floor of the tomb in a spray of liquid shadow with the jaws of her judgment opened wide. The cultivator screamed, but Caesarion’s mother covered his eyes with her hands so he wouldn’t see what happened next.

Caesarion cried out in protest, wriggling away from her embrace, but she only chuckled warmly and pulled him tighter to her chest.

“You promised!” he accused her. She chuckled softly and pressed a kiss against his cheek.

“There is no rush, sweetling,” she whispered. “The longer that you wait, the better the reward will taste. I promise you that.” Caesarion huffed and crossed his arms petulantly against his chest.

Cleopatra-Ka pressed her lips firmly to his neck and blew, laughing musically when he yelped and jumped away. Her hands came away from his eyes, revealing not the shadowed tomb he’d been in moments ago, but the burning light of the midday sun.

Caesarian stood atop the Pharaoh’s central pyramid and looked out across the kingdom of Egypt and all its teeming wonders. The sight took his breath away and stole from him his senses, as it always had before. He looked upon it all in wonder. And when a particularly heavy breeze hit his face, he spread his arms out to his sides and cast his gaze just above the city skyline, in that moment imagining himself as an eagle in flight. He flapped his arms and soared, laughing in delight.

His mother lounged atop the golden peak and watched him fondly, picking flesh and sinew out from between her pearly teeth.

---

So begins the Egypt Arc.

1.e [Nikolas Aetos]

The Stark Blade, Nikolas Aetos

Niko stared at the burning nightmare that had once been Olympia's dock town, and not for the first time, he wondered if his world was ending.

Closer to the clouds, their feet planted firmly on the deck of the Alikonia - higher than they would have been in the crow's nest of the Eos - they had a commanding view of the wreckage. With vision refined by principle and passion, they could see more than any mortal. For once, it was a curse, more than a comfort to have such awareness. The clarity only made the sight of it all worse. They wished they could overlook the broken corpses without noticing, remain blind to the molten scar in the earth, leading all the way back to the half-ruined city just over the horizon.

Niko’s wife shuddered in his arms, her sleeping face twisting in agony - tormented even in her dreams by a pain that Niko couldn’t comprehend. No matter what he’d tried, he hadn’t been able to save her from the sudden agony that had struck her down in the light of that stark pillar. Their companions had been every bit as important for support. Only Archimedes had been able to do anything, even if he had only put her to sleep.

It was silent on the deck, but for his wife’s tortured sleeping sounds. The heroes were trying to make sense of it all, failing miserably without words. Even the sound of the reckoner's stick of charcoal had ceased. Its scratching against the deck had stopped. Archimedes looked out over the burning waves, not with shock or dismay, but with a weary old disgust. His cousins…

Niko rose to his feet, his unconscious wife cradled in his arms. "I’m going."

"Are you out of your mind?" Roxane demanded, her words reflexive.

"Why bother asking when we all know the answer is yes?" Bardas replied, but the words lacked their usual teasing bite. The reformed rover looked questioningly from Niko to the woman in his arms. "You sure about this?"

"Why bother asking?" Thaum threw the pirate's words back in his face as Niko leapt from the deck.

Three followed, and three remained behind. His cousins cried out their protests and tried to follow him across the burning waves, but those three held them back. Niko hardened his heart against their pleas. They were too close as it was.

They moved inland, cautiously at first, then faster and faster as the grim sight grew worse the further they went. Faster, past the molten glass beaches and the uprooted forests, until they were sprinting at full speed. Niko held his wife tight against his chest, hoping that the pounding of his heart wouldn’t wake her, and searched for hope in vain. There was nothing left standing. No one left alive.

"What is this?" Roxane swung her head from side to side, blood-red hair flying back and forth. "Who would dare-?"

"Forget daring, who would be capable? The kyrios wouldn’t let an invading force do half this damage before he wiped them out. It’s not who, it’s what."

"What? You think this happened naturally? There are no fire mountains here. Do you think the hurricane turned that beach to glass and set the sea on fire? Do you think it was an earthquake that split the soil and made it bleed magma?"

"Gods damn you, I wasn’t talking about the weather! Beasts. Who's talking about monsters now of all times, when the stadium is bursting at the seams with contenders? Unless it was Typhon himself-"

"Unless it was…"

"Niko. What do you think?"

Niko thought the fates were never kind.

Their first glimpse of the Temple of the Father seemed almost like a mirage, so out of place was it amid its surroundings. The ancient wonder of the world stood alone, intact where everything else had been broken down or uprooted. Yet there it was, as proud as it had ever been.

There was no one inside, living or dead. Niko stopped just long enough to whisper a quiet prayer to the chrysanthemum monument of the Father before continuing on. On, across the countryside separating Olympia proper from its western dock town. On, along the scattered remains of the red clay road that Niko had once walked as a bright-eyed philosopher. On to the sanctuary city. On to the free world’s beating heart.

On to what remained.

Niko’s brothers and sisters in arms wavered, staggered, fell to their knees.

Niko stared blankly at the corpse of the half-step city, unable to make sense of it all.

He reached out with his sharpest perceptions, cutting through the rubble, the smoke, and the relentless pounding rain in search of something. Anything. The voice of his better judgment was all but deafening. Reason told him that whatever this was, whatever it had been, a first-rank philosopher, and a ninth-rank citizen had better chances swimming across the Styx than they did surviving a calamity like this. If Niko found his cousins here, he’d find them as crumpled corpses.

Niko cast those thoughts aside. He'd been wrong about his cousins since he came home for his wedding. Surely he could be wrong here, too. Just one more time, and he would never take their lives for granted again. Let him be wrong again. Let the fates be kind for once.

When he finally found a survivor in the smoke, he leapt over the rubble of Olympia’s broken walls without hesitation. His companions followed close behind.

The survivor was not a sturdy young soul, nor an old adept. She was just old. They found the old woman kneeling at the edge of the molten scar carved out of the city, as if it was a river like any other and she had come to fill her jug. She was covered in soot and muck, and her arms were stained up to her elbows with dry blood. Yet, even as the city burned around her, even as the shawls pooling around her blackened and caught flame, she went about her work unchanged.

"Old woman-!"

"Get back from there."

"You’ll burn."

Niko put himself between the crone and his companions, lest they yank her bodily from the molten river bank. He crouched down beside her, carefully, shielding his wife from the slow-rolling river of heat.

"Grandmother," he greeted the old woman quietly. "What are you doing?"

"What does it seem like I’m doing, young man?"

Niko watched her peel away another scrap of soot-stained cloth and drop it into the molten river. All the while, her expression remained as placid as still water. As though she was somewhere else entirely.

"It seems like you’re mourning," Niko answered, to the surprise of his companions.

The old woman’s lips cracked and bled when she smiled.

"Oh yes. At my age, I do little else."

"Who are you mourning now?"

The old woman cast another shawl into the river and watched it sink beneath the molten flame. Her eyes were dry. But her fingers trembled as they worked to peel another from her shoulders.

"Among others, my fool husband," she answered. "A thousand times I told him his optimism would get him killed someday, and a thousand times he ignored me. Today I won that argument. The last one that we’ll ever have."

"I’m sorry," Niko said. The old widow scoffed.

"Don’t be. He wasn’t."

"What happened to him?" Niko swept his eyes over what remained of Olympia. In the distance, the mountain under raging heaven glowed a sullen indigo lit by shining amethyst veins. "What happened to this place? What did this?"

"Who did this," the crone corrected him.

THIS MAN TOO IS ALEXANDER.

"Where is the kyrios?"

"In a grave, I'd imagine. He’s been dead for two seasons."

Thaum sucked in soot as if he’d been punched in the gut. Roxane covered her mouth with both hands, aghast, while Bardas hissed a quiet curse.

"Who took his place?" Niko asked, though he didn’t want to know.

The old widow dropped another shawl into the flames.

"We’ll find out soon enough."

Niko shot to his feet. Steam seethed out from between his teeth, mingling with the soot and rain.

In the distance, the exposed veins of Kaukoso Mons’ tribulation amethyst flashed a blinding white in response to a terrible outpouring of hunger and malice. The dread aura of a tyrant unfurled across the ruined city, like the blooming petals of a lily. It was a frail presence. Crippled at its core, Niko realized as his senses brushed against it.

A heartbeat passed, and it was less frail than it had been before.

Thaum tensed, staring at the distant mountain.

Bardas’ precious metal bracelets jangled as he palmed a dagger. "That’s-"

"Old ‘Zalus," Roxane whispered.

The Olympia that Niko remembered had been a place of plenty beyond decadence. The sanctuary city had been an impossibility built on an unshakable foundation of overindulgence, a gathering of cultures that could not hope to share the same streets anywhere else on this earth. It had existed only because the kyrios of the Raging Heaven Cult had decided it would be so. It had stood as a sanctuary above all safe places, despite the monsters that it kept and the feuds that it encouraged, because the tyrant riot would not accept any other outcome.

In the absence of such a unifying force, what was the worst possible outcome? The city of Olympia was a bastion of trade, the only truly neutral territory in the free Mediterranean. And on any given day, it housed statesmen and pioneers of industry from all over the known world. In the weeks leading up to the Olympic games, they’d flock like fair-weather falcons. Then there was the mountain beneath the storm crown, the Raging Heaven Cult.

Eight tyrants left to rule amongst themselves, to split the late kyrios’ authority evenly among themselves or to invest it all in one. What was the result?

Niko shifted his wife in his arms and took the hilt of his sword in hand - with a sharp twist of his wrist, snapped it off the blade. He wrapped his fingers tight around the tang of the blade, and his heart. Flame burned bright.

The Crone tutted and smacked his shin. "I have enough dead to bury. Don’t burden me with more."

"I wouldn’t dream of it, Grandmother," he told the crone quietly. His pneuma rose steadily in time with the tyrant's dread authority. It was still weak, and Niko had time enough to burn.

"This isn’t a fight we should be picking at half mast," Bardas warned, ever the paradox of reason in their crew.

"I agree." Thaum stepped up beside Niko, the hulking pankrator’s anticipation rolling off of him in boiling waves. He grinned viciously at the bright beacon of the mountain. "Fortunately, the two of us alone are worth more here than the six of you together."

They bristled and snapped at one another, familiar arguments, and pre-battle routines. There was no time for it.

"He won’t be weak for long," Niko spoke, and his companions fell silent to listen. In his free arm, Iphys moaned and thrashed. Grief and wrath made his voice frigid. "We strike him down now, before it’s too late."

"No," the hushed voice of the Glorifier whispered in his ear. The goddess of great deeds and histories kept, the Muse Clio, pressed her head up under his chin. The comet-bright strands of her hair tickled his cheeks as they swayed.

"That time is gone already."

The colors on the mountain, the pallor of its veins, began to change. Beneath their feet, and above their heads, and in the shifting rubble all around them, Olympia bucked and fought like a stallion against the reins. On a scale that went beyond a mortal man, the half-step city struggled against the incursion of a new authority.

And it lost.

Niko’s heart beat once, and the distant aura of dread Polyzalus doubled, and redoubled in strength. The vitality of the earth and the bounty of the rain falling from on high twisted and funneled towards the mountain, bolstering the man that held the reins. Before them, Polyzalus of Burning Dusk, took the city of Olympia in hand.

"Nothing changes," Niko declared, and swept his blade around. From his beating heart down to his white, knuckled fingers, defiance flowed into the tang of his blade without an imperfect hilt’s obstruction. Its edge severed one of the unfurling lily petals fully from the flower, taking a chunk out of the newly risen tyrant. From the depths of the distant mountain, there came a bellow like quaking earth. "Nothing ends but him. We fight! We win! For the innocence that died. For the heroes that gave their lives-!"

Niko’s breath caught. From the pit of the distant Olympic stadium, the light of a living cultivator reared up and cast off the reins of Olympia’s new Authority. The Cradle of Champions gave rise to a new contender, as it always had.

But it was wrong.

What flooded from between the statues of old champions was not the light of burning glory, but the heavy pressure of authority. The new contender threw off Polyzalus’ reins, only to lash its own around the spiral colonnades of the Olympic Stadium. Claiming it for itself. Establishing its place as victor above victors, this spot upon the earth its land alone to rule. A domain all its own.

A newborn tyrant staked his claim upon the Olympic stadium and roared a challenge at the distant mountain, as well as the shining stars above.

"Niko!" Roxane cried out above the tumult as the authority of two tyrants clashed. "It’s too much!"

"We can win!" Thaum shouted, though his grin had turned to a defiant snarl.

"What do we do!? Niko!"

His heart told him they could win. But that accursed voice of reason filled his mind in that moment with thoughts of his defenseless wife, still suffering in his arms. Thoughts of Leo and little Myron, bleeding out alone while he fought for a city that had already fallen. Thoughts of Lydia, Caster, and Rena, waiting unaware back on the ship, within range of a tyrant's errant wrath.

Conflicted to his roots, Niko wavered on the edge of his blade.

"Young man, you worry too much," the crone said, not unkindly. She patted his sandaled foot and favored him with a matronly smile. Civic cultivator that she was, her wrinkled skin had already begun to bruise at the runoff pressure of the two tyrants clashing.

Still, she offered him her wisdom.

"Courage isn’t always found at the end of a blade. You have to save yourself before you save the world."

Niko thought of his cousins gathered around the night fire. Happy and whole, together as one.

"Save them," the crone urged him.

Niko turned his back on the fight.

"Get back to the ship. Go!" They followed him without question, even Thaum, and raced back the way they’d come.

Kneeling in the shadow of a grim ascension, the old woman tossed another shawl into the flames.

---

With this, the Olympia Arc is well and truly over. It's been a helluva ride thus far, and I hope you've all enjoyed it. Fingers crossed that the arcs to follow aren't quite this large.

1.e [Old 'Zalus]

One of two epilogue chapters to wrap up the Olympia Arc, then we're off to safer shores. Enjoy.

---

The war for the indigo throne was over. A cold conflict until the very last moment, eight elders of the Raging Heaven Cult had clashed in lethal violence - every one of them reaching for that empty seat, and its dominion over the beating heart of the free Mediterranean. Eight Tyrants had gambled everything on that prize, knowing only one of them would emerge victorious to claim it.

Yet in the end, all eight of them had lost.

In his final moments, Ptolemy Resolved had eviscerated all seven of his rivals on the mountain. He had forced them to choose between his life, and their hopes of any true victory. In his passing, his final breath had obliterated the only structures left standing on Kaukoso Mons - the branch estates of every greater mystery cult. The seven Tyrants that had joined their waning strength to commit a coward’s execution were too weak to protect their domains from the sudden winds.

Broken and without a place to call their own, the seven elders were made mortal once more. Naturally, that had only encouraged them to snuff the others out. Madly, senselessly, they had ripped each other to pieces. And in the end, none of them had gained.

The Dragon of the Coast fled first, slithering north and west towards the Adriatic Sea. Ancient creature that he was, he was wise enough to know the war could not be won now, and he was patient enough to accept that before his wounds undid him fully. He sank beneath the breaking waves of the Adriatic, and as he did, he rendered judgment in his soul. The lawgiver’s tortured criminals rejoiced at their new verdict, even when the dragon snapped them each up in his teeth. Such were their original terms that they smiled and wept in sweet relief even while he ate them all alive.

Least ruined of the lot, and by far closest to the crown, Solon the Reformer was the second one to leave and the only one not to flee. He left in pursuit of Drako, hunting him to the detriment of all else, as he always had. He was only a few steps behind when the old dragon slipped into the Adriatic Sea. The fallen statesman of the Coast followed his charge down into the bleak depths, no weapon but a whaling spear in hand.

Of the rest remaining, only one other escaped the mountain under their own power. The king of seers, Aleuas Pyrrhos, whispered sulfurous oaths and black bile curses upon the stars of every soul that had played him for a fool and dragged him to his lowest low. He cast hateful omens upon the Tyrant Riot, upon Ptolemy, upon Polyzalus, upon the Raven from Rome and his scarlet accomplice, upon anyone and everyone that he could think to blame. He didn’t stop until he got to the pitiful Thracian traitor he’d thought to name his heir, and only then because his daughter burst into violent tears beside him when he spoke the traitor’s name. They staggered on in silence after that, the Hurricane Hierophant carrying on his curses in the privacy of the void that had once contained his heart.

Precious few of the Raging Heaven Cult’s mortal scholars had survived the opening clash of their elders. Tragically, those that lived were forced to watch the war unfold beneath them on the mountain, because their elders had always resided at its base. Trapped and doomed to die by bland logistics.

Some had tried their luck and leapt clear off the side of the mountain. Most did so in helpless panic, a small few with treasures and techniques that they trusted to deliver them safely to the earth. Either way, they died.

Others tried hiding, higher up. Most perished in seconds, their hiding places collapsing on their heads and turning into graves. A fraction of a fraction found hideaways that even a Tyrant’s last breath could not blow down. A fraction of that fraction, the truly desperate and the mad - though only the Fates knew which of them was which - fled up to the Storm That Never Ceased and disappeared behind in the storm crown curtain.

The martial mystikos of the Infernal Frenzy Cult had chosen to hide, not behind storm clouds, marble columns, or even amethyst veins, but instead behind their shields. At the command of their elder - their king -  they had drawn together precious moments before the war began, forming an enclosed shield formation that resembled an onion more than it did a turtle. Shoulder to shoulder and back to back, in tight circular ranks, Leonidas’ soldiers had weathered the war like it was a volley of arrows. For their hubris, they had been forced to watch as outer layer after outer layer of their comrades and arms were stripped away and scattered to the four winds. When all was said and done, only one layer remained -  a newly risen Hero at its center.

The last of the spartan king’s soldiers carried down the mountain on a bed of shields. The king lived, but only in the bleakest sense. No matter how his soldiers begged him to command, to guide them to the Golden Road that would give meaning to their comrade’s deaths, the king didn’t speak. Couldn’t. A Tyrant, especially one like Leonidas, didn’t need words to speak to his soldiers, and Ptolemy Resolved had only crushed his throat. Yet, somehow, the Macedonian had taken his voice. All of it. He could do nothing but listen and watch, trapped inside himself, while the newly risen Hero assumed command in his stead.

Likewise, the man-eaters of the Blind Maiden Cult had not sought refuge in collapsing estates or hopeful hollows. Instead, their despoiled queen had hidden them the moment the war began and her dead eye arrow had pierced the setting sun. They crept out from the blind spots of those few that still lived on the mountain, livid and all too lethal for it.

When they finally found Thalestris in the rubble, they saw their stunted sister had long since beaten them there. Drawn to her mother’s side by a sacred oath sworn out of spite, and drawn away from aiding her own daughter as a result, Ivy’s expression went unseen until her fellow amazons found her. Ptolemy Resolved had torn out the Despoiler’s eyes, had somehow wounded her even more gravely than that wound implied, and so the former queen of the Amazons was entirely blind to the hatred on her poisonous Ivy’s face as the Heroine fed her a cup of nectar she’d stolen from the starving wolf the night before the war.

Lacking both the strength to flee and the surviving supplicants to carry him away, the false king of waning wax could only drag himself out of the stone depression Ptolemy Resolved had put him in once the rest of his rivals were gone. His spine was shrapnel and powder, and somehow, though a Tyrant could control even the smallest portion of their body independent of the rest, his legs would not oblige him. Paralyzed from the neck down, Midas dragged himself across the earth with his chin alone. Like a worm. Unable to bear the shame, uncertain of his chances at escaping the city at all in such a state, and uncaring of the consequences, Midas called in every one of his scattered debts.

Whatever he touched, his domain could turn to gold. That was what the faker had convinced the great city-states of, and their trade partners beyond - the greatest lie he’d ever told. Now, as he dragged himself bonelessly across the dirt, and he put to proof the lie

Across the Mediterranean and beyond it to the four corners of the earth, every coin minted in his name abruptly lost its golden sheen and reverted to what it had been before he laid his hand upon it. some turned to Silver, but more by far turned to utterly worthless substances. In their thousand-thousands, golden coins across the world became coins of rough stone, of imperfect glass, of worthless splintered wood. From the start, the faker had known he’d only get to make this play once, and only if he was willing to make an enemy of every ruling body from Alikos to the furthest eastern reaches of the Conqueror’s Silk Road. It had never been worthy of the risk.

Not until now.

The false king Midas called to collect the full sum of false currency he’d put in circulation over the long centuries of his life. As he did, the coffers occupying the space where his heart had once been began to fill with more than just fools gold.

The first coin to clatter home in his soul had been in circulation for over 50 years. In that time, it had passed from hand to hand a staggering number of times. The coin had been spent to purchase food, to purchase drink, to purchase company and trinkets and beasts and slaves - in every case, above all else, purchasing time.

Plant a seed and tend the vine until it yields you grapes, or substitute a golden coin in place of that labor and enjoy your wine at once. Pay the farmer for their crop, pay the shepherd for their stock, pay the scholar for their wisdom and the mercenary for their blade. Pay them for their efforts. Pay them for their time - the most important portion of their lives.

The first coin collected had been in circulation for over fifty years, and for over fifty years, countless men and women had sacrificed their time and their labor in exchange for its supposed value. Now, the gap between that false promise and the coin’s true value spilled into his soul. He took the time and the vitality that they had been tricked into selling so very cheap, and he took it all. Every changing of hands was accounted for. Every outstanding value was seized.

After the first coin came another. This one had been in circulation longer than the first.

The pretender of the Alabaster Isles filled his coffers with the fruits of his false labors, and it was just enough to begin paying the crippling debt that Ptolemy Resolved had ground into his spine.

Of the Rein-Holder, there was no sign.

—————-

Old ‘Zalus

The tunnel had been carved out with a mortal frame in mind. A cultivator that had a taste of glory and grown to match their story would need to duck their head and hunch their back beyond a certain point, though it was rarely more than a mild inconvenience. For a man of his stature, though, the journey to the heart of the mountain became truly ridiculous. One of many humiliating rituals, neverending since the day the Tyrant Riot had taken him in hand.

But the kyrios was dead now, and Polyzalus knew he wasn’t far behind. He lurched down the tunnel steps, one slow step at a time, leaning heavily against the stone wall as he went. In his passage, he left streaks of blood on the walls and puddles of it on the steps.

Folded over nearly in half, his left hand held his bowels from spilling out of the gaping wound in his stomach. His right hand held an ivory wedding band, carved to fit a finger much smaller than his own.

Every step that Polyzalus took, his body tried to make his last. He refused it every time. His domain was scattered rubble, his ethos much the same, and he had no reins remaining. His vital essence stained the stone behind him, draining faster than he could replenish it. Even so, he continued down the steps, the wedding band

a burning brand in his fist.

He reached the final threshold, an amethyst arch that the Tyrant Riot alone among his peers could step through without stooping. Polyzalus wavered - the blood loss to blame, or perhaps even now the memory of his shame - and stared blankly at its surface. Unbidden and undesired, he remembered the Tyrant Riot’s parting words before his death.

The last of his humiliations.

“Even if you did defeat me - what would you do then?”

Polyzalus ducked under the amethyst arch and into the late kyrios’ subterranean estate.

The cavern was full of babbling children, and not one of them belonged. The oracles were nowhere to be seen, and he lacked the strength to pry through their closed doors with his perception. In place of holy women, or honored guests, the late kyrios’ cavernous courtyard was packed pillar to pillar with unaffiliated philosophers of the Raging Heaven Cult. Young and old, junior and senior alike, they filled the cavern to its lofted ceiling with their sophistry. They swung baseless speculation like swords at their fellows. They debated what was to be done - stay, fight, flee, persuade - and plied one another for solutions that not a single one was capable of providing.

When Polyzaulus stepped inside the cavern, all the chatter stopped. The children - some of them bearded, some of them mothers, but all of them children - shrank back when he stepped forward. Some clutched weapons like a frightened child clutched their mother’s hand. Others bowed their heads in immediate supplication. A few began to sob. He ignored them all, advancing another agonizing step forward.

Seated in the center of the cavern, slumped wearily with his back against an oracle’s displaced tripod, Socrates watched him come.

Off to the side, a ninth rank Philosopher surrounded by piles of rolled papyrus looked up from his work a beat after everyone else and laid manic eyes on Polyzalus. He looked from Polyzalus to Socrates, then back again. The moment the young philosopher realized what he was seeing, his pupils shrank down to bare needle points.

Without hesitation, the manic philosopher cast aside the papyrus scroll he’d been so focused on a moment prior and seized a blank one from the stack, unfurling it with a sharp snap of his wrist. As he did that, he took the dagger he’d been holding in his teeth and swiped it down his arm, splitting the bandages wrapped around it, and parting his flesh as well. The sophists surrounding him cried out in alarm, their fear of Polyzalus briefly overwhelmed, and tried to wrestle the knife out of the man’s hand.

He let them take it, drawing an eagle’s feather from his cult attire and wetting it with his blood. His pneuma rose up around him, and his hand swept across the papyrus in a blur.

“Save your ink,” the Gadfly spoke, too exhausted to do more than wave a weary hand at him. Too exhausted to do anything but watch Polyzalus take another step forward. “This won’t be a story worth telling.”

One last step before his body failed. Then another after that.

Socrates’ wrinkled face twisted in disgust, and something like sorrow beyond that. His skin was pale and drenched with sweat. His eyes were glassy and distant.

“We’ve lost our way, old king. No, worse than that. We’ve been lost for longer than we’ve walked the proper path. Tell me - do you remember the moment that you strayed?”

The philosophers in the cavern held their breath in horror, silent but for the drip of a Tyrant’s blood hitting the mosaic floor, and the scratch of an eagle feather across papyrus.

Polyzalus took another step. His left leg gave out, forcing him to catch himself with one of his hands - either the one holding in his bowels, or the one holding the ivory band. The sound of his innards hitting the floor was a grotesque thing, the sight of it even worse. More than a few of the children gathered in the cavern gagged and retched in response.

“For me…” the Scholar rasped, unbothered by his silence, “I think it was the day I left The Coast. The statesman of my city sentenced me to death by hemlock consumption, but I understood the substance well enough that it could never kill me unless I first allowed it. I told myself that consuming it at all was my sentence rightly served. And when I left my city after that, I told myself it wasn’t the younger generation I was abandoning, only the Tyrants that had taken me in hand.

“I think that was the moment I was lost.”

Another lurching half-step. His own offal dragged across the stone behind him.

The Gadfly chuckled faintly. “All I have ever known is that I know nothing at all. And yet, I found a way to learn the wrong lesson regardless. It’s no wonder I haven’t heard the daemon speak since my golden age of youth. It knows I’m not worth the trouble.”

Young sophists gathered around the Scholar cried out in protest. Some turned their heads away, others had their faces in the crooks of their arms, unable to stand the degradation of the man that even their ancestors had long admired.

“We have such wonders lurking in our souls,” Socrates said in rueful lament. “We could have made this world a better place if only we had looked beyond ourselves. In a world, this small, what excuse do men as large as us have to leave it worse off in our passing?”

Step. Drag. Stagger. Fall-

He saw her then, in the muddled haze of his absent heart. He heard her distant voice. Saw the salvation in her smile.

“Courage.”

Polyzalus seized the reins of his own corpse and forced it to continue on.

“The day I let a spiteful jury of decrepit old men dissuade me from my principles, that was the day I lost my way.” The Gadfly ran a shaking hand across his ruined rags, smoothing out their wrinkles and tears.

“When the cruelest of our kind only grow stronger and more terrible with time, it’s the statesmen and the kings whose ears you have to bend.” The words were spoken with such scorn that it made the nearest children flinch. “I learned the wrong lesson. After all my years of presumption, teaching as if I had something worthwhile to say, I allowed them to mislead me. It wasn’t that I had failed The Coast by emboldening the younger generation at the expense of its old movers. My focus wasn’t wrong.

“They sentenced me to death because I was right.” The Gadfly’s knuckles popped as he clenched his fist hard enough to crush iron. The old scholar was furious, at himself more so than any other.

“Courage,” she urged him lightly.

Step.

“The more that we learn, the more we stay the same. The ages pass us by no matter how we try to keep their pace. The young are meant to flourish, and the old things must decay. our statesmen have forgotten their place in the grand order of it all. They’ve forgotten what is owed-“

The Gadfly hunched over suddenly, coughing violently. When he drew his hand away, it was covered with black blood.

“-to the sons they brought into this world,” Socrates ground out.

Every step forward was a step his body couldn’t take. It took all of Polyzalus’ waning resolve just to remain upright. He had no effort to spare for the buzzing of flies. Nothing, Socrates said mattered. It never had.

And yet.

“As if you’re any better,” Polyzalus spoke. If the reaction of their audience was any indication, his voice was an even more terrible thing than his appearance.

“Of course not.” The Gadfly scoffed. “If anything, I’m worse.”

The cavern erupted, scholars young and old defending the greatest of them all in his own words. Polyzalus was halfway to the courtyard center, halfway to his goal.

“I could have done more today,” Socrates said with absolute certainty. “I would have done more if only I had never strayed. I could have stopped the riot at its source, if I had stepped in directly instead of wasting my time on trying to convince you and yours to act.” There was no heat behind the accusation. He didn’t need there to be.

“I could have done more for those boys,” the man they called the Scholar admitted, and the regret behind his eyes was an ancient, bottomless thing. “I tried to chain them up until the world could change them, when from the start that force of change was theirs. They didn’t need a warden. Even my foolish student understood that much. They needed someone to teach them. They needed guidance.

“I failed them utterly in that.” The Gadfly waved a trembling hand, stained by black bile and blood, encompassing the cavern and all the world beyond it. “This is my result.”

“Courage.”

Another step forward. Polyzalus was all but empty now. A hollow shell, and a wedding band without a wife to wear it.

”The man I sought for his counsel wouldn’t have tolerated such an ending,” Socrates, declared. Even if he had the strength to put logos behind it, though, Polyzalus had no ethos left to shatter. “That man was just. That man was wise. Tempered. Brave.”

Polyzalus staggered.

“Your wife is dead in part because those children lacked guidance, and for that I take full blame. But your actions today have condemned more wives than mine. No matter how small a portion of the result is yours to claim, the king I knew wouldn’t have shied away from blame. I know my younger self would hate the man I am today. What of yours, Polyzalus?”

“A king has no peer but for himself, no jury but his soul,” the Gadfly continued when he didn’t answer. “Those were your words, were they not? Then show me justice, old king. What is owed for your transgressions? What is to be the punishment for the atrocities you have committed?”

Courage.

Polyzalus bared blood-stained teeth. The children in the cavern pressed themselves against the furthest stone walls in terror.

His transgressions. His atrocities. As if he’d been given a choice. As if he’d had the freedom to decide.

“Nothing,” the First Son to Burn growled. “I would suffer no blame at all.”

Socrates closed his eyes, weary beyond his years. When he opened them again, they were dim with his acceptance.

“So be it.” The old philosopher reached into a fold in his rags and pulled from it a golden cup filled to the top with a substance that was not quite wine. He drank deeply from it, draining half the cup, then held it out to Polyzalus. “One last cup, in memory of better days,” he offered with dark humor.

Taking the cup and drinking from it was almost more effort than the elixir it was worth. But even his fading perception of smell and his numb pneumatic sense could tell this was no ordinary wine. It wasn’t even kykeon. It was something far more significant, something familiar, and he was in far too much pain to refuse the offered aid.

Still, he paused with the golden rim pressed to his lips. He stared down at the Gadfly, two questions burning in his mind, though he only needed one answer for them both.

“Why?”

Why help him then, when the hierophant went to strike him down? Why help him now, when he had ignored the philosopher’s every olive branch?

“Admiration is a terrible thing,” Socrates said simply. Polyzalus tipped the cup back and drank the rest of the elixir down.

So this was what the Tyrant Riot filled his cups with. Polyzalus breathed deeply, savoring the impossible amalgamation of perfect flavors. He traced the elixir’s passage down his throat and through his body, guiding it with a Tyrant’s firm hand to the places it was needed most. He straightened up from his hunch, relishing the heat within him, as the elixir went to work on the worst of all his wounds. Burning them away. Burning.

Burning.

Polyzalus coughed and vomited putrid blood-bile onto the mosaic tiled floor. He staggered, legs giving out - courage - before he reasserted control of himself-

He fell.

The elixir burned like acid through his body, and too late he realized it wasn’t cleansing. It consumed him, leaving nothing whole in its wake. He took hold of it again, asserting control over the only domain that every Tyrant had if nothing else beyond it - his own body. He had been poisoned, but poison could not kill a man like him unless he willed it to be so. Polyzalus dragged the elixir‘s taint out, willing it to expel itself from his pores and be gone.

Darkness crept in all around him. On hands and knees, Polyzalus stared down at the faceless portrait of the man who had claimed this mountain for himself. The mosaic relief was an extravagant collection of precious metals. His biles and his blood seeped into the cracks between the pieces, making it look as though the faceless man was bleeding too.

The poison wouldn’t go. The harder he tried to rip it out by its roots, the deeper that it drove them in.

Socrates was within arms reach, yet he could hardly make out the scholar’s face when he raised his head. Socrates’ voice carried distantly over top the roar of rushing blood.

“While I was wasting my time and yours trying to convince you of their good intentions, one of the boys received a visit from a scavenger. It distracted him from the brew I’d forced him to tend in my absence, and he suspected her of tampering with it. He tried to take the blame and test it for himself, but for once I acted as an elder should. I took a single drop upon my tongue,”

Socrates exhaled explosively, as though he’d been holding up a heavy weight for hours, and was now finally throwing it down. As he did, the same putrid blood-bile that Polyzalus had vomited up began streaming from the corners of his mouth, from his eyes and his ears and his nostrils all.

“It killed me,” Socrates revealed without fanfare or regret. “Nectar is an amplifying substance. Joined with healing herbs, it becomes a perfect panacea. Joined with hemlock, it becomes an unshakeable poison. The moment it touched my tongue I knew there was no shaking it. You feel it too, don’t you?” He wasn’t smug, or spiteful, or even sad.

If anything, the Gadfly seemed content.

“Walk with me, old friend,” Socrates said, though neither had the strength to stand. “We’ll find the path once more below. Leave the young blood to their struggles.”

With one hand, the Gadfly picked up the golden cup. The other, he raised above his head, pointing a single finger straight up. The philosopher sign - a signal for all those that could see it to attend. A symbol of the first and most important of a man’s principles. The first thought he’d ever had that was worth the breath of sharing.

The best of us are yet to come.

His final lecture thus complete, Socrates slumped sideways to the tiled floor and died.

Polyzalus’ right arm gave out beneath him while the gathered sophists filled the courtyard with their weeping and hysterics. In the state that he was in, closer to the Gadfly than he was any of the living, it was a wonder he could hear anything at all. Let alone the light, scattering noise of ivory, bouncing and rolling across the tiled floor.

The ivory wedding band rolled away from him. Out of reach. The last of his life slipped away like cypress smoke between his fingers. The underworld beckoned him to its darkened shore.

Even if you did defeat me, a man’s voice echoed in his ears. What would you do then?

They were the Tyrant Riot’s words, but it wasn’t the late kyrios’ voice that Polyzalus remembered.

It was his.

Polyzalus snarled and drove his fist through the mosaic tiles, wrenching a fistfull of stone fragments out and scattering them across the floor. Then he did it again, and again, tearing the mosaic out and revealing what had laid beneath it all along. All at once, the hysteric grieving and the fear drained out of every cultivator in the cavern as Polyzalus unearthed something beyond their mortal comprehension.

The gathered philosophers stared in blank wonder at the unearthing of a corpse.

The goddess had no face, no defining features at all. There was only a glaring cause of death - her heart had been ripped out, her ribs jutting up from the gaping wound like blooming lily petals.

And there, beating senselessly in the gaping cavern of her chest, was a heart unmistakably not her own. It was a human heart, and it was surrounded by a blazing flame - the first of them to burn.

The Olympic heart flame burned defiantly in the Mother’s empty chest, its very presence there an insult to her name.

With profane hands, Polyzalus lifted the olympic heart flame from the corpse’s chest. As he did, the goddess laid her hand upon his wrist and stopped him short. A blessing for a grieving spouse. A warning for a man at the precipice of profanity. She had no mouth to form the words and no lungs to give them breath, but they were deafening all the same.

[Accursed is the cannibal.]

Polyzalus closed his eyes and looked west, to the distant shores of Alikos. Now as before, as it had been for nearly twenty years, the sight remained the same for every Tyrant that dared to look upon it.

Damon Aetos met his gaze through mountain stone and past wine dark seas, and in response to all his hatred the Island in the Sun nocked another arrow to his bow and drew.

“Courage,” Polyzalus vowed over the Mother’s corpse. “Until the war is won.”

He dipped his head and ate.

[MISC] The Fair Folk Went Down To Georgia

This isn't a Virtuous Sons chapter, just a little snapshot I wrote for a 1k contest in the discord server. I'll have the next VS chapter up sometime tomorrow.

'Til then.

------------

The Fair Folk Went Down To Georgia

Gold is for the mistress - silver for the maid

Copper for the craftsman, so cunning at his trade.

But iron - cold iron - is the master of the swayed.

- Rudyard Kipling

Once upon a time, the cloudpiercer had been owned by a bank. Taller than any building for miles around, its open-lattice crown of pyramid steel had once glowed bright-enduring gold atop the city’s skyline. Tonight, though, the beacon bled aurora, staining the stars with otherworldly hues.

It belonged to the Five Court Fae now.

The cloudpiercer’s lobby had once been an Art Deco dream; floor-to-ceiling marble lit by tall firefly bulbs in lofted alcoves, with cold-steel elevators to contrast their warmth. It was the sort of threshold that demanded form before function, its marble floors begging for the click-click-click of wingtips and stilettos.

Tonight, steel-toed boots tracked mud and bloody tracks across the floor instead. In the blue light cast by the firefly bulbs, coated as they were by thick layers of hoarfrost, the shadow of a man stalked through the lobby. The cold-steel elevators had been ripped entirely out of their shafts. He took the stairs.

The cloudpiercer was fifty-five stories tall. While he climbed them all, curious silhouettes danced behind the tower’s windows. They spread rumors of his passage and wondered of his purpose, staining the glass with all their gossip. At first they whispered just loud enough for him to hear them. The longer he ignored them, though, the louder that they grew - until they were all but screaming at him through the stairwell walls.

At the peak, heavy boots of leather and steel crunched through a bed of fallen leaves. The roof beneath the aurora pyramid looked like a forest glade more than it did a man-made structure. Thick, hungry vines wound throughout the steel lattice of the cloudpiercer’s pyramid, making shadows in a space that should have been subsumed by golden light. Gnarled trees loomed large overhead, the greatest of them rising above even the aurora pyramid, the canopy of its leaves blocking out the stars above.

In the shadow of the glade, surrounded by the creatures of her court, a lovely woman reclined on a throne of prickling roses. She watched the man patiently as he came. Her eyes were canted and cruel, the color of northern lights. Her smile was a cold and empty thing. A coffin in want of a corpse.

“Hello again, traveler,” the fair lady greeted him, though they’d never met before. “Have you come to die in vain?”

Nestled in the chestnut curls of her hair, a silver crown glittered blue-green-white.

The keepers of the fair lady’s court tittered and jeered at the man, swaying just out of sight. They appeared human, but only if you didn’t look too close. Some were smaller than alley cats, others so large that the trees could hardly hide them. Some were lank like overstretched taffy, others squat like fat bullfrogs. Some wore wilting flower-petal dresses and poisonous toadstool hats, others sported tree bark armor and gripped thorns like they were daggers. They were many and they were varied, but in this city they were all the same other.

A few grew bold, scampering beneath the man’s feet and daring him to trip. They laughed like tinkling bells. They had sewing needles for teeth, dripping red with human blood.

The right boot came down and crushed one of them to paste. The rest shrieked and scattered.

The traveler pulled a coin from his pocket and flipped it. It spun, winking blue-green-white, and landed at the fair lady’s feet. The coin was silver. In place of a president, it bore the portrait of a woman’s face. The eyes - canted, cruel. The smile - cold, empty.

“You promised me a game,” the traveler said, though they’d never spoken until today. The fair lady tilted her head, searching for his face. He wore a hooded rain jacket - the ugly sort designed for labor.

“May I have your name, traveler?”

“No.”

The creatures in the glade hissed and spat at him for his poor manners, but the lady only laughed. She sat up on her throne, leaning forward just so. Silks of blue and green and white shifted as she moved, exposing skin like chantilly cream. She took up the traveler’s silver coin and cupped it between her hands. She stared up at him, deadly mischief in her eyes, and pulled her hands apart as fists.

“I’ll wager mine for yours exchanged,” she offered. The traveler nodded. Her smile grew wider, revealing pearly teeth without stains. As for her tongue, though, it was scarlet-red. “Before we begin, then, a challenge: Can you tell me which hand holds the silver coin? If you’re right, I’ll let you decide the game.”

“Right.”

The fair lady opened her right hand, revealing the silver coin. She offered it back to the traveler. He didn’t take it.

“So rude,” she teased him. Then, she opened her left hand, revealing golden coins that teetered on the tip of every finger. Five of them in all. “The terms are yours to set, traveler. But I hope you understand just who it is you’ve challenged.”

Her shadow loomed large behind her, its silhouette split five ways. The fair lady of the glade cast five shadows, one for every court.

“Five courts promised you a game,” she said, five voices overlaid. “It’s only right that five courts get to play. Make your move, traveler, and I’ll make five of mine.”

Her aurora gaze glittered, daring him to disagree. He didn’t.

Instead, the traveler drew the cold iron from his hip and emptied all but one of its six chambers. He flicked the revolving cylinder back into place and dragged it down his arm, setting it to spinning. Then he raised the iron to his head and pulled the sunken trigger.

Click.

The shadowed glade was silent as he offered his revolver to the Queen of Five Courts.

The traveler’s name was Johnny.

But the fair folk called him king.

1.140 [OLYMPIA ARC: END]

Griffon, The Risen Flame

The fight was ours to end.

I could see it in their eyes and feel it in their hearts. It was arrogant of me to think it, absurdly so, but I could plainly see the truth of it. These men and women, these impossible glories, they were breaking apart. Their hearts and minds were steadily unraveling, and the more we stripped away from them the quicker that they scattered.

Sol and I drove them back, clashing with such ferocity that our bones began to crack in spite of the fortifying ichor burning in our blood. It was a testament to their souls that even as they danced with deviation, each of our would-be companions pushed us to our furthest limits. Every moment, in every exchange, I watched myself die. I saw them snuff me out, and I knew that the man I was today had no chance of defying their strength.

Kyno stepped into my octagon, feinting right and surging left, trying to slip past me and free Sah-Bakari from my blade. I took him to the ground, dwarfed by his stature and his horrible strength. Even his flexibility outstripped my own. Against such a gap, technique meant all too little. I saw it vividly. My limbs broken, my face twisted by a massive hand to snap my neck. I may as well have been a child trying to wrestle a lion.

I burned my heart’s blood, sacrificed and spent my potential, and made a lion of my soul. I grappled him, matching him strength for strength and overwhelming him in the rain. Despite his size, Kyno was an ambush hunter - and I had invited him in. In seconds I had him submitted, his cheek driven into the dirt so that he could see his crocodile familiar writhing in agony.

I put vicious pressure on his right shoulder, forcing him to choose. To his credit, the Huntsman didn’t hesitate. He lunged forward, shouting, wrenching his right arm out of its socket while his left gripped the hilt of the King’s Curse and tore it out of Sah-Bakari’s mouth. His hand spasmed and dropped the blade the instant it was out, the skin of his palm a burnt and bubbling mess where it had touched the hilt.

I caught the King’s Curse with the blood-stained hands of my intent, spun it around and drove it through the huntsman’s back.

His Loving Muse skipped cursing me to a grave and condemned me straight to dark Tartarus instead. But she withdrew, wanton fingers pried off of his heart. I waved mockingly with the scarlet hands of my intent as she fled. It gave me no satisfaction.

She would be back. They all would.

I ripped the blade from the Hero’s back before it could do lasting damage, rose up and tossed him from my octagon. By the time I’d finished collecting my tribulation swords, Sah-Bakari was gone - rolling fitfully out of existence.

I ran wild. I burned.

Scythas alone shone brighter than he ever had before. Even as Sol hammered him down again and again with the full weight of the captain’s conviction, the Hero from the Hurricane Heights only struck back harder. And there, in the shadow of his cloak, in the fleeting moments between death and deviation, that stone siren waited for the instances that he needed her help most.

There was so much that I didn’t know.

We left Olympia behind, striking through the starlit stades between the ruined city and its nearest coast. We rushed along the grim line of the Rein-Holder’s molten scar, tracing it back to the wine-dark Ionian. They couldn’t stop us. They hardly knew why they were trying.

I had a decade left to burn. By the time we reached the coast I would have less. If I desired it, I could end this now. Bereft of their Tyrants and their Muses, stripped bare of all their hopes, they would crumble if I struck them down. I would win - a junior Philosopher matched against six great Heroes. A junior Philosopher, the instrument of a rotten institution’s collapse. It would be a victory worth telling stories of.

All that it would require was leaving this world worse off than I had found it. My heart throbbed, despising the very thought.

I hadn’t freed them of their chains just to watch them wither. I hadn’t told a lie when I promised them a place within my world. What would be the point of it all if I let it end like this? What would have been the point of all their pain? How could I justify their suffering if I didn’t make them better than they’d been before?

I couldn’t, of course. The premise was flawed. It had been from the start.

“This heat is justice. If it burns you, it’s your own lack that’s to blame.”

“Not everyone is made of iron. For some, the fire only burns.”

Both of them were wrong. Humanity wasn’t nearly so succinct.

Heart of iron. I advanced, burning my years remaining down to single digits.

Heart of brass. Sol marched on, a legion man at war again.

Heart of fire.

Heart of glass.

Elissa bled out through her blade, too battered to be dancing yet too proud to concede. Her bronze sword was short as a dagger now, nicked and melted along the scant edge that still remained. Without her muse, without a living Tyrant to appease, she had nothing but her spite. Brittle, clear, and hollow.

Lefteris fought me like a man possessed, his murderous hatred replaced by black accusation. He fought to have his chains back, desperate for his muse’s tethering. His resentment and his sudden desperation would burn him to the ground if only someone cast a spark his way.

Kyno staggered through the rain, hunted and yet ever the hunter. There was fear there in his eyes, more apparent the longer that we clashed, but there was grim resolve there, too. Even when his crocodile failed to return from its hidden place, he never once attempted to follow it. He weathered my blows, determined to outlast me, to protect the rest of the world from my fury. Even if it meant burning out beside me.

I had been drawn to these three for the same reason Sol’s trio had been drawn to him. There was a resonance in our stories, a rhyme within our hearts. Where Sol’s Heroes had been washed ashore, cast out and forced to flee from broken worlds, my trio had come to Olympia pursuing. Seeking something for themselves. I had felt that from the outset, remembered it distantly, in the drunken stories that we’d shared the day after Bakkhos died. And I had made the fatal mistake of thinking that our resonance made us the same.

A flame could do more than burn or blind. There was a reason that we maintained a hearth in every home. There was a reason that the most vibrant flowers only bloomed at dawn.

I had erred twice with these Heroes. I had made a mistake in thinking we were the same. Worse than that, unforgivable to the grave, when I had finally understood that we weren’t, I’d decided that contrast made them less.

Iron and brass made better swords than glass, but a Hero was more than just a striking blade. If I accepted that a Hero’s highest calling was to cut down, to sever, then I was no different from the gladiators in the bloody pit. There were as many paths to glory as there were stars above. And there could be even more than that, if only this world allowed them to be born.

The Huntsman. The Sword Song. The Gold-String Guardian. They had the power to make wonders on this earth. All they lacked was the hope needed to try.

The path forward was darkened by mystery faith, obstructed by the corpulent souls of those that had started their climb first and refused to finish last. These Heroes didn’t know what they were capable of, how far they’d come already - how close at hand the peak. They hadn’t seen Heaven defied in any way that truly mattered. They didn’t know it was possible outside of myth.

My children are freezing. My children are blind.

All this time I’d tried to temper them, when what they’d lacked was guiding light.

If this world wasn’t what it was meant to be, I simply had to refine it. If these broken hearts had lost sight of pure passion and defiance, I had no choice but to rekindle them myself.

I had to show them it could be done.

Screaming winds preceded the whistling scythe. Scythas raged against the storm, harvesting more of it with every swing of his obsidian scythe. The breeze aided him as surely as the stone siren did, muffling and amplifying and pitching the sound of his passage around, making it impossible to track him by ear and disorienting to try. His pneuma continued pouring out of him in a flood, showing no signs of stopping.

My brother marched grimly through it all, far from me yet ever by my side. Though their exchanges left weeping gouges in his skin, Sol did not relent. Though his heart was dwindling as surely as my own, the passing seconds never made him less. Through the fire and past the storm, there was something new there in his eyes, something I had never seen in him before. It was hope.

Sol matched himself against the Hurricane Harvester in the throes of his Heroic ascension, and the Roman forced the Hero back with every exchange. He burned, he bled, and he learned with every wound. He adapted. He grew stronger. I’d always known he would. We differed in uncountable ways, but we were exactly the same in all the ways that mattered.

Heart of iron. Heart of brass.

It was the losing battle that defined us.

“I trusted you!” Scythas howled, furious vapor-tears spilling from his eyes. His swings were growing wild, easier to avoid. “I confided in you! I betrayed my father, abandoned my wife! I would have fought for you! I would have died for you!”

Sol dodged or diverted with his spear every wild slice, but there was no saving him from the accusations. They cut him deeper than any blade could, straight through to his heart. My own clenched in sympathetic suffering.

“I know,” Sol said, lunging up underneath the arcing scythe and reaching for the Hero’s throat. The stone siren chose that moment to manifest, catching his wrist and clamping down to break it. Sol reared his head back and slammed his forehead into hers. The stone statue of a woman reeled back, and the Roman kicked her chosen Hero in the chest.

“You lied to all of us! You lied to me.” Scythas bared blood-stained teeth, righting himself in midair as he flew back.

“I did.”

“You swore you’d stand with me against the storm, to help me save my brother! You swore it on the Styx. You lied!”

“No.”

Gravitas took hold of the current in the air, shifting its course so that the more it tried to stabilize the Hero, the harder it battered him instead. Sol advanced with fire in his eyes, smoldering heat behind every word.

“I’m not the man I led you to believe in. I’m worth less than you deserve for everything you’ve given me. Those things are plainly true- but I will not be less forever. And though you owe me nothing, although you’re right to hate me, that oath was not a lie.”

Sol clenched his left hand into a fist and took Scythas in hand. The Hero’s stone siren strained against the invisible fist of the captain’s virtue, but Sol only burned more of his blood to spite her.

With passion and with purpose joined, Sol refined the oath he’d given Aleuas.

“I swear to you, my heart and soul upon my city, I will help you save your brother.” That said, Sol cast his empty hand out, and gravitas flung Scythas back the way we’d come.

Heart of iron. Heart of brass.

I should have known my brother wouldn’t be content to scatter them like broken glass.

Sol set his sights on Anastasia in the distance where his punch had flung her back. The Caustic Queen drank weakly from a cup of golden wine, her chest shuddering beneath her funeral silks as the nectar did its work. When she saw the Roman running her down, her pupils shrank to pinpricks and her pneuma surged to greater heights.

I had my own battles to fight.

Without their muses, the trio of Heroes I’d burned were forced to fall back on tactics and techniques they’d long since left behind in the Sophic Realm. They railed against me with rhetoric long rusted by disuse. They levied potent truths and higher ideals in place of their Heroic miracles. As if they needed the guidance of a muse to shine defiant.

It had been years since any of them had fought this way, and it showed. But beyond that rust, deeper than I could have seen without the King’s Curse acting as my eyes, I saw what could have been. What could still be, if they only tried.

“You aren’t justice,” Lefteris spat. I drilled him through the dirt with fists of rosy violence. “You’re worse than any flame!”

“I thought you were an omen - a warning sent by the sun.” Elissa tumbled back from the King’s Curse, the weapon in her hands more hilt now than it was blade. Her glare had not lost any reach. “But you’re worse! You’re worse than any tribulation!”

“You’ve ruined us.” Kyno tried to bring me down like I was a wild beast. I punished him for it with fists and knees and striking elbows. His eyes were haunted. “You’ll ruin more before it’s done. You’re worse than any starving beast.”

I dug my heels into the earth, sliding like an eagle glides. The Heroes I’d maligned gathered themselves in turn, controlling their momentum and rising up against me. It was instinct that drove them. Without their Tyrants nor their Muses, with nothing but their flames, they opposed me because that was what they were beneath it all. They were fighters. They were mine.

“I’m worse than what you think,” I declared over the wind. They tensed and reached for glory. “I’m nothing so succinct - not a fire you can douse, not a tribulation you can endure, and not a monster you can slay.”

I had four years left remaining in my heart. I cast three into the flame, and from their embers rose three pairs of blood stained hands.

“I’m the answer to the question you were too afraid to ask.”

Is this the best that I can be?

Of course the answer was no.

“You don’t need them. You never did.” I saw their resentment. I saw their rage. But clearer still, I saw their fear that I was right - that they’d wasted all these years in search of helping hands they’d never once required. “Don’t believe me? I’ll prove it.”

My hands were stained by scarlet sin. As one, all of my violent intent surged forward in a storm of striking limbs. In the moment of their distraction, the six bloody hands that I had given three of my last four years to slipped past the rest and plunged into their chests through the wounds left by the King’s Curse.

By the time they reacted it was too late. The echoes of my scarlet sin settled around their hearts, stained hands cupping together to form a barrier against any and all incursion.

Elissa, Lefteris, and Kyno staggered back from me, somehow more aghast now than they’d been before. They dug helpless fingers into their chests, scrabbling for some loose strand to yank my influence out by. They grasped nothing but their own skin.

“I’ll prove the peak is closer than you think!” I knocked them off their feet while they were distracted by horror, pursuing faster than the wind. “I’ll show you what your souls are made of! Because I’m worse than any demon!”

I told them what they deserved to hear. The truth I’d been too proud to say all this time I’d known them.

“I’m the passion in your souls- the promise that you’ll win!”

I blew past them, racing for the sea. Between one step and the next, Selene was running by my side.

“Where do we go?” she shouted. Her hair whipped golden-bright behind her, her scarlet eyes flaring as they settled on the distant burning shore. Her voice was thick with despair as she continued, “My father, he- there’s nothing left of the docks! There aren’t any ships left to charter!”

“Then we’ll swim.”

“We’ll never make it!”

I bumped her shoulder with mine, all, but knocking her off her feet. Finally, she turned her bleak eyes from the burning shore and instead glared up at me.

“We won’t know until we’ve tried,” I told her fiercely. She wavered.

Then, from beyond the burning curtain of Olympia’s scoured dock city, there came an eagle’s hunting cry. And as if it had been summoned from the burning depths themselves, the reaching hand of the Eos’ figurehead pierced through the flames, followed swiftly by the ship herself.

I couldn’t help it. Despite it all, I laughed.

There was no time to wait for the ship to come to shore. Polyzalus had turned the beach to molten glass regardless. We leapt clear over the corpse of the dock town, past the burning waves, and hit the deck rolling. The sea dogs toiling at her oars shouted, crying out first in alarm and then in joyful recognition.

I rolled up into a crouch, sliding back across the deck, and slammed the King’s Curse home into its sheath. Its stark insight and its overwhelming hunger vanished from my heart.

Selene tumbled and crashed through a bench. The men turned away from their oars, rushing back to aid us, and a child’s shrill cry rang out from the crow’s nest atop the mast.

“BRACE!” The pirate child screamed, as my brother reached the apex of his leap and fell.

Sol struck the deck hard enough to crater stone. The Eos dipped precariously down, the men screaming and flying off their feet, and the image of an eagle burnt into the ship’s frame flared blindingly bright beneath the deck before abruptly catching flame.

Sol rose up to his feet and turned to meet our end. Five Heroic souls - no, six - had followed us to shore. As we watched, the men in horror and Selene in numb despair, Scythas exploded up over the dock city’s burning corpse, dragging a storm behind him in the shape of a harvesting scythe. Anastasia, Lefteris, Elissa, and Kyno were just a single step behind him, leaping over the breakwater after us.

Only Jason didn’t follow, stumbling to stop as quickly as he had reappeared from the burning treeline of the coastal fir forest. He stared at the churning waves, paralyzed by fear at the final defining moment.

That still left five. I only had a year left in my heart, not nearly enough to match them all. The hand that gripped the King’s Curse reversed its motion, pulling the blade free once more-

Glory overwhelming poured out of my brother’s soul, more than he had leveraged in the entirety of the fight thus far. More than all of his prior sacrifices combined.

Sol reached out and closed his hand into a fist. Scythas howled a challenge, the skies above echoing the call. With heavy deliberation, Sol unfolded his thumb from his closed fist, jutting it out to the side. Kyno, Anastasia, Lefteris, and Elissa matched their pneuma against his current.

Sol turned his thumb down.

All five Heroes and every cloud above their heads slammed down through the waves. The sea dogs that had come to save us clutched the ship’s rails, her benches, and even each other in search of sure footing as the axis of the world shifted on a scale that defied mortal understanding.

The Heroes plummeted to the shallow bottom of the breakwater boundary. It wasn’t as deep as I would have liked, but it would have to be enough. We’d need to be swift-

Sol snarled, his eyes burned golden-bright, and the Ionian Sea around us cratered down to twice its furthest depth. I watched, wide eyed, as the molten glass at its edges and the encroaching tides behind us rushed to fill the sudden gap in walls of coursing waterfalls.

The Heroes were so far down I could hardly see them now. More than far enough for us to make our escape.

“Solus,” Selene protested, but the son of Rome ignored her. The Ionian buckled further beneath his fist.

“That’s enough,” I told him. He didn’t respond, didn’t acknowledge us at all. “Sol!” I snapped, rising to a swordsman’s stance.

Sol kept burning, driving them down further still. I couldn’t see them fighting anymore. A moment later, I couldn’t see them at all. The King’s Curse ground against its sheathe as I drew a sliver of it out.

Sol stared steadily ahead. Not at the five Heroes that he’d buried, but at one still standing at the shore. Jason’s chest heaved, his heart tearing itself to pieces as he watched his peers sink helplessly down. He looked from the sinking shore to us, to Sol, and I could see it in his eyes. He was broken already. This moment would unmake him.

“Brother,” I said. “You’ll kill them.”

Sol buried them deeper. I moved to cross the deck. The moment passed, and Jason was-

Jason was leaping forward.

The Hero of the Alabaster Isles dove into the sinking whirlpool, his terror cast aside like anchor weight, and plunged down to his certain death.

Two bolts of tribulation lightning struck the sinking sea - and through the sliver of the King’s Curse that I’d drawn from its sheath, I saw his glory written in the stars.

***************************************************

** JASON GOES DOWN WITH THE SHIP **

***************************************************

The blackened depths warped and contorted as the advancing Hero’s glory clashed against the captain’s descending fist. Sol abruptly released his white knuckled fist, exhaling explosively and staggering back.

Selene and I caught him on either side, holding him steady on his feet. Scattered around us on the smoking deck of the ship, the Eos’ motley crew stared at Sol like he’d turned the night to day.

Overhead, Sorea let fly a thunderous cry, spreading his wings wide over us all.

“Where to, captain?” the pirate child called down to Sol.

Our eyes shifted south and east.

“To safer shores.”

————

We sat with our backs against the rail as the night gave way to day, Selene wedged between Sol and I with each of our arms slung across her shoulders. Our ragged sea dogs were splayed across every available surface, sleeping like the dead after hours of back breaking rowing. The hands of my violent intent worked the oars steadily in their absence. There wasn’t a sliver of land on any one of our horizons.

Selene slept soundly, her head nestled into Sol’s side and her bloodied hand held tight in mine. Her eyes were rimmed red by long hours of crying. Once we’d left Olympia behind us and the frenzy had abated, the girl had finally allowed herself to break down. She’d sobbed herself to sleep in the end.

In the silence of predawn, I told Sol the story of it all. My life before I met him, the full scope of my sin. And in turn, Sol told me of his vision and the false Anastasia that had delivered it to him, the new conviction that had driven him to send Sorea off in search of a ship before we’d even synthesized our nectar.

When all was said and done, we stared across the wine-dark sea at the rosy fingered dawn. Spent in more ways than one.

“How much did you keep?” I asked him. We both knew what I meant.

“A year. Maybe two. You?”

“Less.”

Sol grunted. “Might be more than we deserve.”

“Arrogant Roman. We weren’t the executioner, nor were we the blade. I won’t let you take this all upon yourself.”

“We played our part. Thousands suffered for our mistakes. I won’t let you make light of that either.”

“I don’t intend to.” I squeezed Selene’s hand tight in mine. It was delicate, frail in a way I didn’t like. Too easy to break. No matter how great or small, we had played our part in this world’s iron decline. “My heart won’t accept anything but a full atonement.”

“And what would be enough for this?” As if he didn’t know.

“We’ll make it golden bright again.” My heart sang its satisfaction at the thought.

We lapsed into comfortable silence. The Eos cut gently through the waves.

Sol glanced sidelong at me. The flames behind his eyes were embers now, hardly there at all.

“Still think tribulations are the best part?”

I chuckled, quietly so I wouldn’t wake my foolish sister, and finally the tears fell.

My mother was dead, her blood a stain upon my soul. Her daughter, my sister, had lost both a mother and a father because of my mistaken judgment. The Heroic souls we had chosen for companions wanted us dead, along with every Tyrant in Olympia and even more I couldn’t name. My future could no longer be measured in centuries or decades - only seasons, months, and days.

Heaven will hurt you in ways your fellow man could never think to, warned Prometheus the Flame.

I am the first of your tribulations, warned Melpomene the Tragic Muse, playfully, as though this was all of it a game. Perhaps to her it was.

High heaven had blindsided me for my hubris, foregoing lightning for a far more fatal cut. Higher power had tried to break me down, and without Sol it may well have succeeded. Yet in so doing, heaven had shown its hand. The Fates had spoken through the weave of their design, declaring who I was and how I could be broken to anyone with eyes to see.

If I could see the weavers’ echo in their weave, I could unravel them along with their threads. I could study them through the lens of their designs. I could begin to understand them. I could begin to see them.

And if I could see them, I could consume them.

Were tribulations the best part? I hefted the adamant dagger in my right hand, twirling it deftly between my fingers.

“No,” I finally decided, smiling wryly while I wept. “Tribulations are-“

-the most important part.

I watched the sun rise, not moving a single muscle as a man that hadn’t existed before that very moment appeared suddenly behind me. I waited for Sol to react to him. He didn’t.

Interloper. I’ve had enough of your kind today to last me a thousand lifetimes- I don’t need your favor. I don’t want to hear your terms. I won’t give you a single drop out of my soul, so begone from my head.

The spirit chuckled, the sound a low and rolling rumble. He propped an arm on the crown of my head, leaning with his back against mine. He had no cloak of stars or shining crown to mark his status. Turned away from me as he was, I couldn’t see his face at all. Belatedly, I felt the ruby hanging from my stolen necklace burning white-hot against my chest.

Presumptuous descendent mine. You’ve only just begun to tell a story worth my time - my notice is the only golden favor you’ll get.

I don’t want it.

As though I care.

We sailed into the sun.

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.

1.139 [An Unkindness]

“Away with you! Begone! I’ll suffer no more!”

An Unkindness

The children of Helen were still transfixed by the stark pillar of light bisecting the earth and skies when the tragedies began.

Across the Free Mediterranean, from the furthest colonies of the cardinal reaches - southernmost Egypt, easternmost Anatolia, northernmost Thracia, and westernmost Alikos - to the beating heart of ancestral Peloponnesia, the favored heroes of the Tragic Muse Melpomene collapsed in screaming fits.

Some were amongst peers, whose best efforts could not soothe their agony, and whose muses could offer nothing more to them than bright outrage. Some were amongst family, whose heartfelt prayers and promises of equivalent exchange went unanswered by the gods. Some were amongst Tyrants, whose eyes turned one and all to glare hatefully at the western horizon.

It hadn’t even been twenty years since the favored champions of Queen Calliope had suffered the very same fate.

As if those tragedies weren’t enough, a grim declaration soon followed.

There was no mistaking it. No man nor woman was deaf enough to miss it. No closed doors could contain it. Not even the tortured cries of Melpomene’s tragic Heroes were loud enough to drown it out. One and all, the people bore witness to the passing of a torch.

The voice of an era rang loud in every ear.

“THIS MAN TOO IS ALEXANDER.”

Pandemonium followed. Panic and terror and impotent rage, expressed in a thousand-thousand different ways throughout every enlightened city-state and humble colonial hovel. Among those old enough to recognize the voice directly, the old generation that had laid eyes upon the Conqueror in flesh, reactions to his heir were all the same.

One and all, they vowed that they would kill him.

———

Anastasia, the Caustic Queen

She had known Solus long before the day they first met.

“A man will never love you as much as he loves himself,” her mother had taught her as a girl. It was a lesson every blind maiden learned sooner rather than later. “He will never choose to listen in a world where he can speak. He’ll boast about himself. He’ll boast about his friends. He’ll boast about his country and his idols. He’ll even boast about the men he hates, if it means he doesn’t have to hear your story.”

In many ways, her mother and her fellow maidens were terribly cynical. But at least when it came to that final sentiment, they weren’t wrong.

Anastasia had been promised to the son of a Roman captain in the middle of their siege. At her mother’s earnest urging, she had spent as much time as she could with the man chosen to be her husband. A legionary through and through, he’d been durable and stout, brazen as a bull with a soldier’s rugged charm - and utterly in love with the sound of his own voice.

He had told her tall tales about himself, about his comrades in the legion, about his father the captain, and of course about the General of the West, all of that before he even asked her name. Eventually, when talk of Rome and all its wonders had run its course, rather than asking her about the wonders of her home, of the great city-state his people were at that time invading, he told her of his foes.

Caesar’s campaigns had been extensive, and to hear her short husband tell it, he’d been there every step of the way. He had painted her a thousand pictures of routed barbarians, desperate clashes between legionary and beast, and even the solemn portrait of civil war. In every recounting, he prevailed. With every telling his voice became more impassioned. Until, inevitably, he had run dry of even bittersweet triumphs to tell her. At that point, she had thought that he would finally pass the reins of conversation her way. Surely, there was nothing left to say.

Instead, he told her of the chosen son.

With neither pride nor passion - but rather a simmering resentment - her husband had confided in her the story of the fifth captain’s son.

Though he had tried to paint her a bleak picture - and oh how he had tried - Anastasia had seen right through him. Her husband despised the wild child of the General’s Fifth Legion. The Fifth was an assembly of conscripted barbarians, a coalition lovingly referred to as Caesar’s feral dogs, and to hear her husband tell it, this Young Patrician had taken on the worst of all their failings. The lie was paper-thin.

Against his best efforts, Anastasia’s would-be husband had painted her the picture of a Roman who loomed larger than the rest. Younger than the prerequisite age for service, yet stronger than barbarians twice his size. Younger than her husband, yet twice and twice again better decorated in his service.

This young man - this boy - that had spent his formative years breaking bread with knuckle-dragging barbarians, was somehow always just a bit more cunning than his rivals in the ranks. It was a dim animal’s cunning, her husband had assured her, just enough for him to avoid reproach and claim glories not his own. She had found herself doubting him, even at the time.

Her husband had never told her this bastard child’s name, calling him instead a dozen epithets, each more inflammatory than the last.  He had, however, described the bastard’s face.

“When our paths converge again, you won’t need me to point him out. He’ll be the surliest face in every crowd. The only man still glaring, even at a wedding celebration - like the bridegroom killed his dog.”

Of all the lies he had told her about Caesar’s favored soldier, that one alone had proven to be true.

“Stop him!” Thalia cried.

At least, she had thought that until today.

Her Flourishing Muse had no laughter in her voice now. Thalia’s teasing smile was nowhere to be found. The Muse of Comedy and the Muse of Tragedy had always been close, intertwined as they were by their mystiques, and Thalia’s rage had eclipsed all her sisters’ when the Tragic Muse was stabbed.

Anastasia burned her heart’s blood and wove cleansing flame along her javelin, dueling without restraint, and still at every turn she was pushed back.

Until today, she’d been certain that Solus was every bit the man her husband had assured her he was only pretending to be.

Her hunting hounds broke their caustic teeth and ripped out their own burning claws as they tried to bring her quarry down. They couldn’t even break his stride.

Until today, she had been certain he was the mighty Legate of the triumphant Fifth Legion. Envied by men that consider themselves his peers. Beloved by his people. Strong enough to stand apart from his legion and fight as though he wasn’t, a feat not even her husband’s father could match.

He advanced. The golden fire in his eyes tracked her every motion, unbothered by the shadows. She had nowhere left to hide.

Until today, until now. Until he had run from the consequences of his machinations, until he had confessed to them his weakness. Until he had admitted, until her grandmother had asserted - until Thalia had confirmed - that he was nothing more than what he appeared to be. A young man in over his head. Half a junior Philosopher, and half a worthless captain of a long dead legion. Until that moment, Anastasia had thought her husband a liar. But somehow, despite everything that had transpired since the kyrios’ death, her would-be husband had been absolutely right about Solus.

The Revenant struck her javelin aside, stomping its tip into the earth when she tried to sweep the weapon low.

At least, she had thought that for a moment.

He punched her in the chest.

Anastasia’s ribs exploded into shrapnel.

———

Elissa, the Sword Song

What was it, exactly, that made a Hero’s heart unique?

The scholars had debated the topic for centuries before she was born, and likely would for centuries more to come. Elissa had never had time for such sophistry. The answer was self evident, or at least it had seemed so to her.

That nebulous excellence, so coveted and yet so rarely found, was the same property that made Elissa so much quicker than the other children in her city, lighter on her feet and more deft with a blade. It was the same phenomenon that allowed her to advance five ranks in the time it took her seniors to move a single step. It was the burden put upon her by the Fates the moment she was born - the burden of promised power.

Elissa had known from a young age - known, not believed - that she would do great things in her time. Her ascension to the Heroic Realm had been inevitable. Because of that, she had never bothered herself with the squabbles of mediocre men.

“Master, what makes a hero’s heart unique?”

She had only asked the question once, and only then because she’d been certain the returning answer would match her own.

Song Yu had looked upon her sadly instead.

“Nothing, little oriole. Nothing at all.”

Then he’d given her another scar, so she would always remember. She still carried that scar.

Somehow, she’d forgotten anyway.

The fair-faced coward from the Hurricane Heights descended like an executioner from heaven, harvesting her patron Tyrant’s last breath as he fell. The storm split along the obsidian edge of his scythe, pouring into it and enveloping him in a ferocious mantle of gale-force currents. Hazel flames poured out from his eyes. His pneuma grew and continued growing, expanding endlessly.

Before today, Elissa would have sworn steadfast that she would advance long before the Hierophant’s adopted heir. It was a fact of life that most Heroic souls, despite their excellence, never progressed past the first rank. Scythas and his ilk were those sorts of Heroes - the type to flee and fly, not follow and fight. She had known it in her bones.

Before today, she had been certain of a great many things.

The eighteen year old Philosopher with eyes like golden flames laughed delightedly as an ascending Hero swept down upon him. Griffon - Lio Aetos? - flourished his arms and all of his pankration hands, welcoming Scythas back to the fight.

Scythas flickered and vanished, by all appearances swept off by the storm. Somehow, though her own senses couldn’t track it, Griffon turned and drew his burning blade sharply up to block.

Chipped obsidian chimed against tempered iron, the sound preceding the sight of their clash. She saw it for just a moment, the whirling cloak of grass-green silks, and then he was gone again. Griffon smiled ferociously, pivoting on his heel and parrying another strike just so.

What made a Hero so much stronger than their lessers? Of course, there was their burning heart. Just the same, though, there was their Muse. In a struggle, if one party had the voice of high heaven guiding them to glory and the other party did not, all other things being equal, it was obvious which of the two would win.

Griffon and Scythas traded blistering blows, the scything winds cutting to pieces anything and everything within their reach. Elissa forced herself back, raising a useless hand against the current when it came too close. Another weeping cut was drawn across her palm.

The difference between a Hero and a Philosopher was as the difference between heaven and earth. One of them divine, the other tethered by fate. It wasn’t the burning heart alone that was to blame for this. The heart was just the symptom. Even the muse’s help was not the sole deciding factor. Otherwise, what threat would Tyrants be?

Griffon danced wildly through the storm, carving through it with his burning blade. Scythas’ pneuma was growing stronger by the second. Yet even so, the cadence of their dance was shifting before her eyes.

Every Tyrant had once been a Hero themselves. Even the lowliest Tyrant had once been the best of every Hero, just as the least powerful Hero had been the best of every Sophist. That difference could be felt, like the warmth of a summer sun. A Tyrant stood above a Hero. A Hero stood above a Philosopher. The reason why was endlessly debatable, but the reality was not. Even her master hadn’t transcended that truth.

Scythas hissed an oath a moment before Elissa saw his mistake. His obsidian scythe swept out wide, drawing blood from Griffon’s neck, but the cut was too shallow to kill. The Scarlet Son stepped into the scythe’s reach and brought his blade down in a severing strike.

So why was this happening?

As the blade fell, the spectral image of a woman flung herself away from Scythas, her starlight teeth grit in horrible frustration. The sophist’s bright smile mocked her as she fled.

Tempered iron struck polished stone. Griffon’s eyes went wide.

In Heavenly-Urania’s place, the stone statue of a woman had risen up behind Scythas and caught the falling blade on her forearm. As Elissa watched, as they all watched, the sword bit deeper into the stone, devouring it as it had devoured everything else. The marble beauty made a grinding sound of agony, but she held firm against the blade.

“What are you?” Griffon asked - wondering.

His foe whistled a piercing note.

Cutting winds drove Griffon back, and Scythas took him to harvest. Great rending cuts split the Philosopher’s tan skin and cut his mended silks to tatters. The Young Aristocrat of the Rosy Dawn drew his pankration hands around himself to guard, blood burning bright, but he’d lost control of their exchange. Scythas tore him apart, growing stronger all the while.

The reaping wind passed over Griffon again and again, taking from him flesh and silk. The fair-faced Hero moved through the coalescing hands of his pankration intent, weaving a perfect line at speeds too swift to believe. He flayed the Young Griffon one slice at a time, and whenever the Philosopher managed to bring his blade between them, the stone woman took the blow in Scythas’ stead.

The killing note wasn’t a whistle from the Hero’s lips. It was the whistle of a harvesting scythe, and by the time Griffon began reacting to it, Scythas was already behind him with the curve of his scythe pressed against the philosopher’s throat.

Scythas twisted at the hips, ripping the scythe around-

The Roman struck him like a charging bull, driving his shoulder into the Hero’s gut and slamming him down to the earth. Griffon jerked his head back, letting the scythe’s edge graze his cheek, and let out a breathless whoop. He was having fun.

Scythas flickered and blurred the moment he hit the ground, vanishing into the wind once more, but in response the Roman simply followed him to the ground and dropped an elbow onto his neck. The impact cratered the earth.

Griffon’s golden-bright eyes shifted, searching. Seeking new struggles.

Settling onto her.